Neandertal

Good to Know

He proposed ‘to distinguish the species by the name Homo Neanderthalensis’ after the Neander Valley where they were discovered. In the process, he unwittingly immortalized a little-known 17th-century psalmist, Joachim Neumann. Following the Philhellenic fashions of the day, Neumann’s last name (literally ‘new man’) was translated to the Greek ‘Neander’ and was then attached to the valley (‘thal’ in German) where he penned his psalms. Thanks to King, members of the long-extinct species unearthed there have been known by the wonderfully ironic name of Neanderthals (people from the valley of the new man).

Phalenar

Choose Your Friends Delicious

Perhaps the most famous modern example of human cannibalism was dramatized in the movie Alive (1993). In 1972 a plane crash stranded members of a Uruguayan rugby team and their friends high in the Andes Mountains. In desperation, the survivors resorted to cannibalism of the crash victims as they lived for more than two months far from any source of food until their incredible rescue. But it is not just in acute crises like this that modern humans have been known to eat each other. The behaviour also occurs where there is chronic protein shortage. As we look back to the distant, pre-agricultural past, access to meat would have depended on the season, success in the hunt, location of wild herds and other factors beyond human control. A parallel can be drawn with the South Fore people of Papua New Guinea, as documented in a classic anthropological study from the 1960s by Shirley Lindenbaum and published as Kuru Sorcery (1978). The South Fore area is very remote, and it is where both traditional subsistence practices and cannibalism lasted longer than elsewhere in the region. When someone died from causes other than an infectious disease, practically the entire body would be consumed after dismemberment using bamboo and stone tools. This took place in highly ritualized ways designed to honour the dead and their families, with particular body parts reserved for close relatives. The practice only came to an end when the South Fore people suffered an epidemic of a prion disease similar to Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (the human version of ‘mad cow’ disease), contracted from the consumption of human brains.

Reklam

Phalenar

Hunters' Fetishes

Yet these burials do begin to hint at a difference in behaviour between the two varieties of human. This difference is seen not only in the bones, but in what was buried with them. At Amud a Neanderthal child burial is associated with a deer bone, and at Kebara a Neanderthal child burial contains a rhinoceros tooth. As for the early modern human sites, a burial at Skhul is associated with a large wild boar mandible, and deer antlers were placed on top of a child burial at Qafzeh. The Homo sapiens were buried with slightly more prominent animal bones than the Neanderthals were, and this hints at a more important distinction.

Phalenar

Our Brain is Our Claw

For the first 1.5 million years after the invention of the handaxe, there was little improvement in stone technology. This represents more than 80 per cent of the time since Homo erectus crafted the first handaxe near Lake Turkana, Kenya, 1.76 million years ago. It is impossible to conceive how long this is – how many humans decided to make a handaxe, to use it, to throw it away, and never to imagine that there might be a better way to make cutting tools.

Phalenar

Getting Closer to Chimps from Gorillas

The difference in body size between men and women (sexual dimorphism) at the Sima is similar to that in our species. This is a sign of modernity because in non-human primates and early hominins, males are much larger than females, while in modern humans the males are only slightly larger. Many researchers believe that the reduction in sexual dimorphism accompanied a shift from a male-dominated harem-type mating arrangement to a simpler, two-females-for-one-male polygamy or even pair-bonding monogamy, as predominates today.