Pity the poor Neanderthals, our prehistoric cousins. The first Neanderthal fossils were discovered in a place of that name in Germany in 1856. Archaeologists have since turned up fossils ranging from Protoneanderthals and Transition Neanderthals to Classic Neanderthals at about 75 sites from Western Europe to Central Asia. In examining the recovered fossils, tools, and other remains, archaeologists have attempted to reconstruct the lives, habitats, and habits of these archaic humans. Since all living non-Africans share, on average, 2.5 percent Neanderthal DNA, the question of their relationship to modern humans has fascinated scholars and the public alike.
There have been two theories concerning the disappearance of Neanderthals from the archaeological record about 30,000 years ago. One ascribes a primary role to the effects of radical and wildly fluctuating temperatures during a climate phase known as Oxygen Isotope Stage 3 (OIS3) on the environment and, thus, on the lives of Neanderthals. A climate downturn from 40,000 years ago coincides with their decline. Since Neanderthals had already lived in Eurasia for up to 200,000 years, during which time they had experienced and adapted to many glacial cycles, we are talking about really extreme weather, the likes of which Earth has not again experienced.
Modern humans moved out of Africa and into Europe about 40,000 years ago, during OIS3. Thus, Homo sapiens plays a major role in the second theory, which posits that the short, stocky, barrel-chested Neanderthals were forced to compete for woolly mammoths and cave bears with the more agile and leaner humans, who also carried assault weapons in the form of spears and other projectiles. Human-mediated extinction is the premise of The Invaders, with a twist. As the hyperbolic title proclaims, it was the “invading” humans and their dogs that did in the Neanderthals. Homo sapiens, Pat Shipman writes, is “unquestionably predatory.” We are in the territory of Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent Sixth Extinction (2014).
In this paleo-anthropological approach, Shipman, a retired professor of anthropology, marshals a benumbing amount of research on radiocarbon dating of fossils, chronology, genome sequencing, isotope stages, and such subjects as intraguild competition (“competitive exclusion”) and canid domestication. (This book is not for the fainthearted, and it is much in need of tables and graphs.) Shipman discusses what these new investigative techniques reveal about Neanderthal demise. She concedes, for instance, that “the severe bout of climatic deterioration” that began occurring about 45,000 years ago and that wiped out much of the vegetation behind which Neanderthals carried out their hunting gave the newly arrived humans and their projectiles a “substantial edge.”
She draws support for the human-mediated theory from the current field of “invasive biology,” which studies the effects of introducing species into (or removing species from) an ecosystem. In an ecosystem, there is invariably an “apex consumer” whose predatory habits keep the food hierarchy in circulation, while invasive species, as Shipman writes, disturb the balance and are “a major contributing factor in many and possibly most extinctions.”
Her proxy evidence for the effect of a new “apex predator” within an ecosystem, and thus for the disappearance of Neanderthals, is contained in her chapter on Yellowstone National Park. Before Yellowstone’s designation as a national park in 1872, most of the indigenous tribal peoples had been driven off the land. The incoming white humans eliminated their chief remaining rival, wolves, according to a policy endorsed by ranchers and the federal government. The removal of wolves, however, led to an overabundance of elk, which, in turn, caused degradation to rangeland. The number of coyotes also soared, since they were freed from suppression by their main competitors for prey. In the mid-1990s, 31 gray wolves from two Canadian parks were “released into [Yellowstone] to restore the natural balance of the original ecosystem before settlement by people of mostly European ancestry.” Elk numbers fell, while coyotes were immediately killed and driven away by the wolves, improving (among other things) “the survival rate of fawns of pronghorn antelope considerably.”
I am a layperson, but it strikes me as specious to compare the Yellowstone ecological “event”—which took place within a little more than a century and, moreover, was orchestrated by humans—with events that occurred over a time span of millennia and that cannot be directly observed.
What the archaeological record does show is that extensive cultural adaptation began to take place after the entry of humans into Eurasia and their dispersal to China and Australia. Thus, while archaics and moderns overlapped in Eurasia for at least 5,000 years, the latter were forced to improvise in their new surroundings—for instance, making garments that would protect their tropics-adapted bodies from the ravages of cold during OIS3. Did their Neanderthal neighbors learn anything from them?
Such adaptation to new surroundings also included the domestication of wolves. Wolves, as Shipman writes, are not obvious candidates for domestication, but, like early humans, they are a social species and travel in packs. The archaeological record shows the presence of large canids (“wolf-dogs”) in sites made by humans from about 36,000 years ago. Mitochondrial DNA indicates that all modern domestic dogs (“a wolf that acts like a dog and relates to people”) originated in Europe, with genetic data suggesting an origin between 32,100 and 18,800 years ago. Their domestication would have helped humans to retain possession of the carcasses of large animals, with the wolf-dogs keeping other predators at bay.
Thus, unlike with Neanderthal hunting, it was no longer a matter of simply chopping off a few choice cuts of meat and running for shelter; instead, every ounce of sustenance could be drawn from the slain animal, after which it would be carefully skinned and dismembered, with its skins used for clothing and its bones for construction of shelters. For Shipman, it goes without saying that such “assisted hunting” contributed to the demise of “any last lingering Neanderthals.”
Shipman introduces a nice bit of speculative evidence for the mutual attraction of humans and young wolves: namely, the presence of “white scleras”—the white part of the eyeball surrounding the colored iris—in both. She notes that white sclera make the direction of a person’s gaze visible from a distance, especially when directed horizontally, which would have been an advantage in hunting with wolf-dogs. “Gaze communication” and the tendency to look for cues from humans are apparent to anyone who has petted a dog—and are correspondingly lacking in our other favorite domesticated animal, cats. (Apes, likewise having dark sclera, are not skilled in “gaze reading.”)
The domestication of wolves indicates quasi-permanent settlements. Domestication of sheep, goats, and pigs would follow, but not for another 10,000 years or so: Modern humans had to make it through the last Ice Age before they could cultivate crops. To this day, as Shipman points out, most of us do not eat dogs, while we regularly feast on other carnivores.
The attractive format, the title, and the cover of The Invaders are meant to influence a larger audience, which is being slowly conditioned to relativize human achievements. Thus, the human-mediated theory of Neanderthal demise has been accompanied by the attempt to elevate the status of Neanderthals so that they approximate modern humans: After all, they used ochre for body adornment and wore pendants. But did the Neanderthals, as Shipman asserts, really live “successfully” for at least 200,000 years? Were they “clever, adept, and well adapted to their environment and ecosystem” when the encounter with humans occurred?
As with present-day climate science, wishful thinking plays a large role. From the evidence here and elsewhere, Neanderthals were never at the top of the food chain, never ruled the territory that modern humans “invaded.” They were not “apex predators” but simply one species among many trying to fill their stomachs while avoiding being devoured themselves. Using clubs and other hand weapons in a world of great beasts, they depended on ambushing their prey. H. G. Wells once suggested that they may have followed herds and played the part of jackal to the saber-toothed tiger.
It was a tough life, and obtaining food was “a lifelong task.” Consider “Nandy,” a Neanderthal re-created from 60,000-year-old bones found in a cave in northern Iraq in the 1950s:
This description is from Man and Microbes: Disease and Plagues in History and Modern Times (1995) by the popular science writer Arno Karlen. Karlen drew on the account of the discoverer of Nandy (officially, a skeleton known as “Shanidar I”), Ralph S. Solecki, whose Shanidar: The First Flower People (1971) suggests the affection that can be aroused by Neanderthals. Despite his multiple injuries, Nandy’s life was “neither very short nor unrelievedly brutish,” writes Karlen. The reason: Although his wounds “left him barely able to forage, and surely unable to survive on his own,” the fact that he lived so long must have been due to being protected by his band, who shared resources with him. If we are looking for an empathy gene in humans, we need go no further. Remember that 2.5 percent.
While Neanderthals had larger crania and brains than modern humans, nowhere in that gray matter were they able to store enough information to get a step up on the animals on which they depended for their survival. The absence of language, which Shipman does not discuss, may have played a role. Even though researchers have learned that Neanderthals had the same gene for speech as humans (FOXP2), it clearly did them no good, as they neither handed down knowledge to their immediate offspring nor passed it on to fellow bands in distant habitats. Population estimates for OIS3 are hard to come by, but the numbers are not large, with fewer than 100,000 individuals across Eurasia. Humans may have been able to communicate with kin groups and bridge the distances by way of spoken language.
The puzzle here seems not to be whether Neanderthals succumbed to climate reversals to which their bodies could not adjust or to competition from invasive predators, but how the species lived so long and so dumbly. While they were adept at making stone tools, even Elizabeth Kolbert admits that they spent “tens of thousands of years making the same tools over and over again.” The truly sad story is that the Neanderthals eked out an existence for 200,000 years doing the same old things.
I am reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, in which Hell is being stuck with the same annoying people and going through the same motions for eternity. Did Neanderthals simply die out from world-weariness? If the arrival of modern humans into an otherwise balanced ecosystem played a role in ushering Neanderthals off the stage of prehistory, it seems more like a coup de grâce.
Elizabeth Powers is writing a book on contemporary liberalism.
