Lone Survivors (15 page)

Of course, we have to put these gruesome reconstructions of past behavior into context against the possibilities that disarticulation of bodies might also have occurred as a part of funerary rites, or that cannibalism was part of rituals to honor the dead, or was forced on human groups faced with disaster or starvation, as recent history demonstrates. We also have enough evidence of the care of individuals during life, and after their death, to show the other side of the story, as I will discuss in more detail in chapter 6. For example, a child in the Atapuerca early Neanderthal material from the Sima de los Huesos site in northern Spain had severe head deformities that certainly affected its appearance, and probably also its behavior and speech, yet it had survived well beyond the infant stage. At times the Neanderthals buried their dead in caves, from newborn infants through to elderly men and women. In at least some cases, grave goods such as animal remains and special rocks or tools seem to have been placed with the bodies, as tributes or perhaps even in anticipation of an afterlife.

Notwithstanding those caveats, which show the compassionate face of our predecessors, I think that early humans were probably as capable of love and hate, and tenderness and violence, as we are, and even chimpanzee bands have been observed in violent and often fatal territorial “battles” with other troops. Such behavior is almost certainly part of our evolutionary history too. Many years ago, in an obscure book,
The Dawn Warriors
, partly inspired by Robert Ardrey's
African Genesis
(itself very much a tale of humans, red in tooth and claw), the biologist Robert Bigelow argued that warfare went back to the beginnings of humanity and had shaped our evolution. Coping with conflict from other human groups encouraged individual intelligence and cunning, and group cooperation and cohesion, and thus fueled social evolution, language, and the growth of the brain. This is something I will come back to in chapter 6, but we have not yet finished with the unfortunate Neanderthals of El Sidrón.

After they had died and apparently been eaten, their defleshed remains must have lain on the floor near the cave entrance, along with other food debris and Middle Paleolithic (Middle Old Stone Age) stone tools, perhaps including those used to butcher them. There the bones would most likely have been trampled, eroded, or scavenged by other animals. But then, serendipitously, a massive muddy collapse of cave sediments dropped them some twenty meters deeper into the cave system and dramatically increased their chances of long-term preservation, in the cooler location where they were ultimately discovered. This also greatly improved the potential for DNA preservation; the Sidrón Neanderthals are now one of the most important contributors to the Neanderthal Genome Project, as I will discuss in chapter 7, along with the main DNA donors, other probably cannibalized Neanderthal from Vindija Cave in Croatia. There are other finds, however, that give a different and more positive perspective on the Neanderthals than this image of cannibalism, and one of the most significant of these was made about thirty years ago, in the French site Saint-Césaire.

The discovery of a partial skeleton in the collapsed rock shelter of Saint-Césaire remains one of the most important of all Neanderthal finds—not just because it was fairly complete by the usual standards, and not because it seemed to be a burial—there were quite a few of those already known for the Neanderthals. Its importance lay in its archaeological associations: stone tools belonging to the Châtelperronian industry. This enigmatic industry from southwestern France seemed to represent a transition from the local Middle Paleolithic (Mousterian) to the Upper Paleolithic Gravettian. The local Mousterian and the Châtelperronian had many types of stone tools in common, but the way they were made had seemingly switched from typical Neanderthal flaking to the systematic striking of thin flakes—blades—something characteristic of the Upper Paleolithic, and thus of Cro-Magnons like the Gravettians. Unfortunately, there were no human fossils reliably associated with the Châtelperronian, which is why its real significance remained a puzzle. Many archaeologists and anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s expected that the manufacturers of the Châtelperronian would, when eventually discovered, turn out to be evolutionary intermediates between the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons, hence finally proving the Neanderthal Phase and Multiregional models of modern human origins. The archaeologist Richard Klein and I shared a different view. We thought that Neanderthals were probably capable of making Upper Paleolithic–style tools and, considering the local ancestry of the Châtelperronian, that the manufacturers were likely to have been Neanderthals and not transitional forms.

So when I heard of a brief French report in 1980 that a human skeleton had finally been recovered with Châtelperronian artifacts, I realized that this could be a crunch discovery that might completely invalidate my doctoral conclusions that there was unlikely to have been evolutionary continuity between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons in Europe. I waited for news of the nature of the skeleton with bated breath, and I must admit to considerable relief when it was identified as a rather typical Neanderthal! However, to my chagrin, many researchers seemed reluctant to abandon ideas of continuity. Some, like Milford Wolpoff, argued that the Neanderthal features of the Saint-Césaire skeleton had been overemphasized and that it was, in fact, “transitional,” while others, like the archaeologist Randy White, suggested that (in line with Loring Brace's Neanderthal Phase model) cultural change had probably preceded, and driven, morphological changes toward modern humans. Thus this Neanderthal had not yet undergone the evolutionary transition that must have followed.

Map showing early human sites in Europe.

For a few years the significance of Saint-Césaire was a hot topic of debate, but gradually, as its Neanderthal nature was generally accepted, it became an important piece of evidence supporting the Replacement model, at least in western Europe. This was because the Châtelperronian had been dated by radiocarbon to about 35,000 years—the same age as the other early Upper Paleolithic industry, the Aurignacian—which seemed to be associated with modern-looking Cro-Magnons. Hence several of us, including the archaeologists Richard Klein and Paul Mellars and the anthropologist Bernard Vandermeersch (who had described the new find), favored a model with two parallel but distinct strands within the early Upper Paleolithic of western Europe. One, the Châtelperronian, was a local Neanderthal development. The other, the Aurignacian, was the product of modern humans (Cro-Magnons), who had brought it with them when they entered western Europe, an event now dated to about 40,000 years ago. But now I'd like to discuss a remarkable site in eastern Europe where modern human fossils have turned up alongside the remains of thousands of cave bears, which suggests a previously unknown and perhaps even earlier arrival of modern humans in Europe.

The Danube is, at some 2,900 kilometers, Europe's second-longest river (after the Volga). Originating in Germany, it flows eastward until it reaches its delta, which spreads between Romania and Ukraine on the Black Sea. It had been a hugely important waterway in historic times, and it must also have provided a route through the landscape for early humans, whether they trekked along its banks or (later on) used rafts or boats to navigate it. A number of key sites in the Neanderthal and early modern story lie close to the Danube, and one of the newest and most fascinating of these is Pe
ş
tera cu Oase (“Cave with Bones”). Oase was discovered by cavers in 2002, and its location is still a closely guarded secret, although it lies in the Carpathian Mountains of western Romania, whose rivers drain into the Danube.

One of those rivers is the Ponor, which runs for about 750 meters underground, and above it are networks of caves through which it formerly flowed. These cannot be reached through their original entrances, which have long since been blocked by sediments and collapses. Instead, a lower entrance has been opened up by speleologists, and, for those brave and capable enough, a trip up and down long shafts, with a scuba dive in the dark through a sixteen-meter siphon of chilling water thrown in for good measure, eventually leads to a cave floor littered with an astonishing collection of thousands of fossil bones. Among these are circular hibernation nests of cave bears, the former winter inhabitants of this part of the cave, represented by over a hundred of their skulls alone. Other occasional residents such as cave lions and wolves are also recorded, but it was a chance discovery in a neighboring chamber in 2002 that showed ancient humans had also been in the vicinity. This was a human lower jaw, containing only the back teeth, with the presence of erupted wisdom teeth showing that the individual was an adult, and from its overall size probably a young man.

The following year, about fifteen meters downslope, the face and skull bones of a younger individual were also found. These isolated human finds seem to have been washed to where they were discovered, since there is no evidence for human occupation or human interference with the bones in this part of the cave system. Careful mapping, excavation, and dating (including direct radiocarbon determinations on the human fossils) suggest the following sequence of events for the cave system. Cave bears regularly entered the deep cave to hibernate until about 46,000 years ago, with many dying during hibernation. About 46,000 years ago, there was a major collapse, which changed the nature of the cave by opening up a closer entrance. Carnivores such as wolves and the occasional lion now denned there, bringing back the remains of prey such as deer and ibex. About 42,000 years ago, the Oase humans were in the cave, either using it for shelter or perhaps carried there by carnivores, and their remains were then swept to where they were discovered, in one of the periodic floodings that engulfed the cave system.

An international team of researchers has been studying the Oase finds, and in particular the human jawbone and the separate skull. The jawbone is strongly built but undeniably modern in its well-developed chin. And yet its molar teeth are large, with quite complex cusps, and it has some interesting features toward the back. The ascending ramus of the jaw is extremely broad, and on its inner side there are yet more intriguing traits. On the inside of the back of this jawbone on each side is the
mandibular foramen
, a hole through which the mandibular nerve travels to the lower teeth. In most living humans and in almost all fossil ones, the foramen is open and V-shaped, as it is on one side of the Oase jaw. But on the other side there is a bridge of bone across the foramen, known as the
horizontal-oval
(
H-O
) type. This H-O foramen is present in about half of all Neanderthal fossils, but it is generally rare in early modern fossils and usually only occurs at a level of a few percent in living humans. Accordingly, when found in a smattering of European Cro-Magnon fossils, it has been seen as a marker of possible Neanderthal ancestry, which it certainly could be, given its rarity in preceding African fossils and those from Skhul and Qafzeh. How much its presence is inherited, and how much is associated with having particularly strong jaw ligaments (which are attached to that area of the jaw), is still unclear, and the picture is further confused by the fact that some of the highest frequencies of it in recent populations occur far away from Europe and Neanderthal influence, in places like Easter Island.

The Oase skull is not Neanderthal-like, but it's strangely unlike later Europeans too. It's from an adolescent, of uncertain sex, with the third molars still unerupted but enormous, and with even more complex cusps than in the separate mandible. The forehead retreats a little, but the lack of brows and suprainiac fossa and the flat face and nose shape are particularly non-Neanderthal. However, the back teeth are bigger than those of any modern humans I have seen from Eurasia, living or fossil. In support of his favored Assimilation model, my friend Erik Trinkaus argued that features like the H-O foramen, the relatively flat forehead, and the large molars could all be a sign of a mixed modern–Neanderthal heritage. And indeed, at a date of more than 40,000 years, the Oase humans seem to have been in the vanguard of modern human penetration of Europe, with the maximum potential for encountering Neanderthals. On the other hand, to me, the teeth look unlike those of Neanderthals as well, so where did these enigmatic early Europeans come from?

At this point we should note that the Oase human fossils have no associated artifacts; even if they were living elsewhere in the cave, only their actual bones were recovered, following redeposition from an unknown location. But given their unusual features and their antiquity—perhaps beyond the age of other European moderns and definite Aurignacian tools—I think they could even have been makers of the mysterious Bohunician industry. This was named after the Czech cave Bohunice, and like the Châtelperronian, its characteristic tools show a mixture of both Middle and Upper Paleolithic elements. The method of manufacture is often the “prepared core” so typical of Middle Paleolithic artifacts in Europe, western Asia, and Africa; in that sense the Bohunician maintains an older tradition associated with both Neanderthals and the earliest modern humans. But there are also many of the blades, end scrapers, and burins (engraving tools) that characterize the European Upper Paleolithic and African Later Stone Age made by modern humans. However, the Bohunician has not, so far, shown any evidence of sophisticated bone or ivory artifacts, or beads.