Thinking about Neanderthals

Rocketmouse said of the recent post about the reconstructed face of a Neanderthal woman:

It *is* cool. What's creepy, though, is how much she looks like women I've seen...

Indeed.

We're Homo Sapiens (at least on good days); she's Homo Neanderthalis--- a different species of human, but she's still fully human.

Neanderthals--- they got their name because the first identified skeleton was found in the Neander river valley, near Duesseldorf, Germany--- were amazing. They had larger brains than we do, but their grey matter was distributed differently: more in the back of their elongated skulls, less in the front. We have more in the front, which is why we have vertical foreheads compared to Neanderthals. But their total brain volume was higher.

What this means in terms of intelligence, cognition, perception and such is anyone's guess. Maybe it's meaningless, and their brains operated just like ours. Maybe not.

Biologically, brains are "expensive." They cost a lot in terms of metabolism to build and maintain. So, it seems reasonable that Neanderthals had their big brains for a purpose.

We know they played music; archaeologists have found a Neanderthal flute made from the bone of a cave bear. They made art, such as masks and talisman figurines. (It must be incredibly difficult to pursue any art when you're in a permanent survival mode. Imagine how strongly Neanderthal artists must have had to feel to be compelled to create music or other art, no matter what.) We think Neanderthals had religion; they sometimes decorated their dead for burial, as if prepping them for a journey in an afterlife. And they probably had some kind of speech, although it wouldn't have sounded like ours because their heads, face and necks were shaped differently.

Neanderthals were people. With brains bigger than ours. Makes you think, eh?

OK: They were human. They were people. But they were different from us, too, and some of that also derived from their big-brained heads. For example, Neanderthal females had to have a somewhat different pelvis from today's ladies. Human birth is already a tough proposition on the ladies because the large head of a average human baby. Imagine giving birth to a human baby with an even larger head.

So, the big-brained, robust Neanderthal women also had wider hips with different bone angles, compared to today's women. They would have walked, run, moved, and sat differently from what we're used to seeing women do.

The men were also big-brained and robust, and although their hips weren't as wide as the women, proportionally, they were wider and angled differently from mens' hips today. We're built to cover long distances efficiently. Neanderthals were stronger, but couldn't run as fast or as far.

And here's an odd thought: Neanderthal women had unusually large birth canals compared to today's women, so imagine what the complementary equipment of an average Neanderthal male must have been like.

Years ago, the popular depiction of Neanderthals had them as sluggish brutes, dim-witted and more primitive than our ancestors who lived then. That made it easy to imagine why they died out and we didn't.

But none of that's really true. These were impressive creatures. Why did they die out?

(And it seems they did truly die out. All the genetic tests done so far indicate that our ancestors and the Neanderthals never interbred in any meaningful way.)

Some anthropologists now point to a much simpler reason:

Imagine a culture that produces stone-age Da Vincis and Einsteins at about the same rate per capita as our culture does. But imagine that in that culture, most of those great ideas and insights die with the person or within the small group that thought them.

You see, the Neanderthal people happened to be in the wrong place when the last Ice Age set in. As the snows fell and the mountains became harder to navigate, Neanderthal ranges were cut off from one another. The increasingly isolated social units became spread too thin for the easy interchange of genes and ideas.

This long isolation may be the real reason why Neanderthals used simpler tools than our ancestors did at that time. It's not that Neanderthals weren't smart enough. It's that their inventions couldn't be disseminated easily to other isolated inhabited valleys. Great ideas could be born--- a new axe, a better way to sew, a superior medicine--- but would simply die out without spreading.

By sheer luck of the draw, our stone-age Da Vincis and Einsteins lived in warmer climes where life and trade and cultural exchanges had been much easier. A good idea didn't have to die with the originator, and indeed many great ideas were passed along: ideas about farming and animal domestication, about cooking, about chemistry and metalworking ("look what I found when I heated these rocks in a hot fire..."), about weaponry, about social organization, about art and religion. All that knowledge became a package of cultural skills that our direct ancestors brought with them when they arrived in Europe, towards the end of the Ice Age.

They came in, hale and hearty; physically and mentally exactly like us. Hell, they *were* us; we *are* them. There's no difference: Pluck an infant from that day and place it with a modern family, and the child would grow up indistinguishable from the true children of today. Likewise, transport an infant from today to a tribe then, and the infant could grow up as a normal member of that tribe, no problem.

Only our cultures make any meaningful difference at all. Today, we're slowly trying to overcome the xenophobia, the racism, the intolerance that seems to be deeply-rooted in our variant of humanity. These negative traits no longer serve a purpose in today's crowded world, but it's likely they were in full flower when our ancestors stormed into Ice Age Europe.

By sheer dumb luck, they arrived there with better numbers, better weapons, better communication, better organization and better health; and almost certainly with the full measure of all the darker impulses that mark so much of our human history.

The Neanderthals didn't stand a chance.