PÄÄBO usually works late, and most nights he has dinner at the
institute, where the cafeteria stays open until 7 PM. One evening, though,
he offered to knock off early and show me around downtown Leipzig. We
visited the church where Bach is buried and ended up at Auerbachs Keller,
the bar to which Mephistopheles brings Faust in the fifth scene of
Goethe’s play. (The bar was supposedly Goethe’s favorite hangout when
he was a university student.) I had been to the zoo the day before, and I
asked Pääbo about a hypothetical experiment. If he had the opportunity
to submit Neanderthals to the sorts of tests I’d seen in Pongoland, what
would he do? What did he think they were like? Did he think they’d be able
to talk? He sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest.
“One is so tempted to speculate,” he said. “So I try to resist it by
refusing questions such as ‘Do I think they would have spoken?’ Because,
honestly, I don’t know, and in some sense you can speculate with just as
much justification as I can.”
The many sites where their remains have been found give plenty of
hints about what Neanderthals were like, at least to those inclined to
speculate. Neanderthals were extremely tough—this is attested to by the
thickness of their bones—and were probably capable of beating modern
humans to a pulp. They were adept at making stone tools, though they
seem to have spent tens of thousands of years making the same tools over
and over again. At least on some occasions, they buried their dead. Also on
some occasions, they appear to have killed and eaten each other. Not just
Nandy but many Neanderthal skeletons show signs of disease or
disfigurement. The original Neander Valley Neanderthal seems to have
suffered from two serious injuries, one to his head and the other to his left
arm. The La Chapelle Neanderthal endured, in addition to arthritis, a
broken rib and kneecap. These injuries may reflect the rigors of hunting
with the Neanderthals’ limited repertoire of weapons; the Neanderthals
never seem to have developed projectiles, so they would have to have
gotten more or less on top of their prey in order to kill them. Like Nandy,
both the original and the La Chapelle Neanderthal recovered from their
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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