We and the Neanderthals

This debate has taken on new virulence amid an accumulation of new, but still inconclusive, evidence. DNA analysis to date suggests that Neanderthals and modern humans are quite probably unrelated — that Neanderthals were a distinct species altogether.

However, archaeologists have shown in the past few years that modern human remains thought to be associated with human-made artifacts from the late Neanderthal era actually date from much more recent times. No one has found modern human remains buried with artifacts older than perhaps 32,000 years.

The argument now is about whether Neanderthals were comic book characters or, instead, a different people who somehow got sideswiped into extinction for some other reason. This mystery, central to the study of human culture during the Stone Age, is nowhere near resolution. “A lot of this discussion is about how we see our own relationship to these creatures,” said Princeton University anthropologist Alan E. Mann. “I worry these discussions are becoming much less about science.”

Early this month, researchers poured more gasoline on the fire, reporting in Nature on the results of new studies of a famous Neanderthal site at Chatelperron, in France. They said the new analysis of materials from old excavations showed that Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted in western Europe during the Neanderthals’ waning days, and thus had “potential demographic and cultural interactions”.

Co-author Paul A. Mellars, a University of Cambridge archaeologist and leading proponent of the view that modern humans shoved aside the Neanderthals and eventually replaced them, said in a telephone interview that he knew “there would be screaming” after publication of the Nature paper.

And there was. “It’s hogwash,” said Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis who is an advocate both of Neanderthal-modern human interbreeding and Neanderthals’ ability to adapt and “modernize”. The evidence is not convincing, Trinkaus said, and Mellars “is grasping at straws”.

The cave at Chatelperron, in central France, was first discovered in the 1840s during railroad construction, and it was excavated periodically through the rest of the 19th century. Today it has become archaeology’s prototype late Neanderthal site.

In the early 1950s, the French archaeologist Henri Delporte revisited the site and documented five levels of Neanderthal-era occupation. The most recent top three layers and the bottom-most layer had distinctively Neanderthal artifacts. But the fourth layer had modern human, or “Aurignacian” material — including the “split-based point” of a weapon made from an antler and two ornaments crafted from perforated animal teeth — typical of the artifacts attributed to early modern humans who spread across Europe perhaps a little more than 40,000 years ago.

Mellars said this “interstratification” provided solid evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans had co-existed in Europe. Mellars suggested that the back-and-forth shift may have occurred because modern humans were better prepared to cope with a western European cold snap about 41,500 years ago. “When it got cold, the Neanderthals moved out and the modern humans moved in,” Mellars said.

Trinkaus disputed both the integrity of the site and the accuracy of the interpretation. He said Chatelperron was a “heavily damaged, classic site” that had been picked over for 150 years. “You cannot argue that these things were made by modern humans just because modern humans made that type of tool,” he said. “The implication is that Neanderthals were too stupid to do it themselves.”

LAT-WP