Anatomically Archaic, Behaviorally Modern - The Last Neanderthals and Their Destiny

8/7/2019 Anatomically Archaic, Behaviorally Modern - The Last Neanderthals and Their Destiny

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DRIEENTWINTIGSTE KROON-VOORDRACHT

PROF. DR. JOAO ZILHAO

A N A TO M I CA L L Y A R C H A I C ,B E HA V IO R A LL Y M O D E R N :

THE L AS T N E A N D E R T H A L S A N D T H E I R D E S T I N Y


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V I E R D E K R O O N - V O O R D R AC H TR a y m o n d I-I. Tl~olnpson,\lr.torrli2etii; arid the G r ~ a l sArihaeology

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N E G E N D E K R O O N - V O O R D R A CH TM . Ridct le , The Thamcs and the Rhznr: urban origins in theChaiind-9-e,yiorr (p'zper pre~entrd or the N in th Kroon-I,'oov~1'1*ai.ht1986): niantd~iviptor p/4hlic~ztzotzZ~ ' Z / I I .rerti~ied)

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DeSTICHTING NEDERLANDS MUSEUM VOOR

ANTHROPOLOGIE EN PRAEHISTORIE,gevestigd te Amsterdam,

werd in het leven getoepen op 14 juni 1939, met als doelstelling:het bevorderen van de studie in de Anthropologie en Praehistoriein den ruimsten zin des woords. Zij tracht d it doe1 te bereikendoor het opsporen, systematisch verzamelen en wetenschappelijkbewerken van materiaal op het gebied der genoemde wetenschap-pen en het vetzamelde in daartoe ingerichte localiteiten ten toonte stellen en verder door alle wettige andere middelen ter be-reiking van dit doel, zulks alles ter beoordeling van het bestuur.

Het bestuur wotdt thans gevormd door:PROF. DR WILLY GROENM AN-VAN WAATERINGE, ZJ00Y~itteY

D R W I L LY H . M E T Z , 5ecreta~i~MR L. J . LEWIN, penningmter

I R D . J . ENSCHEDBD R G . J . R . MAAT

PROF. DR H. R . R E IN D E R SD R S E . J . B U L T

Van de collecties zijn bruiklenen tentoongesteld i n hetAmsterdarns Archeologisch Centrumvan de Universiteit van Amsterdam,Veluws Museum 'Nairac', Barneveld,

Westfties Museum, Hoorn.


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ANATOMICALLY ARCHAIC,BEHAVIORALLY MODERN:

THE LAST NEANDERTHALS ANDTHEIR DESTINY

DRIEENTWINTIGSTE KROON-VOORDRACHTGEHOUDEN VOOR DE

STIGHTING NEDERLANDS MUSEUMVOOR ANTHROPOLOGIE EN PRAEHISTORIE

TE AMSTERDAM OP 23 MAART 2001DOOR

PROF. DR. JOAO ZILHAODIRECTEUR VAN HET INS TITUTO P O RTUG U~~S

DE ARQUEOLOGIA, LISSABON, PORTUGAL


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ANATOMICALLY ARCHAI C, BEHAVIORALLY MODER N:THE LAST NEANDERTHALS AND THEIR DESTINY

I. THE MAKING OF A BAD REPUTATION

NEANDERTHALS AS A DEAD-END

The concept that Neanderthals are a side branch of humanity, adead-end in human evolution, can be traced back to MarcelinBoule's classical analysis of the La Chapelle-aux-SaintsNeanderthal specimen (Boule 1911-13). Later boosted by thePiltdown finds and the endorsement received from Keith, whatcame to be known as the pre-Sapiens theory was borne:

"As formulated by Keith and Boule, the pre-Sapiens theoryargued that large-brained, modern-skulled humans were sodistinctive that they must have had a long (and honorable)evolutionary history. Besides, anything as special as ourselvesmust have taken a long time to evolve . Boule and Keithwere distinctively uncomfortable with any suggestion thatwe might have been descended, relatively recently, from any-thing less human than ourselves. They preferred to believethat pre-Sapiens humans existed far back int o the Pliocene .relegating all known fossil hominids to aberrant side-branches on the family tree" (Trinkaus and Shipman1993:308).

This attitude not only led to popular views of Neanderthals asthe half-man, half-beast of the famous 1953 movie (Fig. I), butalso had scientific implications for the analysis of the hominidfossil record from even earlier times. In fact, such a belief in thephylogenetic time-depth of modern man was still being stronglyupheld by Louis Leakey in the 1960s and, in the I~ ~ O S - I ~ ~ O S ,n-fluenced his son Richard's rejection of Lucy and her kind as an-cestral to both the later Australopithecines and the genus Homo


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Fig. I . The 1 9 ~ 0 siew of NeanderthaIs as ha lf man h alf beast asexpressed in the poster for the movie The Neanderthal Ma n (Un ited

Artists I9 j3 , reproduced rom Trinkazls andship man 1 993 ).Uohanson and Edey 1981; Leakey and Lewin 1981). However, oncethe Piltdown hoax was exposed, the only paleontological evi-dence supporting the existence of the pre-Sapiens phylum in

Europe was the Fontechevade material, upon which Vallois basedhis reassertion of the theory. Their fragmentary condition and theill-defined stratigraphic circumstances in which they were founddid not prevent Vallois from reconstructing the Fontechevadefossils with a voluminous cranium and no frontal torus. On thebasis of this (questionable, as later studies would demonstrate)reconstruction, Vallois proclaimed that "this is the first time thatman, certainly not Neanderthal although earlier than theNeanderthals, has been found in Europe" (Vallois 1949:357).Besides the fragilities of the interpretation, the paucity of thefinds represented another major empirical obstacle to the accep-tance of the theory. Whereas Neanderthals and ante-Neanderthalfossils kept being found throughout all of Europe in the post-waryears, the pre-Sapiens seemed to be mysteriously absent from thepaleontological record. This is how Vallois solved the puzzle:

"Somewhere in the east, doubtless in Western Asia, and priorto the Wiirm, there must have existed Presapiens men whoby gradual development became sapiens proper. . . in parallelfashion in Europe, the Preneanderthals were likewise becom-ing transformed into the classical Neanderthals. Under thesecircumstances one may suppose . that the Swanscombe andFontechevade men were emissaries of an Asiatic stock [ofhumans of modern appearance), coming into Europe duringinterglacial periods, which however were not able to maintainthemselves there.. . [The Neanderthals) remained in sole pos-session at the beginning of the Wiirm. Reappearing with thesecond period of this glaciation, descendants of the Presapienslost no time in taking a final revenge on their Mousterianconquerors". (Vallois, Origin of Homo sapiens, quoted inTrinkaus and Shipman 1993:310).

The fact that Vallois' pre-Sapiens were almost invisible in the pa-leontological record did not seem to constitute a problem to


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Fran~ois Bordes' interpretation of the Middle to UpperPaleolithic transition in Western Europe. For him, theChPtelperronian or early Perigordian, with its stone tools madeon blades and with its ornaments and bone tools, was a fullyUpper Paleolithic culture and the first of its kind to emerge inFrance. Based on the technology and the typology of lithic as-semblages, Bordes asserted that this culture developed from theMousterian of Acheulian Tradition (MTA). The archaeologicalcontinuity between the two, and the belief that UpperPaleolithic culture was the ha'lmark of modern humans, led himto assume that the makers of the MTA could only have been thebiological equivalent of the archaeological remains they leftbehind: put in other words, the pre-Sapiens makers of a pre-Upper Paleolithic culture.Bordes also believed that the different Mousterian facies he hadrecognized in the PCrigord represented contemporary ethnicgroups who would have lived side by side without culture ad-mixture throughout the whole of the early Wurm. ContraVallois, this implied that pre-Sapiens people would have contin-ued to live in the European continent alongside the classicNeanderthals. This also implied that human bones found in asso-ciation with the MTA or the ChPtelperronian could not beNeanderthal, leading him to reject previously reported associa-tions of Neanderthal remains with the MTA. A case in point isthe Neanderthal child found a t Pech de I'Az6 I, where he argued,against the original excavators, that the fossil had come fromsome other level, possibly from one with Denticulate Mousterianindustries (Bordes 1972, 1984). And he rejected that the Saint-Cesaire Neanderthal was the maker of the ChPtelperronian mate-rials found in the layer containing his skeleton (Bordes 1981).As subsequent research has demonstrated (Trinkaus et al. 1999a;Maureille and Soressi zooo), Bordes was wrong on both counts,and his rejection of the empirical evidence in these cases can only

be explained by his philosophical adherence to the pre-Sapienshypothesis. For him, even if no fossils had been found in earlyWurm contexts, the MTA as a pre-Upper Paleolithic culture rep-resented archaeological evidence that pre-Sapiens people werenot mere phantoms. They had actually existed.

Currently, the view tha t the classical Neanderthals are the last ofa variety of humans that inhabited Europe from at least 300,000BP onwards and whose origins can be found in the ancestralstock represented by the group of fossils collectively designatedas ante-Neanderthals (Arago, Atapuerca-Sima de 10s Huesos,etc.) is widely accepted: no one seems to be looking for MiddlePleistocene pre-Sapiens fossils any more (Hublin 1996). On theother hand, and since, by definition, contemporary forms cannotbe ancestral to one another, the establishment of the fact thatNeanderthals in Iberia survived until as late as ca. 28,000 BP(Villaverde and Fumanal 1990; Vega 1990; Zi lhb 1993, 1997,2000; Hublin et al. 1995), whereas modern human fossil remainsare now directly dated by AMS elsewhere in Europe from at leastca. 33,000 BP onwards (Richards et al. n.d.), effectively precludesaccepting the alternative view initially put forward by Hrdlirka(1927) and then developed by Brace (1962) and Brose and Wolpoff(1971), among others. Thei r multiregional model of human ori-gins asserted that humans had evolved as a single interconnectedspecies throughout the whole of the Old World ever since thetime Homo erectus left Africa, more than one million years ago.Rather than an extinct side branch, Neanderthals were seen as aphase or grade in the process of overall worldwide change fromHomo erectus to Homo sapiens. This grade was also represented inAfrica and Asia by fossil specimens in a similar intermediatemorphological stage of the evolutionary process. In sum, the evi-dence for continuity and depth in the phylogenesis ofNeanderthals indicated tha t there was no need to look elsewhere:Neanderthals were the true pre-Sapiens, tha t is, the early modernhumans of Europe were the result of the local evolution of the


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latest Neanderthals, which had become "modern" in morphologyand "Upper Paleolithic" in culture in the framework of a gradual,long-term biocultural transition process taking place throughoutthe period between 50,000 and 25,000 years ago.If Neanderthals are not pre-Sapiens, and if no pre-Sapiens inBoule's sense ever existed in Middle and early Late Pleistocenetimes, the only logical way out in the search for the origins ofEuropean modern humans was to recuperate the other compo-nent of Vallois' model: an extra-continental origin of modernmorphology, and a penetration of the latter i n Europe throughsome sort of diffusion process (which did not have to be neces-sarily represented as the war-like final revenge imagined byhim). Vallois had suggested Western Asia. In the 197os,Vandermeersch's (1981) study of the fossils ftom Qafzeh and hissuggestion that they were Pro td ro -M ag no n and, hence, ances-tral to Europe's early modern humans, seemed to vindicate thisidea, further strengthened ten years later by the establishment ofan early, interglacial chronology, around ~oo ,o oo ears ago, forthe QafzehISkhul people (cf. different papers in Akazawa et al.1998). However, as the work carried at the same time by ErikTrinkaus (1981) and Giinter Brauer (1984) would show, the searchdid not end in the Middle East: the ultimate orig in of the Qafzehpeople was in Africa, where a gradual morphological shift fromHomo erectus to Homo sapiens could be followed throughout theMiddle Pleistocene. This continuous phylum was homologousto that represented by the ante-Neanderthal to classicalNeanderthal sequence of Europe, and suggested that the two hadbroken apart many tens of thousands of years ago and had beenevolving separately ever since.

The recognition of this hct raised three different problems:1. what was the extent of the distinction between the two

phyla; did they represent different species, different sub-species, or different populations of the same subspecies?

2. what neurological and behavioral implications, if any,could be derived ftom the existence of such morphologi-cal differences?

3. given that Neanderthals disappeared and that this couldnot have come about as the result of their own isolatedtransformation into moderns, how, when and why did themodern morphology spread into Europe and eventuallyreplace totally and completely the Neanderthal morphol-ogy?

NEANDERTHALS AS DIFFERENT BUT NO LESS HU M A N

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, adopting Vallois' premiseof looking outside Europe for the origins of modern humans didnot entail accepting what had been the basic premise of the pre-Sapiens hypothesis since its original formulation by Boule: theneed to distance ourselves from Neanderthals as the archetypalman-as-animal dead end of the human evolutionary process. Onthe contrary, under the impact of the finds made by RalphSolecki at Shanidar Cave, emphasis was made on the humanenessof Neanderthals, which tended to be treated in books and televi-sion series written for a wider audience as close cousins who,albeit morphologically distinct, would shock no one if droppedin a subway car dressed in proper at tire (Fig. 2).In his popular book and series Origins, Richard Leakey, a firmbeliever, in his family's tradition, in the deep phylogenetic rootsof Homo sapiens and in the biological separateness of theNeanderthals, explained the bad reputation of the latter in thefollowing terms (Leakey and Lewin 1977:124-125).

"Possibly because he was the first obvious archaic human tobe unearthed . Neanderthal Man has become fixed in theminds of many people as the archetypal human ancestor: alow brow; a thrust ing face, but with a receding jaw; fearsome


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Fig. 2. The 197 0s view ofNeanderthals as fairlygood-looking people witha primitiv e technology an d notal l tha t differen t rom ozrrselves(from Leakey and Lewin 1 981 ).

beetle brows; and a stooped, lumbering gait in which astocky muscular body was dragged about with seeminglymalevolent intent. Misconceptions about the Neanderthalers'posture came mainly from the relatively complete but se-verely contorted remains of an old arthritic individual whodied at what is now known as La Chapelle-am-Saints insouthern France. The notion of malevolence came fromnowhere but a hostile imagination." And he continued: "Wecan now be sure that the Neanderthalers led a complex,thoughtful, and sensitive existence, surviving somehow inthe extremely harsh conditions of an ice-gripped Europe."

The archaeological data invoked as the basis for this evaluationwere the funerary practices of Neanderthals, particularly theShanidar burials. Although the evidence has recently come to beregarded as controversial (Sommer 1999), analysis of the pollencontained in the sediment surrounding one of the skeletonsfound at Shanidar suggested that deliberate arrangements offlowers had been deposited alongside the dead person as part ofthe burial ritual. The fact that the species present in thosearrangements had until recently been used in local herbal medi-cine further led to the speculation that the Shanidar people al-ready knew the healing properties of those plants. In fact, Leakeyconcluded his account of the Shanidar Neanderthals with a sen-tence implying that the evidence for what could be regarded asspecifically human behavior was stronger among them thanamong ancestral modern humans of the same time period:"Although as yet there are no signs of ritual as subtle as theflower burial for our true ancestors, we can be sure tha t their cul-ture was no less developed". And evidence that the two groupsindeed shared a similar level of cultural capabilities was pro-vided, in the Middle East, by the fact that the stone tool assem-blages found in the caves containing the burials of Neanderthalsand Proto-Cro-Magnon people represented essentially identicalMiddle Paleolithic technologies.Leakey's version of how Neanderthals eventually disappeared isalso quite telling of the spirit of the time, and seems to have beenwritten as a direct refutation of Vallois:

"By the time the Neanderthal populations slid in to eclipsearound thirty thousand years ago, truly modern humans hadbeen firmly established for at least twenty thousand years.But there is no convincing evidence to suggest that waves ofmodern man swept through Neanderthal territory, raping,pillaging, and murdering all who stood in their way. Pocketsof Neanderthals, biologically far along their evolutionary


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blind alley, would have remained separate from the newcom-ers until they died out through economic competition. Butothers who were genetically less distant from the evolvingsapiens populations might have been absorbed by inter-breeding."

The fact that, in the late 197os, this quite favourable view ofNeanderthals prevailed among both physical anthropologists andthe media may to a large extent be related to the intellectual en-vironment of the times, still largely influenced, particularly inthe anglophone world, by the 1960s ideology of "flower power"and "make love not war", and by the massive opposition amongAmerica's University students to their country's intervention inVietnam. It is not surprising, in this context, that a new researchtrend emerged precisely at this time. Instead of focusing on thephylogenetic place of Neanderthals in human evolution or onhow their looks and achievements compared with those of our"true" human ancestors, some researchers began to look atNeanderthals with a functional perspective, trying to find out towhat extent some of their anatomical specificities could be ex-plained as adaptation to their natural and cultural environments.This line of inquiry eventually led to Erik Trinkaus' finding thatNeanderthals and Proto-Cro-Magnons had contrasting bodyshapes that could be explained in simple eco-geographical termsas arctic versus tropical (Trinkaus 1981), which also provided thefirst hard evidence that the earliest modern humans of Europe,with their tropical body proportions, had indeed come fromAfrica.It is also in the framework of this functionalist approach that thenotion was borne that robust Neanderthals might have beendoing with their muscles what more gracile early modernhumans had to do with tools and, hence, the hypothesis that thelatter's ultimate prevalence over the former might have been theconsequence of a specifically stronger stimulus for cultural and

technological innovation. As Trinkaus and Shipman (1993:417)put it:

"The aspects of their anatomy that are most telling of theirbehavior are their tremendous strength and endurance. Fromthe robust dimensions of their limb bones .. to the pro-nounced bony crests and sturdy ridges where brawny musclesattached .. the primary message bespoken by Neanderthalanatomy is "power". No Olympic athlete of today has a com-parable overall robustness.. . The evidence suggests that theelaborateness and the eacacy of Neanderthal technology wasapparently much poorer than that of modern hunter-gather-ers, leaving Neanderthals no choice but to accomplish thetask of daily life through brute strength, incredible stamina,and dogged persistence".

In a recent development of this idea, Niewoehner (2001) hasshown that there were significant differences in the functionalanatomy of the hand between Neanderthals and the SkhullQafzeh people, whose carpo-metacarpal remains were much likethose of later Upper Paleolithic and Holocene humans. In spite ofrecognizing that the notion is contradicted by all the availablearchaeological evidence, which shows that stone tool assemblagesassociated with both human types in the Near East are indis-tinguishable in terms of pointltool ratios and of artifactual in-dicators of the use of hafting, the author was led to suggest thatthis skeletal evidence meant that early modern humans wereusing tools with handles much more frequently. This might havegiven them the adaptive advantage behind their later worldwidespread and consequent disappearance of Neanderthals and otherarchaic humans with "power"-adapted instead of "precision"-adapted hands.Even if such paleontological data might be interpreted asstrengthening the case for contrast ing behavioral performances,


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one of the leading figures in Neanderthal research of the lastquarter century could still write, as late as 1989, that "the pro-duction of complex bone tools, varied personal ornaments and ex-tensive use of red ochre would seem, on the face of it, to provide astrong argument for broadly similar cognitive and social capaci-ties among the late Neanderthals to those of modern humans"(Mellars 1989). This statement, based on the St. Cesaire burialevidence, which showed that the ChPtelperronian had been thework of Neanderthals (Leveque and Vandermeersch 1980), is aHthe more significant since the same author, ten years later, wouldbe arguing strongly in favor of explaining those same features ofthe ChPtelperronian culture as a product of mimicking behavior,as a consequence of the fact that the last Neanderthals of France,impacted by the arrival of modern humans, copied some ele-ments of their culture but without really understanding their fullmeaning. In ten years time, the Neanderthals had been down-graded from being endowed with similar cognitive and social ca-pabilities to being separated from modern humans by somefundamental cognitive barrier that prevented them from havingachieved the fully symbolical behavior evidenced by modernhuman's extensive use of art in the Upper Paleolithic (Mellars1998a, 1999).

N E A N D E R T H A L S A S B I O L OG I C AL L Y A N DC U L T U RA L L Y I N F E R I O R

Mellars' change of position is a good individual illustration of themajor shift in the prevailing attitudes towards modern humanemergence that occurred in the academic world during the 1980s.A major factor in this process was the entry in the debate of anentirely new line of inquiry: the inferences regarding past humanevolution made from the study of human genetics and, in partic-ular, the mtDNA evidence on which the "Eve" or "Out-of-Africa" hypothesis was based (Cann et al. 1987). Another factorwas the gradual incorporation in archaeological interpretation of

the taphonomic method. Thi s incorporation prompted a criticalre-evaluation of the major issues of human evolution in the lightof a basic principle coined by Lewis Binford (1983). Defining cul-ture as the set of universal behaviors found to be common to allhumans on the basis of the ethnoarchaeological study of presentday hunter-gatherer societies, he postulated that the capacity forculture could be assumed to have existed in the past only whendealing with the archaeological remains of anatomically modernpeople. When dealing with archaic humans or with th e australo-pithecine~, uch an assumption was unwarranted. In other words,such a capacity had to be demonstrated, and the way to do i t wasto adopt as the null hypothesis that it did not exist: the null hy-pothesis had t o be falsified by showing that the patterns identi-fied in the archaeological record could not be explained in theframework of ordinary mammalian or primate behaviors beforeaccepting that the hominids who produced them were cogni-tively and behaviourally akin to us.

The geneticists behind the mitochondria1 Eve hypothesis arguedthat all humans today were very closely related, implying a veryrecent last ancestor, which, on the basis of different measures ofdiversity and rates of mutation, would have lived in Africa some200,000 years ago. Neanderthals and other archaic human forms,therefore, had disappeared without contributing to the presentgene pool. Put another way, they were not our ancestors, and hadbeen replaced everywhere through the eventual out of Africa mi-gration of Eve's children. This model was elaborated and refinedwith further genetic studies, culminating in the successful ex-traction of fossil mtDNA from the original Feldhoffer CaveNeanderthal specimen and the inferences derived from its com-parison with that of present humans (Krings et al. 1997). Theauthors of this major paper concluded from their data thatthe Neanderthals were phylogenetically distant from modernhumans and quite probably belonged in an altogether differentspecies.


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This line of research, therefore, provided what seemed to be asound and definitive answer to the first of the three questionsoutlined above, that of how biologically different Neanderthalswere from us. The revision of Lower and Middle Paleolithic ar-chaeology made under the influence of this genetic paradigm andwith extensive use of Binford's approach would provide a separateset of arguments that seemed to imply that this biological dis-tance had also had far-reaching behavioral implications. A stringof studies, summarized by Binford (1989), Stringer and Gamble(1993) and Mellars (1996a, 1996b), suggested, for instance:

I. That the faunal assemblages found in Lower and MiddlePaleolithic archaeological sites represented for the mostpart scavenging behavior or immediate consumption atthe point of procurement; this indicated that the plan-ning depth required for the logistically organized largegame hunting documented in Upper Paleolithic timeswas not part of the behavioral repertoire of Neanderthals;such a lack of planning depth and anticipation could alsobe seen in the limited distances travelled by raw-materialsand, hence, in the small size of groups and social territo-ries; "all indications are that groups in the MiddlePaleolithic were uniformly small and their mobility veryhigh whatever the environmental form or dynamics.Related to this lack of mobility and group-size flexibilityis the minimal organization of the technology, its quickturnover rate, and the lack of planning depth" (Binford1989);

2. That the features found in some Middle Paleolithic sitesand interpreted as human burials were better explained asaccidental preservation or simple discard of dead bodies;even when deliberate interment could be proven, therewas no firm evidence of ritual offerings and, therefore, thepractice could not be taken as evidence for complex belief

systems; "at best, all the reported occurrences of supposedgrave offerings from European [Neanderthal) sites mustbe regarded as unproven" (Mellars 1996a);

3. That structured hearths and huts were absent from theLower and Middle Paleolithic record, indicating that theliving spaces inhabited were more like the nests of pri-mates than like the organized camps of the UpperPaleolithic, as was also shown by the absence of pattern-ing in the spatial distribution of artifacts and faunal re-mains; this indicated non-specialized activities and,hence, no division of labor and no evidence for any form ofsocial organization beyond that required by the group'sneed to reproduce; "we suspect, for example, that thestructures at Molodova and Arcy-sur-Cure more resem-bled "nests" than the symbolic "homes" of the Moderns atKostenki or Dolni Virstonice (Stringer and Gamble19931207)

4. That, in terms of their initial shape, the morphology ofMiddle Paleolithic tools was largely constrained by thephysical laws at work when rocks with a conchoidal frac-ture were broken, and, in terms of their shape at the timeof abandonment, it was the outcome of mechanical wear,through use and resharpening; in sum, instead of repre-senting the imposition of mental templates on externalmatter, they were the expression of the basic skills re-quired t o perform in the framework of a "tool-assisted be-havior" as opposed to the true "culture" apparent in thediversity of typologically well-defined bone and stone im-plements, particularly projectile points, found in theUpper Paleolithic; ". the Ancients, including theNeanderthals , [were) tool-assisted hominids . Artifactsand weapons, campsites and landscapes were never elabo-rated in the cultural ways tha t are so basic to any defini-


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tion of what makes a modern human modern" (Stringerand Gamble 1993:216-217);

5. Tha t, combined with the absence of ornaments and repre-sentational art, in sharp contrast with the creative explo-sion of the initial Upper Paleolithic, the above featuresindicated that Neanderthals lacked the capacity for sym-bolic thought, implying that the communication deviceit required, language, did not exist or was exceedinglyprimitive (Fig. 3); this conclusion, in turn, was in goodaccord with analyses of the basal skull of the Neanderthalsfrom which a position of the larynx incompatible with orcomplicative of articulated language was inferred; "Theycould certainly communicate, as can all social animals,and they no doubt spoke, albeit simply and probablyslowly. We argue that the Neanderthals lacked complexspoken language because they did not need it. We couldnot imagine life without it, but they did not have thesocial life to require it" (Stringer and Gamble 1993: 217).

Fig.3. The 1990sview ofNean&thals as a culturally inferior,language-lacking separate species (Obsewer, reproduced rom Stringer

and McKie 1996).In sum, Neanderthals were not only biologically distinct bu talso, as proven by the archaeological record, behaviorally inferior.They lacked the capacity for symbolically organized behavior:

". symbolism in the Upper Paleolithic suffused many ele-ments of behavior, determining such mundane aspects of lifeas the use of space and objects of everyday existence. In ourview, ChPtelperronian stone tools and the rudimentary struc-tures found at such sites as Molodova and Arcy-sur-Cure areevidence that the Neanderthals had the capacity for emula-tion, for change, but not for symbolism.. when Neanderthals and Moderns came into contact inWestern Europe between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago, theModerns changed the forces of selection on Neanderthal be-havior. The social world in which the European Neanderthalsnow participated was fundamentally different from the pre-ceding IOO,OOOears, and the archaeological evidence clearlyindicates that the Neanderthals imitated certain aspects ofmodern behavior. But while they could emulate they couldnot fully understand."

. the main structural difference distinguishing the Modernsfrom the Ancients was the practice of symbolically organizedbehavior." (Stringer and Gamble 1993:207).

In this framework, the last of the above set of three major ques-tions almost became a non-sequitur: the biologically-based intel-lectual inferiority of the Neanderthals carried the implicationthat it was not necessary to explain their disappearance in histori-cal terms, since such would be the inevitable outcome of themassive biologically-based cultural superiority of the moderns.As soon as the latter's expansion began, the Neanderthals, as wellas the other kinds of morphologically archaic humans that haddeveloped in eastern Asia, were doomed. However, even if theirdemise was the inevitable outcome of their biological differenceand did not require a historical explanation, two major problemsremained before the model could be said to account for all thefacts.


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The first problem was that the archaeological record suggestedthat, for more than one hundred thousand years after Eve's death,anatomically modern humans seemed to have behaved just likethe Neanderthals. In fact, the above-mentioned list of differencesbetween the Lower and Middle Paleolithic, on one hand, and theUpper Paleolithic, on the other, applied to both Neanderthalsand their modern human contemporaries. Therefore, even if thedemise of Neanderthals was self-explained by their inferior biol-ogy, one still had to explain why, when and how "modern behav-ior", or "culture", had made its appearance in the evolutionarytrajectory of anatomically modern humans. The second problemwas that, as proven not only by the Saint-Cksaire burial (L6vCqueand Vandermeersch 1980) but also by the inner ear of the Grott edu Renne's child (Hublin et al. 1996), the Chgtelperronian, thefirst Upper Paleolithic culture of Europe, heralded in art historystudies as the first stage of the creative explosion (Leroi-Gourhan1964), had been made by Neanderthals. Bordes' argument forcontinuity between the MTA and the Chgtelperronian was vindi-cated, but the empirical record showed that the implications ofthat continuity were the exact opposite of what he had expected:not that the MTA was the work of the pre-Sapiens ancestors ofCro-Magnon people, but that the MTA-Chgtelperronian se-quence represented the Neanderthals' own transition from theMiddle to the Upper Paleolithic.Out-of-Africa supporters have never adequately solved the first ofthese two problems. Mellars (1998b:107-108) tried by postulatinga distinction between "cognitive potential" and "behavioral per-formance": moderns producing Middle Paleolithic industries inthe Near-East or the Middle Stone Age assemblages of Africapossessed a high cognitive potential but were performing belowtheir full capacity as a consequence of "a variety of different envi-ronmental and related economic and demographic factors." The

presence of burials such as Skhul or the emergence of blade-basedtechnocomplexes such as the Howiesons Poort demonstrated thatthe cognitive potential was indeed there, while the incomplete-ness of the Upper Paleolithic package did not imply that fullymodern behavior capabilities were lacking. As noted by ZilhZoand d'Errico (1999a), however, this carried the unsolvable inter-nal logical contradiction of recognizing major cognitive abilitiesamong moderns even when they behaved like Neanderthals,while denying them to Neanderthals even when (by buryingtheir dead and by manufacturing blade-based lithic assemblages)they behaved like moderns...In fact, the closest we got to a co-herent explanation of why modern behavior took so much timeto emerge from modern anatomy was Richard Klein's invokingof a second biological mutation occurring some time around50,ooo years ago. The first mutation would have created themodern anatomy among Eve's immediate descendants, while thissecond mutation would have been responsible for the advent oflanguage and symbolism among later African moderns, thus pro-moting a quantum leap in their culture and demography andtriggering their invasion of Eurasia:

"For those who favor the replacement hypothesis, a potentialdifficulty is to explain why anatomically modern or near-modern humans expanded to Eurasia only between 50,oooand 40,000 years ago, more than 50,ooo years after theyoccupied Africa and its immediate southwest Asian margin. . The reason, however, is probably that early modern ornear-modern Africans were not behaviorally modern. In everydetectable archaeological respect, they were in fact indistin-guishable from their Eurasian Neanderthal contemporaries.. .It was only when anatomically modern Africans developedmodern behavior between 50,ooo and 40,000 years ago .that they gained an undeniable competitive advantage overtheir non-modern Eurasian contemporaries. Arguably, themost likely stimulus for modern behavior was a neurological


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advance, perhaps promoting the fully modern capacity forrapid articulated phonemic speech . The neurological hy-pothesis requires only a random, selectively advantageousmutation like ones that must have occurred many times ear-lier in human evolution" (Klein 1998:sog-$10).

Although logically coherent and, if valid, apt to play the role ofthe key stone sustaining the intellectual edifice represented by"Out of Africa with complete replacement", this solution had amajor weakness, recognized by Klein himself: "the hypothesis ispresently impossible to test" (Klein 1998:po). Put another way, itwas not a scientific hypothesis to begin wi th.. .The second problem was dealt with by proposing that theChPtelperronian was not an independent achievement ofEuropean Neanderthals but, instead, the result of their accultura-tion by the incoming modern humans (Demars and Hubl in 1989;Harrold 1989; Stringer and Gamble 1993; Mellars 1996a, 1996b).A good summary of these authors' reasoning can be found inHublin (1999:117):

"This Neanderthal transition to the Upper Paleolithic onlytakes place after the Aurignacian-making modern humanshad penetrated in Europe. Among the Neanderthalers, thefamous "transitional" industries develop in the peripheries ofareas where modern groups had settled. It is tempting to seein this the result of contacts, the adoption of techniques, thecopying of objects, arms and utensils. Al though they contin-ued to manufacture their Mousterian tool-kits and used theirown technologies, the contact with Aurignacian populationswould have led the Neanderthals to manufacture kinds of ob-jects that had first been brought into Europe by modernhumans".

Just proposing a mechanism that worked was not enough, how-

ever, to prove that things actually had happened that way. It wasalso necessary to falsify any alternative explanations, particularlythat of the independent Neanderthal transition to the UpperPaleolithic implied by Bordes' establishment of total continuitybetween the MTA and the ChPtelperronian. In order to achievethis aim, as shown above, Stringer and Gamble (1993) suggestedthe simplest of all possible solutions: Neanderthals had not madeit on their own simply because of their intrinsic incapabilities,their lack of truly cultural behavior. Mellars (1998a, 1999) tookthe argument one step further by fleshing it out with operativeanalogies for how Neanderthal acculturation might actually havetaken place.Assuming a long-term contemporaneity between the Ch8tel-perronian and the Aurignacian, Mellars pointed out that "in nocase of modern ethnographic contact between European and in-digenous populations has this kind of separate development beenmaintained for more than a few centuries" and, therefore, "somefundamental barrier must have existed to prevent the total inte-gration and assimilation of the two populations over this impres-sive span of $000-6000 years" (Mellars 1999). Given this, thebarrier had to be a cognitive one, and "the ability to copy thehabits or appearance of the new, intrusive groups" must somehowhave been socially adaptive: "in a contracting, competitive, lateNeanderthal world" it would have given individuals "increasedpersonal or social prestige, or even improved mating success." Insum, ChPtelperronian ornaments would have functioned asproviders of status for male Neanderthals, who would have usedthem without realizing that contemporary moderns attachedmuch more elaborated meanings to such kinds of artifacts. This"beads for the indigenes" model was typical 19th century anthro-pology at work one hundred years after going obsolete, as wasmade explicit in Mellars' example of colonial-time NewGuineans as behaving in terms of the "imitation without under-standing" of Neanderthals, that is, as people who had copied ob-


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jects and technology without a simultaneous transfer of all theassociated social, symbolic, ideological and cognitive patterns:"no one has ever suggested that the copying of airplane forms inNew Guinea cargo cults implied a knowledge of aeronautics orinternational travel". And, much as 19th century anthropologyliked to compare the behavior of the "primitives" encountered innewly colonized lands with that of European children, so Mellarscontinued: "to draw another analogy, if a child put s on a string ofpearls, she is probably doing this to imitate her mother, not tosymbolize her wealth, emphasize her social status, or attract theopposite sex".From the empirical point of view, this solution rested entirely onaccepting as an established fact that there had indeed beena period of close-range, long-term contemporaneity betweenChLelperronian Neanderthals and Aurignacian moderns. Al-though the very early radiocarbon dates reported in 1989 forAurignacian levels in the Spanish caves of El Castillo (Cabreraand Bischoff 1989; Cabrera et al. 1996) and 1'Arbreda (Bischoff etal. 1989; Maroto 1994) came to play a preponderant role in the ar-gument, initially, the proponents of acculturation borrowed ele-ments of Bordes' model of the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithictransition, in this case, the interstratifications between the twocultures described at Le Piage and Roc-de-Combe (Bordes 1984).Bordes, however, had used this evidence to sustain an entirelydifferent argument: that the Chltelperronian was in fact the ini-tial stage of a cultural phylum, the Perigordian, which wouldhave developed in southwestern France alongside the Auri-gnacian for some 15,ooo years. That stratigraphic evidence wasinvoked to ascertain the independence, the separateness and theevolution without mutual influence of the two cultures and,hence, as further support for Bordes' view on Mousterian vari-ability, synthesized in his famous conclusion that the long-termcontemporaneity in a small region of the six Mousterian typesthat he had identified showed that "people exchanged their genes

more readily than their culture" (Bordes 1968).Thus, the acculturation solution turned upside down bothBordes' diagnosis of the ChPtelperronian and its philosophicalpremise. Instead of something very different and completely un-influenced by the Aurignacian (the really solid part of Bordes'analyses of the problem, as confirmed by all subsequent studies- elegrin 1995; d'Errico et al. 1998), to the extent that Bordesthought it could only represent the first stage of a completelydifferent culture that would continue to evolve separately formany thousands of years, the Chltelperronian became a geo-graphically isolated episode of imitation of the Aurignacian.Chhelperronian lithics represented Neanderthals copying theblade technology of the Aurignacian, Chiitelperron points werestone imitations of the bone points of the Aurignacian,Chhelperronian ornaments, if not the product of spurious associ-ations caused by natural processes (White 1992, 1993), mighthave been simply traded, scavenged or copied from Aurignaciancontexts (Hublin et al. 1996). Hence, contra Bordes, peoplewould have exchanged their culture more readily than theirgenes.. . That people actually tend to do both, in the past as wellas in the present, seems to have occurred to none of those in-volved in the elaboration of the acculturation solution.The combined result of all these studies was that a resurrectedand revamped version of the pre-Sapiens hypothesis became thedominant view of the emergence of modern humans in the 1990s.With the exception of the occasional interglacial eruptions oftruly ancestral people, this view shared the other basic tenets ofVallois' model: the Neanderthals-as-less-than-human distantrelatives that were not part of our ancestry; the Asian (Near-Eastern) origin of the true ancestors of the first modernEuropeans; and the complete replacement, with no admixture, ofthe former by the latter. In fact, even that first exception is notabsolute, since some of the staunchest supporters of the accultur-


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ation solution have become to speculate that the interglacial andearly glacial blade industries and the Neanderthal burials ofEurope may be related to an interglacial influx of SkhulIQafzehpeople, or to a long-distance acculturation by the latter: ".the practice of burial and the extensive use of pigments byNear Eastern modern humans seem to predate these behaviors inthe Eastern African and European Neanderthals, and thi s raisesquestions about the possibility of long-distance diffusion ofcultural traits" (Hublin 1998); ". no Neanderthal burial isknown . . before early modern humans are proved to havedeveloped this practice in the Near East. Cultural similaritiesbetween Neanderthals and modern humans in the Levantmight advocate the long distance diffusion of some innovationsin the late Middle Paleolithic, such as the extensive use ofpigments in the late Mousterian of Eurasia on the eve of OIS 3"(Hublin 2ooo:171).Thus we came full circle, fully back to Vallois' 1949 position: atthe peak of its popularity, "Out-of-Africa with complete replace-ment" had become a theoretical proposition which, instead ofmoving the field ahead into the research of new problems and therefining of previously well-established patterns, had taken it fiftyyears back in time. Moreover, in order to achieve internal coher-ence, it had been forced to incorporate lines of reasoning thatshould have looked very suspicious to any one familiar with theintellectual history of western civilization.In fact, the "second mutation" solution was pretty much likeTeilhard de Chardin's reconciliation between Darwinian evolu-tion and Catholic faith: the bodily evolution of humans wasdriven by natural selection, but consciousness, what makes usdifferent from the other animals, was proof of God's hand in theprocess. The internal logic of the model also followed a track thatquite paralleled the biblical narrative: Africa as the Garden ofEden; the mitochondria1 Eve, like the Eve of the Genesis, as the

mother of all humans; the migration of a "chosen people"(whether the Jews of the Bible or the anatomically modernhumans of the model) after having seen the light (or after havingbeen endowed with symbolic thought); mutations happening ata convenient time and in the convenient place in order to be ableto play the mechanical role of miracles in driving the events; etc.The "acculturation" solution, in turn, as it was refined and mademore precise in the process of replying to critics, became com-pletely and explicitly modelled after the colonial expansion ofEuropean powers over the last five hundred years. Clearly, therehad to be something very wrong with an explanation for whathappened in the largely empty hunter-gatherer world of 40,000years ago that was processualy akin to what happened when theindustrial world started to pour millions of people into the terri-tories inhabited by the last surviving representatives of our pre-urban way of life.

The gradual realization of the fundamental weaknesses of the so-lutions found by its proponents to the aspects of the "Out-of-Africa with complete replacement" model that were difficult toreconcile with the empirical record contributed to keeping alivehealthy but minority alternative views of the emergence ofmodern humans and of the disappearance of Neanderthals. Butthe decisive role in the demolition of the model would comefrom the confluence of a string of studies and discoveries pro-duced in the comparatively short time period of three years com-prised between 1998 and 2000.

2 . THE COLLAPSE OF A MODEL

Based on the central European evidence, which they interpretedas showing that particular anatomical features of the localNeanderthals were shared by the Upper Paleolithic modernhumans of the region, multiregionalists stuck to their view of re-


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gional continuity as Out-of-Africa was rising to dominance.Throughout the 1990S, however, the Iberian evidence for a latesurvival of the Mousterian and of its Neanderthal makers, as wellas the dating of the St. Cesaire levels containing the Neanderthalskeleton to less than 40,000 BP (L6v2que 1993) became indis-putable. It was clear, therefore, that Neanderthals had survived inWestern Europe until too late for it to be possible to continue ar-guing that the emergence of the succeeding modern humangroups could be explained solely as the result of the local evolu-tion of that region's archaic population. So, at least in this part ofthe world, i t was clear that some kind of population replacementhad indeed occurred, even if how exactly that had happened,with or without biological interaction between locals and immi-grants, was unknown o r controversial.This realization was instrumental in triggering a gradual changein the multiregionalists' stand. As is clear in a recent publicationby Wolpoff et al. (2001), the original idea of a simultaneous co-evolution into anatomical modernity of the different populationstocks created after the dispersal of Homo erectus with lots of ge-netic flux between them has been replaced by what can bedubbed as a "dual ancestry" model of modern human emergence:an African origin of modern anatomy with subsequent dispersalinto the Old World yes, but accompanied by substantial hy-bridization with the local anatomical archaic populations, partic-ularly in such places as central Europe. Smith, in particular, hadargued before that the gracile features he identified among theNeatlderthal remains from Vindija Cave, in Croatia, could be in-terpreted as evidence of interbreeding with contemporarymodern human populations (Smith 1984, 2000). And the re-cently reported results of the direct dating by AMS ofNeanderthal bones from level GI of that site to about 29,000years ago (Smith et al. 1999) certainly represent strong supportfor that view.

This restatement of the multiregionalist position, however, infact represents a rejoinder to a middle-of-the-road stance, which,although present before, was explicitly presented as a model ofmodern human origins by Gi inter Braiier- he "Afro-Europeansapiens hypothesis" (Braiier 1984). This was also the position pre-viously adopted by Trinkaus, whose 1981 work on body propor-tions was used to explicitly support an Out-of-Africa model withadmixture. Trinkaus' subsequent popular book on Neanderthalsechoed, albeit with much more detail, Richard Leakey's Originsshort statement on the possibility of admixture:

"Though the evidence in different regions of the Old Worldrecords genuinely different events, nowhere is there evidencefor violent confrontations between Neanderthals and modernhumans.. .The mosaic of local evolution, migration, admix-ture, absorption, or local extinction of Neanderthals was acomplex process that occurred over at least 10,ooo years. Thisis a long time for modern humans to spread from the Levantto the Atlantic coast of Europe, whether or not Neanderthalswere "in the way". Slowly, the populations expanded, ab-sorbed or displaced local inhabitants, developed new geneticand behavioral adaptations to new circumstances, retainingthe best of the Neanderthals and combining it with theemerging features of the newcomers who more closely resem-bled ourselves. This same intricate patt ern of change, varyingin rate and degree, occurred across the entire Old World andgave rise both to modern humanity and to the geographicalclusters of traits- any superficial- hat are now recog-nized as racial characteristics. Only humans from the NearEast and parts of Europe can claim Neanderthals per se intheir direct ancestry. Still, every modern human group surelyarose from a Neanderthal-like, archaic human population,even if all these ancestors would not fit our precise and re-stricted definition of "Neanderthal" (Trinkaus and Shipman1993:416).


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Hard evidence much stronger than any presented before in favorof this view of the facts would come unexpectedly at the end of1998 with the discovery and subsequent analysis of the LagarVelho child (Duarte et al. 1999). As it happened, however, thepath to understanding the significance of this discovery and tothe rapid acceptance of its in terpretation was paved by a series ofstudies published in the preceding years that dealt with the ar-chaeological record, not with the in terpretation of fossils. This isbecause, logically, the "Out-of-Africa with complete replace-ment" hypothesis had become entirely dependent on the notionof a biologically based inferiority of Neanderthals. The only em-pirically based biological argument invoked in favor of such anotion put forward in the last thirty years was the shape of thebasal skull of the Neanderthals and corresponding inferences re-garding the lack of speech capabilities (Lieberman and Cr6lin1971). So, once this argument was put to rest (Lieberman 1994;Tobias 1994, 1995), particularly after the discovery of theNeanderthal hyoid bone from Kebara (Arensburg et al. 1989), thenotion had to rely entirely on interpretations of the archaeologi-cal record from which major behavioral differences and, hence,major differences in the capacity for cultural behavior, were in-ferred.

UNPACKING T HE UPPE R PAL E OL IT HIC PACKAGE

The biological contrast between Neanderthals and moderns hasbeen almost from the beginning of the debate on the phyloge-netic position of the former associated with an analogous contrastbetween the Middle and the Upper Paleolithic. As pointed outnotably by Breuil (1913), early Upper Paleolithic industrieswould indicate a major advance in human behaviors relative tothe Neanderthal-associated Middle Paleolithic. Until today, as inthe above quotation by Klein (1998), most supporters of thenotion of Neanderthal inferiority have continued to sustain tha t

the Upper Paleolithic is a package of interdependent cultural fea-tures appearing more or less simultaneously in the archaeologicalrecord at about the time modern humans start to spread out ofAfrica, shortly before Neanderthals become extinct. They alsosustain that the latter never made it into the Upper Paleolithic,even if some of their latest representatives were able to imitatewithout understanding certain aspects of the package. Thenotion of an Upper Paleolithic package representing a quantumleap equivalent to the acquisition of true "culture" or "modernbehavior" and associated with the emergence of modern humansis also of paramount importance in the theoretical renderings ofthe process given by Binford (1989), Stringer and Gamble (1993)and Mellars (1996a, 1996b).A list of the archaeological features commonly considered todefine the Upper Paleolithic package can be compiled fromBrGzillon (1969) and Mellars (1973):

production of blades used as blanks for tool types of verydiverse typology;regional variation in lithics, indicating local traditionsand ethnic differentiation;development and generalization of bone tools;internal spatial organization of camp sites;broadening of the subsistence base to include birds, fishand sea foods;hunting specialization, with concentration on a reducednumber of species (often a single one);massive use of colorants;adornments and art, both mobiliary and parietal.

As research carried out over the last twenty years has demon-strated, however, most of these features are in fact already presentin the archaeological record of late Middle and early LatePleistocene Eurasia. They appear at different times and in differ-


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ent places, independently of each other and in association withdifferent types of hominids. Therefore, there is no way they canbe defined as a coherent package of features which might betaken as an archaeological proxy for modern behavior.Debitage strategies oriented for the extraction of blades and pro-ducing tool assemblages dominated by Upper Paleolithic types(burins, truncations, backed knives) are documented in last inter-glacial Europe at sites such as Rocourt and Seclin (Otte 1990).Although Boeda (1990) considers that the core reduction schemesused at these sites are still essentially of a levallois nature (basedon the exploitation of surfaces), schemes geared to the exploita-tion of volumes, that is, of a classical Upper Paleolithic nature,are now documented as well at sites of similar age in France(REvillion 1995) and in the Middle East, where they may go backto ca. 250,000 years ago, as at Hayonim (Meignen 1998). A recentextensive review of the issue (Bar-Yosef and Kuhn 1999) has effec-tively dispensed with any notion that lithic production systemsgeared to the extraction of blade blanks are in any way indicativeof superior cognitive capabilities or superior adaptive possibili-ties. They appear tens of thousands of years before the UpperPaleolithic, they are adopted and abandoned many differenttimes, and in many very different and very distant regional cul-tural trajectories. Their validity as a time-marker and periodiza-tion tool is restricted to western Eurasia and Africa, it is not auniversal feature of late Upper Pleistocene modern humangroups world wide.Stylistic variation in the modes of levallois debitage used inNorth Africa in early last glacial times patterns along regionallines (Van Peer 1991). The biological status of the authors of suchindustries is controversial, but in the case of the Magreb theyseem to have been the work of the Djebel Irhoud people, a popu-lation thought to derive from the local Homo wectzrs and, althoughbelonging in the phyletic line of anatomically modern humans,

to be in a stage of the biological evolution of humankind similarto that represented by European Neanderthals (Genet-Varcin1979; Hubl in 2000). It is also quite likely that the several pre-Aurignacian Upper Paleolithic cultures of Europe, such as theUluzzian, the Bohunician or the Szeletian were also manufac-tured by Neanderthals, as is the case with the ChPtelperronian.Continuity with preceding Mousterian industries exists in theparts of Europe where those cultures have been identified, indi-cating that regional differentiation with a possible ethnic contentmust have been a feature of material culture among UpperPaleolithic Neanderthals and, consequently, among their imme-diate Middle Paleolithic predecessors as well.The evolutionary meaning attributed to bone tools seems to havebeen largely a consequence of the fact that for a long time theywere known almost exclusively in the Aurignacian and the fol-lowing cultures of the European Upper Paleolithic sequence.However, there is no a priori reason to believe that the use ofbone and ivory as raw-materials indicates a higher level of cogni-tive capabilities, unless this is because they have to be shapedusing manufacture techniques that imply the existence of mentaltemplates and the imposition of standardized form. But this isalso true of wood working, and the set of throwing spears foundat Schoningen, in Germany (Thieme and Maier 1995), are thereto make the point that both the intellectual requirementsand the technical abilities to manufacture the bone points ofthe Upper Paleolithic already existed 400,000 years ago. Truebone tools have also been positively identified even amongAustralopithecines (Backwell and d'Errico 1999), and bone pointshave recently been found in South African Middle Stone Age as-semblages (Henshilwood and Sealy 1997). Even if the latter werearguably the work of anatomically modern humans, they werenot associated with blade-based lithic technologies and, accord-ing to Klein, were made at a time when, at least in terms of theirsettlement and subsistence strategies, those modern humans


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were behaving in non-modern ways.. . The same applies to thewidespread use of pigments in Middle Pleistocene African sitesdated to more than 300,000 years ago (Barham 1998).Moreover, bone tools are widespread, although their numbers arehighly variable from site to site, in the pre-Aurignacian techno-complexes of Europe likely to have been made by Neanderthals.In some cases they are associated with blade-based lithi c produc-tion systems, as in the Chltelperronian, i n other cases they are as-sociated with Transitional assemblages defined by the productionof bifacial points and knives, as in the assemblage from level C ofBuran-Kaya 111, in the Crimea (Marks 1998). At s ites such as theGrotte du Renne, where we can be sure that they were made byNeanderthals, they correspond to large inventories where differ-ent types are represented (points, borers, tubes, handles), includ-ing items decorated with regularly spaced incisions (d'Errico etal. 1998).

A good example of internal organization of Middle Paleolithiccampsites involving construction of complex features is thePortuguese site of Vilas Ruivas (G.E.P.P. 1983; Stringer andGamble 1993). The collection of shellfish and other seafoods inthe late Middle Paleolithic is documented by another Portuguesesite, the coastal cave of Figueira Brava, which contained Patellashells and bones of arctic seal and of the great auk (Antunes 1990-91). But the regular consumption of aquatic resources goes backat least to interglacial times, as proven by OIS 5 sites from SouthAfrica such as Klasies River Mouth (Klein 1998). Here the shell-fish were gathered by early anatomically modern humans, butthe mussel hearth recently excavated in Vanguard Cave,Gibraltar (Barton ~OOO),hows that by at least 50,000 BP, if notbefore, European Neanderthals were doing the same thing. Onthe other hand, the consumption of fresh water fish caught in therivers and lakes of the Eurasian hinterland does not seem tobecome significant until the Gravettian (Richards et al. n.d.) and

is not, therefore, a feature that may be used to differentiate theearly upper Paleolithic from the late Middle Paleolithic.Hunting practices identical to those used in the UpperPaleolithic are already a feature of the Middle Paleolithic de-posits of the Combe-Grenal rock-shelter (Chase 1988).Specialized reindeer hunting patterns similar to those docu-mented in Tardiglacial times have been documented byGaudzinski and Roebroeks (2000) in northern Germany at theMousterian open-air site of Salzgitter-Lebenstadt. In fact, aspointed out by Z i lh b (1998a), the Neanderthal-as-scavengermodel was largely the result of the application of a double stan-dard in the analysis of faunal remains. Most arguments raised infavor of the model were based on the prevalence of "head domi-nated" or "head and foot dominated" patterns among assem-blages from Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites. Such a pattern,however, is also commonly found in later sites, as is the case inthe early Neolithic levels of the Dourgne rock-shelter, in France(Guilaine et al. 1993)~or in the early Magdalenian levels ofRascafio and El Juyo, in Cantabrian Spain (Altuna 1981; Kleinand Cruz-Uribe 1985). In the latter region, moreover, the long-term diachronic analysis of settlement and subsistence strategiesshowed that no change was detectable at the MiddleIUpperPaleolithic divide, and that a significant reorganization of land-use practices did not occur until last glacial maximum times(Straus 1983,1986).In spite of the above-mentioned characteristics of faunal assem-blages, it has never been argued that Neolithic people obtainedtheir meat from scavenging mouton carcasses killed by wolves orthat early Magdalenian Cantabrian hunters (the artists thatpainted Altamira) scavenged for their venison. Instead, hunting(or butchering of domesticates) was assumed, and body part rep-resentation was interpreted in taphonomic or functional terms.Moreover, in their study of the fauna from Kobeh Cave, Marean


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and Kim (1998) were able to show that the "head and foot domi-nated" pattern of the site's Mousterian deposits was reversedonce an extensive refitting of shaft fragments was carried out: inthe end, they demonstrated that, i n fact, leg bones predomi-nated. One of the major implications of this finding was that itquestioned the validity of the conclusion that Middle Paleolithicpeople were predominantly scavengers derived by Binford andothers from the bone assemblages of such sites as Combe Grenal,Grotta Guattari, or Klasies River Mouth, where shaft fragmentshad been discarded by the excavators, thereby seriously biasingthe skeletal profiles obtained.On the other hand, ethological studies demonstrate that, in themammal world, there can be no such thing as a pure scavanger(Tooby and Devore 1987). If Neanderthals and other pre-modernhumans were eating meat, the idea that they were procuring itpurely, or mainly, through scavenging, was in the first placecounter-intuitive and the least parsimonious explanation of theevidence.Marean and Kim (1998)'s results showed that what wastheoretically unlikely was also empirically untenable. Stable iso-tope analyses have since confirmed their paleontological analy-ses, showing that Eurasian Neanderthals (including those fromthe last interglacial levels of Scladina, dated to between 130,000and 80,000 years ago) were top-level carnivores, obtainingalmost all of their dietary protein from animal sources (Richardset al. 2000).The above examples show that no clear cut division betweenMiddle and Upper Paleolithic seems to be possible on the basisof any combination of criteria relating to stone tool technology,use of bone tools or subsistence and settlement. Actually, theissue is further complicated by the fact that the above list of cri-teria compiled from Brbzillon and Mellars does not considerinter-regional variation. As shown by Combe-Grenal andSalzgitter-Lebenstadt, Middle and Upper Paleolithic patterns of

faunal exploitation in the periglacial areas of Europe rich in rein-deer, for instance, are often very similar. But, if such patterns aretaken as a criterion of modern behavior, then one would have toconsider that French Neanderthals were behaviorally moremodern than the anatomically modern humans of the IberianUpper Paleolithic. And, if blade debitage were the criterion ofchoice, they would also be more modern than Upper Paleolithicmodern humans from southeastern Asia or, for that matter, thanmost hunter-gatherers of the present.

THE EVOLUTIONARY S I GNI F I CANCE OF AR T

By comparison with Middle Paleolithic times, the only real nov-elties in the Upper Paleolithicas traditionally defined are, there-fore, art and objects of personal adornment, which do seem to beunknown before 40,000 BP. The whole debate about the emer-gence of "modern behavior" turns out to be, therefore, about amuch more focused issue: when and why did body decorationand figurative art appear in the archaeological record and whichis the historical significance of such an appearance.The most complete and coherent theoretical framework fortrying to understand the appearance of art so far presented andone that fits well with the available empirical evidence isGilman's (1984) model of the "Upper Paleolithic revolution": arelatively slow process beginning in the Middle Paleolithic,whereby increased technological efficiency, bringing about in-creased productivity and increased population densities, wouldhave culminated in the development of restricted alliance net-works, manifested in the appearance of the artifactual indicatorsof ethnicity (such as the synchronic stylistic variation of func-tionally identical classes of stone tools) that are already visible inlate Mousterian times. At a certain moment, this created theneed for forms of personal identification of individuals (adorn-ments) and for ritual practices related with territoriality andgroup interaction (parietal art).

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In this framework, there is no need to assume that the facc that,in Europe, art appears only in the Upper Paleolithic (as definedtraditionally), is a consequence of the fact that only anatomicallymodern humans (not present in Europe before the UpperPaleolithic) possessed the intellectual capabilities demanded byartistic behavior. This model also dispenses with the need toinvoke Klein's (1998) second mutation as an explanation for thefirst appearance of ornaments (ostrich egg-shell beads) in easternAfrican sites ca. 40,000 BP (Ambrose 1998). That the appearanceof this behavior relates to socio-ecological, not biological,processes, is indicated by the simple fact that art is not univer-sally documented among morphologically modern groups: thelatter had been around for as much as IOO,OOOears at the timethe earliest examples of art turn up in the archaeological record.Following Mellars (1978b), it could be argued, however, that artindeed eventually appeared among moderns once the socioeco-logical basis for such appearance was mature, the biological capa-bility for symbolism having been there right from the beginning.Conversely, the fact that art never appeared among the Nean-derthals who before them inhabited the same regions under simi-lar environmental conditions would show that the latter d id notpossess such a capability.Since, apart from parietal art, all other aspects of the "UpperPaleolithic revolution" are documented in the last moments ofthe historical trajectory of Neanderthals, i t seems logical to inter-pret Chhelperronian adornments and decorated bone tools as afurther indication that aboriginal Europeans of interpleniglacialtimes were in the path towards the completion of that "revolu-tion". If future research confirms that figurative art never actu-ally developed among them, that can be seen as resulting simplyfrom the truncation of that trajectory as a result of the migrationinto Europe of anatomically modern people with a Near Easternorigin. Although following a parallel track, it is possible thatEuropean Neanderthal society had not yet attained, at that time,

the population threshold that would unleash the full gamut ofsocial developments that might have driven cheir cultural poten-tial in tha t direction, much as it was not certainly due to the lackof intellectuai capabilities that the Selk'narn from Tierra delFuego did not develop their own writing system. As may havebeen the case with European Neanderthals and figurative art,they disappeared at a moment of their history when the socioeco-logical basis for written communication was simply not there.Trinkaus' (2000) recent revision of the skeletal evidence behindthe functional approach used to infer behavioral contrasts be-tween modern humans and Neanderthals has also further weak-ened the case for a biologically-based explanation of theMiddle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition. When appropriatelyscaled for body-size and bone length, many of the lower limbfeatures previously used to indicate a major contrast in robustic-ity between Neanderthals and the early modern humans ofSkhullQafzeh and the Early Upper Paleolithic in fact show differ-ences that are not all that significant. Overall, early modernhumans of the last interglacial were as "robust" as their Nean-derthal contemporaries in many features, and the process ofskeletal gracilization was a long-term mosaic process that cutacross biological boundaries. Put anocher way, early modernhumans of roo,ooo years ago did not enjoy any evolutionarilysignif cant competitive advantage derived from their skeletalmorphology and the locomotor or manipulative behaviors it en-abled. In Trinkaus' words, most real differences, particularly inthe lower limbs, t end to be in "Middle versus Upper Paleolithicrather than late archaic versus early modern human". That is,they tend to be cultural and chronological contrasts related to ha-bitual life-styles and the impact of technological developments.There is no evidence that such contrasts had a genetic basis thatwould have fixed even late Neanderthals in an archaic body shapeunable to accompany the pace of cultural innovation made possi-ble by a modern human body shape fixed since much earlier


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times in the evolutionary trajectory of late Middle and early LatePleistocene African humans.It is perhaps noteworthy to remark here that most proponents ofmodels of the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition based onthe intrinsic biocultural superiority of modern humans have alsosuggested that the appearance of ornaments and ar t is in fact bestinterpreted as the result of social, not biological processes (White1982; Gamble 1983). However, they sustain that such processesonly occurred in the historical trajectory of anatomically modernhumans and reject the possibility that that might have been thecase among Neanderthals as well. For Stringer and Gamble (1993)and Mellars (1998a, 1998b, 1999), this is because of the Nean-derthals' biologically based lack of the required intellectual capa-bilities. Besides this philosophical a priori, the only empiricalargument evoked to sustain such a rejection is that of temporalcoincidence, also advocated by Hublin (1999). In a nutshell, t heargument is that the only evidence for art among Neanderthals(the ornaments of the ChPtelperronian) is very late and is con-temporary with, or post-dates, the first appearance of art-bearingmodern human cultures in Eurasia. It would be an extraordinarycoincidence, therefore, if the sudden appearance of this particularbehavior among Neanderthals had been a totally independentprocess: the most parsimonious explanation would be thatNeanderthals acquired it in the context of contact with theirmodern human neighbors, through "acculturation" or through"imitation without understanding".

TH E I N D E P E N D E N C E A N D ANT E RI ORI T Y O F T HECHRTELPERRON IAN

As pointed out by d'Errico et al. (1998) and ZilhZo and d'Errico(1999a), the historical coincidence argument has two major theo-retical weaknesses:

First, it overlooks that the appearance of art was as suddenamong Neanderthals as among modern humans and thatthis suddenness needs not be considered an anomaly re-quiring a special explanation. Other innovations, such asagriculture or writing, which arguably had more far-reaching consequences for the environmental and cogni-tive adaptations of human societies, were inventedindependently in different places and at almost the sametime. Therefore, there is no reason, apart from the adop-tion of an a ptiori philosophical stand that the mechanismof human cultural evolution is akin to the phyletic gradu-alism of Darwin's view of biological evolution, to believethat symbolic expression had to arise as a gradual, long-term process. Much as there was no gradual transition towriting, so the adoption of body ornaments was "sudden",or "punctuated", among Neanderthals as well as amongmoderns.Second, even if it were to be demonstrated that their ap-pearance among the former was accelerated by contactwith the latter, that would not warrant the assumption ofNeanderthal inferiority. Few present-day anthropologistswould accept the view that societies adopting, or adapt-ing, to their own needs, a form of writing system createdby their neighbors should be considered inherently inca-pable of elaborating this system themselves or of possess-ing, for that reason, a lower level of cognitive ability. It isprecisely their use of the new communication system thatwe consider convincing evidence of equal intellectualstanding.

The systematic review of the archaeological and chronometric ev-idence carried out by d'Errico et al. (1998) and ZilhPo andd'Errico (1999b) further weakened the coincidence argument.These studies demonstrated tha t Chltelperronian ornaments and


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bone tools were distinct and showed no influence from theAurignacian. Moreover, they demonstrated that the emergence ofthe ChPtelperronian and equivalent transitional technocomplexesin Central and Eastern Europe pre-dated the Aurignacian and,hence, the immigration of the anatomically modern people pre-sumably associated with the latter.

The evidence from the ChPtelperronian levels of the Grotte duRenne, at Arcy-sut-Cure, shows that the Neanderthal-associatedpersonal ornaments and bone tools found there did not resultfrom a mixing of the archaeological strata, as demonstrated bythe coexistence in the same stratigraphic level of finished objectsand of the residues of their manufacture. This is in particular thecase of a tube of a swan's left ulna found in close proximity to i tsdiscarded byproduct (Fig. 4). Not only were these bone tools oflocal manufacture, they also were typologically and technologi-cally distinct from those most common in the Aurignacian.Reindeer antler, preferred in the latter, was neglected in theChPtelperronian, where the use of ivory is three and a half timesmore frequent. Small, thick awls made on short bone fragmentsfound in the Grotte du Renne's ChPtelperronian levels are un-known in the Aurignacian, whereas such typical Aurignaciantypes as split-base or lozenge-shaped bone points have never beenfound in Chhelperronian contexts.Moreover, the Grotte du Renne's ornaments, as well as those re-covered at other ChPtelperronian sites, such as Quin ~ay , ere cre-ated using techniques different from those favored in theAurignacian (Fig. 5). With regard, for example, to the pendants- odified bear, wolf, and deer teeth, among others- he carv-ing of a furrow around the tooth root so that a str ing of some sortcould be tied around it for suspension is the technique most com-monly used in the ChPtelperronian. In the Aurignacian, pendantsare always pierced, as also are some Chhelperronian ornamentsmade on animal teeth or fossil shells. In these cases, however, the

1 2 3Fig. 4. Chiite lpewonian bone tools rwn the Grotte du Renne,

Arcy-sur-Cure, France: I , bone tube of a swan's le ft ulna (level Xb,square A7) and its man ufacture by-product (level Xb, square DI )provzde unequivocal evidence o f stratigraphic integrity ofthe levels

and of local manufacture oft he bone tools (no t trade with or collectionfrom Aurignacians).2. 3. h a t e d bird bone tubes and bone awls

indicate tha t i n late N eandertha l societres symbolism was not a fweign,imported behavior used without understanding but something that

permeated al l aspects of l q e , exactly as woald be expected in a fullysymboltc human culture.

Fig. J . Chiitelpwronianornaments from the Grotte du Renne,Arcy-sur-Care, France. Fw suspension, carving a fuwow tooth root was

the /wefirred technique, but there are also pierced items obtained bypuncturing followed by smoothing and enlarging ofth e perfmation.


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Chhelperronian approach involved puncturing the object andthen smoothing and enlarging the perforation, whereas the tech-nique most commonly used in the Aurignacian was to thin thewhole tooth root by scraping before perforating it.This evidence shows beyond any reasonable doubt that thesekinds of artifacts were an integral part of the material culture ofthe ChPtelperronian, not isolated instances of trade with theAurignacian or of collection from abandoned Aurignacian sites.On the other hand, as is the case with the new knapping tech-niques and tool types of the ChPtelperronian, they show no influ-ence from the Aurignacian. These facts alone make a strong caseagainst the "acculturation" solution or any other view of theemergence of the ChPtelperronian as triggered by the close con-tact of Mousterian Neanderthals with incoming Aurignacianmodern humans. However, there is an even more basic empiricalcondition of viability for such views to be acceptable: the as-sumed anteriority of the Aurignacian over the ChPtelperronian.The systematic reanalysis of radiometric dates and stratigraphicsequences reveals that the assumption is unsustainable (cf. ZilhZoand d'Errico 1999b).In fact, apart from the "interstratifications" recognized by Bordesin the context of his dual-phylum (Perigordian and Aurignacian)view of the French Upper Paleolithic - nterstratificationswhich, after careful taphonomic reevaluation, reveal themselves tobe simple cases of post-depositional disturbance or redepositionwith admixture (cf. for Roc-de-Combe in particular, Rigaud 1998)- he case for Aurignacian precedence rests entirely on radiocar-bon dating. Due critical consideration of the hundreds of datesavailable for this period in Europe and the Near East shows thatwherever the context of the dated samples is well established, andtheir chemistry is beyond suspicion, the earliest occurrences of theAurignacian date to no earlier than around 36,500 ears ago. Thesame radiometric data, however, indicate that the Chgtelperronian

and other late Neanderthal cultures such as the Uluzzian of Italyemerged in Europe around 40,000 P, well before any modernsestablished themselves in those areas.Two examples show the impact that taphonomical and defini-tional issues have had on the chronology of the Middle-to-UpperPaleolithic transition in Europe. El Castillo level 18, convention-ally reported in the literature as Aurignacian, has been repeatedlydated to around 40,000 P (Cabrera and Bischoff 1989; Cabreraet al. 1996). But the samples come from the modern excavations,carried out in an area of the level where no Aurignacian itemswere recovered. The attribution is made by correlation with theinterior area excavated in the early twentieth century where,however, level 18 was a thick palimpsest with at least two occupa-tions: Aurignacian (at the top) and Mousterian (at the bottom).

Fig. 6 . El Castillo Cave, nwthern Spain:stratigraphic profile (afcer Cabrera et al. 1996: Fig.2,mod$ied) and

interpretation of the Lting and industrial composition of level z8.


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thousandsof vear3 6.PThis suggests that the dates may well be chemically and contex-tually correct but related to the Mousterian, not the Aurignacian(Fig. 6).

Number of refittings between levelsAH IIn IIa IIb IId 111 IIIabIIn I I 2IIa 8 7 I 6 5IIb 26 13 43 I0IId 5 18 9I11 73 63

IIIab


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amounts of material derived from the typical Aurignacian occu-pation. Two ivory beads considered to belong in the "Proto-Aurignacian", for instance, are identical to the twelve recoveredin the overlying art-rich deposits and in all likelihood derivefrom them. This may as well be the case with the carinated coresand the other types of Aurignacian lithics listed as part of the"Proto-Aurignacian" repertoire. That major vertical displace-ment of objects took place at the site, for the most part implyingthe presence of typical Aurignacian material in the lower "Proto-Aurignacian" levels, is also confirmed by the fact tha t two of thefive dated samples collected in the la tter gave results identical tothose obtained for the overlying deposit (Fig. 8). Consequently,all that can be said about the Geissenklosterle is that bone accu-mulation, presumably by humans, was taking place at the cavebetween 37,000 and 40,000 years ago, that such humans maywell have been using an Upper Paleolithic lithic technology, andthat such an early Upper Paleolithic was indeed contemporarywith the Chhelperronian. Nothing warrants, however, the diag-nosis of such a possible early Upper Paleolithic occupation asrelated to the Aurignacian, and its use as evidence for modernhuman presence in central Europe in that time range is, there-fore, unsubstantiated.Such a presence is all the more questionable once we bear in mindthat, in the Near East, where Aurignacian moderns are supposedto have originated, they are no earlier than about 36,000 BP (Bar-Yosef 1996). Once the results that are questionable on chemical,taphonomical or definitional grounds are removed from furtherconsideration, however, the European picture is fully compatiblewith the data for the Levant. Even in southwestern Europe,where the Aurignacian was supposed to appear quite early on,there is not a single site where it has been reliable dated to before36,500 BP (Fig. 9) . The situation in Italy, Germany, Austriaand the Balkans is no different. Conversely, there is no evidencefor the presence in post-36,000 BP times of the Chiitelperronian

Chatelperronian(on bone) Aurignacian(on bone) Aurignacian(on charcoal)

Fig. 9. 9~% confidence intervals of AMS C-14 dztesfor the E U Pof France and Spain, including bone samplesfor Ch2telpewonian sites,

and both bone and charcoal samplesfor Aurign acian sites. The scatter inthe datesfm he Ch2telpewonian aftev3J,OOO P is due to chemicalcontamination ofthe samples. Dates in the range ofj -43,000 years

ago that ha ve been related to the Aurig nacia n bu t demonstrablycorrespond to situat ions where the dated samples in act are not associatedwi th the Aur ignac ian mate rial they were supposed to dz te were excluded.

and equivalent pre-Aurignacian early Upper Paleolithic assem-blages anywhere in the geographical range where this earliestAurignacian has been found. The much younger results, differingat the 95% confidence level, obtained for the Chiitelperronian atthe same sites and from the same levels where it has been shownto be older than 36,000 BP have often been used to suggest itssurvival into the period between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago.These discrepancies, however, are more parsimoniously inter-preted as evidence for the impact that even a minimal amountof chemical contamination may have on bone samples dating tovery near the practical limit of the radiocarbon method than


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as evidence for a very late survival of the Chhelperronian andof its long-term local or regional contemporaneity with theAurignacian.This stratigraphic and radiometric evidence is an insurmountableobstacle to the acculturation hypothesis and leaves no optionother than that of considering the emergence of the Chltel-perronian as an autochtonous development, an independentNeanderthal acquisition of "modern behavior". That the manu-facture and use of ornaments in the geographical range thatwould later on be covered by the Aurignacian pre-dates the earli-est manifestations of the latter has been confirmed also in theNear East with the recent discoveries made at the uSagizli site.This cave, located in littoral southeastern Turkey, has an initialUpper Paleolithic level dated to around 39,000 BP which con-tained perforated marine shell beads (Kuhn et al. 1999; Kuhnpersonal communication). This find brings the appearance of artin the Near East to the same time range as the emergence of theChhelperronian and well before the Aurignacian. Although thehuman type responsible for the Ulagizli material is currently un-known, there is no reason to reject that it was the work ofNeanderthals too, particularly given

Anatomically Archaic, Behaviorally Modern - The Last Neanderthals and Their Destiny

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