192 CHAPTER 8 | Early Homo and the Origins of Cultureindividual clad in animal skins and carrying a big club
as he plods across the prehistoric landscape, perhaps
dragging an unwilling female or a dead saber-toothed
tiger. The stereotype has been perpetuated in novels
and film. The popular image of Neandertals as brutish
and incapable of spoken language, much less abstract or
innovative thinking, may, in turn, have influenced the
interpretation of the fossil and archaeological evidence.
One of the most contentious issues in paleoanthropol-
ogy today concerns whether the Neandertals represent
an inferior side branch of human evolution that went
extinct following the appearance of modern humans.
Alternatively, descendents of the Neandertals may walk
the earth today.
Neandertals were an extremely muscular people liv-
ing from approximately 30,000 to 125,000 years ago in
Europe and southwestern Asia. While having brains
larger than the modern average size, Neandertals pos-
sessed faces distinctively different from those of modern
humans. Their large noses and teeth projected forward.
They had prominent bony brow ridges over their eyes.
On the back of their skull, there was a bunlike bony
mass for attachment of powerful neck muscles. These
features, not in line with classic forms of Western beauty,
may have contributed to the depiction of Neandertals as
brutes. Their rude reputation may also derive from the
timing of their discovery.
One of the first Neandertals was found in a cave in the
Neander Valley (“tal” means “valley” in German, “thal”
was the old, German spelling) near Düsseldorf, Germany,
in 1856—well before scientific theories to account for hu-
man evolution had gained acceptance. (Darwin published
On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection
three years later in 1859.)
Initially, experts were at a loss as to what to make of
this discovery. Examination of the fossil skull, a few ribs,
and some limb bones revealed that the individual was a
human being, but it did not look “normal.” Some people
believed the bones were those of a sickly and deformed
contemporary. Others thought the skeleton belonged to
a soldier who had succumbed to “water on the brain”
during the Napoleonic Wars earlier that century. One
prominent anatomist thought the remains were those
of an idiot suffering from malnutrition, whose violent
temper had gotten him into many fights, flattening
his forehead and making his brow ridges bumpy.
Similarly, an analysis of a skeleton found in 1908 near
La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France mistakenly concluded
that the specimen’s brain was apelike and that he walked
like an ape.
The evidence indicates that Neandertals were
nowhere near as brutish and apelike as originally por-
trayed, and some scholars now see them as the archaic
H. sapiens of Europe and Southwest Asia, ancestral toof ochre may signal a rise in ritual activity, similar to the
deliberate placement of the human remains in the Sima de
los Huesos, Atapuerca, already noted. The use of red ochre
in ancient burials may relate to its similarity to the color of
blood as a powerful symbol of life.The Neandertals
To many outside the field of anthropology, Neandertals
are the quintessential caveman, portrayed by imagina-
tive cartoonists as a slant-headed, stooped, dim-wittedThe practice of hafting, the fastening of small stone bifaces and
flakes to handles of wood, was a major technological advance appear-
ing in the archaeological record at about the same time as the inven-
tion of the Levalloisian technique.© PhotoDisc/Getty Images
Neandertals A distinct group within the genus Homo inhab-
iting Europe and southwestern Asia from approximately 30,000
to 125,000 years ago.