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The Neanderthal’s Necklace by Juan Luis Arsuaga, Four Walls Eight Windows, $25.95, ISBN 1568581874

SUPPOSE a remnant population of Neanderthals were discovered today. What would we do with them? Would we welcome them into the human family and try to set them up in suburban semis, send California Man to high school with our teenagers, or corral them in a reservation in Siberia?

The Neanderthals are an interesting test case of what it means to be human. As Juan Luis Arsuaga asks: “Apart from us, has there ever been another life form on Earth that was conscious of its own existence and of its place in the world?” The Neanderthal’s Necklace is his attempt to convince us that the Neanderthals fit the bill. And in this endeavour he is very successful.

As an internationally renowned professor of human palaeontology from Madrid, Arsuaga has been involved with the excavation and interpretation of the extraordinarily important fossil sites of the Sierra de Atapuerca^*. He certainly knows his stuff, so we get the necessary evolutionary and environmental background to this complex story, all well told for the general reader.

Our ancestors coexisted with the Neanderthals for at least 10,000 years. So were they brutish neighbours from hell or just misunderstood meat eaters, minding their own business as they hunted game in the Eurasian ice-age equivalent of the Serengeti?

As Arsuaga explains, the archaeological evidence shows that Neanderthals were certainly brawny (the males may have weighed in at around 100 kilograms), but also big-brained: one skull has a capacity of 1750 cubic centimetres, the biggest known from the fossil record. They were hunters who regularly killed and butchered wild cattle, horses and deer, plus the odd mammoth. And they did this armed only with heavy, hand-held wooden spears. No wonder their skeletal remains show a lot of upper body damage, similar to that suffered by rodeo cowboys who habitually wrestle cattle and horses.

These Neanderthals held the title deeds to a sizeable chunk of Eurasia by virtue of their 100,000-or-so-year occupancy of the territory, which ended only 30,000 years ago. So how come such a successful, cold-adapted species was displaced during the last glaciation of the Quaternary ice age by more recent modern human migrants from Africa, who got as far north as 50° (the Russian site of Kostenki) between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago? Arsuaga says that modern humans’ success “can be partially attributed to their superior technology”, especially needlework. From the large numbers of bone awls and needles found at Kostenki, it appears that these modern human pioneers were simply more proficient at sewing skins to make fur clothing.

But why were they more skilled than their Neanderthal neighbours? After all, Arsuaga argues that the Neanderthals “probably achieved an intelligence very close to our own”. The evidence shows that they were purposeful and capable of making reasonably sophisticated stone tools and burying their dead in caves, acts that required considerable planning and consciousness. So what was the problem?

The answer seems to be partly demographic: their normal group size was too small to develop expanding, self-sufficient populations with a full cultural identity. Perhaps their lack of fully developed syntactical language prevented this. But plenty is unknown about the Neanderthals. “So far, no one has presented any definitive proof of ritual or other symbolic behaviour before the time of the Cro-Magnons in the Upper Palaeolithic,” says Arsuaga. “That proof is a much sought-after prize.” It is still up for grabs.