In 1856, workers at a quarry near Düsseldorf in the Neander Valley, Germany, discovered the first Neanderthal fossil bones. They were also the first human fossils found, and at the time they represented an enigma.
When studying these enigmatic bones, the German anatomist Hermann Schaaffhausen noticed some very crude features, for which he believed that they belonged to a “ prehistoric barbarian ”, before the arrival of the Celtic or Germanic tribes. The scientific society was not yet prepared for such a bombshell, and Schaaffhausen’s interpretations were not liked and cost him his academic career.
More well received was the interpretation of Franz Mayer , another German anatomist. Contrary to Schaaffhausen, he believed that the characteristics of that ancient skeleton were due to rickets, and to having spent all his life riding a horse. He speculated that it was a Russian Cossack who roamed the area during the war of liberation against Napoleon.
Much later, in 1864, and having entered a new era in the natural sciences, already shaken by evolutionary ideas, William King described the Neanderthal fossil human specimen as a new species , Homo neanderthalensis. And at this moment, we can say that the discipline of Human Paleontology or Paleoanthropology is born.
But a lot has happened since then, and the image of Neanderthals that we have today is far from that. So let’s catch up.
The origin of the Neanderthals can be traced to the Near East, where populations of the so-called pre-Neanderthals have been found. From there, these pre -Neanderthals spread throughout Europe, where they gave rise to the Neanderthals. But what were these hominins like and why have we referred to them as our cousins?
Neanderthals were an extinct human species that lived during the interval between about 300,000 and about 28,000 years ago . Its geographical distribution was very wide and covered a multitude of habitats, from the coasts of Portugal to the Near East and even western Siberia.
Physical characteristics of Neanderthals included a very stocky build . Their great skeletal robustness and the strong insertion marks of their muscles indicate that they would have a very muscular body . They had broad shoulders, a large barrel-shaped ribcage – not like ours, which tapers – and short limbs. Their skulls were larger than ours, and they had a larger cranial capacity, from which it follows that their brain was larger than ours. The roof of the skull was low, the forehead receding, and the supraorbital tori , the bones above the eyes where we have the eyebrows, were very marked. Their jaws, unlike ours, did not have a marked chin. As for hair and skin color, thanks to the sequencing of the genome of Neanderthal individuals from El Sidrón (Asturias), we know that at least some of them had light skin and reddish hair.
The Neanderthal diet , despite what has been traditionally believed, was not predominantly carnivorous. Researchers at El Sidrón have found, in calcified dental plaque, molecular evidence of ingestion of a wide variety of plants . In addition, remains of Neanderthal settlements in the Bajondillo cave (Málaga) dating back to 150,000 years ago, have revealed that they also ate shellfish.
Culturally, the Neanderthals are part of the Middle Paleolithic, and theirs is the culture called Mousterian . They already buried their dead – in fact, in pre-Neanderthals there is already evidence of communal burials, but there is some debate about them. Its lithic industry is called Mode III or Mousterian, which is a perfected version of Mode II or Acheulean that many pre-Neanderthals already exhibited. There is also evidence that they would make pendants and other body adornments. And even cave paintings of Neanderthal chronology have been found, although they are very controversial and are the subject of debate in the scientific community.
When modern humans arrived in Europe, some kind of coexistence must have taken place, whether it was more peaceful or violent. In fact, the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome has revealed that current Eurasian individuals share between 1% and 4% of our DNA with Neanderthals. These results raise the hypothesis that modern humans, upon arrival in the Near East after leaving Africa, hybridized for a short period of time with Neanderthals. Finally, after a time of coexistence, the Neanderthals became extinct. And we are left alone on the planet.
As you can see, the image of Neanderthals that we have now is far from those primitive barbarians that we imagined decades ago. And we weren’t so different after all. And even as we have seen, some of us still carry a tiny percentage of Neanderthal DNA. And we should be very proud of it.
References:
Arsuaga, JL; Martínez, I. 1997. The chosen species: the long march of human evolution. Today’s Topics.
Rosas, A. 2010. The Neanderthals. What do we know about? Higher Council for Scientific Research and The Books of the Cataract.
Dalton, R. 2006. Neanderthal DNA yields to genome foray. Nature, 441, 260–261.
