Creative Structures Built By Neanderthals Is Upending Our Understanding of the Species

[Judi Lynn]

Researchers have spelled out the entire Neanderthal genome for multiple individuals, offering new insights into their biology

by Knowable Magazine and Tim Vernimmen
Dec. 23, 2023


Neanderthals are Homo sapiens’s closest-known relative, and today we know we rubbed shoulders with them for thousands of years, up until the very end of their long reign some 40,000 years ago. Most researchers see no reason to believe our two species didn’t get along with each other back then, yet we haven’t been very kind to Neanderthals since their remains were first unearthed in the 19th century, often characterizing them as lumbering dimwits or worse. Even today, their name is sometimes hurled at misbehaving members of our own species, though there is no evidence they engaged in any kind of prehistoric hooliganism.

Well, with one exception, perhaps: What they did in Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France would certainly be frowned upon today. Hundreds of intentionally broken stalagmites were found there, arranged into two large, ellipsoid structures and several smaller stacks, during a time when — as researchers confirmed in 2016 — only Neanderthals were roaming Europe. No one knows what these structures were for, but they suggest a tendency toward creativity and perhaps even symbolism.

No other structures of this kind have so far been discovered. But there have been many other hints that Neanderthal minds were occupied with things many researchers did not expect, says archaeologist April Nowell of the University of Victoria in Canada. The author of a 2021 book, Growing Up in the Ice Age, Nowell outlines the most exciting new discoveries in a 2023 article, “Rethinking Neandertals,” in the Annual Review of Anthropology.

“In the past ten years, things have changed quite dramatically,” she says. “I never thought we’d have the wide range of information about their lives that we do now.” In addition to many new fossil discoveries, new methods for analyzing ancient biological molecules have allowed researchers to examine ancient DNA and proteins that they didn’t even know still persisted.

More:
https://www.inverse.com/science/creative-structures-neanderthals-more-complex-minds