Let’s be real, guys, Neanderthals get a bad rap.
We think of them as primitive and less developed than us humans with our smooth brow bones
and tall posture.
But the field of hominid development has been telling us for some time now that this is
probably pretty far from the truth.
And new research tells us that Neanderthals could have been...just as sophisticated as
humans!
Why have we been wrong for so long?
A lot of our prejudices about neanderthals come from our somewhat mistaken interpretation
of the fossil record.
When the first neanderthal skeleton was recorded by scientists in the mid 1800s, the conclusion
they came to was it must have been a bowlegged Slavic person whose brow seemed furrowed because
he was in a lot of pain.
[incredulous hmmm face here] Yeah, that’s how they explained the pronounced
brow on the skull they found.
And nearly every neanderthal skeleton discovered since then was marked by some gruesome injury
or violent cause of death, particularly around the head and neck.
A small sample a few years ago originally found that significantly more Neanderthal
remains were marked by this kind of violence than the other non-neanderthal species that
were alive at the same time.
I dunno, maybe they just played a lot of football?
This seeming discrepancy between species led the anthropological and paleontological communities
to guess that neanderthals must have been different from the other hominids.
They must have been more prone to violence, which could have due to hunting large, dangerous
game...but some scientists also perpetuated the idea that Neanderthals must have often
been in conflict with one another.
That theory was tempting because it gives us a logical explanation for why Neanderthals
aren’t around anymore and we are--maybe they just had it harder and couldn’t hack
it.
But this view of Neanderthals as brutish thugs was building from already shaky place.
William King was the first to think that maybe these skeletons were an extinct form of human,
which was insightful of him, and he gave the species their name.
But then he kinda backtracked on that brilliance when he compared our early relative’s skull
with its protruding brow to the skulls of living humans.
This in itself isn’t bad practice, but coming to conclusions about a whole group of people
because of their skull shape is a pseudoscience called phrenology that was popular during
King’s time, and has been used in the past to justify extremely racist and unscientific
ideas about the differences between humans.
King’s opinion was that the Neanderthal skulls were similar to the skulls of living
indigenous populations that he already deemed to be ‘lesser’, and so he declared that
Neanderthals must have been very primitive indeed.
This first deliberate misunderstanding about the character of these early upright mammals,
rooted in someone’s personal bias, has stuck in the public mindset about Neanderthals,
perpetuated by the gaps in our data about them and the popular representations of them
in the media.
And the fact that we may not have looked at or questioned the first ideas about Neanderthals
too hard until recently.
But recent work challenges us to unstick those assumptions from our brain...and provides
the science to back it up.
As paleontology advances, we simply have so many more skeletons and artifacts to work
with--there’s more of the picture to see.
And the more we see, the more we realize that our earlier ideas may have just been due to
sampling bias.
A new study, the largest of its kind to date, has looked at large samples of all kinds of
early hominids and come to the conclusion that Neanderthals weren’t special--they
didn’t experience that much more violence than any other early hominid...life back then
was pretty brutal for everyone.
And this just adds to the chorus of evidence that’s come out recently to combat the negative
view of our departed cousins.
Thought Neanderthals were just banging rocks together?
Experts now believe that Neanderthal tools were just as complex as ours.
In fact, early Neanderthal tools show a sophistication that human tools don’t until humans migrated
to Neanderthal territory...indicating that they probably shared that tool-making knowledge
with us!
The world’s oldest cave paintings were also just discovered in modern-day Spain.
The art dates back 65,000 years, well before any of our human ancestors were hangin’
out there, meaning….it had to be the Neanderthals.
Painting up a storm before we even arrived.
If you’ve got grunting and pointing Neanderthals in your head, then think again.
They could probably talk like us and most likely even had culture like ours.
Recent work has revealed that they buried their dead, intentionally and ritually--part
of a culture that also may have included decorating themselves with brightly colored paints, feathers
and shell jewelry.
And they also used medicinal plants to treat their aches and pains, so...that’s sounding
pretty sophisticated to me.
All in all, this shifting field is helping us learn so much more about our past and our
fellow ancestors, and hopefully these insights could give us some clues as to why the neanderthals
went extinct--which is still one history’s biggest mysteries.
All of this is also making us examine where a lot of our scientific assumptions come from.
It’s always good to look critically at why a field has believed what it’s believed
for so long.
And with areas of study where it’s just impossible to see all the data, we have to
check ourselves and be careful not to fill in the gaps with something just because of
an assumption or preconception we’ve had...especially when the science starts to say otherwise.
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Make sure to subscribe to Seeker so we can keep working on thinking critically about
science and its history together.
And fun fact, neanderthals actually had bigger brains than modern humans...they just may
have not have packed as much into it.
Thanks for watching.