The Ancients - Neanderthals
Episode Date: September 15, 2022Neanderthals are stereotypically viewed as thoughtless savages - but is this an accurate depiction or was there more to Neanderthal society?Discovered only 160 years ago what can they tell us about th...e Palaeolithic past? In this episode, Tristan is joined by archaeologist and author Rebecca Wragg Sykes to help dispel some of these myths. Using cutting edge technology and looking at recent discoveries, archaeologists are able to give a clearer picture of what Neanderthal life was actually like. With evidence of seafood in their diet, the advanced use of tools and managing to survive for 300,000 years - there's more to Neanderthal's than meets the eye.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!
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It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we're talking with the brilliant archaeologist Dr. Ragsikes all about Neanderthals.
That extinct hominin that coexisted with early humans, with Homo sapiens. What do we know about
the Neanderthals? Well today Rebecca is giving us a lovely 40 minute overview of the latest
research into Neanderthals. For instance what we know about what they ate, their diet, their communities, their daily tasks, their origins, and so on and so forth.
So without further ado, to talk all about Neanderthals, to give you an overview,
a starting guide to Neanderthals, here's Rebecca. Rebecca, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today.
Thank you very much for having me.
You are more than welcome for a topic like this, Neanderthals.
We're only going to be scratching the surface today,
but this really feels like
such an exciting area of prehistory to study, to focus in on this homonym, because it almost
feels like in the last few decades, like with the origins of Homo sapiens, we're learning so much
more about Neanderthals. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they really are the ancients, so they are quite
well suited to your podcast, I think.
I find Neanderthals interesting on so many different levels for themselves,
but also they are a really good sort of case study for how archaeology as a discipline has actually developed
and how different the way that we do things is now compared to the early days of prehistory, which in fact is over
150 years ago that sort of prehistorians started doing their thing. And I would love to sort of
see their faces if they went onto a modern excavation and see the meticulousness with
which we work now. And so how have scientific advances, how have they really helped us and
technology and the like learn more about these
Neanderthals? Well, there's loads of different things. I mean, archaeological science is like
its own sort of sub-discipline, basically. And there's just an immense amount of different
sort of methods and techniques that we can use for anything from sort of dating so you know back in early days of
prehistory if you found a site you basically had no way to directly know how old it was
versus another site in a different valley you might be digging you just sort of compared your
artifacts and said oh I think these look a bit older or maybe the animals that you find are
different but now we have all sorts of ways to directly date
many different materials so we can obviously everybody's heard of radiocarbon dating that
only works up to about 55 60 000 years ago which for neanderthals is very recent and so you know
if you've done your radiocarbon um but it's not old enough or it's coming out as an infinite measure, then there are other things you can do.
You can do electron spin resonance or uranium series.
And obviously these are kind of similar to radiocarbon because you're talking about isotopes and sort of elemental methods.
But there's other things you can do. For example, if you have some stone tools that were burned in the past, you can date those as well.
So there's all different things. That's just how old stuff is.
But then you've got just like so many different methods to actually study the materials that you find that you're excavating and learn about them.
You know, whether you're looking at technology, how stone tools were made, where they come from.
You know, you can source things to
the to the outcrops of particular rocks you can look for the residues left on stone tools you can
look for the really distinctive use where traces that are formed when tools are used on different
substances loads and loads of things so there's like this whole archaeological science which is
all kind of like labs and white coats and you know sort of glitzy sort of side of it but then there's also
this other aspect to how we think about archaeology and how we do it now and that kind of developed
over the the past sort of 40 50 years which is that people gradually began to realise that what we excavate from the ground,
actually, you know, that the layers themselves, the sediments, they actually contain an awful lot more
stuff than people used to assume. So, you know, rather than just digging out all the sediment and
only keeping the nice, pretty stone tools or the most complete bones, which is what used to happen,
nice pretty stone tools or the most complete bones which is what used to happen now we keep basically everything all of the stone objects most of them that are larger than two centimeters
will be recorded in 3d space with laser which is important for you to know how your site actually
forms where they all fit we do the same with bones and you know in amongst the sediment too
you've got sort of fine preservation of, you know,
things down to the size of pollen, sort of tiny pieces of insects.
Everything is just there waiting for us.
And gradually people realised it's there.
There's this huge archive of material
and we just have to be inventive enough to work out ways
to access all of that information.
And that's why
today, you know, I can write a book like this, an entire book, 400 pages, just about Neanderthal
life, because we can actually say a lot. It is so exciting indeed. And with all of these
resources available, Rebecca, I mean, how could you therefore distinguish a Neanderthal? What
exactly is a Neanderthal? How would a Neanderthal
be recognised? Well, I mean, Neanderthals essentially are just another kind of human.
So sort of in an official sort of parlance, we would call them another kind of hominin.
So they are part of our broader human family tree, but they're not sort of exactly the same as us and our direct
ancestors, Homo sapiens. But in terms of sort of where they fit into human origins more broadly,
they're actually very recent. So, you know, I was just saying, oh, 50,000, 60,000 years ago,
that's recent for Neanderthals. That's because they, as far as we can see at the moment,
they disappear around 40,000 years ago, but they actually began to emerge sort of as a population
that are looking distinctive somewhere between about 400 and 350,000 years ago. And that sounds
awfully long, and it is, it's a very long time. And it's only a little
bit before our own species, Homo sapiens, also emerged, but in Africa, different context,
or at least we believe in Africa. But put that into the deeper setting of human origins, and it's
not very old. Like you have sort of Homo erectus that people will have heard of you know well older than a
million years or you have the Australopithecines so the sort of little bipedal hominins not very
tall probably using stone tools Lucy you know that's 3.4 million years which is much much much
older so Neanderthals are very close really to where we fit.
And not only are they close in time,
but in terms of relatedness as well,
they are, we believe, the closest hominin relation to us.
So we shared a common ancestor with them
only around 550, sort of 700,000 years ago,
which is not long at all.
Not long at all in the whole story.
And it's great to give it that context as you just have there.
I know you generally talk about the Romans and it sounds dreadfully long compared to that.
Trust me, we've done the origins of life on Earth and what's gone on before the dinosaurs.
So don't worry at all.
It's always nice going this far back.
But I mean, from what you've mentioned now, I could go down so many different strands.
But I mean, from what you've mentioned now, I could go down so many different strands.
But what I quite found really interesting there was what you mentioned about the context of Homo sapiens coming from Africa, the recent African origin idea.
We talked to Professor Chris Stringer all about this.
Do we have any idea where in the world Neanderthals emerge from?
Have we got any idea if there's any kind of area from where they spread out from? Well, at the moment, what we can see from the fossil record that we have, and it is far better
than it used to be 50 years ago or whatever, it does look as if the earlier hominins are coming
from Africa. There are probably sort of dispersals of hominins into Eurasia before two million years ago. So there
is a really ancient context for that. But that's not the only time we believe that there were
movements out. We think it happened multiple times. At the moment, the oldest sort of fossils
that look like they are heading towards becoming Homo sapiens, but with different sort of aspects
of them in different regions. They are in Africa, North Africa, different parts.
But everything that looks Neanderthal-ish, even very early, is in Eurasia. We find nothing
like that in Africa. So what we don't know is where the common ancestor for us and Neanderthals was.
And generally that's been assumed also to be in Africa.
But like I said, there had been earlier dispersals into Eurasia.
And there is kind of a period sort of between like 800,000 years ago and, you know, six, 500,000 years ago,
500,000 years ago and, you know, six, 500,000 years ago, where there's all sorts of different fossils from Eurasia, some of which look a little bit like some things in Africa,
but not in other ways. And it's all quite confusing, really. And, you know, there are
different opinions on that. But just recently, in fact, there was a publication suggesting that
perhaps that common ancestor may not have been in Africa.
It may have been in Eurasia, but it's just a possibility because at the moment,
the fossil record is, although there is quite a lot of material,
actually working out the relationships of the different fossils that we find and when and where things are is really quite confusing. But what's certain is that nobody thus far has ever found a Neanderthal-looking skull
or sort of other thing that's distinctive to Neanderthals anywhere in Africa.
It seems to be sort of the Near East is the most southerly area, sort of Palestine, Jordan,
somewhere like that but their
actual sort of realm of existence included europe of course which has historically had the most
tension but also further east into parts of asia but at the moment kind of stopping around central
asia and sort of bits of siberia but we haven't found any Neanderthal
specific stuff as far, say, as China yet. I mean, that's so interesting. So is there still
quite a lot of debate around what was the predecessing homonym to Neanderthals, Homo
habilis or Homo agaster, or another homonym? Well, habilis and agaster are much, much older,
or another hominid?
Well, Habilis and Agasta are much, much older.
So sort of 2 million, 1 million years ago.
So we believe they are part of this much deeper ancestral lineage that eventually would lead to the common ancestor
of Sapiens and Neanderthals.
But yeah, at the moment, you know,
exactly what the population was that gave rise
to both Neanderthals and to Homo sapiens is unclear.
There are sort of different contenders. For example, there's a Spanish site in northern
Spain, Atapuerca. There are lots of different fossil localities there. Some of them are very
old, older than a million years. But one particular one, the Sima de los Huesos, is about
430,000 years old. So that's a bit before what we see sort of in terms of the anatomy as emerging
and becoming Neanderthals in bones elsewhere. But we can see there's a genetic link there between
those individuals. So they might be sort of thought of as like a proto-Neanderthal population,
but it's very complicated basically. And it really is one of those areas in archaeology
where you say we need more data. Fair enough. I always ask those questions first of all, but
we'll very soon go on to the Neanderthal communities themselves, talk about food,
et cetera, et cetera. But one last key question to set the scene for our discussion.
about food etc etc but one last key question to set the scene for our discussion i'd like to ask a bit about what are the key anatomical features that distinguish neanderthals now i appreciate
that there's probably variation between individual neanderthals but what are some general overarching
features that you would recognize if you saw a neanderthal fossil and say, hey, that's a Neanderthal.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. It's a really good point. You know, Neanderthals are not like clones.
They did vary individually. But overall, sort of on a general basis, Neanderthals are more robustly built.
And that includes going down to having slightly thicker bones.
They're a little bit shorter on average but not like super short necessarily some are taller than others you
know we have some very short little Neanderthals and some a bit bigger but sort of across their
body there are sort of other particular things that would be visible for example and some of
the proportions of their limbs are just slightly different but we can see things like the shape of their ribs is quite distinctive
so in in homo sapiens in us our ribs kind of flare out so it's at the top but not at the bottom so we
have a little waist you know in theory um one has a waist whereas neanderthals it kind of more flares outwards
towards the bottom so they they kind of would look a lot more barrel chesty basically and you
might notice that um you know even if say they were dressed up in clothes or whatever and you
might notice that they look very thick set but i think most distinctive, obviously, is their faces and their skulls.
And I think if you were to meet an Neanderthal,
then they would probably be the most distinctive looking person you've ever met.
And you just think, wow, I've never seen anyone who looks like this before.
But you certainly wouldn't sort of think that it wasn't a person looking back at you.
I think you would, but they would just look
very very unusual so the main differences are the shape of their heads overall so we
kind of when you look at us compared to other hominins we've got an unusually balloon shaped
sort of head we're quite round whereas Neanderthals have much more swept back kind of skull so they don't have this really
quite vertical forehead like if you sort of feel above your nose it's quite vertical really that
bone going all the way up whereas Neanderthals it's sloping back more they obviously have large
brow ridge but the form of it is not the same either and they don't have a chin so you know
and they don't have a chin.
So, you know, again, somebody might make jokes about how chinny an individual person amongst us today is,
but no Neanderthals had really the same kind of bony thing
that you can feel under your own sort of mouth.
It's quite clearly there.
And that's kind of related to the fact that they had like a long face,
but the front of their face where their nose is and their mouth is kind of pulled forward compared to ours.
So although it's sort of an unfortunate word, they look a bit more snouty.
They're just a bit more pulled forward.
And that's because they have bone growth cells in that area, whereas we have bone absorption cells.
So in fact, in some ways, although they are quite sort of pulled forward
even in relation to other hominins it's actually us that are weird without like sort of pug-faced
sort of vibe going on so that would i think you would notice that the size of the aperture for
that for their nose is large so they probably really did have quite big noses and the orbital
holes in in the skull are also big so they may have
had quite large obviously deep set eyes so they would have had a very striking quite craggy looking
perhaps face as well. Do we have any idea why they looked like that? Well I mean this is what's also
quite interesting about how researchers shift in ideas and theories and approaches
over time initially a lot of the thoughts about Neanderthals in in terms of their lives and their
bodies and their anatomy was sort of focused on cold climates and that this was an adaptation
and everything was being viewed through that lens and that's partly to do with the history of the
discovery in that a lot of the early sites where Neanderthals were being found were from caves
which happened to have a lot of cold adapted animals so you know the woolly stuff like woolly
rhinos woolly mammoth and then stuff that's clearly lives in cold environments now like reindeer
but obviously over that huge span of time I was talking about when they existed there is not
just one ice age there's many of them and there are many warm periods as well just like there are
now so Neanderthals did live during periods which were not hyper like arctic and sort of viewed from
where we are now we can see that they don't really look as if, certainly in their behaviour, where they seem to appear and disappear
according to climate, they're not like something like an arctic fox,
which is just very much associated with tundra and permafrost
and all this sort of thing.
That's not really their actual environment.
And thoughts about their bodies and why their bodies look as they do have
also kind of shifted a little bit away from the idea that maybe these massive noses people used
to suggest well perhaps it was to warm up the really cold arctic like air that they were breathing
before it got to their lungs and that has kind of shifted away from the cold, cold theory sort of focus.
And now people suggest, for example, with the noses that actually it might be about just sucking in massive amounts of oxygen because they were living very intensive lives.
They had heavier bodies that are more costly to run.
And, you know, you need a lot of oxygen to metabolize.
So, you know, that's also perhaps relating to the lungs and the ribs
and all these different things.
So there's a lot more nuance, I think,
in how we understand their anatomy now.
Well, because we know so much about that, Rebecca,
that leads us on nicely to the next section,
which is, I'm guessing, therefore,
they needed a lot of energy for their bodies,
for their anatomy, more than an average human? average human well i mean when we try and assess sort of energetic needs from the past when we don't have
the soft tissues then it's all based on kind of you know assessing the weight of the bones and
the likely size of the muscles and everything like this so it is estimates but the rough sort of guess is that they might have needed between 5% to 10% more energy to run their bodies.
And that's going to depend on the environment that they're in.
So if you're in a cold environment, you've got to keep your body warm and you need fuel for that.
If you are living in, say, an environment with very deep snow much of the year and you've got to run
and hunt through that that's extremely exhausting so that's going to push your needs up as well
but if you're a Neanderthal in the Near East living in a much more warm environment it's not
going to be the same we do actually see differences in their bodies as well so there is an impression
that Neanderthals from the warmer regions are a little bit more lightly built as well um so that would match the differences in climate but overall
they may have needed sort of anywhere from sort of three and a half thousand up to five thousand
maybe even beyond that in terms of calories per day depending on what they're doing and also we shouldn't forget that you know being pregnant
and breastfeeding are energetically very expensive just for women now and if you have a bigger baby
that you've got to grow and you've got to feed it and then you've got to carry it when it's you know
actually been born and and still too small to walk around that's another added sort of layer of
energetic need so there's all these different factors you have to sort of consider but overall they probably did need
more fuel than an equivalent homo sapiens in any given environment
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to renaissance and early modern right up to now. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. so if they needed more fuel than a modern homo sapien in that environment and this is the time of ice ages as you said earlier so can we
therefore imagine groups of neanderthals hunting and taking on some of the most iconic massive
ice age prey that we think of today yeah i mean absolutely we don't even need to imagine it because
you just dig it up and there's hundreds and hundreds of sites we have for neanderthals i
think this is one of the things actually that that's worth saying that the Neanderthal record is really rich. We have
thousands of bits of their bodies relating to probably hundreds of different individuals. Some
of the skeletons are more complete. Sometimes you're just like a bit of a jaw or something.
So that's a really good record. have material from you know very very young
babies all the way through the different ages till they're a bit older so we understand their
bodies but we also have so much material from their living sites you know you can have one site
with a layer being excavated with a hundred thousand pieces of animal bone so that's not
whole bones it's going to be smashed up stuff but there's an immense rich record so basically everywhere we look it's very clear that
Neanderthals are at the top of the tree in their local environment they are top predators
the question of did they hunt like the really big charismatic megafauna, it's pretty certain that they were getting primary access
to massive things like woolly rhinoceros,
probably mammoth as well, but perhaps just the young.
We're not entirely sure about hunting full adult sort of mammoth
or elephant in the warmer environments.
But what we can definitely say is that they definitely had spears,
you know and
although horses don't sound quite so impressive one of the most striking sites where we can see
sort of a landscape of hunting is a German site called Schöningen and this is about 330,000 years
old and we have multiple spears from this site it's a lakeshore site so it's an old lake that that got silted up
and we have uh sort of really beautifully preserved lakeshores with like all the scatters of the
remains of stuff that Neanderthals are doing and there's material from at least 50 horses that were
killed and butchered there not all in one hunting episode we believe it's it's the sort of the trace of many different hunts over perhaps
a century maybe more or maybe less but what's clear is that they are using spears but these
horses are not little sort of horses like you know if you think about the horses in the cave art
made my after neanderthals um had disappeared those horses are actually quite small they're sort of i don't know like a welsh
welsh pony or something that they're not big whereas these early horses are an extinct form
and they're much more like massive thoroughbred things so they would have been again you know
actually really hard to hunt very intimidating to to deal with with a herd of horses like that so that kind of megafauna
is definitely part of of what neanderthals are up to as well and you know using a lake makes a lot
of sense because horses are really disadvantaged in the water and it slows them down so much so
we can actually see from from material at shurning and that it looks like they were
perhaps ambushed or driven into the water
and then the bodies are being butchered right there in the water and then they're taking the
good stuff and carrying on processing it on the shore. And this helps dispel that old myth that
Neanderthals were just stupid scavengers, doesn't it? From what you're saying there,
it sounds like these Neanderthals were top predators
and expert hunters yeah absolutely um sort of a few you know decades ago there were debates going
on um I think in the in the very early days actually sort of early prehistorians did assume
that Neanderthals were hunting the animals that they were finding in the caves but you can't
always make that assumption because depending on sort of the history of whatever site you're looking at, sometimes, for example,
hyenas are there. They also like to use caves and some of the animals in particular might have been
brought in by hyenas. There's ways that you can pick those different signatures out. But in the
places where we're quite certain that Neanderthals were responsible you know initially I think people were just assuming they had hunted them then it kind of shifted and there were claims
made or maybe they were just scavenging they weren't actually hunting and then that shifted
as well and based on sort of more intensive analysis of the bones but also from different
analytical techniques where you can actually measure sort of the relative amounts of
protein that Neanderthals are getting compared to other predators in the environment. And they do
come out, you know, like hyena or wolf, they are up there in terms of the herbivores that they're
eating. So they certainly, in any environment, meat was very, very important to them. But they didn't only go after big game.
Sometimes they were a lot more flexible. So I think that's such an important thing to stress,
isn't it? Because, Rebecca, this is such a huge topic we're approaching today. And as you say,
Neanderthals, they're found in all these different places. The type of prey that these groups would
have gone after depended on the local habitat the
local environment and as you say in many of these environments was it not the megafauna which was so
prevalent was it more that the smaller prey that these communities would have gone after
yeah it depended very much on the environmental context. So in colder environments, it makes sense to go after big animals
or animals you can easily target in herds and things like this.
For example, reindeer, they're not very aggressive.
They're quite good.
And we do see some sites where it looks like specific targeted reindeer hunts
is what was going on over a long period of time.
But yeah yeah in warmer
contexts then they might be going more for medium game because that's what's around um so say in
iberia where the effects of ice ages yes it definitely still got colder but it obviously
was sometimes it was more arid as well but often you still had red deer available
in sort of arid woodland environments or scrub environments but alongside that you have small
game you've got boar sometimes birds um even things like rabbit sometimes i think the impression
overall is that neanderthals were quite well able to assess what made most sense to target,
and they went for the best of whatever was there. So if they lived near the coast,
sometimes that involved using those resources, which are quite rich as well.
So I'm guessing, so marine animals too, could be on the menu of a Neanderthal.
Yeah, there are some places where we have, for example, down in Gibraltar, we've got some butchered seal and dolphin.
But in that case, they're rare.
They're anomalous within the broader sequence.
And in general, we just don't often find that.
So it's probably that those were either
just stuff that was washed up, already dead,
and they butcher that and they just have it anyway. Or perhaps it was something that was washed up already dead um and they butcher that and they just have it
anyway or perhaps it was something that was weak and they picked it off there's been sort of some
debate with the evidence for shellfish because there is a fair amount of that as well and sort
of different species of marine resources like fish or urchins and crabs and things like this and
some people suggested well maybe they were actually
diving off the coast for shellfish but at the same time if you look at the minimal sort of
the lowest tides you can still wade and get these species you don't actually have to dive it and
some of the fish or the urchins things that can be stuff that's washed up into pools so i don't really think it matters as to whether they were diving or not i think what's obvious is that they
were highly attuned to the shoreline as a place that rewarded careful foraging and that that was
part of the lives of some neanderthals and we can can see, for example, some of them seem to have understood that
you can get muscles to open by heating them and things like this. So in some places they were
enjoying that kind of sea bounty. How interesting. How interesting. Well, I mean, let's move on,
but keep on food. But let's talk about plants. We've done meat, so let's talk about plants.
Neanderthals didn't just
live off meat, did they? Have we got evidence of them also eating plants too? Yeah, absolutely.
What we don't have, we've got no vegan Neanderthals, I don't think. I really don't think that that was
a possible lifestyle at any point for them. But what's clear, I think, is that sort of a few
decades ago, there were hints from some regions that maybe plants were important.
So in the Near East, some of the sites there,
there were remains, little sort of seeds and things like this
that were coming out of hearth deposits.
And the question was, well, are Neanderthals really eating them
or is it just part of sort of the stuff that they're burning?
But, you know people
were thinking well they probably were because it's a rich vegetated environment maybe but more and
more evidence has sort of built up for this as well so not only do you find in some places you've
got preserved bits in in hearths but you also have evidence from Neanderthal teeth as well so
when you go to the dentist and the hygienist sort of
cleans all that grot off your teeth that's kind of useful stuff for future archaeologists
they're going to have trouble in in future but yeah so in in this calculus the dental calculus
it's called um you can get actual little pieces of food can can get stuck but also you know even down to to the level of
starches and things like that which are identifiable to particular plant groups so for example we can
say Neanderthals in some places were eating wild grass seeds or really sort of mad one um water
lily root as well which I really like like that because it really sort of makes you
immediately visualise them wading about in a watery environment
to get these kind of roots, you know, whether a lake or a marshland
or whatever, but it's not the kind of thing I think most people
immediately think of with Neanderthals,
but that is absolutely part of their lives.
And just with all sorts of
hunting and gathering cultures that we know of today and from the ethnographic record of the
past, plants are really important. You know, yeah, meat is important, of course, but it's not always
reliable. Whereas pretty much everywhere, there is a very detailed knowledge of the available plants that are around, what you can do with them, how to process them when you can actually get them.
Even up in modern sort of, you know, like Alaska and the tundra up there, people think, oh, there's no plants up there.
There are, there's loads. And the indigenous communities there absolutely still know those and value those and eat those.
You can watch some videos on YouTube, actually, of people talking about like from tundra to plate and stuff like this.
So there is this very rich knowledge.
And I think it's quite clear Neanderthals were doing that as well.
And we've even got digging sticks, what we think are digging sticks.
So, you know, in terms of the tools tools for life spears get a lot of attention
because people like oh hunting it's really sexy and amazing actually digging sticks are really
important as well because they are what might be getting you your food every day when the hunt
doesn't happen and we see this sort of value actually reflected in the way that those tools
are made so the spears I mentioned
at Schöningen for the horse hunting, they're very finely made, beautifully carved. They're clearly
aware of the wood as a material and its properties. And there's like cool stuff, like they've offset
the carving against sort of the grain and stuff like this. But we see the same selectivity in
these things, which we believe are digging sticks. They're selecting the hardest wood,
which makes total sense because your stick gets bashed about all the time and also they employ these different sort of quite finessed methods to actually work it and probably also
using fire for some of those to help because the wood's so hard so they valued that part of their
lives as well i mean that's so interesting digging sticks maybe not as sexy as spears i get what you
mean but it's still good to highlight,
seeing how important they probably were.
Framed by generations of certain kinds of anthropologists.
This is why we talk about hunting straight away.
But OK, so if, let's say, a group of Neanderthals went out with their digging sticks,
with their spears to go hunting or to go gathering,
do we know the size of the community that they would have been bringing food back to?
And do we have, sorry, it's another big question, but do we have any idea about what sorts of tasks
would have been right at the heart of a Neanderthal community, let's say with the butchering of food,
with other tasks that we know were associated with these communities?
Yeah, I mean, that is two questions, so I'll deal with the first one.
these communities? Yeah, I mean, that is two questions. So I'll deal with the first one.
It's really, really hard. The group size thing is one of the hardest questions that we have to deal with. Because when you dig any Neanderthal site, and you have what appears to be a layer, maybe
it's 20 centimetres thick of sediment. In fact, that could represent a decade's worth of occupation or a century
or a millennium and you have to try and unpick what's going on in terms of the occupation history
for for each layer and that's going to depend on things like how fast is the sediment actually
accumulating has there been any erosion stuff Stuff like this. And what we can try
and do, say you have a site where you believe it's quite a sort of limited time span, maybe,
I don't know, 20, 50 years, but then you've got a very large surface area and there are 60 hearths
across that surface. What does that mean? Which are are any of those halves contemporary with each other or are
you looking at 60 different phases of occupation in some places we do actually have evidence for
for sort of this sub micro layering where it could well be that many individual occupations
but in other sites especially large sites large areas, we're able to make arguments that sometimes there was more than one half active at the same time.
And the way that we can do that is by really fine reconstruction of micro layers within the site.
And that's why we use lasers to record 3D location of everything.
Because sometimes when you're actually digging digging you can't see the fine
vertical sort of patterning in these objects and it's only when later you plug it into your computer
and it sort of reconstructs the layers and you can say oh yeah there are different layers here
so you can do it like that but also when I was talking about sort of keeping all the little
pieces we refit those together basically like a jigsaw,
and you look at are there any connections between different hearths. So if you have shattered pieces
of bone and stone, do any of those objects match, you know, literally refit back to others from
another hearth? And that's some evidence that those were active at the same time. There are
some complexities
though because it turns out in some places Neanderthals like to recycle their tools
and in some cases they were apparently sort of arriving at a site where there were old hearths
visible to them and they would go over and be like oh there's a bit of stone there oh yeah I could
reuse that and so that stone moves to another hearth but they don't do it with bones like
smashed up bits of animal bone.
They're not really, you can't really reuse those for anything.
And they don't seem to sort of have that same risk of confusion.
So when you combine all of these different kinds of data, what we see is that in some big sites, as I said, more than one hearth is active at the same time.
And the kinds of hearths also vary.
said some more than one hearth is active at the same time and the kinds of hearths also vary so it seems like sometimes they had very large fire areas where they're doing a lot of processing
of food that's been brought in from elsewhere and smashing up bones from air and things like this
and then there are smaller hearths which are at the back of the site and that might be for
warmth at night and security as well for sleeping so you do get an impression of sort
of the spatial complexity but the number of people that's really tough if you've got more than one
half you've got different focuses for activity but we still can't tell the exact numbers of people
and in that instance you kind of have to look again to ethnography and sort of roughly say, well, in a given environment as a hunter gathering population, what could it support?
And we're probably looking at really quite small groups, like less than 20, probably.
And that's the impression we get from the archaeology. They're generally quite ephemeral.
they're generally quite ephemeral and in a couple of sort of instances as well where we have really high resolution layers in sites you can sort of see Neanderthals coming in staying for maybe a
night or two just a tiny bit of working of stone maybe they eat a little bit of food and then
they're gone again and that's the only record of their presence in that one layer so is that just a tiny group or which is what i think it's more likely to be our group sometimes
separating off into the landscape to go and do different things you know for a few days and again
ethnographically hunter-gatherers do that all the time it's so interesting i wish i could have more
time to delve into these i mean one last one last question, we'll keep on that therefore. Does it therefore hint at how Rebecca, in these communities, in Neanderthal communities, you know, right from an
early age, they would have to learn the most important tasks that would have been at the centre
of the sustaining of these communities, butchering food, cooking or drying food, and maybe art or
whatever. That right from the start, you know, when you're a small
child, if you're a man or you're a woman, you are expected, you must learn these tasks.
Yeah, I mean, sort of the childhood of Neanderthals is a really fascinating topic in itself. And it is
something that I try to sort of discuss in the book, you know, what's the lifespan, what's the
developmental sort of experience of a Neanderthal. But I think what is clear is that again when you look at how traditional communities operate in
hunting and gathering context children learn how to live how to be by doing the things that adults do
from a very young age so you'll see them sometimes walking around with quite sharp tools and spears
and things like this and that's just normal they're doing their thing and they're learning
they're not sort of given such a structured learning context as is normal for the way that
we educate children in western culture quite often as well in ethnographic contexts children
are learning from slightly older peer groups, not necessarily
direct teaching from adults, which is really interesting that you start to get this impression
of sort of gangs of kids and teenagers hanging out and doing their thing. And maybe the adults
are doing other things. And there is a little bit of evidence for that, which is from one of the
sites where we have footprints, large numbers of the footprints at this one site le roselle in france and they do appear to be
juveniles but of multiple ages sort of hanging out and doing stuff so that's kind of fun but yeah in
terms of like it was was there like a neanderthal childhood it does look as if they as you would
expect progressively learned different skills as they grew older.
And there's a bit of evidence from scratches on teeth,
so not to do with what they're eating,
but when you use your mouth as like a third hand to help you do tasks and things like that,
Neanderthals did that as well.
And we can look at sort of the patterning and the directionality of the scratches.
And essentially it looks like young children had learned how to eat using a tool
where they put food in their mouth and then they slice it off.
They're doing that, but they're not yet using their mouth to process materials
in the way that grown-ups do.
So there's an impression of like a staged development there.
But the question, you know, like did Neanderthal children perhaps have different experiences did
they you know grow up learning different crafts within a group it's an interesting question I
don't think we have any clear evidence for that but some of the things that Neanderthals were doing
in terms of their technology which we you know we haven't really touched on that much
some of it's quite complex for example they used hafted tools where you have an adhesive or a binding and
you stick a handle onto an active stone edge and that's a complex project it's demanding in terms
of cognition but also the different stages the materials that you need to use and perhaps that's
one thing where sort of adults who have particular skills,
you know, may have been passing that on to youngsters in a more structured way.
Well, as you said there, we haven't really touched on Neanderthal tools at all.
We haven't touched on Neanderthal art.
I've got the cannibalism question in there, dispelling that myth, of course.
But we won't, we can't go into that
talk today because we've run out of time for this episode. But we'll have to get you back on in the
future to continue the story of Neanderthals because it's such an amazing but big topic in
itself. And of course, if you want to learn more about the Neanderthals in the meantime,
you know what you can do. You can have a look at Rebecca's new book, which is called, Rebecca?
Kindred, Neanderthal, Life, Love, Death and Art.
Well, there you go.
Rebecca, it just goes for me to say thank you so much
for taking the time to come on the podcast today.
Thanks so much for having me, Tristan.
Well, there you go.
There was Dr. Rebecca Ragsykes giving you an overview
into the world of the Neanderthals.
I hope you enjoyed the episode.
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