The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

endless, often abstruse disputes. (Some archaeologists believe that the
pendants were fashioned by Neanderthals who, after coming into contact
with modern humans, tried to imitate them. Others argue that the
pendants were fashioned by modern humans who occupied the site after
the Neanderthals.) This absence has led some to propose that
Neanderthals were not capable of art or—what amounts to much the same
thing—not interested in it. We may see the hand ax as “beautiful”; they
saw it as useful. Genomically speaking, they lacked what might be called
the aesthetic mutation.
On my last day in the Dordogne, I went to visit a nearby archaeological
site—a human site—called the Grotte des Combarelles. The Grotte is a very
narrow cave that zigzags for nearly a thousand feet through a limestone
cliff. Since its rediscovery, in the late nineteenth century, the cave has
been enlarged and strung with electric lights, which have made it possible
to walk through it safely, if not altogether comfortably. When humans
first entered the Grotte, twelve or thirteen thousand years ago, it was a
different matter. Then the ceiling was so low that the only way to move
through the cave would have been to crawl, and the only way to see in the
absolute blackness would have been to carry fire. Something—perhaps
creativity, perhaps spirituality, perhaps “madness”—drove people along
nonetheless. Deep inside the Grotte, the walls are covered with hundreds
of engravings. All the images are of animals, many of them now extinct:
mammoths, aurochs, woolly rhinos. The most detailed of them possess an
uncanny vitality: a wild horse seems to lift its head, a reindeer leans
forward, apparently to drink.
It is often speculated that the humans who sketched on the walls of
the Grotte des Combarelles thought their images had magical powers, and
in a way they were right. The Neanderthals lived in Europe for more than
a hundred thousand years and during that period they had no more
impact on their surroundings than any other large vertebrate. There is
every reason to believe that if humans had not arrived on the scene, the
Neanderthals would be there still, along with the wild horses and the