The PBS program Neanderthals is, in my opinion, equally marvelous and stupid. Why waste such technological wonders on the foolish and demeaning speculation of the host, Ella Al-Shamahi? To her the Neanderthal doesn’t quite measure up to us. The dramatizations of nuclear caveman family, the woman with herky-jerky movements like a mechanical chimpanzee (you can almost hear her huffing “Ook ook ook”), imagining them in their one-bedroom cave apartment as if every little family had their own cave. How absurd. It ought to be crystal clear to any first-year paleoanthropology student that the people lived communally in the caves, eh? And hunting in the snow barefoot? Grabbing a gobbet of meat from the animal body and eating it raw where they stand? And what about the futility of attempting to create a definitive description of the Neanderthal people in the first place, when a new revelation about them appears almost every week?
Didn’t anyone tell Al-Shamahi that these people survived very harsh conditions for several hundreds of thousands of years? That they lived in a world unrestricted by nations or class or speciational boundaries, intimately with other subspecies of the genus Homo? Wouldn’t it be reasonable today to imagine the cave filled with a variety of hominins in common cooperation? One thing I’ve learned from looking around me in this world and the world revealed by real paleoanthropologists Saez, Hublin, Berger, Hawks and others is that there’s nothing monolithic about us now or then.
Didn’t anyone tell her that while lots of Homo sapiens of 40,000 years ago had bone entheses suggestive of spear chucking in their day to day lives while every Neanderthal hand that has been measured from that time has the fine bone entheses of a tailor or painter? They had a brain capacity equal to anatomically modern humans, too.
“Using CT scans of fossils from an approximately 60,000-year-old male skeleton known as Kebara 2, researchers were able to create a 3D model of the chest – one that is different from the longstanding image of the barrel-chested, hunched-over “caveman.” The conclusions point to what may have been an upright individual with greater lung capacity and a straighter spine than today’s modern human. The study is published Oct. 30 in Nature Communications.” Ancient Origins, Oct 3, 2018.
They cared for their sick. They created ornaments, glue, weapons and tools and who knows, maybe we should call it the Wood Age instead if they, Heaven forbid, failed to advance their stone tool making because they were masters of woodworking and kept the rocks around like that bandsaw gathering dust in your neighbor’s garage? Imagine instead, Ms. Al-Shamahi, stout wooden needles used to sew warm clothes, fire for, at the very least, cooking meat instead of a cold slab taken in the field on the run! All the hominins had fire 500,000 years ago! Did the Neanderthal people not figure out how to drill holes in tiny shells? Is the lack of evidence in paleoanthropology really evidence of lack? Can’t they be the pragmatists to our curious brains still stuck in juvenile mode that can’t sit still even for a millennium? The oldest know cave drawing was by a Neanderthal 65.000,000 years ago, several millennia before the arrival of our ancestors. John Hawks demonstrated how the Neanderthal people could simply have been swamped by us.
Imagine that tens of thousands of years of hardship in a cold place erased the impulse to flights of fancy if there ever was one. And imagine a few of us escaping by the skin of our teeth from Africa after an extinction event, call it the depredations of the parasite H. pylori, that caused a bottleneck in our evolution at around 58,000 years BCE, reducing us to only a few thousand souls who, incidentally, may have had resistance to H. pylori whereas the other survivors of Mt. Toba eruption of 77,000 BCE (whose numbers were down too, Heidelbergensis, Denisovans and H. erectus, H. floriensis) did not.
And couldn’t these survivors have had an equally specific characteristic that enabled them to survive which was beneficial to the newcomers? Did some of us move on when we encountered the other people while some of us stayed and integrated, and maybe infected them? Didn’t we pick up cervical cancer? “Recent discoveries on the origins of modern humans from multiple archaic hominin populations and the diversity of human papillomaviruses (HPVs) suggest a complex scenario of virus-host evolution..Epidemiologic studies have demonstrated that persistent infection of select oncogenic human papillomaviruses (HPVs) is the main cause of cervix precancer and cancer.” Niche adaptation and viral transmission of human papillomaviruses from archaic hominins to modern humans, November 1, 2018, PLOS pathogens
I’m free to guess and speculate since I don’t have to account for my reveries, but you, a scientist, have to be a bit more grounded in fact before you make TV shows about scientific subjects. What happened to you?
Boghul & Acephale 