One of the enduring mysteries of paleontology is the disappearance of the Neanderthals, the reputedly dimwitted and hapless cousins of modern humans who have inhabited popular culture in unflattering incarnations.
The beetle-browed Neanderthal supposedly was sent packing to the fringes of Europe more than 30,000 years ago when smarter, more cultivated modern folk migrated from the Middle East to Europe.
But that long-held scenario may be in trouble, thanks in part to a study to be published Tuesday that shows Neanderthals lived more recently–and in better style–than anyone had guessed. The report, by a Northern Illinois University paleontologist, indicates that at least one group of Neanderthals held its own for thousands of years alongside biologically modern people, winning a prime piece of Stone Age real estate and perhaps even interbreeding with the ancestors of today’s Europeans.
Applying new methods of carbon dating, anthropologist Fred Smith of NIU and his colleagues pegged the age of a Neanderthal jawbone and skull fragment found in the Vindija cave in Croatia at 28,000 years. That’s at least 2,000 years younger than the previous record-holder for youngest Neanderthal and at least 5,000 years younger than bone fragments from a colony of early humans found just a couple of miles from the Vindija cave.
“It suggests to me that (Neanderthals) weren’t pushed away for several millennia,” Smith said.
The findings appear in Tuesday’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The cave at Vindija, nestled among the rolling hills of northern Croatia, was hardly a dank environment. Ample light streamed into the hangar-size room, which offered an unobscured view of wild boars and other quarry trotting by and easy access to the brook below for a cool drink.
Neanderthals stood their ground at Vindija despite apparently sharing the area with supposedly superior modern humans.
“It’s a giant room, with a broad opening,” said Jan Simek, head of anthropology at the University of Tennessee and a Neanderthal expert. “It’s bright, it’s light, it’s very pleasant. It’s not a dark little dank cave.”
Avoiding migrating humans in the area would have been difficult, Smith said.
More Top Picks Best Transparent Overdrive Pedals
“This (cave) is right square where the main routes would have gone between the East and Western Europe,” Smith said. “It shows that Neanderthals are not being quickly (chased) into regions that are considered peripheral. That’s a bit of a surprise.”
The finding is sure to fuel the debate between competing camps of paleoanthropologists. One side says Neanderthals were a separate species that was wiped out when humans arrived; other theorists believe Neanderthals were similar to humans in many ways and disappeared because they mated with early humans and were absorbed into the population.
Scientists were little surprised in 1995 when they found evidence that Neanderthals had lived just 30,000 years ago in southern Spain. The finding fit into the theory that modern humans swept through Europe overpowering the Neanderthals, until the only ones left were at the edge of the continent.
“You can imagine a wave of modern humans shoving Neanderthals across Europe and into the Iberian Peninsula, with Gibraltar sort of being the Alamo,” Simek said.
But the discovery of Neanderthals living behind that “wave” means that the disappearance of the Neanderthals may not have occurred along such a uniform front, Simek said.
Chris Stringer, head of the human origins group at the Natural History Museum in London, said: “This would show that Neanderthals were surviving, apparently quite happily.”
Earlier this year, a team of scientists led by Erik Trinkaus, a co-author of Smith’s paper, announced that a boy who was carefully buried 24,000 years ago in Portugal had the prominent chin and other facial characteristics of a modern human. But his stocky body and short legs were those of a Neanderthal.
The boy was hailed as a human-Neanderthal hybrid–evidence that the evolutionary cousins not only coexisted but interbred.
Trinkaus, a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, said the study does not offer specific evidence that humans and Neanderthals interbred.
But, he said, it shows there would have been “plenty of opportunities.”
Indeed, the researchers found tools alongside the Vindija Neanderthal bones that were on a technological par with tools discovered alongside early human remains.
They included spearheads made of bone, apparently contradicting the long-held belief that Neanderthals were incapable of working with anything but stone.
In 1996, Slovenian scientists discovered a hollowed-out bear’s thigh bone, believed to be a flute, in a cave used by Neanderthals. A 1995 find indicated that Neanderthals performed burial rites.
And a Duke University-led study published last year argued that Neanderthals had the necessary nerve complex to manipulate their tongues into speech, meaning they probably had their own language.
Trinkaus said he wouldn’t be surprised if the year 28000 B.P. (before the present) found humans and Neanderthals in discourse, discussing a possible trade or even whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ears.
“The behavioral abilities of Neanderthals and early modern humans were not all that different,” he said. “They perceived each other as humans, and they treated each other as humans. . . . If there had been major differences between them, the early modern humans would have replaced the Neanderthals certainly within a few thousand years.”
Yet the argument for Neanderthal-human cooperation is not convincing to Ian Tattersall, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Though there is no definitive evidence showing how the two species dealt with each other, Tattersall said, he believes our ancestors drove the Neanderthals to extinction.
“Looking at how modern humans have tended to treat native peoples in recorded history–let alone other species–it seems very unlikely that these would have been happy interactions for the Neanderthals,” Tattersall said.
Most researchers say there is still not enough proof to say for sure why the Neanderthals vanished.
“We know the Neanderthals were all over the place, and not too long afterward it was just modern humans,” Tattersall said.
“The question is what happened in between. It’s almost the stuff of novels.”