Neanderthals

The story

Strange bones in a German valley

In August 1856, in a limestone quarry in the valley of the River Düssel, near Düsseldorf in Germany, some workers found in a cave bones with an unusual look: a very low, elongated skullcap with enormous brow ridges, and thick, curved arm and leg bones. They thought they were the remains of a bear and almost threw them away. A local science teacher, Johann Carl Fuhlrott, realised they were different and had them studied with an anatomist, Hermann Schaaffhausen. The valley was called Neander, after a seventeenth-century poet: in German “Thal” or “tal” means valley. Hence “Neanderthal”, the “valley of Neander”. In 1864 the scientific name was fixed: Homo neanderthalensis.

Other similar skulls had already been found, at Gibraltar in 1848 and in Belgium in 1829, but nobody had recognised them. For this reason the discovery in the Neander valley is considered the beginning of the scientific study of an extinct human species, three years before Darwin's book on the origin of species.

What they were like

The Neanderthals lived in Europe and western Asia from about 400,000 until about 40,000 years ago. They were shorter than us, but very sturdy, with a broad chest, short legs and thick bones: a body suited to keeping in heat in the cold climates of the ice ages. The face had big brow ridges above the eyes, a wide nose and almost no chin. The brain was as big as ours, on average even a little bigger, about 1,400–1,500 cubic centimetres; but the shape of the head was different, longer and lower. The first reconstructions, a hundred years ago, showed them as stooping and brutish, but this was a mistake: the skeleton studied then, found in France, belonged to an old man with arthritis.

A culture of their own

They made very refined stone tools with a technique called Levallois, in which the flint core was prepared before a flake of the wanted shape was struck off. They made wooden spears and hunted horses, deer and big wild cattle. They also cooked plants, as the residues in the tartar on their teeth show. They produced pitch, a kind of glue made from birch bark, to fix points to handles: in Tuscany, at Campitello, traces of it about 200,000 years old have been found. They looked after one another: the skeleton of a man found in Shanidar Cave in Iraq shows very serious injuries and a long recovery, impossible without the help of the group.

They buried their dead, at least in some cases, as at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France, where in 1908 a skeleton was found in a pit dug on purpose. Some groups used ornaments: perforated eagle talons at Krapina in Croatia, about 130,000 years old, coloured shells in Spain, and bird feathers, probably worn as decoration, in Fumane Cave in Veneto. Some studies say that in Spain they may even have painted cave walls more than 64,000 years ago, but the dating is much disputed.

In Italy

Italy is rich in traces. At Altamura in Apulia, in Lamalunga Cave, in 1993 some cavers discovered an almost complete skeleton, covered by a crust of calcite that has preserved it and also made it impossible to remove without damage. This is the Altamura Man, who lived perhaps between 130,000 and 170,000 years ago. In 2015 a small fragment of bone was taken and made it possible to analyse the DNA and confirm that it was a Neanderthal. Another famous cave is Guattari Cave, at San Felice Circeo in Lazio: in 1939 a skull was found there, and in 2021 more remains of nine individuals, eight of whom lived between 50,000 and 68,000 years ago and the ninth earlier still, in a place also visited by hyenas.

Their disappearance and what is left of them

Around 40,000 years ago the Neanderthals disappeared. The causes are debated: perhaps the climate, which was swinging, played a part; perhaps competition with Homo sapiens, who had arrived in Europe; perhaps the fact that they were few and isolated. Most likely there was not just one reason. But they did not vanish entirely. In 2010 a team led by the Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo managed to read DNA from their fossils: he discovered that people today who descend from populations outside Africa carry in them about 1 to 2 per cent of Neanderthal DNA. So there were encounters and children between the two populations. Some genes inherited from them have to do with the immune system and the skin.