Neandertals revised

Abstract

The last decade has seen a significant growth of our knowledge of the Neandertals, a population of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers who lived in (western) Eurasia between ∼400,000 and 40,000 y ago. Starting from a source population deep in the Middle Pleistocene, the hundreds of thousands of years of relative separation between African and Eurasian groups led to the emergence of different phenotypes in Late Pleistocene Europe and Africa. Both recently obtained genetic evidence and archeological data show that the biological and cultural gaps between these populations were probably smaller than previously thought. These data, reviewed here, falsify inferences to the effect that, compared with their near-modern contemporaries in Africa, Neandertals were outliers in terms of behavioral complexity. It is only around 40,000 y ago, tens of thousands of years after anatomically modern humans first left Africa and thousands of years after documented interbreeding between modern humans, Neandertals and Denisovans, that we see major changes in the archeological record, from western Eurasia to Southeast Asia, e.g., the emergence of representational imagery and the colonization of arctic areas and of greater Australia (Sahul).

Neanderthal language revisited: not only us

“…Neanderthals once covered a vast and climatically and ecologically diverse range, from Siberia to Gibraltar, and contrary to earlier stereotypes, they did adapt their diet and technology to local conditions [13,44]. In northern latitudes, they were predominantly carnivorous, had advanced leather processing technology (using lissoirs, probably later borrowed by AMH [45]), with modeling studies suggesting advanced winter clothing [46] using stone and bone awls (such as found in the Grotte du Renne) as sewing aids [47], but in general their diet was apparently very flexible and adapted to the local environment, including both meat and vegetable foods [48] to varying proportions [13,[49][50][51].…”

Aspects of human physical and behavioural evolution during the last 1 million years

“…With Levallois technology, specialized lithic points (and other flake variants such as radial and laminar flakes) can be made for hafting and the creation of stone‐tipped spears. In addition, we have good evidence for the Neanderthal creation and use of pitch as a binding agent in composite tool production (Wragg Sykes et al, ; Roebroeks and Soressi, ). Using composite tools, certain cognitive thresholds must have been crossed by the creating species (Barham, ).…”

Homo naledi and Pleistocene hominin evolution in subequatorial Africa

“…This situation is paralleled outside of Africa, where most of the manufacturing techniques that characterize the MSA were also mastered by Neanderthals and possibly by Denisovans (Roebroeks and Soressi, 2016; d’Errico and Banks, 2013 ). These archaic populations diverged from African populations well before the appearance of such techniques either in Africa or in Eurasia (Meyer et al, 2016), so these techniques must either have been invented independently multiple times or have been transferred by long-distance exchange of ideas across long-separated hominin populations.…”