Instant Genius - The Neanderthals, with Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Episode Date: June 20, 2021

Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes tells us all about Neanderthals, and reveals how they continue to shape our view about deep human history. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius. Dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: https://www.sciencefocus.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In this episode, I talked to Dr Rebecca Ragsykes, who is an archaeologist and honorary fellow at the University of Liverpool. She tells us all about Neanderthals and reveals how they continue to help us shape our view of deep human history. So what exactly is a Neanderthal? Well, I think the simplest and most up-to-date way to describe Neanderthals is that they are another kind of human. I think a lot of people have in mind that Neanderthals are one of a number of. different hominins, so ancient relations of us. But in the broader time scale of human evolution, Neanderthals are actually very close to us. You know, our last common ancestor with chimpanzees, our closest living relative, is about 7 million years ago, whereas we last shared

an ancestor with Neanderthals, possibly only about 550,000 years ago. So that's not actually very long. at all is very recent, so we should expect them to be pretty similar to us. So when exactly did they exist? What was the timeline of them living on the planet? Overall, like I just said, with the two lineages that would lead from a common ancestor, one lineage leading eventually to us, the other to Neanderthals, that split happened somewhere between 550 and about 760,000 years ago. But ourselves and Neanderthals didn't really sort of coales, sort of coales into something recognizable as us until somewhere between 400 and 350,000 years ago. So we kind of were on these parallel tracks of becoming our own separate versions of humans.

And the Neanderthals, after that point from about 350,000 years ago, they carried on their own independent evolutionary pathway until about 40,000 years ago. and from that point onwards, they basically disappear from the fossil record, and we stopped seeing the archaeology that has been associated with them. Where did the Neanderthals live? Am I correct in thinking? They came out of Africa, same as we did. Did they then live in, you think of them as being a cold weather specialists, but did they live all over the world?

Well, actually, they probably did not emerge in Africa. We do not know where that last common ancestral population. population was actually sort of largely based. It may have been in Africa. But the split that separated us off from them, that could actually have been somewhere in Eurasia. We actually don't know that. But what we certainly do see is that by that point around 400, 350,000 years ago, when we start to really see Neanderthals emerging in terms of their anatomy and also genetically, they are definitely a Eurasian species and we've never found anything that looks like a Neanderthal

anywhere on the African continent. There are some Neanderthals in the Near East, so Palestine, Israel, these kind of regions and it goes off into Central Asia, Siberia, but really its Western Eurasia seems to be their sort of core hot and if you want to call it that. If you were off on an expedition, you went into a cave and you found some human remains,

Could you tell just from looking at them if they were Neanderthal or not? Well, I mean, that's a great question because that's exactly what happened when they were first discovered. You know, we didn't expect the Neanderthal. So it was on the basis of their bodies looking different that people began to theorise that this was another form of humanity. And this was right in the middle of the 19th century. So, yes, overall, there are many differences across their bodies. If you found a skull, what would be quite obvious is the largeness of the face.

They had large faces. Everybody thinks of Neanderthals having heavy brow ridges and that's true. But also the front part of their face, the nose and the mouth were actually sort of pulled forward a bit more compared to us. We have quite tucked under little faces under our foreheads. And also their foreheads themselves, we have very vertical foreheads because we have quite large balloon-shaped heads that go straight, straight up. Neanderthals, it's more swept back, sort of more of an aerodynamic kind of look about it. So I think that would be noticeable. You'd have to be probably a specialist in human bones to instantly recognise a difference

based on the shape across the rest of the body. But you might realise that the bones are actually really quite thick as well. So that's another difference that you see across their body. But overall, what we have sort of accumulated in our knowledge about Neanderthal bodies over the past 160, 170 or years since we found them, is that there are these big differences. They're slightly shorter. As I said, the skull really does look different.

There's differences in the pelvis. But there's also lots of little differences across their body as well. So they are distinctive in terms of their physique. But that shouldn't make you think that they are some kind of sort of shuffling, bent over, missing link with apes or gorillas. they are far from that. They're totally upright, walked like us, and you would recognise them as humans. Is there a best site where you can go and find Neanderthal remains? You mean in terms of visiting or where there's loads of them to dig up?

Why leaves them to dig up as like an archaeologist if you went off and you were told, oh, this is like the best place to go, where would it be? Oh, I think probably right now the hot spot for finding actual remains of Neanderthals is probably, a cave in Iraqi Kurdistan called Shanidar. It's a very famous site. It was first dug in the 1960s. With the older work at Shanidar in the 1960s, excavation protocols were quite different

and rather faster than today. What the new team, who are largely from the University of Cambridge, have found, they were invited to go back to Shanada by the government there, and they were interested to basically take up where the previous digs stopped. And the last skeletal remains that came out in the 1960s, it seemed to be a mix of individuals,

individual and the adetals of slightly different ages and builds. So some of them looked a little bit more lightly built than others, but within quite a small area of the site. And it was unclear what was actually going on with those bodies. And so the new team came in and they basically wanted to have another go at that. area and see, you know, what they found. And they did indeed find something spectacular. So this is a new find called Shanidal Z. The previous Neanderthal skeletons were numerically numbered. So, you know,

Shanid al-1 through 10. And this is Shanadar Z because they actually, the new team are not entirely certain, whether it is a fresh individual or whether it is related to body parts that already found. basically it's the upper body of what it appears to be a young adult, perhaps a male Neanderthal, which was found lying sort of three quarters on its side with its head sideways, but sort of the back and the chest slightly turned, almost as if you're lying in bed slightly on your side, lent over. And the preservation is really, really nice. And this is, again, one of the differences.

There were photos from the 1960s, but clearly cameras have embroidered. improved somewhat and so, you know, we can see what the preservation at Shanidar looks like in person and obviously the new team of filming everything as well as they remove the body part. So it's really, really special to see this very famous site worked on from a new perspective. And in terms of understanding Neanderthal practices around the dead and the possibilities that there may have been going on, this individual does not really look like it's been damaged by Rockfall. More, over, because the new team have all of the whizzy sort of techniques that we have available now, including the sedimentological analysis, which basically means we can look at the cave, the structure of the cave that can take slices through that and assess, is there a pit? Does it look as if the edges of that pit were artificially altered? Is the stuff in the pit surrounding the skeleton? Does that sediment look different to like the now? sediment of the cave. And through all of those methods of analysis, which, you know, just were not

possible in the 60s, it is looking as if that Shanada said individual was probably placed in a depression in the cave. It could have been a naturally cut channel like by rainwater and things, but it looks as if it may have been altered. And that sediment is different to the sort of the surrounding stuff and it looks like it's gone in basically in one go. It's not naturally built up slowly over time, as you would expect if that body had just ended up there by accident and slowly been covered through, you know, weathering processes. So in terms of what we can hope for from a site that's really famous

and that was dug decades and decades and decades ago first, to be able to go back and, you know, apply all these new methods and things and pull out not only new actual skeletal remains, but then to really assess the context, that is so important for understanding what Neantatals were actually doing. So it looks like they could have been intentionally burying their dead.

Yeah, I mean, burying is a, you know, it's a word that brings to mind churchyards and things like that. And what it certainly suggests is that the bodies of the dead may have been placed in depressions that were either there naturally or they enlarged them or something,

but then it was covered rapidly, very likely by other individual Neanderthals there. And that's why that particular Shanadar Zed Neanderthal was preserved. But there's also something really interesting that's come out of that. The whole Shanidar cave during the 1960s, the original excavations by the Seleckis, they were from the US. It became really famous because they believed that they had found

pollen in one of the graves, or at least one, I think. And the species of plants included some that are flowering. And so there was this wonderful idea that really took people's imaginations in like the flower power, decade of the 60s that, oh, Neanderthals had these funerary bouquets, and they laid them with the dead. And this kind of, I guess, more gentle view really took people's imaginations. And it's there in some fiction about Neanderthals as well, Gene Owls, a famous series of books, Earth's children. She has a burial with flowers inspired by this cave. So after that, other researchers looked at, you know,

the natural pollen that you find in this cave. There is actually flowering species all over the place, and it turns out that rodents sometimes buried, sort of berry pollen accidentally as they dig burrows into just the ground in the cave. So that didn't look so certain as a really robust idea. But in the new context, the Shanidar Z context, the researchers have suggested that they can see plant macro remains, which basically is bits of plants. They will be able to, again, using the best available methods that we have, they will be able to look and see what is going on in that sediment. Are there plants in there?

What plants are they? What's the pollen? Does it match this stuff that was claimed previously? is there any real evidence that this is plant material that, you know, is more than you would naturally expect or something like this? So it has really exciting potential to, you know, either support or perhaps do away with this persistent idea that Neanderthals had to funeral bouquets at Shanidol. So what else do we know about Neanderthal culture? I think in terms of how they treated each other, what we deem as something appropriate to do with.

the bodies of the dead. That's really variable in human society. But in terms of compassion, I suppose, if you want to frame it like that, there is plenty of, there have been plenty of claims that the rates of injury and especially healed injuries in Neanderthals

point towards some kind of widespread care for each other, while they were ill or hurt and things like this. And I think certainly, in some cases, the severity of the injuries and the state it would have left individuals in either temporarily or over the whole span of their lives. It does suggest that there was some what we call provisioning going on. So basically others were helping feed them. You know, we're talking like a broken femur at the top of a leg or an extremely serious sort of slice to the head,

which we don't know how that happened. It could have just been an accident. But however it happened, that would have left that individual. in a real state and very unlikely to care for themselves. So there are cases which I think are quite reliable, but other claims about, for example, coming back to flowers again and plants and the role that they had in Neanderthal lives,

in some more recent discoveries to do with the dental calculus in their teeth, so this is the grope that sticks on their teeth, and again, we can find tiny pieces of plants, including pollen and things like this. and starches and some of those have been identified as probably coming from species like yarrow or camomile which are known to have medicinal properties and have long been used by herbalists but they are just also edible plants and there's you know there's medieval accounts of yarrow as a great thing to eat with fish for example it's just a herb so that kind of comes down to your

interpretation. I don't think those are such strong claims for sort of the social care. But if we want to think more broadly about Neanderthal culture from a transcendent kind of position of thinking about why you would do things with the body of the dead, is it about thinking about mortality itself? And does that mean that Neanderthal's thought beyond the every day in other aspects of their lives? That's possible. And the way that we try to see that is we would, one way is we would look at their engagement with materials and say, is there things going on that do not look like they are just purely part of functional everyday survival stuff. And the answer is yes, there are some very clear examples. They are rare, but they are persistently present across Neanderthal.

sites through quite a wide span of time, where we can see in the Adetal seem really interested in altering surfaces of things. That can be with colour using natural mineral pigments. And there are many different examples of this now. It seems they were interested in black pigments and also reds and yellows. And also in other cases, they seem to be making regularised markings on surfaces. that don't connect to any kind of, just, you know, everyday thing like butchery. You know, if we look at the carcass of an animal, archaeologists have done thousands and thousands of hours of experimental work, and we know very well what butchering at animals carcass does to the bones.

So we know what typical butchery, the traces that leaves and what they look like. And in other cases, what we see are marked is that very different. So sort of really regularly spaced, quite even markings that don't have that kind of practical explanation. And again, they are pretty rare. We have the best examples are on the bone of a raven, a wing bone of a raven from Saskarnia Cave in Crimea and also a hyena bone fragment from a French cave, Le Pradel.

And in both those cases, if those objects were found, found in sites that were later, that were early on Masapian sites, I think there would be no questioning that those were intentionally made series of, you know, incisions or engravings. However you want to interpret the meaning of those, but the intentionality behind them would not be questioned. And one explanation that's been put forward, which does make quite a lot of sense, is that they are a notational system, an early notation system. So essentially a form of counting.

What we believe is that overall, many animals have a really basic number sense. So they can tell like instantly there's five things there rather than two. But beyond that small amount, you need a system to record information. So it might be something like that, like a tally system,

rather than a formal system where you have one, two, three, four, five, like an actual ordinal counting system, this may be a very simple way to record different kinds of information. It might be about quantity, but it might be something else. But that would make sense. We would expect there to be a really simple system emerging quite early. And again, similar objects that come from early Homo sapiens sites in southern Africa, they are interpreted that way as some form of notation. So that I think is a really interesting aspect of how we think about what Neanderthals were thinking about the world,

that they were interested, A, as I was saying, in changing the appearance of things by altering surfaces, but also why they were doing that. You know, what does applying colour mean? That's very hard to know. But if you are creating a notational system of some form, you are interested, in information and in either retaining that information for yourself or communicating it to somebody else. So that's quite a complicated series of ideas about Neanderthal culture that really do come from quite simple objects. So if you say they may have been interested in communication,

if they've got this notation system and they were altering surfaces, do we know if they could speak or if they could speak, do we know what they would have sounded like? Yeah, the ideas about speech have, I think, really coalesced a lot in the past couple of decades. It used to be a little bit unsure as to whether, you know, all the anatomy and the Neanderthal throat based around the voice box, whether the slight differences there were enough to mean that they basically did not have the same level of sound control as us and other issues like, did they have good lung control and things. So when we talk, you know, we can talk in very long sentences full of lots of words. I'm doing it right now. I'm not even stopping. Okay. And go. You need good

lung control for that. You need to let that air out nice and slow. And so that was a thought that maybe they couldn't do that because of differences in sort of where the spine was and things like this. That doesn't seem that likely now. And I think where most researchers are today, is that vocal communication was very likely, really important to Neanderthals. And that's partly because, as I say, we have the voice box. We have a bone called the hyoid, which supports the voice box, and modelling of the soft tissue of how that would have been. Does suggest that it's pretty similar to us.

But really excitingly, more recent work looking at the anatomy inside Neanderthal ears. We can actually do that because some of that anatomy is bone. and it's inside the skulls that we have. So although their shape inside their ears is different, researchers believe that that shape difference is not because they were hearing things differently, but just because the shape of the skull is different, it's kind of like adapted.

Because when they model how the sound frequencies would be perceived by ears with that shape, it's basically Neanderthal ears are tuned into very similar sound frequencies to ours. and our ears are totally focused on human speech. You know, that's one of the things that we have evolved to be good at hearing. And so the fact that that is very similar in the antesoles is suggestive that some kind of talking was really important to them. But obviously, then you get the question of, well, what is the talking about, you know, how complex is this talking?

Can we call it a language? And that then means that you've just got to go back to the archaeology again and say, well, how are they living? Can we see complexity in what they're up to that would imply some kind of language is needed? Things like this. So there's a back and forth between the anatomy and the archaeology all the time. So what are the hunting techniques might they have been using then? Certainly, we know they had spears because we found them. So how did they use the spears is an interesting question.

Did Neanderthals, basically, there's kind of two simple ways you can use spears. You can chase animals, pursuit hunting, basically. And one way that we see hunter-gatherers do this is they basically use relays. So you chase an animal when that hunter gets tired, another one steps in, chases it. And that can work very well in very hot environments because the animals will overheat and tire.

And I have also seen it claim that it works well in cold environments if the animals are really furry for the same reason. So that's pursuit hunting. We don't know if they did that. It's possible. We don't know. Ambush hunting is the other option where you basically learn your landscape very well.

You observe the habits of animals and you know where they're going to be and when. And you wait with your spear and ambush them. And that may have some evidence for it in that some of the places where we see big butchery evidence going on. And including the Spears, which come from his site in Germany, or Schernigan, 330,000 years old. That's along a lake shore. And in that case, it's hunting horses, multiple phases of horse hunting. There's about 50 animals, at least 50 animals were butchered there,

but not all at the same time. It's not one herd. Horses are really disadvantaged by being in the water. It really slows them down. So if you know, and this is a forested, this is a warm period of time when there was forest around. So if you are living in a forest, the best way to find animals is to follow their trails to water holes because it's very predictable. So if you put all of that together, you can say Scherningen maybe is a lakeshore ambush site for horse hunting with spears. Again, we don't know. Perhaps they were hurting them through the forest or chasing them, whatever. But in terms of the spear use overall, either of those options require cooperation between individuals and collaborative action. So I think that's a certainty that Neadotals were not, you know, off hunting as individuals. They probably did do it sometimes, but I think group hunting is very well supported in the record. in terms of other things like did they use like traps and things like that maybe pit traps we don't really know that we don't have any strong evidence for example of sites like you see for paleo-Indian sites so this is the earliest American settlement you have some places where we can see that there were animals being driven off cliffs repeatedly many times we don't have strong evidence for that but overall it does look as if Neanderthals were probably using spears of varying kinds and so sort of wooden spears that were

sharply pointed but probably also stone tipped spears although we don't actually have a spear with the stone tip still stuck on it and we have the separate pieces and we even have what's probably the glue um so you know if you put those together then it does indicate that they were using stone tips, and in fact, there are at least one site from the Near East. This is where there is the tip of a stone point in the neckbone of a wild ass, and that's probably a Neanderthal site. It's not entirely sure if that one is or not. But what we don't think they had is bows and arrows. So we've spoken about a lot of things. You know, they're obviously very intelligent. You know, they had some sort of form of culture and communication. Why did they disappear? Or what's the best idea at the

moment of why they disappeared? This is still one of the big questions and I have actually had sort of emails from readers saying, well, I really loved your book, but you didn't answer that question. And the reality is we can't answer it, give a completely 100% guarantee. Yeah, this is it. What I think we can do now, and what I have tried to do in the book is lay out the possibilities that we think are most likely. And it has to be plural, abilities because first of all, the Neanderthals were still at the point at which we stopped seeing them, say 40,000 years, they're still in a large area. You know, they're still living in a large geographical span. So whatever happened, it had to have been something important. But what was important might have been quite different in different regions because, you know, the living

conditions and the environment and the things that were, I guess, maybe risky or not going so well for Neanderthals in one part of their world might have been quite different in others. So I think we should never expect there to just be one answer to this. Certainly, the climate was not absolutely freezing at this point. It was getting colder, definitely, but they had lived through colder times. So it can't just be that's really cold. the climate does look as if it was becoming increasingly unpredictable. If you look at the climate graphs,

you can see sort of from 50,000 to about 40,000 over that 10,000 years span, it goes up and down. It looks like a seismograph. Like when you see with an earthquake, it's going to do it looks a bit like that. And by reconstructing the chronology of those climate shifts, it looks as if in some cases, you know, there were changes of multiple degrees over the course of a person's lifetime. So if you are a hunter-gatherer and you're reliant on the environments

and knowing what's going to be available when and where, if that changes, that's really bad news for you. So that could have been something that was more of a problem in some areas than others for Neanderthals. The presence of us of Havasopians, you know, it was thought for a long time that we'd, basically popped up 40,000 years ago in Europe and were like, hi, and then the Neanderthal's gone. That is not looking anywhere near as, you know, cut and dried as it used to be, because we

now know that early Homo sapiens populations were dispersing out from Africa into Eurasia way, way, way before this. There were certainly movements into East Asia by it, least 80,000, probably a lot before that. And we know as well that there was interbreeding going on. So the span of time over which there was contact and by implication, perhaps competition for resources, is much bigger. So why did it take so long is now the question. You know, if there were more than one hominin around and the antitals were there. We also shouldn't forget Denisovans, this closely related sister groups to Neanderthals, are there too. But it's It's much more of a melting pot than it used to be.

It's not like we just turned up and then they go. So that is a question. Is it that those early Homo sapiens groups that were there for maybe 100,000 years already, did they have technology that was so similar to Neanderthals that they just were not actually that big of a problem and they were not out-compete in Neanderthals? Did something come along technologically later that made a big difference? That's possible because in some of the...

later sites we see for the homo sapiens populations around this time sort of 50,000, 40,000, we see what we call points, so stone tip points basically, which Neanderthals could make those as well, but we see really small ones in some cases. And they are pretty good evidence that those are not for spears, they're too small. They're either for darts or bow and arrows. So there may be actually some kind of technological factor that comes in, which means that hunting is more efficient. But on top of all that, there's also, you know, the big thing that people have ever seen for a long time, which is that we just had some kind of cognitive boost or advantage that is linked to the apparent fluorescence in

symbolic stuff. So like pendants, art, paintings, carving, things like this. And it is certainly true. Even from 50,000 years in the early Homo sapiens context in Eurasia, we see more of this kind of stuff, way

more than the Adetals ever were making. So there is a difference in what people are doing with their materials and by implication the kind of culture that they had. And it might be to do with social networks so if you want to maintain your social network over a very large area

and we have to assume that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens people there was hardly any of either of them. They were living at very low densities as Hunter Gatherers generally do in these sorts of environments. But if you want to keep contact with those groups, then having material culture, symbolic material culture that you can recognise is really important. So that might be evidence that they had stronger social.

networks. And there is actually genetic data that backs this up in that some Neanderthal genomes that we've looked at indicate that the individuals were living in really tiny breeding populations. They were basically inbred at a population level. Not all of them show that to such a high degree, but some of them do. But in contrast, when we look at the early Homo sapiens genetic samples that we have, we don't have as many, but when we look at those ones, none of them show that. They seem to be coming from populations that were much more interconnected with each other and basically that allowed them to have a bigger breeding population. And that can make a huge difference.

So on the scale of a few thousand years, you only need to be having a few more babies a year than the other lot to, you know, lead to dominance without there ever actually being conflict. So I think all of these different factors need to be threaded together in how we think about what's going on. And I really like the perspective taken by the author of Peter Brannan actually written a book about sort of much earlier extinctions all through the history of life. And, you know, sometimes the ones that survive, it's not because they're better. They were just luckier. You know, they happened to be good at what they were doing in a time when that's, was needed. And I think we can think about Neanderthals like that. They were really successful.

They were really good at what they did. But something changed at the end. And it may just have been luck that we were slightly better at whatever it was that was causing the pressure and the risk, not that we were like an inherently upgraded model necessarily of humanity. So I think we need to kind of keep that in mind. And certainly, many of those early Homo sapiens pioneers that were in Eurasian vastly earlier, they all went extinct as well. You know, they don't have living ancestors today, many of those earliest groups. So they failed as well. You know, we like to position ourselves as successful all the way along, but that's not really the true picture. Just to wrap up then, what are three things you think people should know about Neanderth?

souls. Okay, I think the first thing that they lived in many worlds, they were definitely not hyper-arctic specialists. They were interglacial Neanderthals as well, walking around forests, enjoying the lovely sun. The second thing is that Neanderthals were really far away from the caveman cliquesia of banging rocks together. They were what I like to call material connoisseurs. They understood the world in which they lived. They understood materials and probably and how to experiment, and they were really creative. And the third thing, they were not failures in the way that they are really often positioned to be, and people still use, you know, Joe Biden.

Got lots of black for calling people Neanderthals. And they were good at what they were doing. And the converse, we were not super successes. There were plenty of extinctions amongst early on the Sapiens populations as well. So I think that's my final point that we need to be a bit more subtle in how we think about them. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Dr Rebecca Raggs. If you want to know even more about Neanderthals,

check out her book, Kindred, which is available now. Listeners can receive 20% off if they quote, Kindred 20 at bloomsbury.com forward slash kindred. To hear her tell me even more about Neanderthals, head over to the Instant Genius Extra podcast. The latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy in store or visit sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal.

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