The relationship between Neanderthals and the first sapiens arouses exciting debates. A confrontation between both species, a ‘war’ of 100,000 years, the time that coexistence lasted on the planet, with a victory for ours, has been the most accepted interpretation for a long time. Today we know that in addition to the possible hostility of the sapiens, there were other enemies in the fight.
The defeat of the Neanderthals, the extinction of the last “sister” species, could have been due to climatic changes, perhaps to their own anatomical condition, even to the effects of an epidemic that decimated them. New archaeological records and advances in understanding our genome have completely transformed the way we can now tell our story alongside Neanderthals.
The population density in Eurasia, throughout the Late Pleistocene, about 129,000 years ago, must have been very small. It is not a mere figure, but rather it addresses the possibilities of encounter that could have occurred in the past between both communities. They and we were very few.
We lack reliable data for the Middle Palaeolithic, but we do have data for the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic (Aurignacian), when a population of between 900 and 3,800 people is estimated in Central Europe. In other words, throughout central Europe the inhabitants of what today could be a small town were distributed. If we consider a habitable area greater than 10 million km², the population density was negligible, close to 0.103 people/100 km².
Add to the low population density that the places of residence (caves, shelters or riverbeds) were repeatedly reused by the same groups over time. Thus, the chances of contact between the two species must have been very low.
More matches than expected
There were more encounters between Neanderthals and Sapiens than seemed likely, and not just competition.
The experts managed to sequence the Neanderthal DNA in human remains such as those from El Sidrón (Asturias), Vindija (Croatia) or Mezmaiskaya (Russia), and we were able to begin to establish comparisons with the DNA of modern populations, as well as with the first sapiens that arrived to Europe.
The importance of sequencing has recently culminated in the award of the Nobel Prize for Medicine to its pioneer, Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. This comparison confirms that the relationship between these human groups was more frequent than previously thought. Likewise, it is contradictory that different species could have common offspring. But today we know that in us there is a genetic load of between 1% and 4% of Neanderthal DNA, although not all sapiens show traces of hybridization as occurs with African populations.
In 2018, the discovery of the remains of a girl, the daughter of a Neanderthal woman and a Denisovan man, was revealed, confirming that miscegenation was a viable and indiscriminate process.
Human remains from the Bacho Kiro sites in Bulgaria and Zlatý kůň in the Czech Republic have recently confirmed that contacts occurred frequently.
For the moment, the meetings must have been limited to specific geographical and chronological contexts. We know that, at least, they could have been produced in the Altai mountains of Siberia about 100,000 years ago, in the Near East around 60,000 years ago and in central Europe around 40,000 years ago, and all this based on genetic records of sapiens and neanderthals
The ‘loving’ relationship between species must have been restricted to the integration of isolated individuals within alien groups. Cultural selection processes in offspring must have sculpted our limited Neanderthal genetic load.
Similar but not the same
We tend to forget the importance of culture as a differentiator between human groups. Although they were not recognized as distinct species, they were should be considered different just as your material culture indicates.
For example, about 300,000 years ago, the first sapiens developed an industry identical to that of the Neanderthals but changed it in a short time to very complex standards. However, the homo neanderthalensis they kept it almost unchanged until its extinction. Likewise, even assuming that symbology and art formed part of the cultural richness of the Neanderthals, its generalization and expression is not at all assimilable to that of sapiens, and this without ruling out sapiens authorship as a result of an early arrival in the West.
Throughout the last 100,000 years in which contacts between these species are established, the culture of the Neanderthals undoubtedly seems the great winner. This Neanderthal industry, known as Mousterian, is recorded in European sites with hardly any variation since 300,000 years. In fact, the cultural hybridization that occurs in the Near East confirms the relative triumph of the Neanderthal tool production modes over those of Sapiens.
Can this be considered a dominance of one species over another? It is possible that the sociodemographic situation conditioned a cultural response in favor of the Neanderthals, but the flexibility and plasticity of the Sapiens could have been the key to this absorption of the Mousterian during the period in which both species came into contact over some 5,000 years. .
Faced with a marked territorial feeling in the Neanderthals, perhaps the Sapiens modeled the occupation of the same territory with greater mobility, gradually exhausting the traditional resources of their relatives.
A battle won in advance
Neanderthals were capable of adapting to harsh climatic changes and of exploiting highly varied environments and resources with complex technology.
Maybe it was his cultural immobility added to the new conditions created by the sporadic and perhaps early arrival of sapiens in Eurasia, which determined their gradual dissolution in favor of these, capable of carrying out agile migrations and adaptations to the environment with greater flexibility.
It was a slow ‘war’ but won in advance. It is not easy to know if the last Neanderthal groups were aware of their own extinction, leaving their traces in isolated redoubts.
This conflict between species led to sex, but it seems that with little love. Otherwise, Neanderthal DNA would be much more present in the human groups that evolved in Europe.
This article was originally published on ‘The Conversation’.
Javier Baena Preysler
“/>
Concepcion Torres Navas
“/>