Our Neanderthal cousins

Book review of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

Ever since we discovered their existence in 1856, Neanderthals have captured our imagination. While we find it easy to accept that the world is home to different kinds of bears, foxes and dolphins, we are startled by the idea of other species of humans. Just by being, Neanderthals challenge some of our most cherished ideals and delusions. Neanderthals force us to question the belief that Homo sapiens is the apex of creation and, more generally, what it means to be human.

These questions are now more urgent than ever. New technologies have also revolutionised the study of Neanderthals and other ancient humans. Over the past few decades novel techniques to analyse stone, bone, and DNA have made it possible to reconstruct what occurred around a Neanderthal campfire 100,000 years ago. A handful of tiny fragments are sometimes enough to determine what some Neanderthal ate for breakfast, what ailments afflicted her, what was the colour of her skin and whether her parents were first cousins.

Every year, enormous amounts of new data about Neanderthals gush forth in scientific journals. The media has picked up the most sensational scoops, most notably that Neanderthals interbred with Sapiens, and that about two per cent to three per cent of our genes today come from Neanderthal ancestors. Yet for most people Neanderthals remain the brutish cave people familiar from countless cartoons.

In Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes aims to tell a complete new story about Neanderthals. She has done a remarkable job synthesising thousands of academic studies into a single accessible narrative. From her pages emerge new Neanderthals that are very different from the cartoon figures of old.

Ms Sykes’s most important contribution is to understand Neanderthals on their own terms. We tend to discuss all other human species in relation to our own. We see them as steppingstones on the path to Sapiens, and we want to know in which ways we were superior to them, whether we had sex with them and whether we killed them off.

But Ms Sykes explains that Neanderthals were sophisticated and competent human beings who adapted to diverse habitats and climates. They ranged from the shores of the Atlantic to the steppes of Central Asia. They thrived in hot climates as well as in ice age tundra. In addition to iconic large game hunts, Neanderthals also fished in rivers, gathered a multitude of plant species and sometimes stole honey from beehives. They manufactured complex tools, made clothing from animal hides, constructed cozy shelters, occasionally buried their dead and maybe, just maybe, even created art.

Yet Ms Sykes’s convincing arguments about the competence and diversity of ancient Neanderthals lead us back to the inevitable Sapiens question. Scholars always noted the suspicious coincidence that Neanderthals made their exit exactly when Sapiens appeared on the scene. But as long as scholars viewed Neanderthals as simple brutes barely scraping by in ice age Europe, it was easy to give Sapiens the benefit of the doubt. Some scholars said that climate change made conditions more suitable for Sapiens while Neanderthals couldn’t cope with it. Other scholars argued that Neanderthals were already on the brink of extinction even before Sapiens left Africa. Another option was that Neanderthals didn’t go extinct at all — they were assimilated into the expanding Sapiens population.

But Ms Sykes’s new synthesis seems to rule out all these options. For over 300,000 years Neanderthals successfully weathered many climatic cycles and adjusted to numerous habitats. They were capable of innovation and adaptation. They disappeared quite abruptly about 40,000 years ago as a result of what looks more like a sudden shock than a protracted process of decline.

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art 

Author: Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma

Price: $28 

Pages: 400

So what happened? If Neanderthals were so good, why did they disappear? Ms Sykes does not provide a definitive answer, but her findings strengthen the suspicion that Sapiens had a hand in it. Apparently, Neanderthals were sophisticated and innovative enough to deal with diverse climates and habitats, but not with their African cousins.

Ms Sykes provides convincing evidence that on the individual level, Neanderthals were in no way inferior to Sapiens. Neanderthal bodies were as fit, their hands were as dexterous and their brains were as big — if not bigger — than those of Sapiens. The Sapiens advantage probably lay in large-scale cooperation.

Ms Sykes explains that Neanderthals lived in small bands that rarely if ever cooperated with one another. At the time when they encountered the Neanderthals, Sapiens too lived in small bands, but different Sapiens bands probably cooperated on a regular basis.

Large-scale cooperation did not necessarily mean that a horde of 500 Sapiens united to wipe out a band of 20 Neanderthals. While individual Neanderthals were perhaps as inquisitive, imaginative and creative as individual Sapiens, superior networking enabled Sapiens to swiftly outcompete Neanderthals.

This, however, is largely speculation. We still don’t know enough about the psychology, society and politics of Neanderthals to be sure. Perhaps the most surprising fact in Ms Sykes’s book is that even if we count every bone fragment and every isolated tooth, so far we have found the remains of fewer than 300 Neanderthals. We have managed to extract an immense amount of knowledge from these very few witnesses.

In coming years we are bound to find some more. Over a period of 350,000 years, millions upon millions of Neanderthals walked the earth. As you read these lines, perhaps an archaeologist is discovering another Neanderthal bone in a cave in Germany, or Russian construction workers are amazed to find a frozen Neanderthal body inside the melting Siberian permafrost. As the evidence accumulates and our technology improves, the Neanderthals will keep surprising us. We are only beginning to understand their true story.

©2020 The New York Times News Service