Homo Britannicus by Chris Stringer

Author:Chris Stringer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2006-08-29T23:00:00+00:00

but their genes may never have impacted the gene pools of the main populations.

We don’t, of course, know what language capabilities either the Neanderthals or the Cro-Magnons had, and can only guess at this from what they left for posterity. The Cro-Magnons were as complex as modern hunter-gatherers and foragers in what we can reconstruct of their ways of life, and as well as their campsites and technology they have left behind evidence of their art, symbolism and music (for example bone flutes). For the Neanderthals, there are hints of social complexity in things like their burial of the dead and (apparently late in their history) production of jewellery. But evidence that they buried their dead with flowers and made bone flutes now seems dubious. Claims have been made that the shape and capabilities of the Neanderthal vocal tract could be accurately reconstructed from fossil skulls and jaws, but even the most pessimistic simulations still give the Neanderthals a big enough range of sounds for complex language, provided brain quality and sufficient social complexity were in place for it to develop. So we must keep an open mind on this, although personally I doubt that Neanderthal social complexity had driven the evolution of their languages to anything nearly as elaborate as ours by the time they died out.

So what really happened to the Neanderthals? Some workers think that there was a relatively gradual merging with the incoming Cro-Magnons, meaning that Neanderthals would indeed have contributed something to future generations of Europeans, even modern ones. They see evidence for this in odd features of Cro-Magnon fossils, which they see as remnants of a Neanderthal heritage. In Britain there is one intriguing, but fragmentary, human fossil that falls into the critical period between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago, when these groups could have been in contact or competition. This is a fragment of an adult upper jaw holding some heavily worn teeth from Kent’s Cavern in Devon, found in 1926, long after the time of MacEnery and Pengelly. It was originally described as an early modern fossil and associated with Aurignacian tools, but recent AHOB research suggests that it is instead associated with earlier leaf point artefacts at the site, in which case it is a unique find that could potentially tell us who made these enigmatic tools. Were they Neanderthal, modern, or perhaps even a mixed population? We are now subjecting the fossil to a battery of different techniques, including an attempt at DNA extraction, to see whether we can determine its affinities. In another highly controversial case the burial of a child from Lagar Velho in Portugal, dated about the same time as Paviland and showing similar treatment with red ochre, has been argued to show signs of a mixed Neanderthal-Cro-Magnon ancestry since it supposedly shows the compact build of a Neanderthal rather than the more lithe form typical of the early Cro-Magnons. However, in all other respects the skeleton seems resoundingly modern, and I doubt that it is anything other than an unusually stocky Gravettian child.

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