Neanderthal or Neandertal?

Both of these spellings (and pronunciations) are commonly found - is either more correct to use?

In short, nope!

Neanderthals get their name from the Neander Valley (or Neandertal in German), near Dusseldorf in Germany.  This valley is where the first Neanderthal fossils were found, around 150 years ago.

OMG, it's a Neandertal baby!!
Or is it a Neanderthal baby...?

'Thal' is an old form of the word 'valley', so Neandertal (the place) used to be called Neanderthal.  Nowadays 'thal' is spelled as 'tal' after a German spelling reform at the beginning of the 20th century (people loved those back then, didn't they?), which is probably why we see Neandertal in spelling now and again.  It tends to be less
common I get the impression...

Neanderthals' taxon is Homo neanderthaensis, with the 'th', so I guess purists could argue that it's better to spell it with the 'th'.  But what is appropriate in language is defined by what people use (generally), so whichever!

'Thal' and 'tal' in the German are both pronounced the same, which reflects how some people (like me!) spell Neanderthal but say 'Neander-tal'.  However, pronouncing the 'th' is totally common and often used in the English pronunciation of the species.

In short, say whatever, spell whatever... it's language!  As I said, what is 'appropriate' is all about what people use, and in what situation.  It's all about conventions, and there are conventions of using both :)

Neanderthal Language: did we once have a linguistic cousin?

In a recent paper ("On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences"), Dan Dediu and Stephen Levinson argue that modern language was a feature of both Neanderthals and modern humans, and therefore of our common ancestor as well.  This takes their date for the origin of language to around 4-500,000 years ago at least, far beyond the common (though what I consider as very conservative!) view that language emerged around 100,000 years ago.

Illustration of hypothesized dates and
communication systems, shown alongside
tool technologies and hominin species 

Whether or not Neanderthals had complex language, or any form of complex communication system such as a protolanguage, has been debated for decades.  More and more though, the evidence seems to bolster the idea that our very close cousins were more similar to us than the classical brutish view, both cognitively as well as behaviourally.

In my previous post "Are we being a bit unfair to Neanderthals?", I discussed the tendency for people to be quite negative when thinking about Neanderthals, to compare their culture to more modern examples of our own, and scorn them as "the other" - languageless, dumb, and trying-to-be-human-but-not-quite-getting-it.  It's an unbalanced view, when humans and Neanderthals had broadly similar behavioural and cultural signature in the record, especially when you look at contemporary examples in the record.

Some might say that the classic image of the Neanderthal has had a makeover - we now know that sometimes, some of them buried their dead.  Sometimes, some of them pierced teeth or shells, and used red ochre and black manganese as colourants.  Often, they made beautiful stone tools with great skill and knowledge of flint working.  Sometimes they interbred with modern humans.

But still, the nul hypothesis for some has remained that Neanderthals are crap versions of humans.  Equally, if you are going to attribute intelligence to a species, don't you also need evidence to attribute them with a lack of intelligence?

Now, with evidence of interbreeding between the species, and the Neanderthal genome sequenced, it's harder to think of Neanderthals so simply as 'the other'.  Dediu and Levinson's article doesn't contain the Neanderthal racism I often find myself complaining about.

Most interesting and unique about their article is the implications for studying language evolution and linguistics, suggesting for example,

the present-day linguistic diversity might better reflect the properties of the design space for language and not just the vagaries of history, and could also contain traces of the languages spoken by other human forms such as the Neandertals.

It's a great article synthesizing lots of relevant information on Neanderthals as well as language origins research, and I recommend it as a good read for anyone with an interest!

Why does human cultural achievement mean Neanderthal demise?

Again and again, science news publish articles headlining things such as "Humans were genius sexy amazeballs, Neanderthals died of jealousy", or, "Humans wore shoes, Neanderthal extinction due to Osteoarthritis?"

Alright those are fake, but they aren't that much of an exaggeration.

This could have been the very skill that allowed humans
to bound across the European landscape,
ejecting Neanderthals from their cave...

Such as this article in Scientific American entitled "Oldest Arrowheads Hint at How Modern Humans Overtook Neandertals", or this article from National Geographic Daily News published yesterday, "Failure to Hunt Rabbits Part of Neanderthals' Demise?"

The first article I point to is a good example of why I'm not quite following the logic - it is about early projectiles from South Africa, a continent away from any possible human-Neanderthal interaction/competition.  These projectiles would have been a nice fancy cultural innovation for hunting strategy.  And Neanderthals just couldn't cope with their inferior spears... extinction naturally followed.

Sorry, what exactly did the impact of these tools have?  Underlying these articles is just an implicit assumption that life is a boxing ring, and the fighter with the fancier shorts wins (ie doesn't extinct themselves).

Any cultural detail different between our two species seems to be taken immediately to be a marker of why one is here today and the other isn't.  Because, for some reason I can't quite figure out, humans being better at life eradicates other life around it.

But species go extinct all the time.  Why does this one deserve so much attention?  At least that question is easier to understand - our obsession with the demise of the Neanderthals is fascinating, and that fascination leads to endless "what ifs" and fanciful speculations based on little or no evidence.  Neanderthals are us but not us, close cousins that resemble human groups in some ways, but not in others.  They are fascinating.  They are so similar, but they failed.  And we see our differences, our Nectar Points and jet packs, as the reason we have won... something.  Life I guess.  Although, we don't go on about our triumph over the Australopithecines (Husband, pers. comm.)

It's a fascination with different cultural groups that led 19th century anthropologists to come to so many conclusions as to why the 'savage races' were inferior to their own amazing mustachioed culture.

Modern humans have undoubtedly impacted most (all?) species on the planet alive today.  And we seem to extend this impact right back into the Palaeolithic - I can't say whether or not there is a grain of truth in that, and that we did make an impact on our landscapes, but we do have to look at our own species, small in number, without Nectar points or jet packs back then, and maybe have a bit more humility.

Catch-up: France and Flint

Last summer I decided to pull up my socks and be a REAL archaeologist.  No more of this ‘watching time team and casually reading about Anglo Saxons’ stuff (which probably wont stop, but anyways)!  I volunteered for the Les Cottes dig in France directed by Marie Soressi, and for a month from half July to half August, I spent an amazing time crouched over on a meter square of dirt developing my right bicep.

It was a fantastic dig – giant cave, giant pit, giant piles of finds – and I felt like I learned so much, this being only my second excavation.  I will definitely try to go again.  The flint in France is gorgeous (pretty translucent ochre colour flint banded with red, and some a lovely raspberry, or deep violets that were almost black) – the area of Poitou we were in is renowned (by flint enthusiasts anyway) for the quality and abundance of material, and the area is rich with prehistoric cultures going back deep into the Palaeolithic. 

Les Cottes itself was first excavated in the 1800s, and again in the 50s.  This excavation led by Marie Soressi took place out in front of the mouth of the cave, in in-situ deposits that held amazingly rich layers of not only classic Aurignacian materials, but Proto-Aurignacian, Chatelperronean and Mousterian as well!  There were vertical walls where you could see the layers, full of flints and antler sticking out, and some layers were red with ochre or black with manganese.  A European Palaeolithic archaeologists’ dream!

Nodular flint we dug up from fields nearby

There were also opportunities while we were there to collect some nearby flint and try our hand at knapping.  I’ve tried knapping obsidian before, and this was my first time trying with flint.  I’ve realised I am a terrible knapper, and although I love lithic technology and the look and feel of flint and the amazing things it can do, I am going to need 5x as much tuition as the next person to be a competent flint knapper.  Lesson one: not putting a hole in the thigh of my trousers.

I met some amazing people on the dig and hope to keep in touch with many of them.  Most of all it’s made me fall in love with flint – although British flint is interesting, I find it a bit more cold and masculine – icy black Norfolk flint, or the steely grey of the south, or the dull orange patina some old flints get here – it’s definitely not as sexy as the French flint!!!

Here's a link to the description of Les Cottes on the Max Planck Institute website:
http://www.eva.mpg.de/evolution/files/les-cottes.htm

And here's a paper on Les Cottes if you are interested:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440311003463

Mary Stiner Lecture: Cave Bears and Neanderthals

Mary Stiner and Steven Kuhn, both from the University of Arizona, are visiting professors at the UCL Institute of Archaeology through UCL's Leverhulme visiting professor scheme, and they are conducting a series of lectures about their research on Palaeolithic Archaeology over the next few months. 

On a Monday evening, Mary gave her second talk on Cave Bears and Neanderthals.  Her first, on cooperative hunting and meat sharing in the late lower palaeolithic, I had to miss due to work- but I was luckily able to make the second one (I also missed Steven Kuhn's first lecture, on ornamentation as information technology, but I try not to think about it as I really wanted to see that one!).  I will try my best to attend more of the public lectures Mary Stiner and Steven Kuhn and report on them here, when I can get away from my desk.

Mary introduced her topic with how cave bears are often depicted in conflict with prehistoric humans, as they were both users of caves.  She said there was a grain of truth in this, as they overlap both in time and space in Europe.

The cave bear was the largest bear of all time- even slightly bigger than the Kodiak bear, although even more robust.  The Kodiak bear, however, has a different morphology and habits.  It can climb trees when young, and is built for strength not speed.  The cave bear, which was probably much more slow and lumbering, with an absolutely massive cranium, lived on a seasonal veggie diet, and therefore hibernated in the winter.

Mary discussed the proposed cave bear cult briefly.  The type site for this is at Drachenlock, in the Swiss Alps.  There a cave bear skull was found with a femur (?) stuck through the zygomatic arch.  It looks at first glance very indicative of some sort of symbolic placement.  This and other sites, Mary said, have been increasingly embellished over time.

It makes sense to consider the odd placement of cave bear bones as being related to human ritual- bears are revered ethnographically by pretty much every human group that lives near them (I immediately thought of Native groups of the Pacific Northwest where I am from, as well as the Ainu of Japan who have a really interesting bear festival called Iomante- and for anyone who has read or seen the movie Clan of the Cave Bear, it will seem quite familiar!).  Associations between humans and bears in the archaeological record have been located in three circumstances in the archaeological record:

• Cave art (ex. Chauvet cave- note, these paintings are made after Neanderthal occupation of Europe)
• Bear remains in human middens (someitmes cutmarked or burned)
• Bone accumulations (of mostly bear bones) with stone tools also present

Mary then went on to discuss in more detail a site in Yaraimburgaz Cave, Turkey.  It is a large cave abundant with cave bear bones in stratigraphic association with stone artefacts.  One part of the cave had actually been used as a Byzantine church.

The layers were dated by ESR (Electronic Spin Resonance) to 211-226 ka BP, which was during a cold interval within MIS 7.

The bones were scattered, some broken and some whole.  Most of the bones were not articulated other than the odd paw.  93% of the bones belonged to one type of cave bear.  There was also a very diverse range of other species present, and there was no burning and few (possibly 2) cut marks, if any, on the bones (not cave bear bones).

The lithics associated with it were not Mousterian, and were primative looking.  There were 1674 in all, of which 602 had been retouched.

Mary's question was, then, "why do the bear bones and the artefacts co-occur"?  She considered that:

• Bears are sensitive about their locations when they hibernate, and keep food debris away rom the cave as it betrays their location to predators (also, interestingly, when a bear is hibernating it becomes odourless because its metabolism drops so low and it manages to reuse its own waste)
• The mortality rate is high near the end of hibernation because of starvation
• Skeletons are often moved around by other bears, and they can acumulate along with the slow sedimentation of the cave.

Mary looked at the mortality pattern in the cave.  Many bears were juveniles and old age adults, while prime age skeletons were comparatively rare.  There was also a relatively complete body part representation (although it was scattered). 

There was extensive gnawing on the bones, especially toe bones, which alludes to low traffic in the cave over a very long period of time.  There was a lot of gnawing from wolves, and wolf scat.

Mary also  looked at the % of bones gnawed with the % where marrow was accessed in a Pearson correlation matrix which I will not be able to comment on!  But there were some lovely charts and the interpretation that the lithics showed little relationship to the other remains.

Her final interpretation was that the cave represents a "palimsest of disparate events".  Bears used the cave for hibernation, and there was heavy use over generations with long quiet intervals in between.  Hominids and other carnivores only visited the cave briefly.

Because of the high proportion of retouched tools (which implies high mobility), few tool marks on the bones, no evidence of fire, no carcass processing, she interpreted that people were stopping at the cave, but not staying.

Next week (15 November) Mary will be speaking on the division of labour and diet diversification in the Mediterranean Palaeolithic.  I'll try my best to catch it!

Neanderthals in the News

Something that really irks me is the way that Neanderthals are potrayed in the popular media, even in science based outlets. Sensational titles like,

• "Neanderthal Males had Popeye-like Arms" (Discovery News)
• "Neanderthals Were More Promiscuous Than Modern Humans, Fossil Finger Bones Suggest" (ScienceDaily)
• "Neanderthal man 'sang and danced'" (BBC)
• Or, even, "Was Neanderthal man the original metrosexual? New study suggests he wore make-up" (to be fair, that last one was from the online version of the Daily Mail, Mail Online so we can't expect much!)

These titles suggest a whole lot more than the content the article actually discusses, much less findings of the research the article is written about.

It's true titles like these serve their purpose and grab the readers attention, and of course misleading titles altered to be more suprising or shocking pervades media on other topics too. But the result is that the message the reader takes away can be a very mislead one.

Yesterday an article on Neanderthals was published in ScienceNOW called "Neandertal Brains Developed More Like Chimps'". To the reader, this would have a very suggestive implication that Neanderthals brains are somehow chimp-like, and attrubute them with chimp-like behaviour. But really, what the article is about (http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/11/neandertal-brains-developed-more.html?rss=1), is how human brains are different from other primates, with a unique brain growth pattern early on in child brain development. Science Daily covered the same story with the title, "Brains of Neanderthals and Modern Humans Developed Differently", and Discovery News with, "Human, Neanderthal Brains the Same Until Birth".

It is facinating to look to our past in amusement when the first Neanderthal bones were uncovered in Germany in the 1850s, and how the image of the arthritic lumbering cave man emerged in popular culture. With todays media, however, that image looks no nearer to a true picture of our late sister species.

Are we being a bit unfair to Neanderthals?

This is another post dedicated to my ongoing efforts to battle Neanderthal racism... I believe Neanderthal technology and its reputation for its uninovativeness is partially due to being compared to a benchmark of quite recent human cultural complexity.

At a recent conference, I was lucky to hear a talk from Wil Roebrooks (Professor of Archaeology, Leiden University).  The conference was on the evolution of language, and researchers with an in depth knowledge of the Palaeolithic did not number many in the crowd, so it was a bit lighter in content than his talk at the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain conference a week earlier (which I was also lucky to have seen!).

During this talk though, Roebrooks did something that has been done many times before: Neanderthal and ancient human culture were compared side by side, tallying up cultural achievements.

This talk made me think about how we as researchers can be quite unfair to Neanderthals, who died out in Europe around 30,000 years ago.  We have a common ancestor, and had a very similar contemporary cultural repertoire throughout most of that time.  The complex cultural achievements people often associate with modern humans have mostly happened since the Neanderthals have disappeared.

Pockets of innovation in Middle Stone Age Africa showed that some human cultures developed new innovative tool technologies well before the upper Palaeolithic; harpoons (such as those at Katanda), blades (such as those at Kapthurian formation 500,000 years ago), and decorative items like shell and ostrich beads (Qafzeh and Blombos Cave) appear before modern humans entered Europe.   Things such as cave paintings, clear forms of social hierarchy, specialisation and wealth appeared much later.

We also see Neanderthals with their own shell ornaments, covered in red ochre at 50,000 years ago in Spain, evidence of exploiting marine resources, and the use of deep caves such as at Bruniquel (Hayden 2003).  These examples suggest a cognitive ability not unlike that of their closest living relatives of the time.  Though the Middle Stone Age of Africa no doubt shows humans at this time to have a higher number of sites that show pockets of innovation, these sites are not typical of humans cross culturally during the MSA.
 

It makes sense to compare Neanderthals and humans, how they were utilising and experiencing their environment, and exploring their differences and commonalities, being two similar species evolving on separate continents.  But I want to point out what I believe is a strong bias that makes the material cultural differences between the two seem much larger than might be the case, leading to the conclusion by many that they were much different as a species, cognitively and culturally.

Roebrooks’ talk looked at Neanderthal material culture, but when it came time to compare this with what humans achieve culturally, time fast forwarded to Gravettian Europe for modern human examples.  Was this a fair comparison?  If culture has sort of a feedback loop, if it first needs to build on itself in order to achieve a more complex stage, then what needs to happen for that complexity, other than a pressure for that complexity to come about, is the passage of time.

To compare Neanderthal complexity at 70,000 years ago with modern humans at 20,000 years ago, where Neanderthals' cultural development was cut off due to their extinction, is a bit unfair to what they could have develloped if given a few more millenia for cultural complexity to intensify.  After all, modern humans at 70,000 years ago really had not accumulated much of their extreme material culture differences that we see showing up later on.  Again, culturally, their material culture was very similar to their European cousins.

Right before Neanderthals disappeared, they developed a culture called the Chatelperronean.  There exists much debate about whether or not this culture is due to contact with humans (for, how could they develop cultural complexity on their own?)

Often humans are cited as the reason for Neanderthal extinction.  While not saying this is not the case, I do have a problem with this is explained as being because modern humans were somehow ‘doing a better job at soemthing’ than Neanderthals (making tools, hunting, speaking, thinking).  Even if modern humans showed up on the scene with higher cognitive capacities and a complex language that they lacked, what in this would force Neanderthals to die out?   If this were the case, surely there would be a massive Europe wide extinction as each species with lower cognitive capabilities to humans started to die out in response to a ‘smarter’ species on the scene?

My main point is that to compare what Neanderthals did on average throughout their 400,000 year stint in Europe, with modern human Gravettian culture at 20,000 years ago, which even in human terms is pretty impressive, is no less than an unfair comparison and puts Neanderthals in a very uninovative light.  It would hardly be fair to compare 21st century art, technology and cultural achievements of Japan, to say, the gravettian cultures of France at 20,000 years ago.

Perhaps if Neanderthals did not die out roughly 30,000 years ago, if left to their own devices they may have fallen into a cultural feedback loop of increasing complexity that could rival that of our own ever increasing speed of invention.

Neanderthal innovation or acculturation: did aliens build the pyramids?

I have a (bad?) habit of making flaky analogies, and they occasionally crop up in my writing as well- generally near the end, and they generally read like a poor attempt at introducing stylistic flair in order to bring an essay to conclusion and leave my reader stroking their chin!

One analogy I used that I'm particularly fond of compared speciation and rainbows.  In another, I compared attitudes towards the debate over the origin of late Neanderthal tool industries to19th century anthropologists' incredulity to New World earthworks and Central and South American pyramids- the Hopewell and Mississippian mounds, for example, were attributed by some anthropologists as having built by an advanced race that was destroyed by the Native American tribes.

This incredulity at the cognitive capacities of the indigenous population associated with the complex material culture is echoed in both instances.  Neanderthals are found essentially with a Chatelperronean backed blade in one hand, and a perforated wolf's tooth in another, and the suggestion immediately arises that Neanderthals attained these skills by acculturating themselves with modern humans, generally because Neanderthals are viewed as having inferior cognitive capabilities.  Why IS that (other than humans are egotistical beings!)? 

It's true this is a possibility, that Neanderthals gained Chatelperronean tool technology from contact with modern humans.  But there is also the possibility that Neanderthals simply developed these tools themselves.  After all, we see examples of Neanderthal symbolism before evidence of modern human arrival such as with the ochre covered shells in Spain 50,000 years ago, uses of black manganese, burial, deep cave use, and complex tools like throwing spears and hafted points, well before Neanderthal use of a 'typically Upper Palaeolithic' toolkit.

As a sister species that branched apart only 4-500,000 years ago, we can expect there to be some cognitive differences between modern humans and neanderthals, but I expect there were also large similarities.  Both species seemed to use technology to adapt to their environments to a large degree, and I do not believe things such as symbolic thought, language, and complex tool manufacture to be out of the realm of the Neanderthal mind.

To me, jumping to a conclusion that if Neanderthals did have complex tool sets resembling what was once thought unique to modern humans then it must have been a borrowed or copied technology, is reminiscent of 19th century anthropologists incredulity that indigenous populations built great momuments and fine architecture.