Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived (20 page)

Not that any of this means that Neanderthals were less adept at the undertakings necessary to their survival. Mithen believes that they had plenty of “domain specific” intelligence characterized by the tools they made, the hunts they organized, and the food they prepared, but there is little evidence so far that they wove ideas into a broad culture filled with story and myth.

Their small numbers might have hindered their proclivities and talents. There couldn’t have been much cross–pollination of ideas among separate groups. Mithen even wonders if they developed hmmmm “dialects” specific to their own clans. Each group would have been like an out–of–the way island, rarely found. Given their dialects and the rarity of chance meetings, technical and social progress would have been stunted. In the long run that would have made the rise of sophisticated culture difficult.

This may explain why the more closely anthropologists have explored Neanderthal culture, the more they have noticed something odd. For all of their dogged courage and resilience, they didn’t make much technological progress during their two–hundred–thousand-year run in Europe. The Mousterian tools and cultural artifacts they crafted and left behind show remarkably little innovation considering how long they were around. The craftsmanship is first–rate, and the design of the tools and the methods used to fashion them were clearly passed along quite precisely, but given their intelligence, you would have expected more novelty, more originality.

Their greatest technical breakthroughs seem to have come
after
they first crossed paths with the Cro–Magnon people. This could be coincidence or it could illustrate what they might have accomplished if they had been able to better share ideas among themselves. Or it could mean their sparse numbers and the limitations of their language
hampered the two species’ ability to interact once they finally and fatefully met.

Imagine this encounter, and its shattering effect. Each group must have gazed at the other in bewildered amazement. In an instant they would have seen that these creatures resembled them, but were clearly not one of them. Why didn’t they communicate in the same way or even make the same sounds? This wasn’t simply a different tribe that dressed in unfamiliar apparel, spoke an indecipherable language, or carried odd weapons. This was another creature altogether, perhaps a god or an animal or something in between. To the Cro–Magnon (see sidebar p. 114), the large–muscled, beetle–browed white people with their fiery hair must have struck them as alien, and possibly dangerous. To the broad–backed Neanderthals, the slim creatures with their baby faces and rounded skulls might have looked slight, childlike, and at first glance weak. But the Neanderthals may have sensed danger, too, in the sophisticated weapons the strangers carried, and in the alien precision of their communication. Chances are the Neanderthals had seen the handiwork of those weapons long before they met face–to–face the creatures who had fashioned them. The evidence of such efficient killing must have had a chilling effect.

The big and primal question—the mastodon in the room so to speak—that had to have entered both of their collective minds was, whoever they are, can they be trusted? Are they a friend or an enemy?

For twenty-five thousand years, nearly three times longer than we have been recording our own history,
Homo sapiens
and Neanderthals shared the same part of the world. Over time, and as the Cro–Magnon people wandered deeper into Europe, the species must have met again and again. Did they cooperate or wage war or simply do their level best to ignore one another while each worked desperately to stay beyond death’s long reach?

As thoroughly as the archaeological record has been pored over, it has yielded nothing more than the skimpiest portrait of how the two species lived, let alone how they may have interacted.
Homo sapiens
, we know, had set up trading relationships with one another thousands of years earlier, which increased cooperation and improved their chances of survival. But because both species were itinerant, neither had yet established villages or cities, though there were settlements, favored places that clans and bands regularly returned to over long periods.

Neanderthal and early Cro–Magnon existence may not have been terribly different from the way Native Americans lived on the plains of North America as recently as the nineteenth century—moving with the seasons, following the large animals they fed on, hunkering down in the winter against the elements, in and near caves that provided warmth and shelter, and then moving again when the weather grew a little kinder. Generation after generation they likely lived this way, bending with the climate, following the herds of mammoth, elk, and deer that provided them with food, clothing, bones for tools, many of the raw materials they relied on for their existence. Life was a short, harsh cycle of perhaps thirty to thirty–five winters and summers of close cooperation, family feuds, and occasional encounters with other humans, then death, at which time the next generation took on the fight. In some ways it isn’t all that different from our existence today. Life was shorter, it’s true, and tougher and the technologies different, but the same general pattern applied. They too sought love, enjoyment, and friendship and searched for ways to express themselves, just as we do. They were, after all, human as well. Just a different variety of human.

All of this only makes it more tempting to wonder what happened during those long and wintry twenty-five millennia when our kind and Neanderthals coexisted. Why did Neanderthals fail to survive? It’s a vexing mystery. Every species runs its course.
We know that. And the Neanderthal had made an immensely successful run. They roamed the steppes and mountain forests of Europe and western Asia through three ice ages, and their close cousin
Homo heidelbergensis
had survived a full two hundred thousand years before departing. During most of their time the Neanderthals were the dominant primate species north of Africa. But as the last glacial age began, ever so slightly, to wane, perhaps for the Neanderthal people their time for departure had simply come just as it had come for so many others before them. If that was the case, the arrival of modern humans couldn’t have helped their situation whatever the intentions of
Homo sapiens
. The Cro–Magnon were moving into the Neanderthals’ ecological niche and were proving to be better survivors.

Some have speculated that we systematically wiped out our long–lost cousins as we came across them. When we met, the theory goes, if hunting or choice settlements and locations were at stake, the CroMagnon, with their superior weapons, and possibly their superior planning, killed or enslaved whoever got in their way, including Neanderthals. (They might have done the same to their own kind. We still do today.) It wouldn’t have been an all–out war in the sense that armies were assembled and clashed, but the damage done to the Neanderthals would have been relentless, with one settlement, tribe, or clan after another falling to the new intruders.

There’s not much evidence for warfare or murder in the fossil record, however. We haven’t found ancient killing fields, strewn with the hacked and broken bones of the two species; no sites where dead
Homo sapiens
lie next to the skeletons of Neanderthals. The first evidence of a violent Neanderthal death was discovered in the Shandihar Cave in northeastern Iraq. The man was about forty years old when he met his end. Scientists found evidence of a wound from a spear, or some sort of sharp object, in his rib cage. Based on the nature of the wound, Steven Churchill, an anthropologist at Duke University, suspects a light spear thrown by a Cro–Magnon enemy inflicted it. It doesn’t seem to be the result of a thrust by a knife or a long Neanderthal spear, the kind they favored when hunting. It’s a theory, but a long way from a certainty. If this one man was murdered in this cave, or nearby where were the other victims? It’s just as likely that the man died from a wound suffered while hunting, or maybe another Neanderthal did him in.

Other findings have been a little more conclusive, and considerably more gruesome. Paleontologist Fernando Ramirez Rozzi found something rare in the human fossil world, a cave called Les Rois in southwestern France that housed the bones of a modern human and a Neanderthal child lying together, positive proof that the two species came face–to–face. Unfortunately the jawbone of the child shows the same sort of markings paleontologists see on the bones of butchered reindeer skulls. The unappetizing conclusion is the child was made a meal of. Hints that other Neanderthals met a similar, cannibalized fate have been found at a site called Moula–Guercy near France’s Rhône River. Except in this case those who dined on their fellow humans were themselves Neanderthals. Perhaps it was a violent ritual, or the spoils of war, or maybe some who had died of starvation became the sustenance for those who survived. Not a cheery thought, but a world this harsh would inevitably require harsh choices.

If there were violent meetings, then this is the extent of the evidence we have for now. Others if they exist have yet to reveal themselves. Maybe, somewhere in Europe, in a remote mountain forest or beneath a broad river rerouted by the last glaciers, lie the bones of prehistoric warriors who fell to the invaders from the southern seas. So far, though, no battlefields, and no warriors, have been found.

A second theory that could explain the disappearance of the Neanderthals is that Cro–Magnon simply outcompeted them for resources, food, and land, not unlike the way we outcompete nearly every other species living wherever we show up. The thinking is that we didn’t kill them hand to hand, but we exterminated them in a war of attrition, by taking over the best habitats and hunting grounds, killing game faster than they could, and in larger numbers. Slowly, over thousands of years, the already sparse Neanderthal population retreated to pockets where it became increasingly difficult for them to survive. (We are doing this today to the gorillas and chimpanzees of Africa and the orangutans of Southeast Asia.) This might further have crippled Neanderthals’ ability to band together, weakening them still more, until in the end each of the dwindling clans died away.

There is some evidence for this. Neanderthals did become progressively rarer as Europe withdrew into the coldest phase of the last ice age. Leslie Aiello of University College London suggests that Neanderthals, as adapted as they were to chilly climates, couldn’t survive temperatures below 0
^°
F (−18
^°
C). Their clothing and technology
simply weren’t up to it thirty thousand years ago. As temperatures dropped and a new ice age descended, warm pockets of land would have become increasingly hard to find. If the Neanderthals retreated to them, they may have been trapped and died as even these locations grew too cold. Or they may have sought them only to find that the new creatures from the south had beat them to it, leaving them bereft of their favorite settlements and with no choice but to settle for places that, in the end, couldn’t sustain them.