www.newscientist.com /article/mg25634062-900-rebecca-wragg-sykes-on-the-objects-that-reveal-the-neanderthal-mind/

Rebecca Wragg Sykes on the objects that reveal the Neanderthal mind

Colin Barras 9-11 minutes 9/27/2022
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Nabil Nezzar

DID Neanderthals think like us? We used to assume that our closest ancient human relatives, who lived in Europe and Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, were concerned only with survival. But in the past few decades we have discovered various things they made that had no clear practical purpose: a shell coloured with red pigment, a deer bone engraved with chevrons and a ring of stalagmites assembled deep inside a cave.

Archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes, honorary fellow at the University of Liverpool, UK, and author of Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art, is fascinated by these artistic – or what she calls aesthetic – objects. She spoke to New Scientist about whether they bring us closer to understanding how Neanderthals thought about the world, and what clues they offer to the species’ mysterious disappearance.

Colin Barras: How can we get inside the Neanderthal mind?

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Rebecca Wragg Sykes: Clearly, there are no Neanderthal texts, so we can’t hear descriptions of what they were thinking about the world around them in their own voices. But there is a mass of information in the material they left behind. In a sense, what we can do with those artefacts is limited only by our imagination.

How do we glean information from these artefacts?

One way is to study their technology through a technique called refitting – basically, putting things back together, looking at the sequences they used for knapping, the process of flaking stone blocks to make tools. It’s “slow archaeology”: you excavate meticulously and collect even the tiniest objects. Then you try, piece by piece, to fit those fragments back together. It …

takes hundreds of hours, but if you don’t do that you’re missing so much about how things were made and used.

This is as close as we can get to time travel because you recreate this series of moments and you can watch the decision-making that was going on. For instance, a Neanderthal might encounter a natural flaw – say, a crack – in the cobble they’re flaking, and you can watch how they decide to problem solve. It’s almost like looking over their shoulder.

That’s mind-blowing. What do you think is the most exciting recent discovery that gives new insight into Neanderthal cognition?

Archaeology advances not just by single new discoveries, but by the knowledge and inferences that emerge through comparing many sites, many analyses. So I’ll be cheeky and choose a category: our understanding of Neanderthal organic technologies.

We have known for quite some time that Neanderthals invented the first synthetic substance, birch tar, at least one use for which is as a glue in tool-making. But in recent years there has been renewed interest in assessing the techniques of manufacture and the cognitive complexity involved in the process.

Wooden objects are immensely exciting too, because they are so rare. New discoveries of probable digging sticks are very interesting, such as ones found in central Italy that are nearly 200,000 years old. These are extremely important tools for hunter-gatherers, and show the same clear appreciation of material properties and clever production methods as used for making spears. They used fire to soften harder wood.

Is a similar approach useful for studying objects that may have had social or symbolic purposes? For instance, a 2018 study concluded the notches on an animal bone might have been made by a Neanderthal to tally or keep count.

When archaeologists find objects beyond the “everyday”, which may be to do with aesthetics or point to complex mental processes, it’s exciting. But we are also really cautious. No one wants to make claims that are later dismantled. Very carefully argued cases were made in 2018 for the Les Pradelles object you mention – a hyena bone from a site in France marked with tally-like notches – as representing something extraordinary. The same peer scrutiny was applied to the 2021 discovery of chevrons carved on a giant deer bone from Einhornhöhle in Germany at least 51,000 years ago.

At every stage we second-guess ourselves and look for different possibilities. If, after all of that filtering, you’re still left with an object that doesn’t have a clear explanation from a functional or survival perspective, then you know it’s reliably “weird”. It’s an object that tells us something deeper about how Neanderthal minds worked and how they engaged with the world.

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Neanderthal objects: An etched bone (above), flint hand axe (left) and fossil shell (right)

Clockwise from top: Francesco d’Errico et al.; Marco Peresani et al.; DIRK WIERSMA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

What is your favourite “reliably weird” object?

A shell from Grotta Fumane in Italy, which was left there more than 47,000 years ago. It’s actually a small fossil originally picked up at least 100 kilometres away. At some point, a Neanderthal had rubbed the outside of the shell with red mineral pigment that had been sourced elsewhere. There is no clear simple explanation for this object: it’s not food waste and doesn’t have an obvious functional use.

As hunter-gatherers with no means of transport except walking, Neanderthals wouldn’t have carried anything without value. I can imagine the shell itself being noticed out of curiosity, and the pigment does seem to make most sense as a means to alter the surface appearance for a visual aesthetic effect.

Why might someone have decorated this object?

We will never know what it was understood as, how many individuals were involved with it or how long it had been held onto for. But this object opens many windows to thinking about Neanderthals as motivated by more than mere survival. I think we must consider them as beings curious about materials, and interested in the aesthetics of engaging with them, for instance applying colour to a surface.

I think the idea of who these objects are being made for is fascinating. We tend to assume such artefacts are designed for an audience, but perhaps this is not the case.

So, when we struggle to understand the significance of an aesthetic object, maybe we’re not alone? Perhaps an object that was meaningful for one Neanderthal might have puzzled another?

That’s a really interesting question. What would a different Neanderthal group make of a site like, say, Bruniquel [a French cave made famous in 2016 when it was discovered that, more than 174,000 years ago, Neanderthals had snapped hundreds of stalagmites off the cave floor and arranged them into rings several metres across]? I think they would have been intrigued. They would have recognised purposeful activity, but it might not have had the same resonance for them as for the original creators.

Why do you think this?

When we look at Neanderthal stone tool technology, some core flaking methods were apparently commonly known and understood, albeit with some regional differences. But it’s not as easy to see that universality with their rare aesthetic objects.

Bruniquel cave

A circle constructed from stalagmites by Neanderthals more than 174,000 years ago

Luc-Henri Fage/SSAC (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Is this different to the aesthetic objects made by early Homo sapiens?

I feel like Neanderthal aesthetic objects are a more intimate form of expression, and there was never the intention to use them as badges of identity, woven into encounters with other groups. Early Homo sapiens had a greater repetition and coherence in their material culture than we see with Neanderthals. Instead of one red-coloured shell, we find many in a single site occupied by H. sapiens.

Could that imply that interacting with other groups wasn’t as important or as routine for Neanderthals?

Neanderthals were living in more isolated groups than most early H. sapiens were, and while encounters would have been important socially, they may have been rare enough that material culture was not systematically integrated into those interactions.

Do these findings bring us any closer to solving the mystery of the Neanderthal extinction?

This question is so hard to answer. It’s clear that Neanderthals were good at being hunter-gatherers, and they survived all sorts of dramatic climate change. To some extent they were able to flexibly adapt. But, yes, there are these differences with H. sapiens that have been highlighted more and more as we have developed a better understanding of the archaeology and the genetics.

So far, every early H. sapiens genome we have looks like it comes from a well-connected population, unlike a lot of the Neanderthal genomes. Maybe the ability to network and cooperate did make a difference.

I find it hard to accept the argument that Neanderthals were heading for extinction anyway. I think we would very much like there to be a reason for our survival that makes us sound great. But maybe we were just lucky.

NewscientistLive

Rebecca Wragg Sykes will be speaking about the minds of Neanderthals at New Scientist Live on 9 October. Join us at the world’s greatest festival of science at ExCeL London from 7 to 9 October and online newscientistlive.com