Fossil Friday: Human Nature of Neanderthals Supported Again
In a recent Fossil Friday article (Bechly 2024) I discussed the many lines of evidence that have accumulated in the past decade in favor of a fully human nature of Neanderthal men. As I documented with many references to the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, we know that Neanderthals used fire, buried their dead, created stone circles and bone tools, made jewelry from eagle talons and used feathers as body decoration, made cave art with paintings and engravings, played music with bone flutes, used ochre as pigment and sophisticated fiber technology, produced flour from processed plants, dived for seafood, cooked food and self-medicated with herbal painkillers and antibiotics, and even produced glue from birch bark with a complex chemical procedure.
Hints of Compassion
Now, we can add compassion to this growing list of very human behaviors. A new study by Conde-Valverde et al. (2024) described fragments of hominin fossils from the Cova Negra cave in Spain, which have been dated by electron spin resonance (ESR)/U-series to an age of 273-146 thousand years ago. The age and the morphology clearly suggest an attribution to Neanderthals. But the truly remarkable finding was that the remains of a six-year-old child showed the typical congenital pathologies of the inner ear associated with debilitating Down syndrome. The authors suggest that this disabled child “would have required care for at least 6 years, likely necessitating other group members to assist the mother in childcare.” The press release emphasized that this “Fossil of Neanderthal child with Down’s syndrome hints at early humans’ compassion” (Reuters 2024).
It was known already that Neanderthals cared for sick and injured individuals (Hublin 2009, Noble 2010, Spikins et al. 2010, 2018, Tilley 2015, 2022, Thorpe 2016, Spikins 2022), but such behavior can also be found in some of the more intelligent and social animal species like the great apes, elephants, and whales. However, extended caregiving for a strongly disabled child is a highly non-Darwinian behavior that indeeds suggests compassion on a level only found in humans, because it is not driven by mere survival of the fittest and differential reproductive success. Elephants abandon or even kill disabled infants (Rodrigo 2011). Monkeys and apes usually neglect or reject disabled infants (Hogenboom 2015), or at best bother to care for a few weeks (Jackson 2023, Valença & Falótico 2023). There exists just a single report of maternal care for a 23-months-old disabled chimp infant with symptoms similar to Down syndrome (AFP 2015, Matsumoto et al. 2016). The compassionate caregiving of Neanderthals is clearly not intermediate between such animal behaviour and human behavior, but rather as Noble (2010) put it: Modern research “rejects the popular portrayal of Neanderthals as simple, unfeeling brutes and suggests that our closest ancient relatives may well have demonstrated a level of compassion that would put many modern humans to shame, caring for the infirm and the vulnerable for years at a time in organised groups.”
Strongly Corroboration
As I discussed in my previous article (Bechly 2024), the strong evidence for significant and common genetic admixture with modern humans, also suggests that Neanderthals and modern humans belonged to the same species. This was recently strongly corroborated by a new genetic study published in the journal Science (Li et al. 2024; also see Choi 2024b and Starr 2024), which found clear evidence for a “recurrent gene flow between Neanderthals and modern humans over the past 200,000 years”, suggesting a decreasing Neanderthal population that “was ultimately being absorbed into the modern human gene pool” as already suggested by a previous study (Stringer & Crété 2022). This definitely goes far beyond just some rare instances of admixture. Instead, it confirms a shared gene pool of different subpopulations within the same biospecies. Neanderthals were not a separate species of primitive hominins that went extinct, but were one of us and are still with us in our genes. They only vanished as a distinct group just like many other ancient subpopulations of humans, such as the Jomon people in Japan.
A Somewhat Different Result
Strangely, another new genetic study by Iasi et al. (2024), which is still in preprint stage and not yet peer-reviewed, comes to a somewhat different result and “suggests that humans interbred with Neanderthals 47,000 years ago for a period lasting 6,800 years” (Choi 2024a), but that “interbreeding that occurred at other times, such as the earlier events that impacted the Neanderthal genome, likely did not leave a detectable trace in our genome” (Choi 2024b). Looks like there is still much room for disagreement and different interpretation of the data, leading to quite different speculative scenarios.
Anyway, neither compassionate human behavior nor a shared gene pool would by itself refute a Darwinian evolution of modern humans, but such evidence certainly better resonates with the views of Darwin critics, who have always championed the view that there is only one humankind and that it is unique and distinct from the animal kingdom. Neanderthals and other ancient representatives of our genus Homo are not “stepping stones” on the way from bacteria to Beethoven, but just examples of human diversity in space and time.
References
AFP 2015. Japan researchers find chimps caring for disabled infant. Phys.org November 11, 2015. https://phys.org/news/2015-11-japan-chimps-disabled-infant.html
Bechly G 2024. Fossil Friday: New Evidence for the Human Nature of Neanderthals. Evolution News February 2, 2024. https://evolutionnews.org/2024/02/fossil-friday-new-evidence-for-the-human-nature-of-neanderthals/
Choi C 2024a. Neanderthals and humans interbred 47,000 years ago for nearly 7,000 years, research suggests. LiveScience June 7, 2024. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/neanderthals-and-humans-interbred-47000-years-ago-for-nearly-7000-years-research-suggests
Choi C 2024b. Neanderthals didn’t truly go extinct, but were rather absorbed into the modern human population, DNA study suggests. LiveScience July 11, 2024. https://www.livescience.com/health/genetics/neanderthals-didnt-truly-go-extinct-but-were-rather-absorbed-into-the-modern-human-population-dna-study-suggests
Conde-Valverde M, Quirós-Sánchez A, Diez-Valero J, Mata-Castro N, García-Fernández A, Quam R, Carretero JM, García-González R, Rodríguez L, Sánchez-Andrés Á, Arsuaga JL, Martínez I & Villaverde V 2024. The child who lived: Down syndrome among Neanderthals? Science Advances 10(26):eadn9310, 1–10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adn9310
Iasi LNM, Chintalapati M, Skov L, Bossoms Meta A, Hajdinjak M, Peter BM & Moorjani P 2024. Neandertal ancestry through time: Insights from genomes of ancient and present-day humans. bioRxiv May 13, 2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.05.13.593955
Hogenboom M 2015. The wild chimpanzee who cared for her child with disability. Projeto GAP November 17, 2015. https://www.projetogap.org/en/news/the-wild-chimpanzee-who-cared-for-her-child-with-disability/
Hublin J 2009. The prehistory of compassion. PNAS 106(16), 6429–6430. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0902614106
Jackson J 2023. Compassionate disabled infant care from a wild capuchin monkey mother. Phys.org March 7, 2023. https://phys.org/news/2023-03-compassionate-disabled-infant-wild-capuchin.html
Li L, Comi TJ, Bierman RF & Akey JM 2024. Recurrent gene flow between Neanderthals and modern humans over the past 200,000 years. Science 385(6705), 1–10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi1768
Matsumoto T, Itoh N, Inoue S & Nakamura M 2016. An observation of a severely disabled infant chimpanzee in the wild and her interactions with her mother. Primates 57, 3–7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-015-0499-6
Noble C 2010. My bright idea: Neanderthals could show compassion. The Guardian October 10, 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/oct/10/bright-idea-neanderthals-evolution
Reuters 2024. Fossil of Neanderthal child with Down’s syndrome hints at early humans’ compassion. The Guardian June 26, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jun/26/fossil-of-neanderthal-child-with-downs-syndrome-hints-at-early-humans-compassion
Rodrigo M 2011. Handicapped baby jumbo left bleeding and abandoned in paddy field. Sunday Times May 1, 2011. https://www.sundaytimes.lk/110501/News/nws_28.html
Spikins P 2022. Material evidence: Caring for adult vulnerabilities. pp. 71–127 in: Hidden Depths: The Origins of Human Connection. White Rose University Press, New York (NY). DOI: https://doi.org/10.22599/HiddenDepths.c
Spikins P, Rutherford H & Needham A 2010. The Prehistory of Compassion. Blurb, 106 pp. https://www.blurb.com/b/1628917-the-prehistory-of-compassion
Spikins P, Needham A, Tilley L & Hitchens G 2018. Calculated or caring? Neanderthal healthcare in social context. World Archaeology 50, 384–403. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2018.1433060
Starr M 2024. Humans And Neanderthals Had a Longer, More Intertwined Relationship Than We Thought. ScienceAlert July 12, 2024. https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-and-neanderthals-had-a-longer-more-intertwined-relationship-than-we-thought
Stringer C & Crété L 2022. Mapping Interactions of H. neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens from the Fossil and Genetic Records. PaleoAnthropology 2, 401–412. DOI: https://doi.org/10.48738/2022.iss2.130
Thorpe N 2016. The Palaeolithic Compassion debate – Alternative Projections of Modern-Day Disability into the Distant Past. Chapter 6, pp. 93–110 in: Powell L, Southwell-Wright W & Gowland R (eds). Care in the Past: Archaeological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Oxbow Books, Oxford (UK), 208 pp. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1kw290q.11
Tilley L 2015. Setting the Scene for a Bioarchaeology of Care. pp. 13–64 in: Theory and Practice in the Bioarchaeology of Care. Springer, Cham, xvii+319 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18860-7_2
Tilley L 2022. Disability and Care in the Bioarchaeological Record. Meeting the Challenges of Being Human. pp. 457–481 in: Grauer AL (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Paleopathology. Routledge, London (UK), 692 pp. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003130994-28/disability-care-bioarchaeological-record-lorna-tilley
Valença T & Falótico T 2023. Life and death of a disabled wild capuchin monkey infant. Primates 64, 207–213. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-023-01052-1
No comments:
Post a Comment