The Neanderthal in the Mirror

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Neanderthals have long haunted our imagination, however silent their stone tools and cold hearths might be. Now they have suddenly come much more alive thanks to the partial unravelling of their genome. The recent recovery of Neanderthal DNA has been a roller-coaster of a story, developing over a number of years, but the recent paper by Richard E. Green and his 55 colleagues (including the inspirational Svante Pääbo) on a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome has justifiably attracted enormous attention.

Neanderthals and humans diverged some half million years ago, and it is inconceivable that the last two species of Homo did not meet on occasion, even if the immensity of the Paleolithic world meant that this was perhaps once in a lifetime (recall that most were dead before their 30th birthday). But meet they did, because the most talked about insight of the new genomic research is that humans and Neanderthals must have interbred. Such evidence confirms a long-held suspicion that there was some sort of hybridization, but it still holds surprises, since it demonstrates that such contact was substantially earlier than most researchers had postulated and only involved ancient denizens of the Middle East and their descendants as they populated much of the rest of the globe in a series of diasporas.

The most intriguing of the genomic differences that have been detected so far are several genes associated with cognitive capacities, whose malfunctions in humans might have links to autism and schizophrenia, potentially crippling but also implicated in creativity. How tempting to point one’s finger and inquire: is this why, in the end, we are human and Neanderthals are not, our exploding brilliance both transforming the world and also spelling their doom?

Not so fast. Who ever said the Neanderthals were cognitively challenged? If they were, then so were we for at least half of our history. Human culture starts its acceleration only about 100,000 years ago. And the Neanderthals? Here we enter extremely controversial waters. It is not that advanced acculturation of our sister species is disputed. For example, the striking Châtelperronian artifacts from France, including stone tools and personal ornaments, unequivocally speak of a species that has crossed the symbolic threshold. But perhaps this is simply the result of first contact with humans — imitation, trading, possibly theft as our slightly dim-witted relatives struggled to keep up?

Flattering as this might be to our pretensions, the evidence increasingly points to Neanderthals arriving at a symbolic capacity quite independently. One of the main proponents of this view, Joâo Zilhao (with a number of co-authors, including Francesco d’Errico) has recently presented convincing evidence that Neanderthals used sea shells to hold paint, thus serving as palettes. And in another cave, some shells were almost certainly used to decorate the body. As Zilhao and his colleagues argue, the evidence “is, literally, rock-solid”: in Spain at least, the emergence of Neanderthal symbolism far predates any contact with humans.

Despite the wealth of genomic and archaeological information now available, inferences about our ancestors' encounters with Neanderthals still hang by a thread. Take the evidence for hybridization. As the investigators stress, the number of episodes of interbreeding between human and Neanderthal may have been minuscule. And in reality, very little depends on the fact that I might be in some tiny part Neanderthal. There is no reason to think that Neanderthal DNA has any bearing on who we are and how we behave.

What of the Neanderthals themselves — our mysterious alter egos but also evolution’s runners up, Darwin’s consolation prize, perhaps a little too close for comfort but now safely extinct? The Neanderthals certainly began to define a symbolic world, where the application of body paint and ornamentation may have denoted status, or sexual signals, or shamanism. All of these interpretations are equally possible, but so too are they equally speculative and possibly equally wrong.

On occasion the Neanderthals are known to have buried their dead, but with what implications? At the Kebara burial site in Israel, the skull is missing. Was this deliberate or simply an accident of circumstance? Is an abundance of pollen in another burial site in Iraq because flowers were placed on the corpse, or again simply accidental? Neanderthals were at times cannibalistic, but was it part of a solemn ritual or a response to the exigencies of starvation?

With the limited evidence currently available, some in the field are intensely skeptical of any effort to draw inferences about Neanderthal psychology. Others allow imagination a role in trying to see the world through Neanderthal eyes. So perhaps we can make some cautious speculations, always reminding ourselves that even among human cultures, ritual can be not only opaque but interpreted quite differently by succeeding generations of anthropologists. Nonetheless, in human cultures there are not only recurrent motifs but also persistent trends, not least a seemingly inexorable shift from polytheism to monotheism.

We cannot possibly impute any of this to Neanderthals, but the very fact that they too stumbled into a world of meanings suggests that it would be no surprise, if one were able to travel back in a time machine, to find Neanderthals articulating a sense of the numinous and transcendent, expressing the belief that there is more to the world than met the eye. And however fleeting the contact between the two species might have been, we can speculate that in each others' eyes, they saw a shared curiosity about the world.

A naïve romance? Perhaps. It is often assumed, and possibly rightly, that the extinction of the Neanderthals was a result of competition with us. There is no concrete evidence for human involvement with their final demise some 20,000 years ago, but given the disastrous nature of more recent cultural encounters, it does put speculation about contact between the two species in a less encouraging light. All the same, we cannot exclude the possibility that, as the last Neanderthal closed his eyes for the last time, not only did he grasp a necklace, but he felt that this was not the end of his story.

Simon Conway Morris is a professor of evolutionary paleobiology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St. John's College. Elected to the Royal Society in 1990, he is the author, most recently, of Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe.