Tag: Neanderthals

Neanderthal elephant hunters

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In the 1980s miners in the Neumark-Nord area of Saxony-Anhalt, central Germany uncovered an extensive assemblage of animal bones and stone tools in opencast ‘brown coal’ (lignite) workings. Archaeologists working over a ten-year period recovered bones from an estimated 70 straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), as well as many other large herbivores, while huge bucket-wheel excavators advanced through the deposit. Most of the elephants were adult males, some preserved as entire skeletons others as disarticulated bones. Weighing as much 15 tonnes – equivalent to ten medium SUVs – and standing up to 4 m high at the shoulder, they were twice as large as the biggest modern African elephants and had far longer legs. Being so tall they could browse vegetation up to 8 metres above the ground surface using an 80 cm tongue as well as a long trunk and their huge tusks.

The lignite deposits formed in marshes and shallow lakes that occupied low-lying depressions left in the wake of retreating glaciers during the last (Eemian) interglacial (130 to 115 ka ago). The warming encouraged temperate forest to extend much further north than it does today. The fauna too would have changed substantially once the ice sheets began to retreat. For instance, mammoths that grazed low tundra vegetation during the preceding ice age disappeared from Central Europe to be replaced by straight-tusked elephants migrating from much further south that had plenty of trees, shrubs and grasses to feed on, as did other herbivores. So the central European plains teemed with big game. The marshes and lakes had little outflow and became depleted in oxygen so that dead vegetation built up to form extensive peat deposits: just the conditions for organic preservation.

Artistic impression of Neanderthal elephant butchery site (Credit: Tom Bjorklund, Science)

The Neumark-Nord sites yielded literally tonnes of fossils, including 3400 elephant bones. But these were not simply the remains of animals that had become bogged down and died of exhaustion. Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser and Lutz Kindler of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany and Katherine MacDonald and Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University, Netherlands have examined every bone for signs of post-mortem modification by humans (Gaudzinski-WindHeuser, S. et al. 2023. Hunting and processing of straight-tusked elephants 125.000 years ago: Implications for Neanderthal behaviour. Science Advances, v. 9, article add8186; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.add8186). Some bones are so large as to require a forklift to shift or turn them in the laboratory. Most of the bones bear deliberate cut marks made by stone blades: far more than signs of gnawing by carnivores. Neanderthals had got to them before scavengers. The density of cuts and gouges suggests that almost every scrap of meat and fat had systematically been harvested from the corpses, even the fat-rich feet and brains. The sheer number of cuts needed to skin and deflesh the elephants strongly suggests that their meat was fresh: rotten meat could simply have been pulled from the skin and bone quite easily. Little was left for scavengers to gnaw.

Each elephant would have yielded enough meat and fat for an estimated 2500 portions, each with a calorific value of around 4000 kcal. To fully butcher each beast and then to dry and/or smoke the produce can be estimated – by comparison with such work on a modern African elephant – would take around 1500 person hours. To achieve that would require 3 to 5 days of very heavy labour by 25 people. Some means of preservation would have been needed, unless hundreds of people had scoffed the lot at one or two sittings. The authors consider the bounty to imply  that a considerably larger collective of Neanderthals than the previously estimated ~25 per band probably benefitted from a single elephant, whether it was eaten on the spot or preserved in some way and either carried off or cached. But 70 elephants …?

The geographic context suggests a pile of corpses built up in lignite close to or on a lake shore had accumulated over a lengthy period. Using likely sedimentation rates backed by counting of annual tree rings from stumps in the lignite the authors estimate that the pile formed over about 300 years at a rate of one kill every 5 to 6 years. But this site is one of several found in the Neumark-Nord area, albeit not quite so large, and there are probably more, either remaining buried or destroyed by the brutal lignite mining technique. Taking on a herd of animals would be far more risky than hunting individuals. This is where the sex of the elephant remains gives an idea of the hunters’ strategy. Those that could be sexed – about 23  – were all adult males that were estimated to be from 20 to 50 or more years old. By analogy with African elephants, adult male are generally solitary, only joining herds of females and offspring when one or more is at oestrus. Male straight-tusked elephants were more than twice the mass of adult females and when keeping themselves to themselves would have been a safer and more profitable target than females and juveniles in a herd. Solitary males would have been easy to approach, being confidant  that their size would deter direct predation by the largest carnivores, such as lions. In a peaty swamp, simply driving an individual into deep mud would bog it down to be dispatched by spear thrusts. The earliest known thrusting spears have been unearthed in similar lignite beds 200 km away.

This study adds to growing understanding of Neanderthal culture. It suggests that they were not just opportunistic and wandering foragers but regularly combined resources to focus on a specific, very high-value prey. Maybe that was restricted to the special peat-swamp environment of what is now central Germany, but it speaks of an ability to plan and orchestrate spectacular communal events. And they performed such feats again and again. They were the masters of Europe through three of four glacial-interglacial cycles.

Family links among the Neanderthals of Siberia

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Caves used by the Neanderthals of southern Siberia: A – location map; B – Chagyrskaya Cave; C – Okladnikov Cave. (Credit: adapted from Skov et al.; Extended Data Fig. 1)

The early focus on Neanderthals was on remains found in Western Europe from the 19th century onwards. That has shifted in recent years to southern Siberia in the foothills of the Altai mountains, despite the fossils’ fragmentary nature: a few teeth and bits of mandible. The Denisova Cave became famous not just because it contained the easternmost evidence of Neanderthal occupation but through the genetic analysis of a tiny finger-tip bone. It proved not to be from a Neanderthal but a distinctly different hominin species, dubbed Denisovan (see: Other rich hominin pickings; May 2010). What Denisovans looked like remains unknown but genetic traces of them are rife among living humans of the western Pacific islands and Australia, whose ancestors interbred with Denisovans, presumably in East Asia. Modern people indigenous to Europe and the Middle East have Neanderthal genes in their genomes. Other bone fragments from Denisova Cave also yielded Neanderthal genomes, and the cave sediments yielded traces of both groups (see: Detecting the presence of hominins in ancient soil samples; April 2017). Then in 2018 DNA extracted from a limb bone from the cave clearly showed that it was from a female teenager who had had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father (see: Neanderthal Mum meets Denisovan Dad; August 2018). These astonishing and unexpected finds spurred further excavations and genetic analysis in other caves within 100 km of Denisova Cave. This was largely led by current and former co-workers of Svanti Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany: Pääbo was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his coordination of research and discoveries concerning ancient human genomes. Their enormous field and laboratory efforts have paid astonishingly valuable dividends (Skov, L. and 34 others 2022. Genetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals. Nature v. 610, p. 519–525; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05283-y).

To the previously analysed 18 Neanderthal genomes from 14 archaeological sites across Eurasia (including Denisova Cave) Skov et al. have added 13 more from just two sites in Siberia (the Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov caves). Each site overlooks valleys along which game still migrates, so they may have been seasonal hunting camps rather than permanent dwellings: they are littered with bison and horse bones. Tools in the two 59-51 ka old human occupation levels are different from those at the older (130 to 91 Ka) Denisova Cave about 100 km to the east. As at the much older site, human fossils include several teeth and fragments of bones from jaws, hands, limbs and vertebrae. The detailed genomes recovered from 17 finds shows them to be from 14 individuals (12 from Chagyrskaya, 2 from Okladnikov).

Chagyrskaya yielded evidence for 5 females (3 adults and 2 children) and 7 males (3 children and 4 adults). One female estimated to have lost a premolar tooth when a teenager was the daughter of a Chagyrskaya adult male. He, in turn, was brother or father to another male, so the girl seems to have had an uncle as well. Another male and female proved to be second-degree relations (includes uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, grandparents, grandchildren, half-siblings, and double cousins). The two people from Okladnikov were an adult female and an unrelated male child. The boy was not related to the Chagyrskaya group, but the woman was, her former presence at that cave lingering in its cave-sediment DNA. None of the newly discovered individuals were closely related to six of the seven much older Denisova Cave Neanderthals, but the Okladnikov boy had similar mtDNA to one individual from Denisova.

Further information about the Chagyrskaya group came from comparison of DNA in Y-chromosomes and mitochondria. The father of the teenage girl had two types of mtDNA – the unusual characteristic of heteroplasmy – that he shared with two other males. This suggests that three of the males shared the same maternal lineage – not necessarily a mother – and also indicates that they lived at roughly the same time. The mtDNA recovered from all Chagyrskaya individuals was much more varied than was their Y-chromosome DNA (passed only down male lineage). One way of explaining that would be females from different Neanderthal communities having migrated into the Chagyrskaya group and mated with its males, who largely remained in the group: a ‘tradition’ known as patrilocality, which is practised in traditional Hindu communities, for instance.

So, what has emerged is clear evidence for a closely related community of Neanderthals at Chagyrskaya, although it cannot be shown that all were present there at the same time, apart from the five who show first- or second-degree relatedness or mitochondrial heteroplasmy. Those represented only by individual teeth didn’t necessarily die there: adult teeth can be lost through trauma and deciduous teeth fall out naturally. There was also some individual physical connection between the two caves: The Okladnikov woman’s DNA being in the sediment at Chagyrskaya. Looking for DNA similarities more widely, it appears that all individuals at Chagyrskaya may have had some ancestral connection with Croatian Neanderthals, as did the previously mentioned mother of the Denisovan-Neanderthal hybrid girl. Four of the Chagyrskaya individuals can also be linked genetically to Neanderthals from Spain, more so than to much closer individuals found in the Caucasus Mountains. So, by around 59-51 ka the results of a wave of eastward migration of Neanderthals had reached southern Siberia. Yet the apparent matrilineal relatedness of the Okladnikov boy to the much older Neanderthals of Denisova Cave suggests that the earlier group continued to exist.

The new results are just as fascinating as the 2021 discovery that ancient DNA from Neolithic tomb burials in the Cotswolds of SW England suggests that the individual skeletons represent five continuous generations of one extended family. The difference is that they were farmers tied to the locality, whereas the Siberian Neanderthals were probably hunter gatherers with a very wide geographic range.  Laurits Skov and his colleagues have analysed less than one-quarter of the Neanderthal remains already discovered in Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov caves and only a third of the cave deposits have been excavated. Extracting and analysing ancient DNA is now far quicker, more detailed and cheaper than it was in 2010 when news of the first Neanderthal genome broke. So more Neanderthal surprises may yet come from Siberia. Progress on the genetics of their anatomically-modern contemporaries in NE Asia has not been so swift.

See also:  Callaway, E. 2022. First known Neanderthal family discovered in Siberian cave.  Nature online 19 October 2022.

Seven thousand years of cultural sharing in Europe between Neanderthals and modern humans

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Two years ago material excavated from the Bacho Kiro cave in Bulgaria revealed that anatomically modern humans (AMH) had lived there between 44 and 47 ka ago: the earliest known migrants into Europe. Bacho Kiro contains evidence of occupancy by both Neanderthals and AMH. This discovery expanded the time over which Europe was co-occupied by ourselves and Neanderthals. The latter probably faded from the scene as an anatomically distinct group around 41 to 39 ka, although some evidence suggests that they lingered in Spain until ~37 ka and perhaps as late as 34 to 31 ka in the northern Ural mountains at the modern boundary of Europe and Asia. For most of Europe both groups were therefore capable of meeting over a period of seven to eight thousand years.

Aside from interbreeding, which they certainly did, palaeoanthropologists have long pondered on a range of tools that define an early Upper Palaeolithic culture known as the Châtelperronian, which also spans the same lengthy episode. But there have been sharp disagreements about whether it was a shared culture and, if so, which group inspired it. Evidence from the Grotte du Renne in eastern France suggests that the Neanderthals did abandon their earlier Mousterian culture to use the Châtelperronian approach early in the period of dual occupancy of Europe.

Dated appearances in France and NE Spain of Neanderthal fossils (black skulls), Châtelperronian artefacts (grey circles) and proto-Aurignacian artefacts (white squares) in different time ‘slots’ between 43.4 and 39.4 ka. (Credit: Djakovic et al., Fig. 3)

Igor Djakovic of Leiden University in the Netherlands , Alastair Key of Cambridge University, UK, and Marie Soressi, also of Leiden University have undertaken a statistical analysis of the geochronological and stratigraphic context of artefacts at Neanderthal and AMH sites in France and NW Spain during the co-occupancy period (Djakovic, I., Key, A. & Soressi, M. 2022. Optimal linear estimation models predict 1400–2900 years of overlap between Homo sapiens and Neandertals prior to their disappearance from France and northern Spain. Scientific Reports, v. 12, article  15000; DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-19162-z). Their study is partly an attempt to shed light on the ‘authorship’ of the novel technology. The results suggest that the Châtelperronian (Ch) started around 45 ka and had disappeared by ~40.5 ka, along with the Neanderthals themselves. Early AMH artefacts are known as proto-Aurignacian (PA) and bear some resemblance to those of Châtelperronian provenance. The issue revolves around 3 conceivable scenarios: 1. the earliest AMH migrants brought the PA culture with them that Neanderthals attempted to copy, leading to their Ch tools; 2. Neanderthals independently invented the Ch methodology, which AMH adopted to produce PA artefacts; 3. both cultures arose independently.

Djakovic and colleagues have found that the data suggest that the proto-Aurignacian first appeared in the area at around 42.5 ka. Maps of dated human remains and artefacts for six 400-year time ranges from 43.4 to 39.4 ka show only Neanderthal remains and Châtelperronian artefacts from the earliest range (a in the figure). Two sites with proto-Aurignacian artefacts appears in NW Spain during the next ‘slot’ (b) then grow in numbers (c to e) relative to those of Châtelperronian provenance, which are not present after 40 ka (f) and neither are Neanderthal remains. These data suggest that local Neanderthals may have made the technological breakthrough before the appearance of the AMH proto-Aurignacian culture, which supports scenario 2 but not 1. They also suggest that the sudden appearance of Ch in France and Spain and the abandonment of earlier Neanderthal artefacts known as Mousterian could indicate that the Ch culture may have been introduced by Neanderthals migrating into the area, perhaps from further east where they may have been influenced by the earliest known European AMH in Bulgaria: i.e. tentative support for 1 or 2.

However, well documented as Djakovic et al.’s study is, it considers only 17 sites across only a fraction of Europe and a mere 28 individual artefacts each from Neanderthal and AMH associations (56 altogether). More sites and data are bound to emerge. But the study definitely opens exciting new possibilities for cultural ‘cross fertilisation’ as well as the proven physical exchange of genetic material: the two seem very likely to go hand-in-hand. Seven thousand years (~350 generations) of mutual dependence on the resources of southern Europe surely signifies too that the initially distinct groups did not engage in perpetual conflict or ecological competition, as with small numbers of both one or the other would have been extinguished within a few generations.

 See also: Devlin, H. 2022. Neanderthals and modern humans may have copied each other’s tools. The Guardian, 13 October 2022; Davis, N. 2020. Humans and Neanderthals ‘co-existed in Europe for far longer than thought’. The Guardian, 11 May 2020.

Did earliest modern humans in Europe share a cave with Neanderthals?

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The cave of Grotte Mandrin in the Rhône Valley, France. (Credit: Slimak et al Fig 1c)

Since 1999 a cave (Grotte Mandrin) on the west flank of the lower Rhône valley in sothern France has been revealing archaeological remains from 3 metres of sediment that can be divided into 12 distinct layers (Slimak, L. and 22 others 2022. Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories 54,000 years ago at Mandrin, France. Science Advances, v. 8, article eabj9496; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abj9496). Tens of thousands of objects have been recovered, mostly from a layer just below midway in the sequence, which is dominated by small (<1 cm), ‘standardised’ stone points that are also found at other sites in the local area. This veritable industry – dubbed the ‘Neronian’ from the nearby Grotte de Néron – seems to have been focussed hereabouts. Older artefacts in layers F and G are considered to be Mousterian, that is generally ascribed to late Neanderthals. Horse, bison and deer bones suggest that these were the main source of animal protein for the cave’s occupants. The site also contained a few objects that show simple decoration. The way in which the Neronian points were produced resembles the working of similar artefacts in Lebanon by anatomically modern humans (AMH) about 45 ka ago; so it is possible that the technology had spread westward with the earliest AMH migrants into Europe. Yet precise radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating of the Grotte Mandrin site suggests that the sediment accumulated between 84 to 44 thousand years ago. The Mousterian/Neanderthal objects occur in layers F and G between 79 and 57 ka, whereas the Neronian layer E spans 56.8 to 51.7.

Grotte Mandrin has yielded very few hominin remains, except for 9 teeth in layers C to G. Those from C, D, F and G showed clear Neanderthal dental features. However, shape analysis of one damaged, deciduous (infant) molar from Layer E suggests that it matches Upper Pleistocene AMH dental morphology. That seems to place Grotte Mandrin as by far the oldest AMH occupation site in Europe, up 11 thousand years earlier than the 45 to 43 ka AMH site at Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria. To some extent that tallies with the tiny tooth’s association with a prolific, standardised and delicate industry new to the area: probably points for small projectiles. Neanderthals re-occupied the site in Layers D to B, yet in the upper part of layer B, from 44.1 to 41.5, there is a return of Neronian-like points, probably made by AMH.

A curious detail from layer E (not reported in this paper) is the occurrence of soot trapped in thin, annually deposited layers of carbonate on the cave walls. Fragments of the sooty speleothem continually fell onto the cave floor to be incorporated into the sediments. The base of layer E that contains Neronian, possibly AMH artefacts and the top of layer F that shows preceding Neanderthal occupation, contain such sooty speleothem fragments. Precise dating of them is claimed to suggest a very short period of transition between the two kinds of occupants: perhaps only a few years. Neanderthals and AMH may not have met in the cave, but may well have been co-occupants of the surrounding area at the same time.

A great deal of effort over more than two decades has gone into this publication, and several of its findings have caused quite a stir. Because permanent AMH occupation of the Levant began at least 55 ka ago, there is no reason to suppose that AMH migrating along the northern shores of the Mediterranean could not have arrived a little earlier in what is now southern France. What has been emphasised in the broad media is the exchange of a Neanderthal to an AMH population in the Grotte Mandrin, as if it was done in a friendly, indeed neighbourly spirit (!). That hinges on the ultra-precise dating of the sooty speleothem fragments to reveal just a few years between the Neanderthals doing a ‘flit’ and the AMH starting a ‘squat’ in the vacant premises to set up a cottage industry. The time of the replacement before present is, in fact, very close to the limit at which radiocarbon dating is feasible, almost all 14C formed at that time having decayed away since then. There can be no doubt that layer E did mark a major change in sophistication of stone technology, but was it really an AMH development? The only definite evidence is the single deciduous molar, and that is damaged to such an extent that an independent dental paleoanthropologist who has specialised in distinguishing AMH from Neanderthal dentition isn’t convinced. But,surely, DNA from the tooth would resolve the issue. The paper notes that trial extraction and sequencing of 6 horse teeth from layer E failed to yield results, which suggests degradation of genetic teril. So the team did not commit the tooth to sequencing, which would have further damaged it. Finally, four separate groups occupying what certainly looks like a nice little cave over the course of about 40 thousand years is hardly a surprise. Many caves throughout Europe and southern Africa show evidence of multiple occupancy. After all, before 11 ka all humans and their forebears were of necessity foragers and migrants; just think of how many times your neighbours have changed since you moved in …

See also: Price, M. 2022. Did Neanderthals and modern humans take turns living in a French cave? Science, v, 375, p. 598-599; DOI: 10.1126/science.ada1114

The early signs of counting and arithmetic?

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Three earlier articles in Earth-logs originally focussed on what I supposed to be ‘ancient abstract art’.  One highlighted a clam shell that bears carefully etched V-shapes found at the type locality for Asian Homo erectus at Trinil on the Solo River, Java, dated between 430 and 540 ka. Another is about parallel lines etched on a piece of defleshed bone from China dated at 78 to 123 ka, which may be a Denisovan artefact. The most complex is a piece of ochre found in the coastal Blombos Cave 300 km east of Cape Town, South Africa in association with tools ascribed to early modern humans who lived there about 73 ka ago. Fascinating as they seemed at the time, they may hold much greater significance about early-human cognitive powers than about mere decoration. That is thanks to recent evaluation of other simple artefacts made of lines and notches by anthropologists, cognitive scientists and psychologists. Their work is summarised in a recent Nature Feature by Colin Barras (Barras, C. 2021. How did Neanderthals and other ancient humans learn to count? Nature, v. 594, p. 22-25; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-01429-6). The European Research Council recently allocated a €10 million grant to foster research into ‘when, why and how number systems appeared and spread’.

Examples of ancient ‘abstract’ art. Top – V-shaped features inscribed on 430-540 ka freshwater clam from Java; Middle – parallel lines etched through red ochre to show white bone, from a possible Denisovan site in China; Bottom – complex inscription on a tablet of iron-rich silcrete from South Africa

Straight lines and patterns made from them are definitely deliberate, whatever their antiquity. In recent times, such devices have been used by artists to render mental images, moods and thoughts as simplified abstractions: hence ‘abstract’ art, such as that of Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich. The term also applies to the dribbles and drabbles of Jackson Pollock and many more styles. But these works are a very recent evolutionary development out of earlier schools of art. So deliberate geometric shapes and arrangements of lines that are many millennia old cannot simply be termed ‘abstract art’. It is certainly not easy to see how they evolved into the magnificence of Palaeolithic figurative cave art that started at least 40 thousand years ago; Yet they are not ‘doodles’. Being so deliberate suggests that they represented something to their makers. The question is, ‘What?’

The research summarised by Barras is mainly that of Francisco d’Errico of The University of Bordeaux, France and colleagues from Canada and Italy (d’Errico, F. et al. 2018. From number sense to number symbols. An archaeological perspective. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, v. 373, article 2160518; DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0518). They focused their work on two remarkable artefacts. The oldest (72 to 60 ka), from a cave near Angoulême in France, is a fragment of a hyena’s thigh bone that carries nine notches. It is associated with stone tools almost certainly made by Neandethals. The other, from the Border Cave rock shelter in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, is a 44 to 42 ka old baboon’s shin bone, which carries a row of 29 prominent notches, and a number of less distinct, roughly parallel scratches. The rock shelter contains remains of anatomically modern humans and a very diverse set of other artefacts that closely resemble some used by modern San people.

Top: notched hyena femur bone fragment associated with Neanderthal tools from SW France. Bottom: notched baboon shin bone from Border Cave, South Africa. Scale bars(Credit: F. d’Errica and L. Backwell)

Microscopic examination of the notches made by a Neanderthal suggest that all 9 notches were cut at the same time, using the same stone blade. Those on the Border Cave shin bone suggest that they were made using four distinctly different tools on four separate occasions. Are both objects analogous to tally sticks; i.e. to count or keep a record of things as an extension to memory? There are other known examples, such as a 30 ka-old  wolf’s radial bone from the Czech Republic having notches in groups of five, suggesting a record of counting on fingers. Yet very similar devices, made in recent times by the original people of Australia, were not used for keeping count, but to help travellers commit a verbal message to memory enabling them to recount it later.

Do read Barras’s summary and the original paper by d’Errico et al. to get an expanded notion of the arguments being debated. They emerge from the truly novel idea that just because the makers of such objects lived tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago that doesn’t make them intellectually lacking. Imagining in the manner of Victorian scientists that ancient beings such as Neanderthals and H. erectus must have been pretty dim is akin to the prejudice of European colonialists that people of colour or with non-European cultures were somehow inferior, even non-human. To me it is admirable that the European Research Council has generously funded further research in this field at a time when research funding in the UK, especially for the disciplines involved, has been decimated by those who demanded an exit from the EU.

The older Trinil and Blombos patterns appear yet more sophisticated. The pattern on the latter looks very like the kind of thing that someone in a prison cell might draw to keep track of time. It also incorporates the zig-zag element engraved on the Trinil clam shell. Remember that the word ‘Exchequer’ is derived from a tax audit during the reign of Henry I of England that was conducted on a counting board whose surface had a checked pattern

CSI and detecting the presence of ancient humans

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Enter a room, even for a few minutes, and dead skin cells will follow you like an invisible cloud to settle on exposed surfaces. Live there and a greyish white, fluffy dust builds up in every room. Even the most obsessive cleaning will not remove it, especially under a bed or on the bathroom floor. Consider a cave as a home, but one without vacuum cleaners, any kind of sanitation, paper tissues, panty liners, nappies or wet wipes. For pre-modern human dwellings can be added snot, fecal matter, sweat, urine, menstrual blood and semen among all the other detritus of living. A modern crime-scene investigator would be overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of DNA from the host of people who had once dwelt there. CSI works today as much because most homes are pretty clean and most people are fastidious about personal hygene as because of the rapidly shrinking lower limit of DNA detection of the tools at its disposal. Except, that is, when someone from outside the home commits a criminal offence: burglary, GBH, rape, murder. We have all eagerly watched ‘police operas’ and in the absence of other evidence the forensic team generally gets its perpetrator, unless they did the deed wearing a hazmat suit, mask, bootees and latex gloves.

Artistic impression of Neanderthal extended-family life in a cave (credit: Tyler B. Tretsven)

Since 2015 analysis of environmental DNA from soils has begun to revolutionise the analysis of ancient ecosystems, including the living spaces of ancient humans (see: Detecting the presence of hominins in ancient soil samples, April 2017). It is no longer necessary to find tools or skeletal remains of humans to detect their former presence and work out their ancestry. DNA sequencing of soil samples, formerly discarded from archaeological sites, can now detect former human presence in a particular layer, as well as that of other animals. In many cases the ‘signal’ pervades the layer rather than occurring in a particular spot, as expected from shed skin cells and bodily fluids. The first results were promising but only revealed mitochondrial DNA. Now the technique has extended to nuclear DNA: the genome (Vernot, B. and 33 others 2021. Unearthing Neanderthal population history using nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from cave sediments. Science, v. 372, article eabf1667; DOI: 10.1126/science.abf1667). Benjamin Vernot and colleagues from 7 countries collected and analysed cave soils from three promising sites with tangible signs of ancient human occupation. Two of them were in Siberia and had previously yielded Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes from bones. The other is part of the Atapuerca cave complex of NW Spain that had not. The Russian caves yielded DNA from more than 60 samples, 30 being nuclear DNA consistent with that from actual Neanderthal and Denisovan bones found in the caves. Galería de las Estatuas cave in Spain presented a soil profile spanning about 40 thousand years from 112 to 70 ka.

Teasing-out nuclear DNA from soil is complicated, from both technical and theoretical standpoints. So being able to match genomes from soil and bone samples in the Russian caves validated the methodology. The Spanish samples could then be treated with confidence. Galería de las Estatuas revealed the presence of Neanderthals throughout its 40 ka soil profile, but also a surprise. The older DNA was sufficiently distinct from that from later levels to suggest that two different populations had used the cave as a home, the original occupants being replaced by another genetically different group around 100 to 115 ka ago. The earlier affinity was with the ancestors of sequenced Neanderthal remains from Belgium, the later with those from Croatia. That time is at the end of the last (Eemian) interglacial episode, so one possibility is a population change driven by climatic deterioration. This success is sure to encourage other re-examinations of caves all over the place. That is, if there is the analyical capacity to perform such painstaking work in greater volume and at greater pace. Like many other palaeo-genomic studies, this one has relied heavily on the analytical facilities pioneered and developed by Svante Paäbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Covid has forced genetics to the front page for a year and more. And it has led to many advances in anlytical techniques, particularly in their speed. It would nice to think that a dreadful experience may end-up with positive benefits for understanding the full history of humanity.

Relationships between modern humans and Neanderthals

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Before 40 thousand years (ka) ago Europe was co-occupied by Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans (AMH) for between five to seven thousand years; about 350 generations – as long as the time since farming began in Neolithic Britain to the present day. Populations of both groups were probably low given their dependence on hunting and foraging during a period significantly colder than it is now. Crude estimates suggest between 3,000 to 12,000 individuals in each group; equivalent to the attendance at a single English Football League 2 match on a Covid-free winter Saturday afternoon. Moving around Europe south of say 55°N, their potential range would have been around 5 million square kilometres, which very roughly suggests that population density would be one person for every 200 km2. That they would have moved around in bands of, say, 10 to 25 might seem to suggest that encounters were very infrequent. Yet a hybrid Neanderthal-Denisovan female found in Siberia yielded DNA that suggested a family connection with Croatia, 5,000 km away (see: Neanderthal Mum meets Denisovan Dad, August 2018); early humans moved far and wide.

The likely appearances of Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans when they first met between 50 and 40 thousand years ago. (Credit: Jason Ford, New York University)

A sparsely populated land can be wandered through with little fear other than those of predators, sparse resources or harsh climate and lack of shelter. But it still seems incredible for there to have been regular meetings with other bands. But that view leaves out knowledge of good places to camp, hunt and forage that assure shelter, water, game and so forth, and how to get to them – a central part of hunter-gatherers’ livelihoods. There would have been a limited number of such refuges, considerably increasing chances of meeting. Whatever the physiognomic differences between AMH and Neaderthals, and they weren’t very striking, meeting up of bands of both human groups at a comfortable campsite would be cause for relief, celebration, exchanges of knowledge and perhaps individuals of one group to partner members of the other.

As well as that from Neanderthals, ancient DNA from very early European AMH remains has increasingly been teased out. The latest comes from three individuals from Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria dated to between 45.9 to 42.6 ka; among the earliest known, fully modern Europeans. One had a Neanderthal ancestor less than six generations removed (perhaps even a great-great grandparent 60 years beforehand). Because of the slight elapsed time, the liaison was probably in Europe, rather than in the Middle East as previously suggested for insertion of Neanderthal genes into European ancestry. The genetic roots of the other two families stemmed back seven to ten generations – roughly 100 to 150 years (Hajdinjak, M. and 31 others 2021. Initial Upper Palaeolithic humans in Europe had recent Neanderthal ancestry. Nature, v. 592, p. 253–257; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03335-3). The interpretation of these close relationships stems from the high proportion of Neanderthal DNA (3 to 4 %) in the three genomes. The segments are unusually lengthy, which is a major clue to the short time since the original coupling; inherited segments tend to shorten in successive generations. The groups to which these AMH individuals belonged did not contribute to later Eurasian populations, but link to living East Asians and Native Americans. They seem to have vanished from Europe long before modern times. The same day saw publication of a fourth instance of high Neanderthal genetic content (~3 %) in an early European’s genome, extracted from a ~45 ka female AMH from Zlatý kůň (Golden Horse) Cave in Czechia (Prüfer, K. and 11 others 2021. A genome sequence from a modern human skull over 45,000 years old from Zlatý kůň in Czechia. Nature Ecology & Evolution  DOI: 10.1038/s41559-021-01443-x). In her case, too, the Neanderthal DNA segments are unusually lengthy, but indicate 70 to 80 generations (~2,000 to 3,000 years) had elapsed. Her DNA also suggests that she was dark-skinned and had brown hair and brown eyes. Overall her genetics, too, do not have counterparts in later European AMH. The population to which she belonged may have migrated westwards from the Middle East, where one of her ancestors had mated with a Neanderthal, perhaps as long as 50 ka ago. But that does not rule out her group having been in Europe at that time. A later modern human, dated at 42 to 37 ka, is a young man from the Petştera cu Oase cave in Romania, whose forbears mixed with Neanderthals. His genome contains 6.4% of Neanderthal DNA, suggesting that his Neanderthal ancestor lived a mere 4 to 6 generations earlier, most likely in Europe, and was perhaps one of the last of that group.

The data suggest that once modern humans came into contact with their predecessors in the Middle East and Europe, mixture with Neanderthals was ‘the rule rather than the exception’. Yet their lack of direct relationship to later Europeans implies that AMH colonisation of Europe occurred in successive waves of people, not all of whom survived. As Palaeolithic specialist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London cautions, of these multiple waves of incomers ‘Some groups mixed with Neanderthals, and some didn’t. Some are related to later humans and some are not’. Even five thousand years after ‘first contact’, relations of modern humans with Neanderthals remained ‘cordial’, to say the least, including with the last few before their extinction.

See also: Gibbons, A. 2021. More than 45,000 years ago, modern humans ventured into Neanderthal territory. Here’s what happened next. Science, v. 372, News article; DOI: 10.1126/science.abi8830. Callaway, E. 2021. Oldest DNA from a Homo sapiens reveals surprisingly recent Neanderthal ancestry. Nature, v. 592, News article; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-00916-0. Genomes of the earliest Europeans (Science Daily, 7 April 2021). Bower, B. 2021 Europe’s oldest known humans mated with Neandertals surprisingly often (ScienceNews, 7 April 2021)

Magnetic reversal and demise of the Neanderthals?

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A rumour emerged last week that the Neanderthals met their end as one consequence of an extraterrestrial, possibly even extragalactic influence. Curiously, it stems from a recent discovery in New Zealand, where of course Neanderthals never set foot and nor did anatomically modern humans, the ancestors of Maori people, until a mere 800 years ago. It started with an ancient log from a kauri tree (Agathis australis), a species that Maoris revere. Found in excavations of boggy ground, the log weighed about 60 tons, so it was a valuable commodity, especially as it is illegal to fell living kauri trees. The wood is unaffected by burial and insect attack, has a regular grain and colour throughout, so is ideal for monumental Maori sculpture. Such swamp kauri also preserves their own life history in annual growth rings, and the log in question has 1700 of them. Using growth rings to chart climate variation gives the most detailed records of the recent past, provided the wood can be dated. Matching growth ring records from several trees of different ages is key to charting local climate with annual precision over several millennia.

An ancient kauri tree log recovered by swampland excavations in New Zealand. (Credit: Jonathan Palmer, in Voosen 2021)

Radiocarbon dating indicates that this particular kauri tree was growing around 42 thousand years ago. That is close to the upper limit for using 14C concentration in organic matter to determine age because the isotope has a short half-life (5730 years). In this case samples of the log would contain only about 0.7 % of its original complement of radioactive carbon. Cosmic rays generate 14C when they hit nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere and it enters CO2 and thus the carbon cycle. Carbon dioxide taken up by photosynthesis to contribute carbon to plants contains only about one part per trillion of 14C. Consequently wood as ancient as that in the kauri log contains almost vanishingly small amounts, yet it can still be measured using mass spectrometry to yield an accurate radiometric age.

The particularly interesting thing about the 42 ka date is that it coincides with the timing of the last reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field, known as the Laschamps event. The kauri tree bears detailed witness through its growth rings to the environmental effects of a decrease in that field to almost zero as the poles flipped. The bulk of cosmic rays are normally deflected away from the Earth by the geomagnetic field, but during a reversal a great many more pass through the atmosphere, the most energetic reaching the surface and the biosphere. The kauri growth rings record fluctuations in the generation of 14C by their passage and thereby the geomagnetic field strength, which was only 6% of normal levels from 42.3 to 41.6 ka (Cooper, A. and 32 others  2021. A global environmental crisis 42,000 years ago. Science, v. 371, p. 811-818; DOI: 10.1126/science.abb8677). This coincided with an unrelated succession of periods of low solar activity and a reduced solar ‘wind’, which also provides some cosmic-rayprotection when activity is at normal levels; a ‘double whammy’. One consequence would have been destruction of stratospheric ozone by cosmic rays and thus increased ultraviolet exposure at ground level.

Combined with the highly precise growth-ring dating, the climatic changes over the 1700 year lifetime of the kauri tree can be linked to other records of environmental change. These include glacial ice- and lake-bed cores together with stalactite layers. Apparently, the Laschamps geomagnetic reversal coincided with abrupt shifts in wind belts and precipitation, perhaps triggering major droughts in the southern continents. Highly plausible, but some of the other speculations are less certain. For instance, some time around 42 ka, but far from well-established, Australia’s marsupial megafauna experienced major extinctions, the Neanderthals disappear from the fossil record and modern humans started decorating caves in Europe (20 ka after they did in Indonesia). In fact, speculation becomes somewhat silly, with suggestions that early Europeans went to live in caves because of increased exposure to UV (they knew, did they, while Neanderthals didn’t?), their painting and, by implication, their entire culture shifting through the shock and awe of mighty displays of the aurora borealis. Just because the number 42 is (or was), according to the late Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, ‘the answer to life, the universe and everything’, the authors tag the episode as the ‘Adams Event’. In their summary for The Conversation they include an animation with a quintessential Stephen Fry narrative, which Earth-logs readers can judge for themselves. Perhaps ‘Lockdown Trauma’ has a lot more to answer for, other than upsurges in Zoom conferences, knitting and gourmet experimentation …

See also: Voosen, P. 2021. Kauri trees mark magnetic flip 42,000 years ago. Science, v. 371, p. 766; DOI: 10.1126/science.371.6531.766

How like the Neanderthals are we?

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An actor made-up to resemble a Neanderthal man in a business suit traveling on the London Underground. (Source: screen-grab from BBC2 Neanderthals – Meet Your Ancestors)

In the most basic, genetic sense, we were sufficiently alike for us to have interbred with them regularly and possibly wherever the two human groups met. As a result the genomes of all modern humans contain snips derived from Neanderthals (see: Everyone now has their Inner Neanderthal; February 2020). East Asian people also carry some Denisovan genes as do the original people of Australasia and the first Americans. Those very facts suggest that members of each group did not find individuals from others especially repellent as potential sexual partners! But that covers only a tiny part of what constitutes culture. There is archaeological evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans made similar tools. Both had the skills to make bi-faced ‘hand axes’ before they even met around 45 to 40 ka ago.  A cave (La Grotte des Fées) near Châtelperron to the west of the French Alps that was occupied by Neanderthals until about 40 ka yielded a selection of stone tools, including blades, known as the Châtelperronian culture, which indicates a major breakthrough in technology by their makers. It is sufficiently similar to the stone industry of anatomically modern humans (AMH) who, around that time, first migrated into Europe from the east (Aurignacian) to pose a conundrum: Did the Neanderthals copy Aurignacian techniques when they met AMH, or vice versa? Making blades by splitting large flint cores is achieved by striking the cores with just a couple of blows with a softer tool. At the very least Neanderthals had the intellectual capacity to learn this very difficult skill, but they may have invented it (see: Disputes in the cavern; June 2012). Then there is growing evidence for artistic abilities among Neanderthals, and even Homo erectus gets a look-in (see: Sophisticated Neanderthal art now established; February 2018).

Reconstructed burial of a Neanderthal individual at La Chappelle-aux-Saints (Credit: Musée de La Chapelle-aux-Saints, Corrèze, France)

For a long time, a pervasive aspect of AMH culture has been ritual. Indeed much early art may be have been bound up with ritualistic social practices, as it has been in historic times. A persuasive hint at Neanderthal ritual lies in the peculiar structures – dated at 177 ka – found far from the light of day in the Bruniquel Cave in south-western France (see: Breaking news: Cave structures made by Neanderthals; May 2016). They comprise circles fashioned from broken-off stalactites, and fires seem to have been lit in them. The most enduring rituals among anatomically modern humans have been those surrounding death: we bury our dead, thereby preserving them, in a variety of ways and ‘send them off’ with grave goods or even by burning them and putting the ashes in a pot. A Neanderthal skeleton (dated at 50 ka) found in a cave at La Chappelle-aux-Saints appears to have been buried and made safe from scavengers and erosion. There are even older Neanderthal graves (90 to 100 ka) at Quafzeh in Palestine and Shanidar in Iraq, where numerous individuals, including a mother and child, had been interred. Some are associated with possible grave goods, such as pieces of red ochre (hematite) pigment, animal body parts and even pollen that suggests flowers had been scattered on the remains. The possibility of deliberate offerings or tributes and even the notion of burial have met with scepticism among some palaeoanthropologists. One reason for the scientific caution is that many of the finds were excavated long before the rigour of modern archaeological protocols

Recently a multidisciplinary team involving scientists from France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Spain and Denmark exhaustively analysed the context and remains of a Neanderthal child found in the La Ferrassie cave (Dordogne region of France) in the early 1970s  (Balzeau, A. and 13 others 2020. Pluridisciplinary evidence for burial for the La Ferrassie 8 Neandertal child. Scientific Reports, v. 10, article 21230; DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-77611-z). Estimated to have been about 2 years old, the child is anatomically complete. Bones of other animals found in the same deposit were less-well preserved than those of the child, adding weight to the hypothesis that a body, rather than bones, had been buried soon after death. Luminescence dating of the sediments enveloping the skeleton is considerably older than the radiocarbon age of one of the child’s bones. That is difficult to explain other than by deliberate burial. It is almost certain that a pit had been dug and the child placed in it, to be covered in sediment. The skeleton was oriented E-W, with the head towards the east. Remarkably, other Neanderthal remains at the La Ferrassie site also have heads to the east of the rest of their bones, suggesting perhaps a common practice of orientation relative to sunrise and sunset.

It is slowly dawning on palaeoanthropologists that Neanderthal culture and cognitive capacity were not greatly different from those of anatomically modern humans. That similar beings to ourselves disappeared from the archaeological record within a few thousand years of the first appearance of AMH in Europe has long been attributed to what can be summarised as the Neanderthals being ‘second best’ in many ways. That may not have been the case. Since the last glaciation something similar has happened twice in Europe, which analysis of ancient DNA has documented in far more detail than the disappearance of the Neanderthals. Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were followed by early Neolithic farmers with genetic affinities to living people in Northern Anatolia in Turkey – the region where growing crops began. The DNA record from human remains with Neolithic ages shows no sign of genomes with a clear Mesolithic signature, yet some of the genetic features of these hunter-gatherers still remain in the genomes of modern Europeans. Similarly, ancient DNA recovered from Bronze Age human bones suggests almost complete replacement of the Neolithic inhabitants by people who introduced metallurgy, a horse-centred culture and a new kind of ceramic – the Bell Beaker. This genetic group is known as the Yamnaya, whose origins lie in the steppe of modern Ukraine and European Russia. In this Neolithic-Bronze Age population transition the earlier genomes disappear from the ancient DNA record. Yet Europeans still carry traces of that earlier genetic heritage. The explanation now accepted by both geneticists and archaeologists is that both events involved assimilation and merging through interbreeding. That seems just as applicable to the ‘disappearance’ of the Neanderthals

See also: Neanderthals buried their dead: New evidence (Science Daily, 9 December 2020)

Further back in the Eurasian human story

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About 800 to 950 thousand years (ka) ago the earliest human colonisers of northern Europe, both adults and children, left footprints and stone tools in sedimentary strata laid down by a river system that then drained central England and Wales. The fossil flora and fauna at the Happisburgh (pronounced ‘Haze-burra’) site in Norfolk suggest a climate that was somewhat warmer in summers than at present, with winter temperatures about 3°C lower than now: similar to the climate in today’s southern Norway. At that time the European landmass extended unbroken to the western UK, so any hunter-gatherers could easily follow migrating herds and take advantage of seasonal vegetation resources. These people don’t have a name because they left no body fossils. A group known from their fossils as Homo antecessor had occupied Spain, southern France and Italy in slightly earlier times (back to 1200 ka). Since the discovery of their unique mix of modern and primitive traits, they have been regarded as possible intermediaries between H. erectus and H. heidelbergensis – once supposed to be the predecessor of Neanderthals and possibly anatomically modern humans (AMH). Since the emergence about 10 years ago of ancient genomics as the prime tool in examining human ancestry the picture has been shown to be considerably more complex. Not only had AMH interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, those two groups were demonstrably interfertile too, and a complex web of such relationships had been pieced together by 2016. But there has been a new development.

700 ka Homo erectus from Java: a possible Eurasian ‘super-archaic’ human (credit: Gibbons 2020)

Population geneticists at the University of Utah, USA, have devised sophisticated means of making more of the detailed ATCG nucleotide sequences in ancient human DNA, despite there being very few full genomes of Neanderthals and Denisovans (Rogers, A.R. et al. 2020. Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestors interbred with a distantly related hominin. Science Advances, v. 6, article eaay5483; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aay5483). In Earth-logs you may already have come across the idea of the ancestral ‘ghosts’ that are represented by unusual sections of genomes from living West African people. Those sections seem likely to have resulted from interbreeding with an unknown archaic population – i.e. neither Neanderthal nor Denisovan. It now seems that both Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes also show traces of such introgression with ‘ghost’ populations during much earlier times. The ancestors of both these groups separated from the lineage that led to AMH perhaps 750 ka ago. Rogers et al. refer to the earliest as ‘neandersovans’ and consider that they split into the two groups after they entered Eurasia, at some time before 600 ka – perhaps around 740 ka. This division may well have occurred as a result of a population of ‘neandersovans’ having spread over the vastness of Eurasia and growing genetic isolation. The reanalysis of both sets of genomes show evidence of a ‘neandersovan’ population crash before the split. Thereafter, the early Neanderthal population may have risen to around 16 thousand then slowly declined to ~3400 individuals.

A ‘state-of-play’ view of human interbreeding in Eurasia since 2 Ma ago (credit: Gibbons 2020)

However, the ‘neandersovans’ did not enter a new continent devoid of hominins, for as long ago as 1.9 Ma archaic H. erectus had arrived from Africa.  Both Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes record the presence of sections of ‘super-archaic’ DNA, which reflect early  interbreeding with earlier Eurasian populations. Indeed, Denisovans seem to have repeated their ancestors’ sexual exploits, once they became a genetically distinct group.  From the ‘ghost’ DNA fragments Rogers et al. conclude that the ‘super-archaics’ separated from other humans about two million years ago. They were descended from the first ‘Out-of-Africa’ wave of humans, represented by the fossils humans from Dmanisi in Georgia (see First out of Africa, November 2003 and An iconic early human skull,  October 2013 in Earth-logs Human evolution and migrations). A measure of the potential of novel means of analysing available ancient human DNA is the authors’ ability even to estimate the approximate population size of the interbreeding ‘super-archaic’ group at 20 to 50 thousand. Long thought to be impossible, it now seems possible to penetrate back to the very earliest human genetics, and the more DNA that can be teased out of other Neanderthal and Denisovan fossils the more we will know of our origins.

See also: Gibbons, A. 2020. Strange bedfellows for human ancestors. Science, v. 367, p. 838–839; doi:10.1126/science.367.6480.838