New Views of Neanderthal Are Reshaping Prehistory

Mark Derr
Dog's Best Friend

New evidence of Neanderthal society helps reveal humanity’s place in the world.
Posted December 11, 2022 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

In the last decade of the last millennium, I began investigating our near, extinct cousin Homo neanderthalensis, or to those who thought him too feeble to stand as a species, H. sapiens neanderthalis.

Many of the top experts in the field described Neanderthals as thick-headed cave dwellers who lacked speech and fire—not to mention proper clothing—and thus, survived in the bitter cold of the last Ice Age on the strength, one supposes, of their brutish animal nature.

This view was by no means universal, and it had already begun to crumble in the face of solid archaeological evidence when Svante Pääbo isolated and analyzed Neanderthal’s genome in 2009—for which work he was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Since then, it seems, each month brings a new report of a Neanderthal talent or action that leaves yesterday’s experts scratching their heads in wonder, if not disbelief. Inevitably, the dates for these activities are shifted back in time so that they show the many adaptations Neanderthals made to their circumstances.

For instance, Neanderthal appears to have mastered and used fire for a variety of purposes including cooking after their appearance in Eurasia some 300,000 or more years ago. They also made carvings into ivory, and they almost certainly communicated using speech. To show how slowly attitudes change, I have recently seen people speculate that Neanderthal may have only seasonally had fire, but in general were incapable of igniting tinder on their own. This view recently received what would appear to be a mortal blow when Ceren Kabukcu and colleagues revealed that Neanderthal not only had fire throughout the year, but also used fire to cook a wide variety of foods which they consumed.

More:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/dogs-best-friend/202212/new-views-neanderthal-are-reshaping-prehistory