In Our Time - The Neanderthals

Episode Date: June 17, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Neanderthals.In 1856, quarry workers in Germany found bones in a cave which seemed to belong to a bear or other large mammal. They were later identified as being from a previously unknown species of hominid similar to a human. The specimen was named Homo neanderthalis after the valley in which the bones were found.This was the first identified remains of a Neanderthal, a species which inhabited parts of Europe and Central Asia from around 400,000 years ago. Often depicted as little more advanced than apes, Neanderthals were in fact sophisticated, highly-evolved hunters capable of making tools and even jewellery.Scholarship has established much about how and where the Neanderthals lived - but the reasons for their disappearance from the planet around 28,000 years ago remain unclear.With: Simon Conway MorrisProfessor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at the University of CambridgeChris Stringer Research Leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum and Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway, University of LondonDanielle SchreveReader in Physical Geography at Royal Holloway, University of LondonProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1856 in the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf, workers quarrying limestone stumbled across some old bones, which they assumed to be the remains of a bear.

They were handed over to a local naturist who realised that he was looking at something far more intriguing. The remains, which included part of a skull as well as leg, arm and ribbones, appeared to be ancient in origin and to come from an animal similar in appearance to humans. But this was an animal previously unknown to science, possibly even an ancestor of modern humans. The following year, the discovery was announced to the world as a new species, namely Homo Neanderthalis, in honour of the place where it was discovered. Today we know Homo Neanderthalis as the Neanderthals,

a relative of modern humans that flourished several hundred thousand years ago. scholarship has established much about their lives and behaviour, although the reason for their extinction remains unclear. With me to discuss the Neanderthals are Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology at the University of Cambridge. Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum, and visiting professor at Royal Holloway University of London, and Daniel Shreve, reader in physical geography also at Royal Holloway University of London.

Simon Cornwallis, before we talk about the Neanderthals themselves, can you set the scene for us? What was the earth like about 400,000 years ago, just before the emergence or they're said to emerge, these Neanderthals? Well, at that time, in a sense, one could almost say it was the best of times and the worst of times, because in that interval going back about 2 million years, we're in what we call the ice ages. So effectively we have times when it's warm, in fact, sometimes exceedingly warm,

and otherwise in times slightly after that, going towards the present day, it then becomes very much colder. So, where we're sitting at the moment a few hundred yards away, 400,000 years ago, then one wouldn't be surprised to wander across a hippopotamus. But, of course, if we'd go a bit further towards the present, then, in fact, we'd find a scene which would be almost indistinguishable from Greenland. So the point here is, effectively, we have these blocks of time, roughly about 100,000 years each,

where it is generally very warm, super global warming, almost, other times when it's exceedingly cold. And what's so interesting about this, of course, is first of all, the change from one system to the other can be very rapid, but also when it's very cold, for example, it's not continuously cold. It can oscillate violently. And why all this matters is, first of all,

the environment we associate with present day is really quite benign. In that time, in fact, there were major oscillations where one could go very quickly in terms of climatic change. But so far as we're concerned, especially when we want to look at the evidence, there are two things that really matter. We're still talking, I'm losing me a bit. We're still talking about 400,000 years ago.

Yes. Right, fine. Okay. When you say, I mean, you guys have trouble with time, as far as we have, 400,000 years, is Lazare Wednesday. We're still talking 400,000 years ago. Okay, fine. That's right. And that's particular time, sea level would have been actually, if anything, slightly higher than today. But as soon as we go into other systems, then in fact, then the sea level forms. And then

effectively, in the local way, the geography changes quite dramatically. But, as I say, what matters is when humans are migrating, when they're going after their hunting patterns and things like that, there are times when it's very opportune to be in one place, and other times when things shift, then we move very dramatically and also very rapidly into a completely new system. I think that's actually pretty important because there's good reason to think that human evolution, at least in part, is driven by these rapid environmental changes.

So, and before the Neanderthals came along 400,000 years ago, if we can sort of keep that figure in mind, there's a lot of figures but we'll just, we'll be very selective about them. Before they came along, what were the most sophisticated hominid ape species?

Well, if we look at the evolution of humans broadly, we know that it started in Africa. If we go back about 6 million years, it's already clear that we're on our hind feet, we're what's called bipedal. And then when we look at the hominid story by and large, it's often described as a bush. In other words, rather surprisingly, today we belong to the genus Homo, and we are the only representative Homo sapiens. That's extremely unusual in biology.

Normally you have a whole lot of species, more or less living together, which of course has a bearing on out of what happened to the Neanderthals. But more particularly, we find a series of explorations, first of all in Africa, and then they begin to leak out of Africa a long time before 400,000 years ago. But all of this is driven, affected by the opportunities of, is the Ice Age in full swing, or is it a relatively benign time when you can get more easily into certain sort of areas. But what really matters is that there are lots and lots of species of Homo, and all of those, with now one exception ourselves, are extinct.

So we have an enormous diversification, which is now whittled down to us. Let's briskly bring it to the Y figure. Can you just explain, briefly, how that Y works and where the Neanderthars are on that Y? Well, the letter Y is useful. We can just put that in our minds and just tell us why that's useful. What happens? Well, what matters is that almost everybody accepts that Neanderthals are a separate species from us. Some people think, in fact, they're a variant of us.

So as you go back in time, you'll find that we share some sort of common ancestor, which I think very crudely we can call Homo erectus or Homo ergaster. And these are the sorts of things which live not only in Africa, but in many parts of Asia. Then there is this divergence, and effectively we and our lineage are principally, with Africa and parts of the Middle East, whereas the Neanderthals are really moving into the area which defines most of Europe and a good part of Asia. And it's effectively what happens is after that divergence,

which one must remember in terms of evolutionary relationships, we are still extremely close to the Anandotles. A number of differences between us are not that significant. So there was this split. And what became Homo sapiens and largely stayed in Africa and what became the Anadal's moved across the bridge because of one of these oscillations in weather that you're talking about, there was a land bridge moving to a walk,

let's loosely call Europe, so there's the split of the Y, the top Y is there, so now we're concentrating around that area. Chris Stringer, let's talk about the evidence. There's discovery I mentioned in introduction in 1856. Now, has there been a great deal of evidence

since then, are we talking? Can you give us more detail, please? Yes, I mean, certainly already a couple of Neanderthals had even been found before 1856, but they weren't recognised as important until later on, so the Neanderthal find sort of got all the glory in the name of the group.

But yes, certainly by the 1900s, a number of other partial Neanderthal skeletons have been found in Belgium and Croatia, particularly France. So we start to build up a sample of Neanderthals from Europe in particular. Later on, they turn up in the Middle East, and even as far, you know, they're in Uzbekistan. And, of course, in Britain, we've got early Neanderthals even over here. So the sample enlarged, and we've now got, if you allow bits and pieces of Neanderthals,

we've probably got something like 1,000 individuals represented over several hundred thousand years. Now, we keep talking about fossil evidence, or you keep talking about fossil evidence, and I know it's right, when you get this stuff, these fossils, these bones, can you tell us what you do with them? How do you know that this is a Neanderthal and it's not a late ape or an early... away you go? Yes, I mean, if it's a relatively complete material, then certainly we can compare it directly with ours,

so the Neanderthold walked up right. They were not in any sense a sort of so-called missing link. They were very evolved humans. So they shared most of their characteristics with us. They had a large brain. But nevertheless, when you get into the details, they certainly are different from us. So you've got this strong browage over the eyes,

big nose, those sorts of features. So as long as you've got the right bits of a Neantol, you can clearly distinguish them from anyone around today. But how, when you look at these fossils, Chris, Can you say they emerged at around this time and they survive for this long? You've got the bone. I've got a pen in my hand.

You've got the bone. I'm looking at this bone. Now what do you do to say this bone emerged 400,000, 200,000, 3. And what your bit, gentlemen, and it lasted that long. What do you do? Okay, yes. Well, for example, on the back of the skull, there are these little depression of muscle markings

which is present in all known Neanderthal skulls. Even the babies that have them. So this little depression, It's too technical name the Super Iniac Fossa. That little depression is present on a scarlet from Kent at Swancom that's 400,000 years old, and it's present in fossils from Spain at the same age. So these Neanderthal features were beginning to emerge 400,000 years ago. But the full development of the Neantiles comes later.

I'm obviously being thick here, but how do you know it's 400,000 years, and not 300,000, not 200,000, not 500,000, not 500,000? I still don't get it. Okay, well, let's take the example of Swanscom in Kent. Now, the River Thames has laid down a series of terraces, and the Swanscom Terrace is the highest terrace of the River Thames in its present position near London. And as you go up this, what's been called,

a staircase of terraces, you're going back in time. So each terrace roughly forms about every hundred thousand years, as the river fluctuates in its levels, with the Ice Ages, as Simon has mentioned. So that highest terrace, we judge it to be the first terrace since the Thames was pushed to its present position, so we're talking geology here. It's a geological method. We can't use radiocarbon dating back then, it's too far back. So we have to use geology, and people like Danielle have worked on the animal fossils in these terraces, and those change through time as well, so we can look at those animals, and they help us to place the Neanderthal fossils in time in relation to each other. Good. I've got it.

So Danielle, let's move across to you. Chris has teed you up for this. How widely were they spread geographically? I mean, we have this idea that this particular group, family, whatever it is, moves across Africa, across a land bridge that there is temporarily a few hundred years, whatever it was, maybe even less than that, that Simon pointed out at the very top, these things came and went as the sea went up and down,

as ice came and went and bottled up water, and so on. So how widespread were they? Well, once the common ancestor of Neanderthals moves out of Africa, finds themselves in Europe, essentially it's a bit of a backwater for them. And they're found right the way over from North Wales, extending across down to the Mediterranean, into Western Asia, so the area around Israel, Jordan, for example. And these are based on not only the fossil evidence that we have,

but also on the material culture, so the artefacts that they make. very interestingly we've also got new genetic evidence which has pushed the boundaries of the Neanderthals even further to the east so whereas we can only tell distinctive features in the bones of the Neanderthals where present if we find a tiny fragment of bone and we can analyze the mitochondrial DNA we can put them in the Neanderthal family and that's now pushed the range right over into the Altae Mountains of southern Siberia so a very extensive range from Siberia over in the east right the way to the British Shiles.

Are there any particular difficulties about analysing the DNA of Neanderthals? It's really a question of presence and preservation of DNA. That's a critical thing. And I think many of the sites that we have are cave sites, and these turn out to be very good environments for the preservation of bone. So as long as the material is buried rapidly, it doesn't degrade too much, then there is a very good chance as long as you are away from areas

of high aridity or humidity of getting DNA out of that. When they came over this land bridge into, let's call it Europe, were they cut off then? Did this fill up again? They couldn't get back. Were they in a sense trapped in Europe?

Well, the land bridge really only relates to Britain because effectively there is a constant area of land that they can occupy all the way. But the Blundbridge I'm talking about from Africa to Europe, as it were. Well, that has remained pretty much constant. Why did only a few of them come across then? Well, we don't know how many of them came across.

Bear in mind that we're relying on a very, very small pool of evidence to tell us about these people. But those few that came across, I'm trying to get the idea of how distinct they were, before we talk about how similar they are. They come across, they become a distinct group, and those who are left behind in Africa have no DNA of DNA in Italian, and the European lot have some. They were distinct in a way. So were they not joined by others?

Did they not go backwards and forwards? There's no real evidence that there was a lot of movement backwards and forwards because the Neanderthals evolve as a distinctive species and they have very clear differences in their bones, their skull, for example, which separate them from modern humans. So there doesn't seem to have been a great deal of genetic mixing. Chris gave us as a sketch outline of what they were like. Can we go into more details?

Because people think of them generally as sort of small, hump, shoulder. It's not at all like that, is it? No, they've certainly suffered from something of an image problem in the past, I think, but we're on our way to rehabilitating them. If you were to encounter a Neanderthal on a hillside, there would be something hauntingly familiar, but very other about them. I think for a modern human, they would be recognizably different. So, for example, if you look at the skull, they've got a very low,

sort of flattened head, very pronounced brow ridges, the whole of the middle of the face is pulled forwards and they had enormous noses. What function did that serve? There's some suggestion that this may have been to warm air in cold environments. So if you increase the surface area of the nasal area, then you've got greater surface area with capillaries for warming the air in cold environments. It's possibly slightly misleading because Neanderthals were also found in warm environments, but they do certainly have adaptations to living in cold environments.

as well. So the body particularly we see this with a very stocky body, relatively short limbs. Again, these are very reminiscent of features that we see in modern human populations that live up in the high Arctic. So very muscular bodies, short limbs, reducing surface area to keep warm. And we were talking about them being extraordinary strong from the notes I've read and actually when they hunted going in and taking the animals on, and these big animals almost physically.

Yes, absolutely. They led very, very physical lives. In fact, many of the Neanderthal bones that were described early on were described as degenerate or diseased because they had this bowed aspect to them, very, very robust, but it's because they are so muscular.

And in fact, we see an enormous amount of trauma healed breakage on Neanderthal bones because presumably they got up close to their prey. They used jabbing spears. Many of them were knocked over, suffered breakages, but these healed and they carried on. And we told that they could run very quickly and for very long periods of time because of the structure of their legs and their feet and so. Well, not, no. I mean, that's very much a modern human trait, actually, with the longer limbs.

Neanderthal seemed to be much more sort of ambush predators and certainly used features of the landscape to help them with that. Simon Combin-Morris, what does Neanderthal anatomy allow us to conclude about their habit and lifestyle? Well, the only I've already mentioned, the evidence is that they dealt with what's called close quarter hunting. So they're always putting pointed sticks into very angry ungulates, and they have correspondingly responded. There's some evidence, I believe, that the hunting patterns which we Homo sapiens employed were really rather different from the way than Neanderthals operated. But what's also fascinating, and although some of this is controversial, first of all, there is reasonable evidence that Neanderthals who were injured were cared for by other Neanderthals. Now, that should not surprise us in a way.

They are a sort of human, but again, as Daniel said, they are hauntingly different, so similar, but subtly different in all sorts of ways. The other aspects about them, of course, is... Why, they look after the moon, it sounds a sort of bit better, really, isn't it? Well, one hopes so, of course, one doesn't really know how their clans operate. Well, we have teams that a lot of discoveries have been made of people have had terrible injuries and must have been sustained by these groups and could do nothing to help the group, but yet they were looked after for a long time after they'd had these horrible injuries.

That's true, and in fact, evidence of that sort of thing actually goes deeper into, into the history of the hominids. The other aspect about them is, and as far as I know, it's still reliably accepted, is that there is evidence of cannibalism. And of course, this screen is real sort of, what are they doing? And was it actually the way cannibalism has been used

amongst various human groups, which is effectively a ritual, or was it actually simply a matter of starvation? Because I think whatever else one thinks about these people, life was desperately hard most of the time. And the average lifespan, if you were a 30-year-old Neanderthal, you were a very old man indeed.

And that would have been true of ourselves as well. Can you come back to you from now, Daniel, how much just finished, what do we know about their diet and their food? We used to think there were scavengers, and that's now developed, no, they were hunters, but there were scavengers and hunters. I think we're very clearly in the camp that they were hunters now, and we can tell that from a number of sources, the first of which is looking at chemical analysis of their bones.

By looking at isotopes of carbon and nitrogen, this tells us that they had an incredibly high meat component to their diet, so high that they are comparable with other carnivores, wolves, hyenas, for example, and that they were exclusive. They were top of the range predators. So the chemical analysis certainly supports that they were hunting. They were getting an enormous amount of meat in their diet. But equally, we can look at animal bone assemblages, and that tells us, again, what Neanderthals were doing in terms of their hunting and subsistence practices. And in fact, things like fat and bone marrow would have been even more important than meat for their caloric content.

So, for example, when I sit there going through tens of thousands of bones in a museum, scrutinising the surface, looking for cut marks, evidence of butchery, but also looking to see where the bones have been smashed and systematically cracked open, twisted open to extract the bone marrow, which would have been eaten straight away. They domesticated fire, didn't they? We know that fire had actually been around before Neanderthals were on the scene But yes, I mean we imagine that we certainly have evidence of hathes from Neanderthal sites across Europe And so it seems fairly certain they would have been cooking their food as well

So they'd been cooking the food, it wouldn't have been raw meat? I think probably when they first bring down an animal It's very likely that they would have consumed things like eyeballs, tongue, the guts straight away and then dismember the carcass as swiftly as possible. Bear in mind that for most of the time that they're around, they're surrounded by a pretty formidable guild of predators who would have been very keen on what they were doing and to take the carcasses away.

And they're very keen on them, presumably, some of the predators. Absolutely. So it would have been a case of defending their carcasses, working as a team, dismembering the elements, taking them away somewhere safe to consume. Chris Stringer, two things here, really. This working as a team is interesting, isn't it? Because that's part of the...

So we know they had short-javing spears, we've told, anyway, you people tell me, and therefore they had to get very close to these animals, and sometimes they attacked the most massive animals, mammoths, with these short-javing spears and fierce animals. We know that. So can we talk about how they hunted in groups, and where they got these weapons from, what sort of weapons they were, what was their technology?

Yes, I mean the fact that they were dealing with these dangerous wild animals means that almost certainly there must have been cooperation between the groups, communication between them. We assume that they had the ability to communicate with each other, some basic language skills probably, at least basic ones, and obviously able to plan things because you don't deal with these dangerous animals without careful thought and planning. It's a dangerous activity.

So they were getting close into their prey, and clearly at times we see very large accumulations of animals in some of these sites. They had to get through the winters in Ice Age Europe, and particularly you are reliant on meat resources. So they must have had good hunting, and I'm sure they wouldn't have turned their nose up at a, let's say, de-frosting mammoth carcass equally, but certainly they could get the meat they needed.

They also had vegetable resources, of course, which don't preserve so well in the sites. And from sites like Gibraltar, we know that they even at times exploited marine resources, which has tended to be thought of as a modern human feature. But there we've got evidence they were eating at times, things like seal and dolphin even. So quite wide-ranging skills from that point of view

and in terms of their stone tools and their technology, they knew their raw materials, they were good stone tool makers, they made wooden artefacts at times. You could say they probably weren't the great innovators that we find with modern humans, there's a lot of change through short periods of time. We get long periods of stasis in the archaeological record with the Neanderthals. But you could say the same at that time for our ancestors

in Africa. Things were changing at a much slower pace at that time. Can't we just go into these tool-making a little bit more, in a little bit more detail, because that's one key to culture, isn't it? So what tools were they? Where did they get it? How did they make them? Can we just have a bit of detail, please?

Yes, I mean, where the Neanderthals had good access to say Flint, Flint is a fantastic raw material, it's really... But they'd have to find Flint and know about Flint, so they didn't just stumble across it. They must have communicated to you. If you go and dig over there, there's a bit of a quarry. you can get good flint.

Absolutely. I mean, if there are chalk cliffs nearby, you can pull chunks of flint out of there. If you've got a river like the River Thames, it will have big chunks of flint in it. And we're able to recover the stone tools of the Neanderthals. We can often find sites where you've actually got the debris from where they've made stone tools.

You can piece it together and tell exactly the sequence of blows that they had to make on these blocks of flint. So they're using, first of all, cobbles as hard hammers to knock off large flakes, and then they switch to soft hammers of wood or antler or bone and they start to knock off much finer flakes. So clearly mentally they've got a template in their mind

of the tool they want to make and they achieve that most of the time. And these tools, well we call them obviously, we've given them names, we call them scrapers and piercers and notches for... So we obviously assume they're being used for particular purposes. Certainly some of them must have been used for butchering carcasses, others for working skins,

probably others for carving wood to make things like wooden spears. So not unsophisticated and not unlike us at about that time. Yes, absolutely. If you compare them with the early modern humans in Africa, behaviour is really pretty similar overall. And it's only later on you start to see this divergence of behaviours. Can we talk about the groups, Danielle?

I'm interested in that. We're all interested in that. Group suggests a society, doesn't it? And if a group, let's just take the hunting, which you seem to know more about, than anything else. So you're going to have to have a lot of people to get together to organise, as I understand it,

to ambush the animals and to tire them out by keeping tracking them down to low tide, then to ambush them. What does that tell us? I think it's true that you imagine Neanderthals work together cooperatively. One of the things that it's impossible to really get a good handle on

is actual group size. But I mean, we could be looking at anywhere between 20, 30, 40 individuals together. There doesn't seem to be in much distinction between men and women in this, does they, in terms of going out, hunting together. And children, I'm just talking back the notes that you people have provided, children seem to go very, very quickly and get on with it. There's certainly evidence that Neanderthals matured more rapidly than modern humans, so you can imagine that as soon as they were able, they would be in the thick of it as well.

You're right that we can't see a gender subdivision as such. We don't know whether males and females participated equally. but it's certainly true that they used the landscape. They knew their landscape intimately. They knew places where animals would come down to drink, good places for ambush. We see at some sites, for example, there's a very well-known site in Jersey

where Neanderthal seemed to have herded small groups of mammoth and woolly rhino over a cliff in order to kill them. Equally, there are areas of marshland, again, where mammoths perhaps have been driven in, and tired out and then picked off eventually. So they knew their landscape. They could use that to their advantage. And equally, they know, for example,

the migration patterns of these animals. And we see that reflected in the animal bones that we find from these sites. They seem to be picking on particular species, particularly adult animals as well, the nice meatiest animals, at certain times of year when these animals were coming through their territory.

Is there any sense, Simon, that they're getting these animals in the good hunting time? Then you've begun this program, by giving us a very clear idea of the impact of the vast oscillations of temperature. Sometimes it's very good, much more rapid oscillations than we would imagine. Sometimes Gulf Stream could be cut off sometimes after 10 years and then after 50 years, and so on. Well, is there any sense that they hunted in the hunting season? And then they kept the stuff cold through the winter.

They kept so they could keep eating from that, or did they have to hunt all the time? Well, I'm not sure there's much direct evidence. I think the fact of the matter is that humans, and here I would include that Neanderthals, are clever with their technologies and they're not going to starve. And almost certainly there must have been various ways that they've preserved the meat. The simplest ways, in certain cases, either it's a semi-freeze it or to dry it. But there's one tiny clue, because Chris mentioned this acquisition of marine resources, and there's a little bit of evidence, very recently published,

to suggest that they were taking shellfish as well. And ingeniously, they notice that with these shellfish, there's some remains of seaweed. And it turns out what's the best way of preserving shellfish from going, ugh, off very quickly? It's wrap them in nice, moist seaweed, and they'll preserve for several days beautifully. And because the sites where these shellfish have been found

as quite a few miles from the ocean, one can be pretty sure that they've got little parcels where they take in their oysters, equivalent to these other sorts of areas. But, I mean, the point about this thing is what Chris was saying with regard to the technologies, is that one mustn't ever, I think, underestimate them. And, you know, in this brutal business,

there's no National Health Service and all the things you need to get you through incredibly severe winters and I think certainly so far as the European ones you're asking Daniel about the fires and so forth I think it's inconceivable not in did they cook their food they must have it for warmth and also I think it's practically

inconceivable they didn't have some sort of clothing so once again one begins to build up a sort of fragmentary picture of these things but you think about the way that the clothing would be skins I would have very well after all if you've gone to the trouble of slaughtering a woolly mammoth you might as well use the rest of it as an extremely agreeable coat for about 30 people.

Yes. But talk about that. Let's talk a little, try to talk a bit more about that culture, Danielle, and I'll come to you, Christy. There's a burial culture. But talking about the skins, the homo sapiens seems to develop the craft of sewing, the bone needles and sewing,

so they could sew skins together, make tents, be more protective, be more protective of their children and that doesn't set being developed with me undertiles. Can you give us one or two more clues about culture in that area? It's true that we don't see any evidence of tailored clothes before anatomically modern humans arrive on the scene, and there is a vast amount of evidence from things like bone needles. Neanderthals must have been using skins, though, to keep themselves warm,

because, in fact, when you look anatomically comparing Neanderthals with modern humans, despite the fact that they have these robust features, in fact, they only have a minimal advantage over anatomically modern humans in terms of temperatures that they would be able to tolerate. So from that we infer that in order to survive some of the temperatures that we can see that they were certainly experiencing, we know that they had to have some kind of clothing

as well as this hunting culture which kept them going. Can we talk a little bit more, Chris, about the burial culture. Burial culture seems to suggest an idea of a future, it seems to suggest ancestor worship, it seems to suggest the sort of cultures that we know about from, well, beyond the Egyptians and so on. Is it, or what are we talking about here? Well, yes, it's very difficult to be sure

the Neantols are burying their dead, as early modern humans did. And to begin with, these are very simple burials. So you find a body buried in a cave with no, in the case of Neanderthals, no associated grave goods that we can say were definitely there. So one view is that this was just really extending that care

that they've given people during their life into their death, that you don't want to come back to this cave three months later and see your mum or dad's bones being chewed over by a hyena on the surface of the cave. So you bury them to, in a sense, save them, and then later on perhaps this does become added into with the view of an afterlife, that actually you're preserving that body

and it will go on to an afterlife. Now we can't be sure, of course, about that for the Neanderthals, the level of spirituality, but later on we do find things in the graves with the dead, both for modern humans and Neanderthals. And so then there are tributes, either tributes in there to these individuals or things that they will need in their afterlife.

So I think it's quite likely the Neanderthals had the beginnings of spirituality. One of the very haunting things, there's also one which is deeply controversial, is in the caves from Iraq. In one of the burial sites, the investigators found a very large amount of pollen. and some people say, ah, maybe not only did they put perhaps the odd grave could,

but maybe they also put flowers there. Now, I have to stress this one is extremely controversial. But I wouldn't regard it as out of the question, if you like. And again, it sort of begs this question, you know, what exactly are they thinking about their own dead? And I think it's fair to say these burials are very rare. They're not uniform in any sort of sense, but in another burial, I believe the skull is missing.

Now, nobody knows whether it was never there in the sense that it was, you know, the person had been killed and something else had happened to them, or whether it was used for some other function. But once again, you keep on getting this sort of rumours, if you like, of something which is very close to ourselves. Let's talk about language, Christringer. They had the Foxp2 gene that enables language.

Do we know what they did with it? Well, yes, I think Foxp2 has been called the language gene, but it's a little bit more complicated than that, of course. And I think what we know is that when Fox P2 mutates and malfunctions, it interferes with language production in modern people. So it's been called the language gene, but actually it does many other things, and it certainly is not going to be the only component of language. So I think the fact they've got that and we've got it means it probably was there

in our common ancestor 500,000 years ago. So I think we have to grant them basic language abilities, and people, of course, have tried to reconstruct Neanderthal vocal tracks to see what sounds they could make. But even on the worst-case scenario, they've got 25 or 30% of the range of sounds we can make, and that's certainly for modern humans completely adequate to make any complex communication. So I would give them

language skills, but I doubt myself personally that they had the complexity of language we're using now, which deals with the... No, but we didn't have the complexity language we're using now then, did we? Well, there's evidence from Africa that modern humans were communicating in more complex ways

probably 100,000 years ago. We start to see a beginning of complexity there, which we don't at that time find in the Neanderthals. they do get more complex at the end of their time but at that time there is a gap beginning to open up in my view of the complexity of communication and symbolism before we talk about their extinction which is still a great puzzle can I just ask you then Neanderthals and Homo sapiens are knocking about at the same time

are they like cows and sheep in a field sort of really sharing the same field but ignoring each other is that what we're talking about or are they avoiding each other are they fighting each other what are they doing this is one of the big questions for us because undoubtedly they had been encountering each other in the Near East since maybe 100,000, maybe slightly earlier. And certainly in Europe from 40,000 onwards, the nature of those interactions is difficult to discern. Certainly they would have been in competition with each other for living space and cave sites, for hunting resources. We don't know whether encounters were warlike, more pleasant.

It's a very big question for us. So that's the answer. It's a very big question. That is the answer at the moment. It's a good answer. It's fine. I like answers like answers like that. It means you can do more progress. There's a little bit more to it, perhaps. Well, I'm not, Daniel Vee is just as familiar with this work.

You've not more so than myself. You mentioned this Fox 2 P-Gene, which is implicated language. The recent recovery of more of the DNA from ancient Neanderthals has been used, I think, very persuasively, to suggest there must have been some sort of interbreeding between ourselves, Homo sapiens and a Neanderthals. And what's really interesting about this is, first of all, it happened long before most people had expected, maybe 80, 90,000 years ago, something of that order.

And the other thing is before we get too excited, even though I think it's probably fair to say all of us around here in this studio, have some Neanderthal DNA in us, it makes no difference to us. And the number of those interbreedings, and as I say, was it, well, God forbid, a rape, or was it just, for want of a better word, a lakeside dalliance, where two species come together? Because hybrid, hybrid, for instance, between a dolphin and another group of whales, was a wolf in as they call it. So why not a humothal? But these interactions would have been extremely limited.

There are probably only a handful of them. And it does show that in one way or another, the speculation did they just meet and look at each other eye and the eye and then part, went a little bit further than that. But what does that suggest? That suggests much closer kinship than has been allowed so far, doesn't it, Chris?

Well, I think we know the Neanderthimes, as you said at the beginning really. They are closely related to us. The split time is maybe four or five. 500,000 years now, geologically speaking, that is yesterday. So we are very closely related to them. And I think we're now in the position of saying, well, either they are a distinct but very closely related species,

where there is some hybridisation possible, and we know that from many other mammal species, as Simon said. Or they could, perhaps, as some suggested when it was first found. People like Huxley said, this is just an extreme variant of modern humans. And I think they're in that grey area. I tend to think there are different species because we can track their separate evolutionary history in Europe

and the development of distinctive features. And their DNA up to now, I mean, the first work on DNA did stress their distinctiveness. The mitochondrial DNA, so-called, Ychromosome DNA was distinct from anyone around today. So I was quite surprised, of course, to suddenly be presented with this evidence from the more complete data

that there was at least a small level of interbreeding. That surprised me, because I assumed that any interbreeding had kind of maybe disappeared 25,000, thousand years ago at the peak of the last ice age. But it does seem it came through outside of Africa. Daniel, can we come back to the coexistence business, say 30, 40,000 years ago? So they're around Europe together, homo sapiens and the And that is true. How different are they? Would they be so different? Cows and sheep isn't all that bad, is it? You go across the field

and there's cows and sheep and they take absolutely no notice of each other. They're sharing the same territory. Is it like that? I think given the conditions that they're living under, it was probably an awful lot harder because two very similar species cannot coexist indefinitely together in the same space.

Why is that? Because they are in competition for the same resources and ultimately one will oust the other. Whether that is the reason why Neanderthals became extinct. Well, we'll come back in a minute, but so that's fine. So they would actually, they would constantly be meeting and separating, rather

than meeting and just getting on with being around. I think that's something that we cannot see in the archaeological record. We just can't get any evidence for the nature of those interpersonal relations. Whether, I mean, for example, Neanderthals have been masters of their environment for 200,000 years before modern humans arrived on the scene. They had never seen another species of human around. And suddenly there is a new competitor in their territory. And what, just saying, what do these humans stand up?

How are they, how are they, how are they different? How do they have a competitive advantage? It's partly down to technology in that we know modern humans are making different tools, they make a much wider range of tools, but the key differences lie in the brain. It's not to do with brain size

because as we know Neanderthals had brains that were as large as Arseney in some cases larger, but it's to do with how that brain brain is wired. Modern humans' brains seem wired differently, different social makeup, different adaptations, and in that sense they may have had the edge. Well, Chris and Daniel have referred to it in slightly different ways, but of course this is fascinating thing of how the cultures are really very parallel in number ways, but there are these divergences. And one of the things which interest me the most is that towards the end of their distinguished career, that's a Neanderthals, they do undergo

really sort of quite significant cultural explosion. In other words, you begin to find in Europe, these various incised bones and drilled things. And you look at them and you say, well, if I had them, I'd make that into a necklace. And the general idea, and this is being put forward, I think, by such people as my friend in Cambridge, Paul Mellas, is that this is the result of contact. Humans are moving in, they're bright, they're smart,

they're drinking beer, they're playing guitars, they're having a wail of a time. No, no, no, no, no, it's true because there are cultural differences, and the idea is that the Neanderthals are imitating us, that they are stealing from our technology, they're having a good go at doing as best as we can. I don't like the drinking beer and playing guitar. I don't know what really went on.

I mean, honestly, I'm sorry to be that. I'm a bit stuffy here, but I want to know what was going on 30,000 years ago. Well, we can certainly tell you something about alcohol used deep into archaeological records if we had the time. Oh, that's all right. I go with the alcohol, that's fine, all right. That's what I would say. So the point there, of course, has been that in a way the Neanderthals remain the runners-up. Now, as I was mentioning earlier with regard to the shellfish possibly wrapped in seaweed,

there is increasing evidence, which I certainly think is very convincing, that this cultural explosion which the Antelansans underwent, was actually independent of the humans there, just a little bit behind us. Chris, can we just briskly go through the evidence of the superiority of technology that Daniel referred to that Homo sapiens had? If you can do that briskly, and then begin to talk us into why they went extinct, why they came extinct. I think by the time of the overlap of us and Neanderthals,

Modern humans did have much more complex technology, more specialized tools, tools that did many more different things. So, for example, engraving tools that can work, I mean, bone and antler and ivory was all around the antols, but they didn't do too much with it. Modern humans start to engrave it and cut it and sculpt it. And we also, you've mentioned sewing, the arrival of needles and things, and weaving. We think modern humans could weave. And if you can do things like that, you can make nets and snares and traps. So this means you can get a much wider range of food. Even the old people and the young can join in the food acquisition.

I think that gave modern humans an edge. And also we could kill at a distance with throwing spears and bows and arrows. That was a big thing. Absolutely, yes. Throwing spears and spear throwers themselves with the zebine evidence of things like boomerang, surprisingly, at an early date. So these kinds of weapons give you a safer way of killing, if you like, and as you say, later on, bows and arrows even come in. So I think that, yes, modern humans had the edge in all these extra bits of technology,

but as Simon says, near the end of their time, the Neantos start to do some of this more complex behaviour. And personally, I think that the DNA may be a clue to what's going on, that not only could they be copying and acquiring this through diffusion, but maybe they were getting some modern human genes in their brains. Now, can I just ask you to be very brisk? I'm sorry we're running out of time. Why, in your view, one at a time, did they become extinct? 25,000, 28,000 years ago.

I think they're under enormous ecological pressure because as they come towards the last glacial maximum, the climate is oscillating 6 to 7 degrees every 100 to 1,000 years. It's putting their prey under stress, so their prey is disappearing and they are under ecological stress. Yeah, I agree largely they're in a pretty tough corner, but the problem was that we are roughly 30,000 years ahead of them in terms of inventiveness.

Right. And Chris? Yes, and I would say they already were a threatened species. even before modern humans turn up and in a sense they suffer a double whammy, climate change and a competing human species. Threatened species in what way? Well, from the DNA data, we know their numbers in Europe were probably down to thousands of people, that's all.

So they already are, you know, there aren't many of them around on the ground. I think it's very pointed at the end that the last survivors seem to be in Gibraltar gazing across the sea to Africa from whence they came but unable to make boats. Anyway, thank you very much, Chris Stringer. Daniel Shreve and Simon Conway Morris.

And next week we'll be talking about 35 million years in the history of the Antarctic. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4.