If I ask you to picture a Neanderthal, the image that you conjure up in your head might not be very flattering. Sloping brow, speaking only in grunts, maybe carrying a cartoonishly large club -- sound about right? Well, a slew of recent discoveries -- just in the last five or ten years -- suggest that Neanderthals were anything but brutish cavemen.
They lived in Europe from about two hundred thousand years ago, to around the time that anatomically modern humans -- that’s us -- showed up on the continent, roughly 40 thousand years ago. And they’re a lot less different from us than scientists used to think. In fact, many experts aren’t even sure that Neanderthals and modern humans are different enough to be considered separate species.
We now know, for example, that by the standards of fifty centuries ago, their technology was surprisingly advanced. Neanderthals made stone tools, but they didn’t just pick up a pointy rock off the ground and tie it to a stick. The process of making stone tools involved a lot of steps, and required practice and skill -- from shaping pieces of rock into the forms they wanted, known as knapping, to attaching the stone pieces to handles, know as hafting.
Even more interestingly, those knapped stones were sometimes glued to shafts using a sticky substance called pitch. Pitch is made from birch bark, but it’s not easy to get out. The bark has to be heated in the absence of oxygen to over four hundred degrees Celsius -- a procedure that’s finicky and difficult enough that archaeologists have had trouble replicating it.
But pitch has been found at several Neanderthal sites, and chemical analysis shows that it was distilled from birch bark. Some archaeologists have said this is evidence of the world’s first industrial process. Just as remarkably, Neanderthals may have invented a tool we still use today.
It’s called the lissoir, and it’s used in leatherworking. It’s kind of a smoother, or a burnisher, designed to make leather hides tougher and more flexible. Neanderthals used lissoirs made of bone, because it was more flexible than wood or stone, which wouldn’t have gotten the job done.
This shows they understood the materials they were using, and altered them for special tasks. There’s also some evidence among Neanderthals for what you might call culture. Many archaeologists think they buried their dead, for example, used pigments for painting, and made beads for decoration, although some experts aren’t so sure.
But maybe what’s most controversial about Neanderthals is whether they had the capacity for language. Unlike bones or stone tools, language doesn’t fossilize. So scientists have had to get pretty creative in how they’ve looked for evidence of it.
One clue has come from their skeletal anatomy. The hyoid bone, which supports the tongue, is necessary for human speech. And while other primates have this bone, too, it’s not positioned in the right way to make the kind of complex vocalizations that we can.
But scientists in Australia created a computer model of the Neanderthal hyoid to simulate its movement. And their analysis showed that it could have been used in ways a similar to ours. It doesn’t prove that Neanderthals spoke, but it does show that maybe they could have.
and yet another clue about whether Neanderthals used language can be found in their genome. One gene of particular interest here is known as FOXP2, which is known to be involved in language and cognition in many different animals. Songbirds need this gene in order to sing, and modern humans missing even a single copy of it can have trouble forming speech.
But all modern humans have two small changes in that gene that we don’t share with any other animal, including chimps. It’s part of what sets our complex language abilities apart. A team of German scientists looked at the FOXP2 gene in the gene of Neanderthals and found that they had those same two genetic changes.
Now, if you’ve seen our episode on what we know about the sex lives of early humans, you know that modern humans and Neanderthals did a fair amount of … interbreeding. But scientists don’t think that this is how those genes got swapped. Instead, they believe that our earlier, common ancestor must have passed those changes onto both of us.
Now, other studies have found that there are still some differences between the FOXP2 gene that we have and the one that Neanderthals had. And, language is way too complicated for a single gene to tell us all that much, really. So we may never know for certain whether Neanderthals could speak, but they definitely have more in common with us than we thought.
They may have had technology, culture, even language -- --And that kinda makes me wish they were still around, so we could hang out -- play some video games. Thanks for watching this episode of Scishow, brought to you by patrons on Patreon. If you wanna help us make more videos like this, you can go to patreon.
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