The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

“And smelly,” Dennis Sandgathe, of Canada’s Simon Fraser University,
said.
“Probably hungry,” Harold Dibble, of the University of Pennsylvania,
added.
“No one would have been very old,” Sandgathe said. Later on, back at
the barn, I picked through the bits and pieces that had been dug up over
the past few days. There were hundreds of fragments of animal bone, each
of which had been cleaned and numbered and placed in its own little
plastic bag, and hundreds of flakes of flint. Most of the flakes were
probably the detritus of toolmaking—the Stone Age equivalent of wood
shavings—but some, I learned, were the tools themselves. Once I was
shown what to look for, I could see the beveled edges that the
Neanderthals had crafted. One tool in particular stood out: a palm-size
flint shaped like a teardrop. In archaeological parlance, it was a hand ax,
though it probably was not used as an ax in the contemporary sense of
the word. It had been found near the bottom of the trench, so it was
estimated to be about seventy thousand years old. I took it out of its
plastic bag and turned it over. It was almost perfectly symmetrical and—
to a human eye, at least—quite beautiful. I said that I thought the
Neanderthal who had fashioned it must have had a keen sense of design.
McPherron objected.
“We know the end of the story,” he told me. “We know what modern
culture looks like, and so then what we do is we want to explain how we
got here. And there’s a tendency to overinterpret the past by projecting
the present onto it. So when you see a beautiful hand ax and you say,
‘Look at the craftsmanship on this; it’s virtually an object of art,’ that’s
your perspective today. But you can’t assume what you’re trying to
prove.”
Among the thousands of Neanderthal artifacts that have been
unearthed, almost none represent unambiguous attempts at art or
adornment, and those that have been interpreted this way—for instance,
ivory pendants discovered in a cave in central France—are the subject of