Neanderthals Were a Lot More Like Humans than We Realize
News stories at Phys.org and IFLS are reporting on a new paper in Science which finds more evidence of human-Neanderthal interbreeding. The Editor’s summary of the technical paper notes, “there is now ample evidence for gene flow from Neanderthals to humans and vice versa.” Under the standard biological definition of a “species,” such evidence of interbreeding would indicate that humans and Neanderthals should in fact be considered members of the same species.
But there’s a lot of baggage in the way of that view. Mainstream paleoanthropologists would not say that we are directly descended from Neanderthals, but they are often promoted as an evolutionary relic representing a primitive stage of human evolution. As a 2020 paper in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences says: “To most researchers however, the Neanderthal represented an ancient, inferior race of Homo sapiens, an extension into the past of the hierarchy of living human ‘races’, descending from civilized to savages.” But this view is increasingly countered by mainstream scientists who are saying that Neanderthals were just as advanced as contemporary humans.
Most Unkind to Neanderthals
A few months back, Smithsonian Magazine published an article about Neanderthals noting that “we haven’t been very kind to Neanderthals since their remains were first unearthed in the 19th century, often characterizing them as lumbering dimwits or worse.” Yet there is evidence that they used creativity and symbolism
Hundreds of intentionally broken stalagmites were found there, arranged into two large, ellipsoid structures and several smaller stacks, during a time when — as researchers confirmed in 2016 — only Neanderthals were roaming Europe. No one knows what these structures were for, but they suggest a tendency toward creativity and perhaps even symbolism
“Rethinking Neanderthals”
A 2023 article titled “Rethinking Neandertals” in Annual Review of Anthropology, previously reviewed by Günter Bechly, notes that Neanderthals used symbolism much like modern humans
The use of symbols is often argued to be a defining feature of H. sapiens. Growing evidence, however, supports the use of symbols by Neandertals in the form of personal ornaments, portable art, and spoken language (see the section titled Language, Cognition, and Brain Development) and possibly cave painting, although the latter remains somewhat controversial.
According to the paper, there are multiple potential examples of Neanderthals creating cave art:
The paper reports, “New research suggests that Neandertals were responsible for some hand-stencils, painted lines, and dots in multiple caves in Spain.” The cave art is controversial because some argue the dates are too young to be the work of Neanderthals.
At the French cave site La Roche-Cotard, there are 57,000-year-old “digital tracings” or “finger flutings” associated with Neanderthals. However, “The meaning of these tracings currently remains ambiguous … they are not necessarily symbolic in nature.”
At the Einhornhöhle site in Germany there is an engraved phalanx bone of a giant deer that dates to 51,000 years.
A “hashtag” like symbol from Gorham’s cave in Gibraltar, Spain.
A “pecked pebble from the Axlor Rockshelter in Spain.”
It is also argued that there are Neanderthal adornments, including a necklace made of eagle talons found in Croatia, “personal ornaments in the form of perforated, painted, and unpainted large marine bivalves,” and other possible examples of adornments. The Smithsonian Magazine article notes that Neanderthals may have used rope, red ochre pigments, and feathers in adornments.
Peeters and Zwart (2020) summarize this evidence:
[A] mounting body of evidence continues to expand the known repertoire of sophisticated strategies and symbolism practiced by Neanderthals, and sapiens-centrism has come under pressure. The more data we gather on their behaviour, the more similar Neanderthals seem to be to the modern human pattern. Not only dental hygiene, also large-scale cooperative hunting, complex stone tools, language, planning, care for the ill, imagination and symbolic behaviour, was present in Neanderthals. The only traceable advantage of Homo sapiens was that they had started to produce ornaments with little beads and shells, something which seemed absent in Neanderthal culture. Recent research, however, yielded perforated and ochre marine shells and colorants attributed to Neanderthals, suggesting once again that they were cognitively indistinguishable from modern humans. [Internal citations removed.]
Intelligence and Culture
Going back to the Smithsonian article, it quotes researchers remarking on just how much our understanding of Neanderthal intelligence and culture has changed in recent years:
In addition, the many freshly unearthed or newly analyzed artifacts, some now confidently assigned to Neanderthals thanks to improved methods for dating archaeological finds, make for quite a collection. “If you’d have asked me 20 years ago, I would have said there was quite a big gap in behavior, and Neanderthals would have lacked many of the complex behaviors we find in Homo sapiens,” Stringer says. “Now that gap has narrowed considerably.”
Of course there’s still much we don’t know and the evidence is sparse — due in part to the fact that Neanderthals probably had a relatively small overall population size. But as time goes on, the “gap” between humans and Neanderthals seems to be narrowing, not expanding — and this trend line has profound implications for whether Neanderthals really were the primitive brutes they’re often portrayed as.
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