The Dawn of Human Culture (23 page)
In 1995, Turk’s team excavated a new Mousterian fireplace and nearby they found what they believed was a flute made on the shaft of a young cave bear thigh bone (femur). The specimen was about 11 centimeters (4.3 inches) long and it exhibited four evenly spaced, circular holes on one surface (Figure 6.7). Two of the holes were complete and the other two were only partially preserved on the broken ends of the shaft.
Like the overwhelming majority of cave bear bones from Divje Babe 1, the supposed flute bears no detectable stone tool marks, and the key question is whether another agency could have produced the holes. Francesco d’Errico, who also studied the Berekhat Ram figurine, has joined colleagues to examine bones from cave bear dens where artifacts and fireplaces are totally lacking and bears were probably the sole occupants. d’Errico’s group found that between four and five percent of the bear bones had punctures like those on the putative flute, and biting by cave bears or perhaps another large carnivore is the most economic explanation. They conclude that the flute was actually a fluke, an accidental product of cave bear or other carnivore feeding.
If the Divje Babe flute is placed aside, the oldest unequivocal musical instruments are bird bone flutes from 30,000- to 32,000-year-06 Neanderthals.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 195
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0
0
perforations
5 cm
2 in
juvenile bear femur shaft
(Divje Babe I)
FIGURE 6.7
The putative bone flute from Divje Babe 1, Slovenia (drawn by Kathryn Cruz-Uribe from a photograph).
old Aurignacian layers at Geissenklösterle Cave in southern Germany and Isturitz Cave in the French Pyrenees. Both sites have also provided indisputable, even spectacular, art objects, and the contrast with the Mousterian could not be more stark.
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We could expand our discussion here to include perhaps fifteen proposed art objects from Mousterian sites scattered across Europe and western Asia, and not all can be as easily dismissed as the Divje Babe flute. Still, none are as convincingly artistic as many Upper Paleolithic specimens, and in the words of Cambridge University archeologist Paul Mellars, we conclude that “the sheer scarcity and isolation of these objects . . . makes it difficult to see this kind of symbolic expression as a real and significant component of Neandertal behavior.”
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Archeologist John Shea of Stony Brook University on Long Island has made a special study of the triangular (Levallois) points from the Mousterian layers at Kebara Cave, Israel, and other southwest Asian sites, and he has often observed chipped tips or other fractures that occurred during impact. Either strong jabbing or throwing could produce such damage, but Shea argues that the spears tipped with triangular flakes were too heavy and unwieldy for throwing, and they were probably used close up, as thrusting weapons. They would have been far more effective for this purpose than the 400,000-year-old all-wooden spears from Schöningen, but the need to get up close would still have exposed 06 Neanderthals.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 197
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the hunter to great risk. This could explain why Neanderthal bones so often exhibit healed fractures. Biological anthropologist Steven Churchill of Duke University also notes that repeated use of the body to thrust spears could largely explain why Neanderthals were so heavily muscled.
Archeologists excavating the Mousterian site of Umm el Tlel in Syria recovered a neck vertebra of a wild ass that shows just how hard a Neanderthal could jab. Embedded in the vertebra was a 1-centimeter (0.3-inch) long fragment of a triangular, Levallois point that snapped off when the animal was killed. The location of the point was probably not accidental, since its entry would have severed the spinal cord and left the animal totally unable to defend itself. Still, closing in on a large animal was dangerous, and the Neanderthals’ principal coping strategy may have been to hunt in groups that could essentially surround a target.
Shea imaginatively thinks of them as “wolves with knives.”
We have already noted that ancient bones sometimes retain traces of protein (collagen) and that geneticists seek such traces before attempting the more difficult task of extracting DNA. The protein traces are valuable in themselves, for they can be used to reveal ancient diet.
Species like wolves or lions that are highly carnivorous tend to have proteins that are enriched in the variant (isotope) of nitrogen known as 15N. 15N composition has been determined in Neanderthal bones from caves at Marillac, France, Scladina, Engis, and Spy, Belgium, and Vindija, Croatia, and in each case, the results indicate an extremely carnivorous diet. The degree of meat-eating is certainly too great to result mainly from scavenging, and like stone-tipped spears, it thus implies active hunting.
The Cro-Magnon successors to the Neanderthals focused mainly on the same species of medium-sized mammals, and from the animal 06 Neanderthals.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 198
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bones alone, it is difficult to argue that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons hunted very differently. Nevertheless, two circumstantial observations imply that Cro-Magnons were more successful. First, Cro-Magnon sites are more numerous per unit of time and they tend to contain greater quantities of cultural debris. This suggests that Cro-Magnon populations were larger, even though environmental conditions remained roughly the same. Second, the Cro-Magnons were almost certainly better armed, and their stone and bone artifacts include pieces that were probably parts of projectile weapons—perhaps throwing spears or darts to begin with and arrows later on. Better armament could explain why the Cro-Magnons, though heavily muscled, were less so than the Neanderthals and also why they apparently broke their bones less often. Reduced musculature would also mean that the average Cro-Magnon required fewer calories per day, and Cro-Magnons could thus have been more numerous, even if they obtained only the same number of animals and other resources as the Neanderthals.
Finally, while we’re on the subject of food, we should say something about Neanderthal cannibalism. Recall that the earliest inhabitants of Europe—the people who occupied the Gran Dolina cave 800,000 years ago—were cannibals, and that we attributed their practice to dietary stress.
We suggested that such stress could explain similar cases of cannibalism among late prehistoric and historic modern humans. So far, no Cro-Magnon site has provided compelling evidence for dietary cannibalism, but one or two Neanderthal sites have. The evidence is slim, but Neanderthal sites are rarer, and the implication might be that Neanderthals engaged in cannibalism more often, perhaps because they faced severe hunger more often. The two most relevant Neanderthal sites are Krapina Rockshelter in Croatia and Moula-Guercy Shelter in southeastern France.
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The Croatian paleoanthropologist Dragutin Gorjanovic-
Kramberger recovered roughly nine hundred Neanderthal bones at Krapina between 1899 and 1905. His excavation methods were crude by modern standards, but they helped to establish the great antiquity and wide geographic distribution of the Neanderthals within Europe.
They also showed that Krapina did not contain graves or articulated skeletons. Nearly all parts of the skeleton were present, but they were scattered through the deposit, and most were broken. Subsequent studies have shown that at least twenty individuals are represented, and most were either teenagers or young adults. Preservatives now coat the bone surfaces, which impedes any attempt to estimate the extent of damage from stone tools or carnivore teeth. This is unfortunate, because the accompanying animal bones come partly from bears, hyenas, or wolves that might have played a role in the bone accumulation. Human occupation doesn’t seem to have been intense, since Mousterian artifacts only slightly outnumber the Neanderthal bones.
Still, cannibalism remains a plausible explanation for the sheer quantity of human bones and for their high degree of fragmentation. The age bias towards individuals who are the least likely to die of natural causes may imply the intentional destruction of one Neanderthal group by another.
The evidence from the Moula-Guercy shelter is more compelling. In 1991, archeologist Alban Defleur of the French National Center for Scientific Research recovered twelve fragmentary Neanderthal bones from Mousterian layer XV, and he noticed that several had stone tool cutmarks. Metal excavation tools can sometimes mimic stone tool cutmarks, so in his continuing work, Defleur instructed his team to use bamboo tools instead. He also avoided the application of any 06 Neanderthals.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 200
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preservative that might obscure bone surfaces. The Moula-Guercy bones are extremely well preserved to begin with, and their surfaces are almost pristine.
In 1999, Defleur and his team published a report on a significantly enlarged sample of seventy-eight Neanderthal bones from the same Mousterian layer, and they compared the human fragments with about three hundred bones of red deer (elk to Americans), which dominated the animal bone assemblage. Both the human and the deer bones came from virtually every region of the body. The human bones represent at least six individuals ranging in age from 6 or 7 years to mature adult at time of death, while the deer represent at least five individuals, from newborn or even fetal to adult. Both sets of bones were extensively damaged by stone tools, and the damage tended to occur in the same anatomical positions regardless of species, showing that the butchers had used their tools first to disarticulate bodies and cut away flesh and then to open the skull and the long bones for brains and marrow. When they were done, the butchers scattered the human and deer bones equally across the surface of the site.
Like the Gran Dolina people 700,000 years before, the Moula-Guercy Neanderthals thus fed on people in the same way that they fed on other animals. Other Mousterian sites have provided occasional cutmarked Neanderthal bones, but most have not, and among those that have not are other layers at Moula-Guercy. From the perspective of a species competing with others, cannibalism is obviously a zero-sum game (or worse), and like modern humans, Neanderthals probably did not eat each other routinely.
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Strictly speaking, Neanderthals and modern humans should be placed in separate species only if they could not interbreed to produce fertile offspring. Biologists have often compromised on this criterion, however, and most place dogs and wolves in separate species even though dog/wolf crosses are well known and the crosses are usually fertile. The key point is that free-ranging wolves and dogs do not interbreed very much and they have developed behavioral or anatomical specializations that limit the possibilities. Ancient and modern genes suggest that if modern humans and Neanderthals interbred, they didn’t do it very often, and we have proposed that behavioral differences provided the isolating mechanism. Not everyone agrees, and as coun-terevidence, they can point to the recently discovered Lagar Velho Upper Paleolithic skeleton, which its describers believe represents a hybrid between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.
In November 1998 João Maurício and Pedro Souto from the Torrejana Speleological and Archeological Society in Torres Novas, Portugal, were surveying rock art in the narrow limestone Lapedo Valley of west-central Portugal. They passed the Lagar Velho rock shelter whose fill had been largely bulldozed away during road construction six years earlier. A rabbit had dug a burrow into the remaining deposit, and when Maurício reached in, he pulled out the left forearm and hand bones of a child. Inspection showed that the rest of the skeleton was mostly still buried, although the bulldozer had broken and scattered the skull and some other parts. Archeologist João Zilhão of the Portuguese Institute of Archeology and his physical anthropologist colleague, Cidália Duarte, immediately mounted an excavation to recover what was left.
Zilhão and Duarte were intrigued, because the skeleton appeared to date from the Upper Paleolithic, based partly on its 06 Neanderthals.r.qxd 1/29/02 5:05 PM Page 202
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estimated 2-meter (6.5-foot) depth from the original surface of the deposit and partly on a mass of red-coloring matter that surrounded it.
Both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons sought out naturally occurring red ocher (iron oxide), and some archeologists have speculated that Neanderthals used it to paint their bodies. The most widely accepted alternatives are that they employed it to tan skins or to treat the surfaces of wooden artifacts. In contrast, Cro-Magnons commonly pulverized ocher to make pigment for wall painting, and unlike the Neanderthals, they often scattered large amounts in graves. At Lagar Velho, the tight concentration of pigment around the skeleton suggested that the body had been buried in a wrap. It had been laid out on its back, with the trunk and head slightly turned towards the wall of the rock shelter. The legs were extended, and the feet were crossed. The only artifact found in the rescue excavation was a pierced sea shell pendant, but careful screening of the deposits redistributed by the bulldozer produced three perforated red deer canines along with some additional skeletal fragments.
The layout of the body, the red-staining, and the pierced shell and teeth suggested to Zilhão that the child belonged to the Upper Paleolithic Gravettian culture, which we previously noted was spread across Europe between about 28,000 and 22,000 years ago. Subsequent radiocarbon dating of associated charcoal and animal bone showed the skeleton was about 24,500 years old, confirming Zilhão’s suspicion.