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Jewelry from the Grotte du Renne "reindeer cave" at Arcy-sur-Cure in Central France has long been assigned to Neanderthals, helping rehabilitate them in the picture paleontologists paint of early mankind. But these artifacts have now been questioned thanks to a redating of the lowest levels of the cave, where Neanderthals were presumed active. According to Science Magazine vol. 330, no. 6003, p. 439) in October 2010,

In the new study, a team led by dating expert Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom reports 31 new radiocarbon dates from the Grotte du Renne using novel methods designed to avoid contamination. The dates, obtained on materials such as bone tools and ornaments made of animal teeth, paint a disturbing picture: While upper layers attributed to modern humans clock in at no older than 35,000 years, artifacts from the Châtelperronian levels range from 21,000 years old, when Neandertals were long extinct, to 49,000 years old, before the Châtelperronian began. About one-third of the dates were outside the expected range.

What we don't understand is the dichotomy between "modern humans" and Neanderthals to begin with. If the dating was mixed (contaminated) how can paleontologists be sure, since "modern humans" and Neanderthals were mixed themselves according to all proven genetic analyses. These retests seem to be splitting hairs to prove or disprove pet theories that no longer apply.

It is particularly nonsensical to say, as the archeologist Randall White of New York University said, "This key site should be disqualified from the debate over [Neanderthal] symbolism." The debate over Neanderthals' symbolic intellectual and communicative capacities has already been settled to 99% of the scientific world's satisfaction. It is a non-issue. Paintings, jewelry and art from over 32 Neanderthal grave sites and camps settled it several years ago, and since the Neanderthal genome was sequenced in draft form earlier this year it has been demonstrated that they had the same or similar intellectual genes as "modern humans." In fact, their brains were bigger, so if anything they had a greater capacity to conceptualize the world.

We wish archeologists and science writers would work on their own symbolic thinking a bit and let the bones of tired myths and ethnocentric fallacies rest in peace. And pu-lease spell the word wrongly right. It's N-e-a-n-d-e-r-t-h-a-l. Neandertal is purist and is not going to become popular. Trust us.

Next thing you know they're going to be talking about the Visigots and Ostrogots.

We predicted as much:  anthropologists are beginning to have a more positive attitude toward the role of Neanderthals in human prehistory. According to an article in today's Washington Post, "Scientists are broadly rethinking the nature, skills and demise of the Neanderthals of Europe and Asia, steadily finding more ways that they were substantially like us and different from the limited, unchanging and ultimately doomed inferiors most commonly described in the past."

The article by Marc Kaufman is titled "Anthropologists Adopt a More Favorable View of Neanderthals," and appeared in the October 4, 2010 edition of the newspaper.

Earlier research this year noted that Europeans have, on average, 1-4% Neanderthal genes. That began the wheels of scientific thinking rolling. "Our picture of Neanderthals is likely to change radically now that we know they were among ancestors of ours, not a dead-end, primitive race," we wrote in the blog post "Most Humans Part Neanderthal" on May 12. DNA Consultants introduced its Neanderthal Index in June.

Ancient flint meat-cutting tools found in sediment along a highway in Dartford, Kent, prove Neanderthals were present in Britain before the beginning of the last ice age (and possibly before the previous two or three cold periods or interglacials), when the British Isles were joined to mainland Europe due to low sea levels. The find pushes back the earliest known evidence for Neanderthals in England by 40,000 years, according to a June 1  report in the Daily Mail headlined "Neanderthal Man Was Alive in Britain at Start of Ice Age.

Previous notions postulated "pre-Neanderthals" (perhaps H. heidelbergensis) sparsely occupying Britain in the Pleistocene Period but vacating it when the climate became prohibitively cold about 200,000 years ago. It was thought that true Neanderthals did not reach Britain until about 60,000 years ago, not far in advance of their cousins, H. sapiens sapiens.

Neanderthals were known to be in northern France and Belgium about the same time. Their range must now be extended to Britain, and that country's prehistory recast. As in the rest of Europe, it appears Neanderthals were living in Britain hundreds of thousands of years ago since a date like the Dartford find is only a terminus ante quem. If Neanderthals were living 100,000 years ago off the present-day junction of the M25 and A2, they probably had not just arrived. Similarly, they probably did not die off or move out of Britain in the next generation. It was not an excursion or isolated incident. The chances are unlikely that the first, and so far only, evidence of Neanderthals in Britain would be from the exact beginning or precise end of their population's stay.

Current thinking about interglacials is changing, well, like the weather, but there have undoubtedly been many eons-long stretches of time during which Britain was temperate and hospital to humans. Since the Middle Pleistocene about 600,000 years ago,significant advances of continental ice sheets in Europe have occurred at intervals of approximately 40,000 to 100,000 years. These long glacial periods were separated by more temperate and shorter interglacials. The age of Neanderthal humans is conventionally set at 400,000 years before present but may be revised backward as we learn more and encounter more fossil evidence.

Mary Settegast is described on the jacket simply as an archeological researcher, the 20-year-old book being Plato Prehistorian; 10,000 to 5,000 B.C. Myth, Religion, Archaeology (Hudson:  Lindisfarne, 1990). It's obvious she is not a member of the entrenched academic community of archeologists and prehistorians, for she spends most of the introduction to her fascinating study inveighing against the Old Model and New Archeology and defending the value of myth. She then retells the Egyptian Priest's tale from Plato's Timaeus about how Solon's ancient Greek ancestors defeated an aggressive Atlantic sea-power situated on a now-lost continent beyond the Straits of Gilbraltar--the so-called Atlantis myth, which has no other source but the writings of Plato. Her thesis is that Plato is representing what he believed to be historical fact. Among other arguments, Settegast points out that it would have been impious for him to contrive a political fiction and put it in the mouth of Critias, who attributes the story to his grandfather, who received it from Solon himself, given the occasion of the dialogue, a celebration of Athena's festival day. She asks, "Would Socrates have Critias offer to the goddess as 'a just and truthful hymn of praise' (Timaeus 21) an intentional misrepresentation of Athena's own past history with the Greeks?"

Once Plato's word and intentions are vindicated it is possible to study the scattered clues he gives us to prehistory of the Mediterranean world in a new light. Settegast makes a good case that the Magdalenian cave art of 17,000/15,000 to 9000 BCE preserves the fading glory of an Atlantic culture of enormous power and sophistication that came to an abrupt end toward the end of the tenth millennium. She brackets the question of the location of a sunken continent and dwells instead on the blunders of modern prehistorians who fail to grasp the advanced picture of civilization left to us in Paleolithic remains like the Lascaux paintings. For instance, most anthropologists have explained the paintings as vehicles for sympathetic hunting magic without noting that it is the horse that is most commonly depicted while excavations of Magdlenian sites reveal almost exclusively the remains of reindeer as their principal animal food. The religious significance of the animals is lost on most analysts. Plato, as usual, provides the pertinent clue: the Atlantics worshipped Poseidon and regarded his sacred animal the horse with great awe. A revisionist look at the horses in cave paintings clarifies that the lines on horses' heads represent harnesses, not natural contours or anatomical details, proving that the Magdalenians or Atlantic peoples had tamed the horse by 12,000 BCE, some eight thousand years before the date assigned to the domestication of the horse in the conventional model.

Upper Paleolithic writing recovered from Magdalenian cave sites (top) compared to characters in three early written languages:  (b) Indus valley signs, (c) Greek and (d) Runic. Settegast (p. 28) after Forbes and Crowder, 1979.

I've just started to read the book and will conclude this "preview" for the blog by mentioning that one obstacle to accepting Plato's story at face value was that he describes the Atlantics as literate. The recent reevaluation of the "magic signs" in Magdalenian caves as a writing system with heirs in many Old World alphabets seems to bear him out once again...and make his detractors look stupid and full of hubris. It is the effect many Socratic dialogues were meant to have on their readers.

Addendum:  One of the offshoots of Atlantic Culture according to Plato Prehistorian was the Çatal Hüyük civilization that flourished in Anatolia from 6200-5300 BCE. Only 2-3 % of the 32 acre site has been excavated, but what has come to light so far includes amazing cyclopean walls, refined wall paintings and peculiar religious practices such as a vulture-bull rite, leopard shrine and Mistress of the Animals cult reminiscent of Venus figurines. It is conceivable that Atlantic Culture itself was spurred to life originally by admixture of Europeans with Neanderthals, since there are numerous signs of Neanderthal culture in  archeological remains. Significantly, the Venus figures once associated with Gravettian Culture now appear to have had their origins with Neanderthals, who occupied Europe for 350,000 years before H. sapiens sapiens. Venus figurines were worn about the neck by Neanderthals, as proved in several excavations in Spain and elsewhere. In 1961, archeologists unearthed the skull of a Neanderthal man in the ancient site of Chalcedon on the east side of the Bosporus in Asia Minor, although the find is seldom mentioned today.

Our Neanderthal Index is based on affinities with archaic populations presumed to carry the highest rate of admixture with Neanderthals. These include many of the Atlantic and Mediterranean populations mentioned in Plato Prehistorian, including Greek, Turkish, Syrian, Arabian, Basque, Egyptian and Berber.

The bombshell arrived with the May 7, 2010 issue of Science Magazine. Entitled "A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome," it presented the years-long attempt of an international team of scientists to derive DNA from ancient female Neanderthal bones and determine if there was any genetic overlap with humans. The news was so sensational that the journal made the original scientific report and all collateral materials free to everyone, along with a podcast, multimedia presentation "The Neandertal Genome" and slew of links and forums for comments.

Read the original press release from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. It was embargoed for May 6, 2010, 8 p.m.

 

Svante Pääbo’s Neanderthal research group from left to right: Adrian Briggs, Hernán Burbano, Matthias Meyer, Anja Buchholz, Jesse Dabney, Kay Prüfer, Svante Pääbo, Janet Kelso, Tomislav Maričić, Qiaomei Fu, Udo Stenzel, Johannes Krause and Martin Kircher. (Copyright: Frank Vinken)

Some background

Discovered in a quarry in Germany in 1856, 40,000-year-old Neanderthal man became the first recognized early human fossil. The debate immediately began whether Neanderthals were a separate species or sub-species of Homo sapiens. German language orthographic reforms rendered the spelling of the name Neandertal in the twentieth century, although most people even today prefer to stick with the th of the original word. Neanderthals are named after the Neander Valley (German thal or tal) in which they first came to light.

More and more of them turned up over the years:  in Belgium (1886), a nearly complete skeleton in southern France (1908), Israel (then-Palestine, 1930) and Iraq (1953). The first ambitious genetic work was a partial sequencing of their mitochondrial DNA based on highly degraded specimens: Krings et al., Cell 90, 19 (1997). A second mitDNA sequence was achieved in 2000. The complete mtDNA sequence came in 2008:  Green et al., Cell 134, 416 (2008).

In the meantime, Neanderthals were found to have red hair and fair skin, body paint, customs, societies, rituals and art. They used fire, tools and weapons. They hunted bison, horses and other large animals and made bread of acorn meal. With their short arms and weak shoulder sockets, however, they probably could not throw spears. Before they were conquered by their smaller human cousins, they had colonized an area extending from Spain to Western Siberia and the Middle East. They were acclimated to northern Europe's icy temperatures and flourished especially before and during the last Ice Age. Then, suddenly, about 30,000 years ago, the fossil record goes silent. Their last holdout appears to have been in Spain.

Our picture of Neanderthals is likely to change radically now that we know they were among ancestors of ours, not a dead-end, primitive race. Some writers had already speculated, in fact, that Neanderthals were more advanced in many ways than their rivals, Cro-Magnon Man. Certainly, their religion was highly adumbrated. Some carried Venus figures on necklaces. According to the author of The Neanderthal's Necklace, Juan Luis Arsuaga (co-director of the World Heritage Site Sierra de Atapuerca in Spain), at one burial in Russia, a 60-year-old adult had 3,000 beads of drilled mammoth ivory sewn onto his clothes. A boy in the same burial wore a belt decorated with 250 arctic fox canines. There were also shells, armbands, head ornaments, bracelets, pendants, assegais, ceremonial staffs and other artifacts made of bone, antler, ivory and stone (p. 294).

The blockbuster draft of the Neanderthal genome just published noted genes linked to cognitive abilities, geo-spatial skills, language and motor coordination as well as strength, reproductive advantages and (what we knew already) cold adaptation. Much attention is likely to focus on the Neanderthal's signature occipital bun, noticed in isolated or vestigial populations like the Berbers, Saami, Canary Islands, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines and Melungeons. These populations probably preserved greater proportions of Neanderthal admixture than others.

Because the genetic legacy of Neanderthals (so far) has not been detected in the mitochondrial record, it is believed that gene flow came from males mating with human females. No male Neanderthal lines survive -- not surprisingly. Only autosomal DNA reveals the Neanderthal contribution to human populations.