If I were to call you a Neanderthal, you’d think I was calling you brutish, primitive, and stupid.
Allow me to set the record straight: Neanderthals were none of the above.
Neanderthals were a type of human that lived between 350,000 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 his theory of evolution yet suggesting that humans might have evolved from a different ancestral form, so the prevailing opinion at the time was that the strange-looking bones were those of an ordinary 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: Neanderthals’ brains were, on average, larger than our own. (So much for being stupid.) They were protected by a skull with a shelf-like ridge over the eyes. Neanderthals also had a pronounced nose bridge, large, round nostrils, a protruding jaw with no chin, and large teeth.
The negative popular impression of Neanderthals can be traced back to the work of French paleontologist Marcellin Broule, who said Neanderthals had ape-like feet, could not fully extend their legs, and had to thrust their heads awkwardly forward because their spines prevented them from standing upright. His reconstruction gave us our stereotypical cartoon caveman, with bad posture, sloping forehead, and knuckles almost dragging on the ground.
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…just like our own branch of humanity.
But how closely related are we? Ancient DNA from Neanderthal remains differs significantly from our own. This supports the “Out of Africa” theory, which argues that all modern humans are descendants of early modern humans that arose in Africa 200,000 years ago, and over the next 160,000 years or so displaced all other types of humans, including the Neanderthals, all over the world.
A competing theory, the “multiregional evolution” theory, argues that humans first left Africa one to two million years ago, and spawned various archaic human populations, including the Neanderthals, who then evolved into modern humans within their own geographic regions; later out-migrations from Africa interbred with these local populations, so that today, supporters of this theory claim, characteristics of archaic human populations can still be found in modern humans in the regions where those archaic humans lived. As for the differences between Neanderthal DNA and ours, well, they point out that DNA from modern humans from the same era also differs considerably from ours.
Still, the Out-of-Africa theory is the most widely accepted. If it’s true, then we have to wonder, “What happened to the Neanderthals?” By 27,000 years ago they were all gone.
One theory has been that perhaps Neanderthals were unable to use tools as effectively as modern humans—but that theory was shot down last week, thanks to research conducted by Wesley Niewoehner at California State University in San Bernadino. He scanned epoxy casts of the thumb and index finger bones of a Neanderthal skeleton found in 1909 in La Ferrasie, France, in order to produce three-dimensional computer models. The computer determined that the Neanderthal hand had at least as much dexterity as that of modern humans, even though it was much more heavily muscled than modern human hands, and had broad finger tips.
Other theories: perhaps Neanderthals weren’t as inventive as modern humans; maybe they lacked language skills. Perhaps modern humans were better at finding food, or maybe they introduced diseases the Neanderthals had little immunity to. Or maybe the modern humans simply banded together and slaughtered the Neanderthals wherever they came into conflict.
Whatever happened, the Neanderthals are gone—and since they were stronger than us, and probably just as smart, that’s a sobering thought.
In another 25,000 years, will anything be left of us?
