it was august of 1856. the pickaxes of miners clearing out a limestone cave deep inside the rocky neander valley near düsseldorf snagged on some strange humanlike bones. the earth wasn't actually showing us the face of our forgotten brother for the first time, similar skulls with thick bones and heavy brow ridges had surfaced before in belgium and gibraltar, but the elites of the era had brushed them aside, calling them "misshapen deformities of modern man." this time, though, the bones reached the hands of johann carl fuhlrott, a local schoolteacher and naturalist, and fuhlrott became the first person to sense the ancient truth behind that flattened skull. what stood before us wasn't a modern human who'd suffered rickets, but another species of human left behind in the depths of history. the scientific world officially named this new species "homo neanderthalensis," but naming something, of course, isn't the same as understanding it.
to this species we had probably been neighbors with for thousands of years, we committed one of history's greatest injustices over the century following the day we rediscovered its existence.
the racist, colonial arrogance of victorian europe had framed evolution as a linear ladder, starting at the very bottom and climbing inevitably up to the white man. since the neanderthals had gone extinct, they could only have been "failures," crude, lumbering, incapable of speech, half-savage creatures barely a step above apes.
sloppy work like the famous flawed reconstruction the paleontologist marcellin boule commissioned in 1911, based on the skeleton of an elderly neanderthal, ruthlessly carved the cliche of a caveman into modern minds, knees bent, neck hunched forward, standing more like a gorilla than a human. yet boule had completely ignored the fact that the skeleton he was working on belonged to an elderly individual whose spine had been bent by arthritis. this caricature was really a mirror reflecting the warped mentality of our own species, the one we scramble to portray as flawless and noble, a mentality that inevitably comes to light today. we made them savage to hide our own savagery; we declared them mute to sanctify our own tongue.
but of course, the truth has a way of eventually coming out, even from beneath the soil. by the time the 1950s arrived, new studies being carried out in many parts of the world began to shake the rigid template surrounding the neanderthals.
in 1957, the anatomists william l. straus and a. j. e. cave reexamined the "la chapelle-aux-saints" skeleton that marcellin boule had used as the basis for his 1911 "apelike freak of nature" model, and they laid out evidence that the skeleton's owner was simply an elderly patient suffering from severe arthritis (osteoarthritis), and that neanderthals had in fact stood and walked completely upright, just like modern humans. the evidence was so striking that these two scientists were bold enough to claim that a neanderthal, shaved and dressed in modern clothes, wouldn't raise an eyebrow from anyone if he boarded the new york subway.
but the real turning point came with the excavations the american anthropologist ralph solecki carried out at shanidar cave in northern iraq between 1957 and 1960. solecki presented his examinations of the skeletons he found there to the world in 1971 with his book "shanidar: the first flower people." the work, with the new findings it laid out, argued that the neanderthals weren't crude brutes but instead possessed deep social bonds and compassion.
in his excavations at shanidar cave, located in the zagros mountains of northern iraq, ralph solecki had found skeletal remains belonging to neanderthals who lived roughly 45,000 to 60,000 years ago. according to him, two specific findings among these skeletons offered evidence that would fundamentally change the way we see neanderthals:
solecki determined that an elderly neanderthal male, whose skeleton was found in the cave, had his right arm amputated as a result of severe blows taken at a young age, had gone blind in one eye, and had trouble walking, and he demonstrated that this individual's ability to live for years with these grave disabilities was only possible thanks to being cared for, protected, and fed by the other members of the group. this was the first major piece of evidence for human behavior that shattered the "primitive savage" image.
the same excavations also showed that neanderthals buried their dead. but what was far more intriguing was that the pollen samples taken from the soil of another neanderthal buried in a funerary position suggested that this individual had been buried with healing, colorful wildflowers like yarrow, st. john's wort, and hollyhock deliberately laid over him. (even though this finding has been reopened to debate in recent years, the impact it created at the time was enormous.)
with the book "shanidar: the first flower people," published in 1971, ralph solecki announced to the world that neanderthals weren't the "gorilla-like savages" that figures like marcellin boule had claimed, but on the contrary possessed deep emotions, an aesthetic sensibility, compassion, and an advanced soul. even the book's title, by alluding to the era's "flower children" (hippie) movement, positioned neanderthals as peaceful and sensitive beings.
solecki's book had been published in a climate where the era's flower children movement and the humanist, anti-vietnam-war wave were at their peak. in presenting his findings, solecki was no doubt influenced by the social headlines and this peaceful atmosphere, and by naming his book "the first flower people" outright, he practically positioned neanderthals as the peaceful hippies of ages past. under the conditions of the time, bending the scales the other way, toward extreme romanticism, in order to tear down the "savage monster" portrayal marcellin boule had created worked strategically, but scientific objectivity eventually filed down some of these claims.
solecki's most popular thesis in particular, the "shanidar iv, flower burial" hypothesis, took serious hits in later years from the work of developing micro-archaeology and palynologists (pollen scientists). when solecki saw the pollen of healing plants like yarrow, st. john's wort, and hollyhock concentrated in the grave soil, he took it as evidence of an aesthetic and medicinal respect for the dead. but later analyses showed that this pollen might have been carried there by the activities of rodents like the "persian jird" (meriones persicus), which are very common in that region and dig deep tunnels into cave floors. these rodents pulled whole plants of this kind underground to insulate their burrows and to feed. in other words, that romantic funeral ritual was most likely nothing more than a prehistoric rodent stocking up for winter.
then again, it wouldn't be fair to say solecki was completely wrong either, because the anatomical facts on the "shanidar 1" skeleton (the elderly, disabled individual) in that same cave were too concrete to romanticize away.
the severe bone damage in the left eye socket clearly proved that the elderly neanderthal had been blind for many long years, that the trauma to his head had probably paralyzed his right side, and that his right arm had been amputated below the elbow and healed while he was still alive.
under the harsh ice age conditions the neanderthals lived in, it would have been impossible for a paralyzed individual who couldn't hunt, who couldn't even protect himself with his one arm, to survive more than ten years with these injuries. the thesis that the other members of the group brought him food and protected him from predators isn't a romantic embellishment but a scientific finding that still holds up today.
in the end, solecki, in the process of restoring the neanderthals' good name, had no doubt gotten swept up in the spirit of the times and dressed the story up in language that was too poetic. today's archaeology sees neanderthals neither as the peaceful "flower children" solecki claimed nor as the crude "gorillas" the old century claimed. they too, probably just like us, were a species of human that came up with pragmatic solutions to survive, that cared for its wounded when the moment called for it, that resorted to violence when the moment called for it, that could think abstractly but above all was pragmatic and extremely realistic.
even so, the paleogenetics and modern archaeology methods of the 21st century keep on demolishing the arrogant narrative solecki struck the first blow against. today we know for certain that neanderthals were complex beings who survived for hundreds of thousands of years with resilience and grace in the brutal world of the ice age. they could think abstractly, they drew geometric symbols on cave walls with red pigments, they made beads out of seashells and hung them around their necks. they didn't just bury their dead in the ground, they perhaps sent them off into the unknown by leaving flowers and gifts beside them. they didn't abandon their sick and wounded; through social cooperation, they kept them alive for years.
today, one of the most stunning and current pieces of evidence for neanderthal sophistication lies in a 59,000-year-old molar from the chagyrskaya cave in siberia. according to the results of microscopic analyses led by dr. alisa zubova, a senior researcher at the peter the great museum of anthropology and ethnography (kunstkamera) under the russian academy of sciences (ras), a deep cavity in this tooth may show signs of having been drilled out and cleaned with stone tools at millimeter precision, with a rotating motion.
if this thesis is correct, it would be the oldest known invasive dental procedure in human history. what's more, the smoothed-over walls of the cavity carry evidence suggesting this neanderthal survived despite that terrible pain and kept chewing with that tooth for years. all of this, like it or not, points to the manual skill needed to perform an operation that painful, the knowledge of healing plants to ease that pain, and a sense of community to care for that individual after the surgery.
then, when the gene maps were spread out before us, we saw to our great astonishment that they hadn't completely disappeared after all. even today, a 1 to 2 percent neanderthal legacy circulates in the dna of every modern human outside of africa. the neanderthal wasn't just our cousin, he was also our ancestor.
so how did a species this adaptable, strong, resilient, and intelligent end up withdrawing from the stage of history? and at the same time, how did it manage to preserve its existence in our genetic legacy?
the first thing that came to mind had been "genocide" theories. but this bloody thesis, grounded in the cruelty of our species, is gradually giving way in the scientific world to a far more tragic and sorrowful truth. we didn't wipe them out with a systematic massacre. we assimilated them.
new findings show that around 40,000 years ago, while europe's climate was fluctuating at an unpredictable pace, the homo sapiens population arriving in waves from africa vastly outnumbered the neanderthals. the neanderthals were already living in small, scattered groups. the large crowds of sapiens narrowed their hunting grounds, depleted their resources, and pushed them to the edges of the map, toward gibraltar. but this wasn't a war, it was a melting away.
sapiens mixed with the neanderthals they encountered and had children. the neanderthals slowly dissolved into the enormous gene pool of our numerically superior species, melting away inside us.
this species, which had managed to survive for hundreds of thousands of years under the harsh conditions of the ice age, had adapted physically to the cold to perfection. but around 40,000 years ago, sudden and extreme fluctuations occurred in europe's climate (very rapid warming periods followed by extreme cooling). this turned the wooded hunting grounds they were used to into open steppe. while homo sapiens, with their higher technological and social flexibility, adapted much more quickly to the changing ecosystem, the new environmental conditions may have contributed to the process that brought about the end of the neanderthals.
homo sapiens, setting out from africa, may also have carried into europe tropical diseases and pathogens that neanderthals had never encountered and developed no immunity to. these epidemics may have rapidly drained the already fragile neanderthal population.
as sapiens mixed with the increasingly shrinking neanderthal population that remained, they must have absorbed the neanderthal gene pool into themselves. so, as we said, maybe we didn't slaughter them en masse, but we assimilated them within our own population. the 1 to 2 percent neanderthal legacy living on today in the genes of people outside of africa is the most concrete proof of this.
what we see today when we turn around and look back isn't a primitive, shapeless freak of nature, but merely a version of humanity that could have been a good alternative but vanished, unable to keep pace with the new conditions.
as for the neanderthals' sorrowful story, it's trying to tell us this: there wasn't just one way to be human in this world. and the option that existed alongside us may have been offering something more human than today's humanity, an alternative that adapted without throwing off nature's balance, and most importantly, one that was far more peaceful. we sapiens, meanwhile, while spreading across the world with our organizational ability to mobilize masses, probably ended up responsible for the disappearance of this brother species of ours that had ruled the european continent for thousands of years, and in doing so we laid the groundwork for the conditions that will, before too long, bring about the total disappearance of humankind in general too.
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