CLUMSY, stupid brutes with little in the way of developed culture. That harsh view of our sister species Homo neanderthalis is being tempered by findings suggesting that they were often forced to make the best of a desperately tough life.
A team led by Antonio Rosas of Spain’s National Museum for Natural Sciences in Madrid studied 43,000-year-old Neanderthal remains found in the El Sidrón cave in the Asturias region of northern Spain. The teeth of eight individuals from El Sidrón examined by the team showed evidence that during growth they had probably gone through a period of starvation (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0609662104).
Cuts on some of the bones examined by the team suggest that the Neanderthals practised cannibalism, but Rosas points out that this does not mean that the group concerned were savages. “One possible explanation is that ecological conditions forced these people to eat whatever was at hand,” including their dead companions’ flesh, he says. Another possibility is that cannibalism had some symbolic meaning, as it has done for some human hunter-gatherers. “Signs of cannibalism could tell us something about the spiritual life of Neanderthals.”
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Examination of fossils from El Sidrón also supports the idea that there were distinct Neanderthal populations. The cave is in a part of Spain linked with northern Europe but cut off by mountains from the rest of the country. When Rosas’s team compared fossils unearthed there with others from sites further south they found morphological differences, with southern individuals having broader faces and jaws. “It makes sense that different environmental factors would lead to a demographic gradient,” says Katerina Harvati of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Since the El Sidrón cave was discovered in 1994 it has yielded some 1300 Neanderthal fossils. “Neanderthals were seen as brutish, but I want to believe that our picture of them is being changed with new discoveries,” says Rosas. “All palaeoanthropologists feel some kind of love for their study species,” he points out. “In my case, it’s the Neanderthals.”
