Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived (18 page)

It’s difficult to imagine how we could ever decipher how these people communicated. The business of unlocking the past without the benefit of a working time machine makes science uncertain, especially when it deals with the spoken word. Any encounter between our kind and this other branch of the human family, each of whom had been traveling quite different evolutionary roads for nearly two million years, must have boggled both of their minds when it finally took place.

You might compare the meetings to those between the civilizations of the Old and New Worlds five hundred years ago, even if the comparison isn’t altogether accurate. Francisco Pizarro’s clashes with South America’s Incas, or the Iroquois’s crossing paths with early French traders who were exploring northeastern America, or Captain James Cook’s legendary encounters with the people of Polynesia, all brought together cultures that were radically different and fraught with misunderstanding, often tragic (Cook eventually met his end when he was hacked to death by the natives of Hawaii, who had come to realize he and his men were not the gods they originally thought they were). But at least the meetings were between two
groups that were the same species! Their cultural experience was different, but their intelligence was the same. They both used language, they had each developed tools, and they had the same brains, genetics, and anatomies.

Nor, on the other hand, would the meetings have been anything like early recorded human encounters with Africa’s apes. There would have been no mistaking even a friendly chimp for a member of the human race, never mind that we share nearly 99 percent of our DNA.
^e

When our direct ancestors came face–to–face with these other humans twenty-five thousand years ago, would they have seen them as equals, as an enemy, as nothing more than an interesting, or terrifying, animal? Would their cultures have been even remotely the same after two million years of genetic divergence?
Homo erectus
, we know, had tamed fire, like
Homo sapiens
, but their way of communicating must have been radically different. More different than that of a British naval captain and a Hawaiian chief. Had they developed music or art? Surely they were social.
Homo erectus
had, after all, evolved from the same gregarious stock we had, but how well organized were they, how complex was their society? Did they festoon or paint themselves? How did they dress? Had they developed religion or superstition to explain the world? Did they even care to explain it? Was there something about the chemistry or structure of their brains that made their reality fundamentally different from ours?

It’s not a given that our kind would have dominated this other species when they did meet. A chimpanzee, despite its diminutive size, is strong enough that it can, rather literally, tear one of us limb from limb, if it chooses. And these people may not have been diminutive. Based on earlier fossils, it is entirely possible that they were faster, bigger, and stronger.
Homo erectus
men could easily reach heights in excess of six feet and could likely outrun our kind. (The same may have been true of the Red Deer Cave people, though we don’t yet know enough.)
Homo erectus
was a species that had been around in one form
or another for nearly two million years, the longest run any human species has ever enjoyed based on the current, if sparse, information we have. The world had tested them again and again, and they had passed the test. When these people first spied the strange, globe–headed, square–jawed creatures with their throwing spears and fire–hardened tools, it must have been as shocking to them as having aliens from Tralfamadore beam down from the sky and show up in Times Square, a race of aliens with superior technology who had come seemingly out of nowhere. How would these people have explained one another to themselves?

It’s fascinating to speculate on all of this, but, unfortunately, speculate is all we can do because, so far, like a crime without a clue, there is no archaeological evidence of the meetings. There are only the parasites. But what a shattering event that meeting must have been.

Our encounters with the ape–men of south Asia were not, however, unique. Twenty-five thousand years earlier, and half a world away, we came face–to–face with another branch of the human family tree, the native Neanderthals of Europe and west Asia. This time we were more closely related, and of similar intelligence. Here, thankfully, we have a little more hard evidence that can shed a bit of additional light on the nature of their astonishing encounters.

Ne·an·der·thal (n
ē
–
ā
n
ʹ
der–thôl
ʹ
, – tôl
ʹ
, n
ā
– än
ʹ
d
ē
r – täl
ʹ
) also Ne·an·der·tal (– tôl
ʹ
, – täl
ʹ
)—Someone who is big and stupid and thinks physical strength is more important than culture or intelligence
.

—Macmillan Dictionary

Maybe it’s because they aren’t around any longer to defend themselves, but Neanderthals are among the most maligned species paleoanthropologists have ever taken to studying, and they have been studied since before there was any such thing as a paleoanthropologist. The first Neanderthal fossils to attract serious attention were found in 1856, a full three years before a nervous Charles Darwin had finally gotten around to sharing his provocative theories about natural selection with the publication of
On the Origin of Species
. The unearthing of the skull, torso, and legs that limestone workers near Düsseldorf in western Germany had shoveled onto a hillside made their long–deceased owner the first acknowledged representative of a prehistoric human species ever. Rather a big deal. Not that anyone realized this when the quarry’s owner first examined the bones. Like the workers, he assumed these were the remains of a cave bear. Others speculated that they were what was left of a Mongolian Cossack who had failed to keep up with his fellow soldiers a few decades earlier when Russians were desperately fighting off Napoléon’s army.

Luckily, rather than being tossed aside, and into oblivion, the fossils found their way to a local schoolteacher named Johann Carl Fuhlrott, who recognized immediately that they were human and got them into the hands of Hermann Schaaffhausen, an eminent anatomist of the
day. After nearly a year’s careful study, Schaaffhausen presented the bones to the rest of the scientific world and pronounced that they belonged to a savage member of a “very ancient human race.”

Not everyone agreed. This was, after all, a time when many Europeans still held fast to the conclusion the Church of Ireland’s Archbishop James Ussher had come to in 1650. God, he said, had completed the world’s creation at precisely twelve o’clock P.M., October 23, 4004 B.C. The undisputed expert on human anatomy at the time, Rudolf Virchow, reckoned that because of the skeleton’s unusual shape and the heavily ridged brow, these were the bones of a rickets–ridden, cave–dwelling hermit who had met an untimely death at the site sometime in the past, but not the deep, dark past.

That might have been the end of the whole discussion, but then in 1863, the highly respected British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (of the remarkable Huxley family, which also produced Leonard, Aldous, and Andrew Huxley, among others) published his landmark book,
Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature
. Huxley was a devoted adherent of Darwin’s theories, so devoted that in some circles he was known as Darwin’s Bulldog. Being a bulldog, he made the argument that Neanderthals preceded modern humans somewhere down the line in our inexorable march from ape–like ancestors to our present form. In other words, he was an earlier version of you and me.

Homo neanderthalensis

Ultimately Darwin’s and Huxley’s views won out, at least generally and at least in the scientific world. Then in 1908, decades after the original discovery was made in Germany, France’s leading biological anthropologist, Marcellin Boule, saddled the world with a damagingly inaccurate view of Neanderthal when he got hold of another set of bones that had been found in a rock shelter in La
Chapelle–aux–Saints in southwestern France. Boule studiously scrutinized the remains, but missed that the person to whom they belonged had suffered from chronic arthritis and a disease that had cruelly twisted the man’s spine. So when he rebuilt the crippled Neanderthal’s anatomy, the image he created was of an apish, bowed, and stoop–shouldered creature who became the prototypical caricature of the caveman that most of us still carry around in our minds—dim–witted, brutish, and slow, something along the lines of a Harry Potter troll. His conclusion: Neanderthals were not our ancestors but an evolutionary dead end, which, oddly enough, turned out to be about right, but for all the wrong reasons.

Insights into Neanderthals and their world have altered considerably within the past decade as new fossils have been discovered, and scientists have applied genetic technology in creative ways to plumb exactly who these remarkable people were. It’s now clear that though they lived under brutal and stupefying circumstances during their nearly two hundred thousand years in Europe and Asia, they were themselves neither brutal nor stupid. In fact their brains were slightly larger than ours are today, and their accomplishments, when placed in the context of the challenges they faced in their daily lives, were nothing short of astonishing.

Two hundred millenia is a long time, and Neanderthals were by all accounts a busy species throughout. Although the best evidence is that their worldwide population never reached into six figures, they still managed to range thousands of miles in all directions. The bones of over four hundred Neanderthals have been unearthed during the past hundred years. They reveal that at one time or another these people lived as far west as the Iberian Peninsula and as far east as the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia.
¹
When the weather grew colder, they traveled south to the Arabian Peninsula and Gibraltar, and when glaciers receded, they receded with them up to the mountain ranges of northern Europe. There is no evidence that they ever ventured into Africa, which makes sense. Their bodies were optimized for cold weather, and over the past two hundred millennia there was plenty of that in Europe and their haunts in Asia.

Neanderthals’ physical adaptations to the cold are among the reasons we think of them as brutish. On thick necks they carried large heads to hold their big brains (one fossil cranium indicates a brain of over 1700 cc, about 300 cc larger than your brain or mine). Their jaws
were big with long rows of square teeth, but their chins were small, almost as though the middle part of their face had been pulled out slightly around their nose and upper lip. (From their point of view, it would have looked as though ours had been pushed in and flattened.) The thick brow ridge that ran over their eyes gave them a brooding, almost sinister look, even if their heads were topped, as some scientists have speculated, with mounds of red or blond hair. Their hair color and their fairer, possibly freckled skin were an evolutionary accommodation to living farther north than the
Homo sapiens
from the warmer climates of the south. Dark skin in equatorial environments evolved to reduce the amount of vitamin D we absorb, but light skin increases our absorption rate, a good thing in lands where sunshine is in short supply for half the year.
²

The selective pressures of cold, northern climates also endowed Neanderthals with big, rounded shoulders and thick–barreled chests that would shame a professional fullback. Even their noses helped them survive frigid temperatures. They were enormous and fleshy and rigged with expanded nasal membranes that warmed and moistened the cold, dry air they breathed. Above all they were strong, much stronger than we are today, with slightly foreshortened arms and thighs that reduced the amount of skin they exposed to the air. Their hands were large and far more powerful than their
Homo sapiens
cousins’, and their forearms were thick and roped with muscle, at least if the anatomy of the fossil bones that ran from their wrists to their elbows are any indication.

Despite their rounded shoulders and foreshortened legs, the fossils scientists currently have in hand indicate they were not shorter than the
Homo sapiens
of their time, though they were shorter than their direct ancestor,
Homo heidelbergensis
, who stood six feet tall, and the slender
Homo erectus
, creatures who were as well optimized for running and hot climates as Neanderthals were for battling big game and cold weather. What they lacked in height they made up for in bulk, which may, in an odd way, have contributed to their undoing. To stay warm and maintain their enormous strength, some scientists have theorized, they required up to 350 calories more a day than their
Homo sapiens
counterparts. Today 350 calories might not seem like much, nothing more than an extra muffin at Starbucks, but fifty thousand years ago that much extra food would have been exceedingly difficult to come by day in and day out.