If I were to call you a Neanderthal, you’d think I was calling you brutish, primitive, incapable of nobility and the higher emotions, and stupid, to boot.
Of course, if we said this about any existing group of humans–expatriate Texans, for instance–we would be accused of being racist. Neanderthals, alas, cannot seek redress for libel, being all dead, but allow me to put the record straight: they were none of the above.
Neanderthals were a type of human that lived between 200,000 and 27,000 years ago, mostly in Europe. They get their name from the Neander Valley (in German, “thal”) near Dusseldorf, where German workmen discovered a strange skeleton in 1856.
Charles Darwin hadn’t published The Origin of Species, so the notion that humans might have evolved from a different ancestral form didn’t cross most people’s minds. The prevailing opinion was that the bones were those of a modern human afflicted with rickets in childhood and arthritis later in life, who had also suffered deforming blows to the head.
Then more skeletons were discovered, evolution became an accepted notion, and scientists realized Neanderthals were an earlier race of human–though quite different from us.
Neanderthals had short powerful limbs, stocky trunks and a wide-hipped, knock-kneed stance. (Short limbs are characteristic of humans who live in extremely cold climates; they provide less surface area from which heat can escape.) They were very strong: a Neanderthal of the same height as a modern human would weigh 20 pounds more, all of it muscle. (Which means, as one writer put it, a Neanderthal man could pick up an NFL lineman and throw him between the goalposts.)
The wide hips were necessary to allow the birth of babies with large heads. Yes, Neanderthal babies had large heads: despite the modern inclination to equate “Neanderthal” with stupid, Neanderthals’ brains were, on average, larger than our own.
Those large brains were protected by a skull with a shelf-like ridge over the eyes. Neanderthals had a pronounced nose bridge, large, round nostrils, a protruding jaw with no chin, and large teeth.
Popular impressions of Neanderthals as stupid brutes can be traced back to the work of French paleontologist Marcellin Broule, who said Neanderthals had prehensile feet (like apes), could not fully extend their legs, and had to thrust their heads awkwardly forward because their spines prevented them from standing upright. Illustrations based on his reconstruction gave us the stereotypical “caveman,” with his bad posture, large club, and tendency to drag women around by the hair.
Now we know that the skeleton Broule worked from belonged to an old man crippled by arthritis: healthy Neanderthals walked just as upright as we do. And while they may have sometimes lived in caves, they also lived in tents, cared for their sick and elderly, conducted burial ceremonies and created tools and ornaments. In other words, they had every bit as much on the ball as Cro-Magnon Man, our direct ancestors.
Which raises the question: what happened to them? Cro-Magnon Man is still here: he’s us. But Neanderthals disappeared not long after Cro-Magnons moved into their territory.
That question is as hotly debated as any in science. Some scientists say nothing happened to the Neanderthals: they mingled with Cro-Magnon Man and disappeared into the general population. Unfortunately, the fossil record doesn’t support this: even in areas where Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals co-existed, there doesn’t seem to have been any mixing.
That brings up another possibility: that Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, though equally “human,” were biologically distinct species. Anthropologists are divided on this subject into two camps: the “lumpers,” who would lump Neanderthals in with us as one species, and the “splitters,” who feel the Neanderthals were a different species. New research supports the splitters: an analysis of the nasal structures of five Neanderthals revealed far more extensive differences from ordinary humans than would be expected within the same species.
If Neanderthals were a different species, maybe that’s why they vanished. Maybe they weren’t as inventive as homo sapiens, or lacked language. Maybe the better-adapted homo sapiens ate up all the available food, or (knowing humans) simply slaughtered them. Or perhaps homo sapiens brought in new diseases.
Whatever happened, the Neanderthals are gone; a warning to us. They were smart, they were strong, and it wasn’t enough.
If we’re not careful, we may be the ones whose disappearance will be a topic of academic debate a few millennia hence.
Here’s hoping we don’t also end up a synonym for nasty and brutish.
