her. Or maybe it saved work by reducing the size of the grave.
On a gentle slope near this family plot another child had been buried—its head separated from its body. The head lay almost a yard higher on the slope. Why this child did not lie with the others, and why the head was detached, is not known.
Quite a few Neanderthal graves were found at the Shanidar cave in northern Iraq. Several of these people appeared to have been killed by rocks falling from the roof, possibly during an earthquake. In one trench lay a hunter with a fractured skull, and when the surrounding soil was analyzed it disclosed pollen from a number of brightly colored wildflowers related to the hollyhock, bachelor’s button, grape hyacinth, and groundsel. The existence of so much pollen could not be attributed to wind or to the feces of animals and birds. The only other explanation is that flowers were scattered on his grave by somebody who loved him.
A less agreeable picture came into focus at Monte Circeo, fifty miles south of Rome. Laborers at a tourist resort were widening a terrace when they exposed the entrance to a cave that had been sealed long ago by a landslide. The owner of the resort, accompanied by some friends, crept on hands and knees through a tunnel leading deep into the hillside and finally they entered a chamber that had not been visited for perhaps 60,000 years. By lantern light they saw a human skull, face to the earth, within a circle of stones. Anthropologists suspect the skull may have been mounted on a stick and dropped in that position when the wood decayed; but the unforgettable part of this ceremony must have occurred before the skull was mounted, because the aperture at the base had been enlarged, almost certainly in order to extract and eat the brain.
Neanderthal rituals in Switzerland clearly focused on the bear. A number of boxlike stone structures found in Alpine eaves contain bear skulls. One of these crude chests held seven skulls arranged so that the muzzles pointed to the chamber entrance, while farther back in the cave six more skulls had been set in niches along the wall—one with a bone thrust through the arch of the cheek.
What this bear business means, nobody knows. Maybe the earliest human pageantry involved a bear. Even today a few Stone Age tribes conduct ceremonies whose principal figure is a bear, and some ethnologists regard this as the last glint of light from Neanderthal times.
Says Herbert Wendt: “It was in the time of cave bears that the first cultural and religious ideas arose, that the first magicians appeared, that Man achieved dominion over Nature and began to believe in the support of supernatural powers.”
What did they look like?—these people we faintly abhor and seldom think about, yet who seem always to be not far away.
Museum dioramas are familiar: shambling, hairy, ape-faced monstrosities wearing animal pelts, the males holding spears or clubs, the females usually crouched beside a fire. This is the image, but it may not be accurate. Our impression is based on a skeleton reconstructed and studied in 1908. The relatively uncorrugated inner surface of the skull suggested that the brain had been simple, with convolutions resembling those of apes. The 1908 examiners also deduced a “simian arrangement” of spinal vertebrae and concluded that Neanderthal man slumped along with knees bent, on feet very much like the feet of a gorilla.
In 1957 this skeleton, which was that of a male, was reexamined. The gentleman was not exactly typical. He might have been fifty years old, which in those days was very old indeed. He suffered from arthritis of the jaws and spine, and perhaps of the lower limbs. The 1957 inspectors issued this statement: “There is no valid reason for the assumption that the posture of Neanderthal man . . . differed significantly from that of present-day man.”
And in museum displays their faces are never painted because it was assumed that Neanderthals had not crossed that threshold of humanity where the idea of decorating something—a wall, or themselves—would occur to them. Well, maybe. But powdered black manganese, yellow ocher, and various red pigments are found at their campsites, frequently in stick-shaped pieces that appear to have been rubbed on a soft surface.
As for other artistic efforts, probably there were none. No sculpture has been found, nothing but tantalizing hints. A bone with a hole drilled in it. An ox rib with a collection of unnatural streaks. A bit of ivory polished and artificially stained.
Yet these same people, struggling toward a new plateau, seemed unable or unwilling to distinguish between animal meat and the carcasses of their neighbors. Twenty mutilated skeletons were discovered in a Yugoslav cave, skulls bashed, arm and leg bones split lengthwise to get at the marrow. And in France another grisly accumulation turned up—some of the bones charred, implying a barbecue.
Neanderthal front teeth, when examined under a microscope, often show a number of parallel scratches, the result of an eating habit. Even today certain primitive people stuff big chunks of meat into their months and use a knife to hack off what they are not able to chew, which leaves scratches on their teeth. These scratches almost always run diagonally from upper left to lower right, proving that the gourmets in question are right-handed—as you will see if you act out the scene. Now this information is not as useless as you might think, because man is the only animal that prefers one hand to another, and neurologists suspect there may be some kind of relationship between this preference and the development of speech. If that is correct, those minuscule marks on Neanderthal teeth could help to solve one of the most fascinating questions about our predecessors—whether or not they could speak.
The answer would seem to be: Yes.
Yes, but only a little. So say linguist Philip Lieberman and anatomist Edmund Crelin who reconstructed the vocal tracts of some fossilized men. They concluded that European Neanderthals did not have much of a pharynx, and without a decent pharynx it is impossible to articulate g or k or several vowel sounds. Consequently a Neanderthal’s power of speech would be limited. Furthermore, say Lieberman and Crelin, he could not have pronounced his few sounds in quick succession. He spoke slowly, about one-tenth as fast as we do, perhaps one-twentieth as fast as a Spaniard.
It is alleged that Pharaoh Psamtik in the seventh century B.C. had two infants reared beyond the sound of human voices on the theory that when they began to talk they would necessarily resort to man’s earliest language. One child finally said “bekos”—which is the Phrygian word for bread. But that k would seem to preclude Phrygian as the Neanderthal language.
James IV of Scotland conducted an almost identical experiment. He gave two babies to a mute woman who lived alone on Inchkeith Island, and we are told that the children grew up speaking perfect Hebrew. However, with a stunted pharynx it would be exceptionally difficult to speak Hebrew. At the moment, therefore, all we can do is speculate.
But the absorbing question about Neanderthals is not what they spoke; it is what became of them.
Did they vanish because of some inability to meet a changing climate?
Could they have been slaughtered, liquidated, terminated with extreme prejudice, by the Cro-Magnon people?
Or could these two supposedly distinct races be, in fact, the same?
Present wisdom holds that the last unadulterated Neanderthal died 40,000 years ago. However, one April evening in 1907 some Russian explorers led by Porshnyev Baradiin were setting up camp in an Asian desert when they noticed a shaggy human figure silhouetted against the late sun on a ridge just ahead. Whatever the thing was, it appeared to be watching them. After a while the creature turned and lumbered away, so they ran after it but were quickly outdistanced. This was the first meeting between Westerners and Yeti, or Sasquatch as the beast is called in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
Soviets do not treat these encounters with as much levity as do Americans; there are Soviet anthropologists who believe that a few Neanderthals have survived in the deserts and
