Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth by Chris Stringer

Author:Chris Stringer [Stringer, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805088915
Publisher: Macmillan

Neanderthals used pigments too—these are of manganese dioxide from Pech-de-l’Azé in France.

In support of that last viewpoint, there is arguably even stronger evidence of complex Neanderthal social behavior from two Middle Paleolithic cave sites in southeastern Spain (Cueva Antón and Cueva de los Aviones). There, museum studies and excavations led by the archaeologist João Zilhão found seashells that had apparently been used symbolically. Cockle and scallop shells with natural holes in the right places to be strung as pendants had been collected and transported inland. Some of the shells had light or dark pigments stored in or painted on them, and a thorny oyster shell contained ground pigment that had apparently been mixed with pyrite as a glittering cosmetic. While the painted scallop from Cueva Antón was probably less than 40,000 years old, and therefore might reflect Cro-Magnon influence, the Cueva de los Aviones material dated to about 50,000 years ago, seemingly too old for that explanation to apply. But in either case these sites represent strong evidence that at least some Neanderthals were expressing themselves symbolically, seemingly as much as many Middle Stone Age Africans, and I will return to this question in the next chapter.

In 1993 Clive Gamble and I argued that the Neanderthals had absorbed aspects of Cro-Magnon culture, but while they could “emulate … they could not fully understand.” Now I would say instead that if the Neanderthals were making or just using objects like pendants, they were participating in symbolism just as the moderns were, whether they were signaling within their own groups or to others, who might at times have even included early Cro-Magnons. And if that is so, the idea that these aspects of modern human behavior resulted solely from genetic changes in African Middle Stone Age peoples must be wrong, unless the Neanderthals had undergone similar mutational changes in their own evolution, or they had acquired the modernizing genes by hybridization—a subject I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter.

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