In the Neumark-Nord sediments, just as Neanderthal lithics become visible, there’s a sharp spike in charcoal particles: 10 times background levels. The pollen shows more sun-loving species too, like blackthorn and hazel; something was opening up the forest. What’s difficult to tell is whether this was natural burning creating a landscape attractive to Neanderthals, or if they were the fire starters. It’s clear, however, that there’s a connection, since the pattern lasts for 2 to 3 millennia, then as their archaeology disappears, so the forest begins closing in again.
the full analysis from Abric del Pastor provides an answer to the conundrum of whether multiple hearths mean one or more visits. When studied in detail using RMUs and 3D mapping, every level at Abric de Pastor with multiple fires turned out to consist of individual phases, each with one hearth. This strongly suggests that it was only ever visited by very small groups of Neanderthals.
One has far more artefacts, RMUs and refitting sequences than the others, which in theory might be due to an unusually long occupation. However, the numerous lithics aren’t matched by more animal bones or butchery. This makes it especially likely that there were instead more Neanderthals sitting round the fire, even if it was just for a night or so.
Micro-morphology has also provided proof that, far from being slovenly, Neanderthals were regularly disposing of their rubbish. At Abric Romaní some samples taken away from hearths nonetheless showed a mélange of tiny bone and lithic fragments burned at different temperatures. They were most likely scraped up from inside and around fires, then dumped some distance away. Other rubbish samples were quite distinctive: masses of mostly unburned, crushed bone and animal fats, plus coprolite (fossilised dung) fragments (species unclear). These matched deposits surrounding particular hearths, and likely reflect Neanderthals tidying up especially messy butchery waste and other waste. Most interesting, this cleaning was systematic: some dump areas were multi-layered, clearly having been used repeatedly.
It looks like Neanderthals had first made a fire when arriving, then swept the floor and burned the waste, which included old faeces mixed with animal dung and plant material. This feels like a ‘deep clean’ on moving into a home, but there’s also evidence from Abric Romaní that bodily waste was routinely incinerated along with grass and potentially moss: most likely old bedding.
La Folie contained something even more astonishing. Surrounding all of the archaeological features was a roughly circular series of small, slanted pits, each ringed by limestone blocks. They contained traces of organic material and had compacted walls, and were the first clear case of Neanderthal constructions. By piecing all the evidence together, it seems that large wooden poles had been rammed into the ground, then secured with stone blocks. It’s even possible to see how the stones collapsed inwards slightly when the poles were removed (or rotted). This was clearly a built living space, providing both shelter – probably using hides lashed to the poles – and an enclosed ‘home from home’. The area is so large that it wasn’t likely to be roofed, but there was probably one main entrance marked by a gap in the circle, with a hearth adjacent. Most interestingly, refitting shows that artefacts moved between different zones inside the structure: even during a relatively short stay, Neanderthals were dividing up space. Knapping was happening outside and around the inner edges, while the central area seems to have been for processing wood, vegetable matter and skins. And just like in a cave, the bedding was directly opposite the entrance, up against whatever barrier was used: the farthest point from danger. The La Folie discovery wasn’t the first claim for Neanderthal-built structures, but without modern excavation and analysis, there were many sceptics of things like the stacked mammoth bones at La Cotte de St Brelade. Other recent finds are, however, tipping the trend towards Neanderthal ‘furniture’, of a sort. Around 70km (40mi.) south of Paris is a field called Les Bossats, near the village of Ormesson. In the 1930s, Upper Palaeolithic artefacts made by H. sapiens were tugged loose by ploughing, though not reported until 70 years later, which kicked off excavations. Beneath that layer, archaeologists found that Neanderthals had been there too, somewhere between 53 and 41.5 ka. A fine covering of sediment meant that knapping debris lay virtually where it had fallen, and in the richest area four sizeable sandstone blocks were found. They must have been hauled in from nearby deposits, and were most likely useful surfaces; in other words, camp tables or chairs.
Le Rozel, on today’s north-west French coast, contains many sandy layers backed up against a cliff and dunes. Astonishingly, a series of levels from around 80 ka preserve hundreds of footprints. In the richest phase, careful size comparisons show that at least 4 and probably over 10 individuals were here. Most fascinating, they’re largely adolescents and children as young as 2 years old. With so few adults it’s hard to imagine this was a full group, and instead it looks like a pack of youngsters foraging at the beach.
Something was changing in the way Neanderthals lived in the landscape after 150 ka, but working out what caused it is one of the hardest remaining problems.
Dramatic changes after 150 ka – from full interglacial to deep glacial and everything in-between – were very likely part of the reason for Neanderthals’ growing flexibility, as well as specialisation. Everyday experiences began to look quite different depending on where, and when they lived.
f we recall the impression that many Quina sites, even places one stage beyond hunting camps, don’t look particularly like ‘homes’ with hearths, then perhaps these Neanderthals were using tents or shelters. We know from La Folie that open-air constructions of some sort were used later, but truly mobile shelters formed from hides would have allowed Quina-making Neanderthals to move flexibly across the tundra and stay warm while ranging over long distances. Even if they obviously returned time and again to particular caves or cliffs for the hunting and initial butchery, the lack of hearths despite there being some burned materials suggests we’re missing these parts of sites.
The oldest known Neanderthal prints were left more than 250,000 years before those at Le Rozel. On the slopes of the extinct Roccamonfina volcano, southern Italy, they were believed to be the Devil’s tracks after being revealed by eighteenth-century landslides. left around 350 ka by three early Neanderthals whose feet sank into cooled and rain-softened pyroclastic ash and mudflows. More than 50 prints show how all moved differently: one zig-zagged down, another took a cautious curving path, slipping and sometimes dropping down a hand for balance, while the third ploughed in a straight line. All three walkers were under 1.35m (4.4ft) tall, exactly the calculated height of Le Moustier 1, making them young teenagers.Tracing the three trails upslope, all led from a flat ledge speckled for about 50m (55yd) by yet more hominin footprints, as well as those of animals: a Neanderthal routeway.
Chimpanzees and bonobos, who are both physically and socially quite different, have only been separated since around 850 ka; roughly the same time that our own ancestors separated from the lineage that would lead to Neanderthals and Denisovans. Modern zoology’s concept of allotaxa may be more appropriate for what Neanderthals were to us: closely related species that vary in bodies and behaviours, yet can also reproduce. Yaks and cattle are an example, and it was certainly happening in Pleistocene fauna too: different types of mammoths sometimes hybridised, while living brown bears were recently found to preserve a small percentage of cave bear DNA.
Climatic impact is a possibility, with the rapid temperature rise towards the hothouse’n’hippos Eemian peak, followed by a world in flux, experiencing massive temperature jumps of 11 to 16°C. The population changes are mirrored in the archaeology too, with a proliferation of techno-complexes and regional traditions between 125 and 45 ka. Another theme that needs far more unpicking.
We are prone to paint ourselves as victors, but outside Africa we nearly went extinct at least once, and suffered a major population crash around 70 ka, just before the majority of interbreeding with Neanderthals.
dispersing populations obviously spreading all the way into Australia by 65 ka – adapting to arid deserts and wet mountain forests, even an ocean crossing to Indonesia – there’s no clear sign of H. sapiens in Central or Western Europe until more than 20,000 years later. Perhaps that land was already taken, and Neanderthals were successful enough, at least for a while, to prevent others coming in. Yet there is the Néronian ‘joker in the pack’, reminding us that what we can make out archaeologically is far from the whole story.
Furthermore, during the 25,000 years after Oase, it appears that successive Upper Palaeolithic populations totally replaced each other, and were then replaced in their turn by later prehistoric cultures. Parisians, Londoners or Berliners today with ostensibly European heritage have very little connection even to Mesolithic people just 10,000 years ago. The vast majority of their DNA comes from a massive influx of Western Asian peoples during the Neolithic.8 This means that many of the first H. sapiens populations are more extinct than the Neanderthals; not a great sign of evolutionary dominance.
A recent project modelled the collaborative possibilities, inviting expert Ju/’hoan San trackers from Namibia to examine physical traces within European Upper Palaeolithic caves. Their knowledge identified new tracks, and gave fresh interpretations of what was happening in these places….Neanderthals potentially also shared broader perspectives with Indigenous hunter-gatherers, whose cosmologies are often based around relational ideas. This isn’t about clumsy cut’n’paste analogies, but questioning the objectivity of assumptions most researchers already use.
Current interpretations are structured around themes of dominance, exploitation and conflict; life as struggle against nature, and animals as unthinking, unfeeling commodities. In stark contrast, relational frameworks emphasise the similarities between human and non-human. Hierarchies exist, blood is still spilled, but a relational world is filled with communities based on recognition of common personhood, of which humans are members, not masters. Human survival is not in conflict with creatures, but entwined in relationships with them.
Across multiple levels of river deposits, many thousands of bones show that Neanderthals hunted and thoroughly butchered at least 107 Deninger’s and brown bears. Though flatness is the overwhelming feature of northern France, Biache-Saint-Vaast is right at the point where the Scarpe River flows north from hills to the Flanders plains. Since bears will den in slopes with reasonably soft ground, hunting during hibernation may have been possible even without caves. But most are adult males, which doesn’t really fit the pattern seen in denning caves like Rio Secco. The river itself might have provided an ambush locale, especially if adult males were distracted by fishing. But however they were obtained, bears aren’t that easy to find, and while they represent a lot of meat and fat, hunting them is more dangerous than other more abundant prey like horses or giant deer.
Heavy bear fur may well have been a motivation, and cut marks do support this. But bear hunting is least common during the colder phases here. In the absence of clear economics a socially motivated explanation for the Biache-Saint-Vaast bears was proposed, but it was very Western: Neanderthals were intentionally selecting dangerous prey to gain prestige. However, it’s equally possible that this was about something relational between hominins and bears. Intriguingly, even if many Indigenous cultures consume bears – some like the Natashquan Innu even naming their land as ‘the place where we hunt bear’ – conceptions of these creatures as strongly linked to personhood and humans also exist, including in Naskapi, Tlingit, Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples.10 During the Palaeolithic, bears shared Neanderthals’ habits of moving into the earth to live, leaving their bones and claw marks in the same caves. With this in mind, there’s another weird thing about Biache-Saint-Vaast: high numbers of butchered skulls. Bears weren’t arriving here as entire carcasses, but if furs and fat were the main interest, why carry extremely heavy heads? Eyes, tongue and brain could easily have been removed elsewhere.
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