Neandertal Scientists

"Who Were the Neandertals?" by Kate Wong, in Scientific American (Apr. 2000), 415 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017–1111.

Were Neandertals (a.k.a. Neanderthals) more like modern humans than many of us care to admit? Were they (gasp!) our ancestors? A fierce scientific debate rages, reports Wong, a Scientific American staff writer.

Neandertals first came to researchers’ attention in 1856, when a partial skeleton—a heavy skull with arched browridge and massive limb bones—turned up in Germany’s Neander Valley. Scientists assigned the newfound hominids to their own species, Homo neanderthalensis. Then, a half-century later, came the sensational French discovery of the "Old Man" of La Chapelle-aux-Saints, prompting scientists to draw the now-familiar portrait of Neandertals as primitive protohumans.

After 200,000 years in Europe and western Asia, they said, the dimwitted brutes— stooped, lumbering, apelike—were driven to extinction, unable to compete once intelligent, sophisticated Homo sapiens arrived on the scene.

Scientists subsequently determined that Neandertals actually had the same upright posture and way of moving as modern humans have. Even so, such characteristic Neandertal features as robust skeletons, short limbs and barrel chests, prominent browridges and low, sloping foreheads, protruding midfaces and chinless jaws, says Wong, still clearly indicate to many paleoanthropologists "an evolutionary trajectory separate from that of moderns."

Other scientists, such as Milford H. Wolpoff of the University of Michigan, disagree. They argue that many of the Neandertal features are also seen in some early modern Europeans who came later, such as the ones found at Mladec, a site in Moravia (Czech Republic), and that this is evidence of extensive interbreeding.

But scientists who hold with the separate-species view dismiss that idea. "When I look at the morphology of these people [from Mladec]," says Christopher B. Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum, "I see robustness, I don’t see Neandertal." The question seemed settled when a 1997 analysis found that mitochondrial DNA from a Neandertal fossil was vastly different from that of living moderns: "Neandertals Were Not Our Ancestors," shouted the scientific journal Cell on its cover. Nevertheless, Wong says, "undercurrents of doubt have persisted."

Much recent research also has focused on Neandertals’ behavior. In the past, they were often depicted as unable to hunt or plan ahead, but animal remains from a Croatian site indicate they were skilled hunters, and several Neandertal burial sites contain what might have been grave goods, indicating a capacity for symbolic thought.

"If Neandertals possessed basically the same cognitive ability as moderns," Wong says, their disappearance becomes all the more puzzling. It did not happen overnight. Anthropologists have recently shown that Neandertals still lived in central Europe 28,000 years ago, thousands of years after moderns appeared.

Gradually, in Stringer’s view, the Neandertals were supplanted by the new species, "because moderns were a bit more innovative, a bit better able to cope with rapid environmental change quickly, and they probably had bigger social networks."

Not so, contends Wolpoff: The Neandertals were vastly outnumbered, and after thousands of years of interbreeding, their distinctive features were diluted and ultimately faded away. Clearly, the same cannot yet be said of the passionate scientific debate about Neandertals.