Neanderthals What We Know

What Do We Really Know About Neanderthals? about:reader?url=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-...
smithsonianmag.com
What Do We Really Know About

Neanderthals?
Alexa Vachon,Franz Lidz
36-45 minutes
I’m scuttling through a shadowy fairyland of stalactites and

stalagmites deep within a cave in southern Spain, an experience as
daunting as it is exhilarating. Cueva de Ardales is cool, musty and
slightly damp, a contrast to the midsummer sun blazing outside.
Garbled voices echo in the distance and beams of headlamps flash
nervously in the dark, throwing spooky silhouettes on the limestone.
In the flickering half-light I listen to water trickling along a runnel cut
into the stone floor and search for the ancient markings that remain
tucked beneath layers of calcium carbonate like pentimenti in an
old painting.
In a corner of the cave, cloaked in shadow, my fellow spelunker, the

Portuguese archaeologist João Zilhão, inspects a flowing curtain of
stalactites with a laser pointer. As we huddle together, red points of
light bounce around the surface, finally settling on a pair of
blotches. The designs, hazy circles in red ocher, survive in tattered
remnants. Cueva de Ardales is one of three sites in Spain
examined by Zilhão and his colleagues. Separated by hundreds of
miles, the caves house distinctively splotchy handiwork—vivid
patterns (spheres, ladders or hand stencils) have been stippled,
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splattered or spat on the walls and ceilings.
At Spain’s Cueva de Ardales site, archaeologist João Zilhão takes samples

from a calcite formation overlaying traces of prehistoric artistic production.
(Alexa Vachon)
Wielding drills and surgical scalpels, Zilhão’s international team of

researchers grind and scrape the milky crusts of minerals that
dripping groundwater has left on top of the blotches. At each
sampled spot, a few milligrams of veneer is removed without
actually touching the final coat of calcite that overlays the ocher.
“The idea is to avoid damaging the paintings,” says expert dater
Alistair Pike. The flecks will be sent to a lab at the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where
their minimum age will be evaluated using uranium-thorium dating,
a technique relatively new to paleoanthropology that’s more
accurate, less destructive and can reach back further in time than
traditional methods.
Last year the results of sampling at the three caves were published,
and our understanding of prehistoric artistic creation was upended.
Analysis showed that some of the markings had been composed no
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fewer than 64,800 years ago, a whopping 20 millennia before the

arrival of our Homo sapiens ancestors, the presumed authors. The
implication: The world’s first artists—the Really Old Masters—must
have been Neanderthals, those stocky, stooped figures,
preternaturally low-browed, who became extinct as sapiens
inherited the earth.
“More than a dozen of the paintings have turned out to be the

oldest known art in Europe, and, with current knowledge, the oldest
in the world,” says Zilhão, a professor at the University of
Barcelona.
Ever since the summer of 1856, when quarrymen in Germany’s

Neander Valley dug up part of a fossilized skull with a receding
forehead, researchers have argued about the position of this group
of early people in the human family tree. Though they apparently
thrived in Europe and Western Asia from about 400,000 to 40,000
B.C., Homo neanderthalensis got a bad rap as lamebrained brutes
who huddled in cold caves while gnawing at slabs of slain
mammoth. Nature’s down-and-outs were judged to be too dimwitted
for moral or theistic conceptions, probably devoid of language and
behaviorally inferior to their modern human contemporaries.
A new body of research has emerged that’s transformed our image

of Neanderthals. Through advances in archaeology, dating,
genetics, biological anthropology and many related disciplines we
now know that Neanderthals not only had bigger brains than
sapiens, but also walked upright and had a greater lung capacity.
These ice age Eurasians were skilled toolmakers and big-game
hunters who lived in large social groups, built shelters, traded
jewelry, wore clothing, ate plants and cooked them, and made
sticky pitch to secure their spear points by heating birch bark.
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Evidence is mounting that Neanderthals had a complex language

and even, given the care with which they buried their dead, some
form of spirituality. And as the cave art in Spain demonstrates,
these early settlers had the chutzpah to enter an unwelcoming
underground environment, using fire to light the way.
Left: For a 1955 fashion show spoofing “Formal Wear Through the Ages,”
comedian Buddy Hackett and actress Gretchen Wyler show off cave-
couple chic. Right: In The Neanderthal Man, a 1953 horror film, a mad
scientist turns his cat into a saber-toothed tiger and himself into a
prehistoric marauder. (Bettmann / Getty Images; Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy
Stock Photo)
The real game-changer came in 2013, when, after a decades-long

effort to decode ancient DNA, the Max Planck Institute published
the entire Neanderthal genome. It turns out that if you’re of
European or Asian descent, up to 4 percent of your DNA was
inherited directly from Neanderthals.
No recent archaeological breakthrough has confounded
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assumptions about our long-gone cousins more than the dating of

the rock art in Spain.
Inside Ardales Caves in southern Spain (the entrance in first slide),

archaeologists João Zilhão, Gerd Weniger and their international teams of
researchers look for possible mineral extraction sites—places where red
blotches are visible. The minerals will be subjected to uranium-thorium
dating, which will not only determine their age but the age of the pigments
underneath. The drawings are thought to be the work of Neanderthals.
(Alexa Vachon)
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(Alexa Vachon)

(Alexa Vachon)
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(Alexa Vachon)
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(Alexa Vachon)

(Alexa Vachon)
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(Alexa Vachon)
The squabbles over the intelligence and taxonomic status of these

archaic humans have gotten so bitter and so intense that some
researchers refer to them as the Neanderthal Wars. Over the years
battle lines have been drawn over everything from the shape of
Neanderthals’ noses and the depth of their trachea to the extent to
which they interbred with modern humans. In the past, the
combatants have been at each other’s throats over authorship of
the cave art, which had been hampered by lack of precise dating
—often sapiens couldn’t be ruled out as the real artists.
The latest rumpus centers on whether the abstract patterns qualify

as symbolic expression, the $64,000 question of 64,800 years ago.
“The emergence of symbolic material culture represents a
fundamental threshold in the evolution of humankind—it is one of
the main pillars of what makes us human,” says geochemist Dirk
Hoffmann, a lead author of the cave art study.
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Zilhão says the debate over whether the cave art qualifies as
symbolic expression “touches deeply on a concern that goes far
beyond academic rivalries. It confronts the issue of how special we,
as modern humans, actually are, how distinct we are—or are not—
from humans who were not quite ‘us.’”
Zilhão has been the Neanderthals’ loudest and most persistent

advocate. At 62, he’s more or less the de facto leader of the
movement to rehabilitate a vanished people. “The mainstream
narrative of our origins has been fairly straightforward,” he says.
“The exodus of modern humans from Africa was depicted like it
was a biblical event: Chosen Ones replacing debased Europeans,
the Neanderthals.
“Nonsense, all of it.”
***
Zilhão is a plucked sparrow of a man, thin as a wand, with twin

dikes of hair that keep the baldness at bay. At this particular
moment he’s wearing what is essentially his uniform: a gray T-shirt,
jeans, hiking boots and a scruffily unshaven mien. He’s declaiming
from a bench, shaded by jacaranda, on the fringe of a cobbled
Lisbon square. This is Zilhão’s hometown, the birthplace of the
fado—the mournful and fatalistic mode of song, where sardines are
grilled on limestone doorsteps and bedsheets billow in the breeze.
“Was Fred Flintstone a Neanderthal?” asks a visitor from America.
“No, he was a modern human,” says the professor, deadpan. “He

drove a car.”
Lifting his eyes, he makes sure that the joke lands. “The most
interesting thing about Fred Flintstone’s car was not that he
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propelled it with his feet or that his toes were not destroyed by the
roller wheels. The most interesting thing was that as soon as the
car was invented in the cartoon Pleistocene Epoch, it spread fast
and was adaptive, like Henry Ford’s Model T.”
Adaptation is key to Zilhão’s take on Neanderthals. He has long

maintained that they were the mental equals of sapiens and
sophisticated enough to imagine, innovate, absorb influences,
reinvent them and incorporate that knowledge into their own
culture. “Sure, there were physical differences between
Neanderthals and modern humans,” he says. His tone is soft and
measured, but there’s a flinty toughness to his words. “But
Neanderthals were humans, and in terms of basic things that make
us different, there was no difference.”
East of the whitewashed village of Ardales lies a site where Neanderthal

history is being rewritten. An earthquake jolted the cave open in 1821.
(Alexa Vachon)
On one hand Zilhão is a cogent voice of reason; on the other, a
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pitiless adversary. “João has a forceful personality and he thinks

painfully—to many—logically,” says Erik Trinkaus, an authority on
Neanderthal and modern human anatomy at Washington University
in St. Louis. “He is not always as tactful as he might be, but then
being tactful on these issues has not often gotten through.” Gerd-
Christian Weniger, former director of the Neanderthal Museum,
near Dusseldorf, Germany, regards Zilhão as a supremely erudite
rationalist, a man who pushes hard and rests his case on clarity
and reason. Others praise Zilhão’s stubborn integrity and his
“Confucian sense of fairness”—meaning that he deals with both
defenders and opponents in the same way. Some of those
opponents dismiss Zilhão as an absolutist when it comes to
vindicating Neanderthals.
The eldest child of an engineer father and a psychiatrist mother,

Zilhão was inclined to subversiveness from an early age. The
Portugal of his youth was a country emaciated by 48 years of
dictatorship and five centuries of colonial empire. Young João
rejected the constraints of the fascist regimes of António de Oliveira
Salazar and Marcello Caetano, and joined the student protests
against them. He was a high school senior when Caetano was
overthrown in an army coup.
Zilhão was barely a teenager when he started caving in the cliffs

overlooking Lisbon. He slid and squeezed through the narrow
passages of Galeria da Cisterna, a vast sponge of interconnected
shafts, pitches and chasms. It was there, in 1987, when he returned
to the site, that he made a major archaeological discovery—7,500-
year-old Early Neolithic relics from Portugal’s first farming
community. Thirty years of significant Paleolithic discoveries would
follow.
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In 1989, six years before completing his doctorate in archaeology at

the University of Lisbon, Zilhão and a colleague went spelunking in
the Galeria. They shimmied up a vertical tunnel and stumbled upon
the hidden back entrance to another cave, the Gruta da Oliveira. In
a hollow of the cavern were tools, bones and ancient hearths.
Dating of artifacts would show that the hideaway was one of the
last Neanderthal sanctuaries in Europe.
Zilhão didn’t think much about Neanderthals again until 1996, when
he read a paper in Nature about human remains uncovered years
before in a cave in central France. Strewn among skeletal
fragments in the same layer of dirt were delicately carved bones,
ivory rings, and pierced teeth. The research team, led by Jean-
Jacques Hublin, proposed that the remains were of Neanderthals
and that these objects used for personal ornamentation reflected
the acculturation of the Neanderthals by the moderns.
The Upper Paleolithic tools and pendants discovered with the

Neanderthal oddments had been found deeper at the site than a
deposit with the earliest signs of modern humans. Elsewhere in
France, the same types of tools and ornaments were likewise found
to predate the earliest evidence for sapiens. Zilhão believes this
pattern implied that the Neanderthal layer had formed before
moderns had even reached France. Nonetheless, Hublin’s team
argued that the bling was created by Neanderthals who must have
come into contact with sapiens and were influenced by or traded
with them.
That infuriated Zilhão. “Views of the Neanderthals as somehow

cognitively handicapped were inconsistent with the empirical
evidence,” he says. Zilhão conferred with Francesco d’Errico, a
prehistory researcher at the University of Bordeaux. “It seemed
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obvious to us that Neanderthals had created these things and that

therefore archaeologists should revise their thinking and their
current models.”
Zilhão and d’Errico met at the Sorbonne in Paris to see the material
for themselves. To the surprise of neither, the jewelry didn’t look like
knockoffs of what Europe’s earliest modern humans had made,
using different kinds of animal teeth and different techniques to
work them. “After just a day’s look at the evidence, we realized that
neither ‘scavenger’ nor ‘imitation’ worked,” Zilhão says. “You cannot
imitate something that does not exist.”
***
The gentleman in the charcoal-gray suit is leaning on a railing in the

gallery of the Neanderthal Museum. He has a gnarled face and
brushed-back hair and scrunched-up eyes that seem to be off on a
secret, faraway trip. He looks like Yogi Berra formulating a Yogi-ism
or maybe a Neanderthal contemplating fire. Indeed, he is a
Neanderthal, albeit a Neanderthal dummy. Which we now know to
be an oxymoron.
The museum, which houses a permanent exhibition about the

human journey, from our beginnings in Africa four million years ago
up to the present, is set at the bottom of a limestone gorge in the
Neander Tal (or valley), surely the only place in the world where
calling a local a “Neanderthal” is not an unambiguous insult. The
building is just a bone’s throw from the spot where workmen found
the original Neander Valley fossil fragments buried in four to five
feet of clay in 1856.
Cave bear, thought the quarry foreman who salvaged the

specimens and took them to Johann Karl Fuhlrott, a schoolteacher
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and fossil enthusiast. Fuhlrott sent a cast of the cranium to

Hermann Schaaffhausen, a professor of anatomy at the University
of Bonn. They agreed that the remains were vestiges of a “primitive
member of our race” and together announced the finding in 1857.
“The discovery was not well received,” Weniger, the museum
director, says. “It contradicted literal interpretations of the Bible,
which reigned in the days before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
In scholarly circles, there has been a collective prejudice against
Neanderthals. It’s the nature of the profession.”
Unprepared for the notion of a divergent species, most elite

scholars disputed the Neanderthal’s antiquity. The anatomist
August Mayer speculated that the specimen had been a rickets-
afflicted Cossack cavalryman whose regiment had pursued
Napoleon in 1814. The man’s bowed bones, he said, were caused
by too much time in the saddle. The pathologist Rudolf Virchow
blamed the flattened skull on powerful blows from a heavy object.
The thick brow-ridges? The result of perpetual frowning. In 1866—
seven years after the publication of Darwin’s bombshell book—
German biologist Ernst Haeckel proposed calling the species Homo
stupidus. The name didn’t stick, but the stigma did. “Unfortunately,”
concedes Zilhão, “you never get a second chance to make a first
impression.”
The caricature of Neanderthals as shambling simians derives

largely from a specimen that achieved a degree of fame, if not
infamy, as the Old Man of La Chapelle. In 1911, a time when
dozens of Neanderthal bones were excavated in southern France,
paleontologist Marcellin Boule reconstructed a nearly complete
skeleton, found at La Chapelle-aux-Saints. Burdened by the
prevailing preconceptions of Neanderthals, his rendering featured
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chimplike opposable toes, and a head and hips that jutted forward
because the poor fellow’s bent spine kept him from standing
upright. To Boule, the Old Man’s crooked posture served as a
metaphor for a stunted culture. The shape of the skull, he wrote,
indicated “the predominance of functions of a purely vegetative or
bestial kind.” It wasn’t until 1957 that the Old Man’s dysmorphia
was recognized as the byproduct of several deforming injuries and
severe osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease. “For Boule,
Neanderthals were a side branch of humanity, a dead end in
evolution,” says Zilhão. “His crude stereotype went unchallenged
until the end of the century.”
By 1996, when Zilhão entered the fray, the question of human

emergence had been long dominated by two utterly contradictory
schools of thought. No one disputed that the Neanderthals and
sapiens descended from a common ancestor in Africa. The ancient
bones of contention: Who were the first humans and where did they
come from and when?
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At the Max Planck Institute, a French paleontologist’s early 20th-century

representation depicts a Neanderthal as apelike and backward. (Alexa
Vachon)
The first model held that humans belonged to a single species that
began migrating from Africa almost two million years ago.
Dispersing rapidly, those ancient Africans evolved as more or less
isolated groups in many places simultaneously, with populations
mating and making cultural exchanges, perhaps as advanced
newcomers drifted in and added their DNA to the local gene pool.
According to that model, called Multiregional Evolution, the smaller
numbers of Neanderthals mated with much larger populations of
sapiens. Over time, Neanderthal traits disappeared.
The competing view, Recent African Origin, or the Replacement

model, argued that barely 150,000 to 190,000 years ago, many
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sapiens left the continent of Africa to make their way in the rest of
the world, outwitting or supplanting their predecessors (think
Neanderthals), without appreciable interbreeding. They brought
with them modern behavior—language, symbolism, technology, art.
In the absence of clinching evidence either way, the argument

raged merrily on.
Few of the Replacement kingpins reacted in higher dudgeon than

Paul Mellars of the University of Cambridge. Convinced of the
sapiens’ ascendancy, Mellars declared that Neanderthals were
either incapable of art or uninterested in aesthetics. In a confutation
oozing with Victorian condescension, he likened the Neanderthals’
cognitive talents to those of colonial-era New Guineans: “No one
has ever suggested that the copying of airplane forms in New
Guinea cargo cults implied a knowledge of aeronautics or
international travel.”
Though Zilhão wasn’t fazed, his recall of the putdown, published

more than 20 years earlier, is still vivid. “Many prominent figures in
the field are prominent only in the sense that they are the high-
priests of a new cult, the Church of the Dumb Neanderthal.”
While under siege, Zilhão met Erik Trinkaus, a fierce advocate of

the Assimilation Model, a human origin hypothesis first expressed
in the 1980s. The model proposed that Neanderthals and archaic
people like them were absorbed through extensive interbreeding.
The meeting with Trinkaus turned out to be serendipitous. During

the fall of 1998, Zilhão was told that one of his team had made a
strange discovery at the Lagar Velho archaeological site in central
Portugal. The researcher had reached into a rabbit hole and pulled
out a radius and an ulna—the bones of a human forearm. Zilhão
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got there expecting to find the fossil of an early modern human.

Instead, the remains were of a 4-year-old child who’d been buried
in the sediment for nearly 30,000 years. To Zilhão’s infinite
amazement, the child had a sapiens’ prominent chin, tooth size and
spinal curvature as well as the stout frame, thick bones and short
legs of a Neanderthal.
Zilhão called in Trinkaus.
After an examination, Trinkaus surfaced with a radical verdict: the

child was a hybrid—and no one-off love child at that. Morphological
analysis indicated assimilation took place and there was still
evidence of it 1,000 years later. A paper was published in 1999 and
a furor followed, as scholars tussled over the implications for
human evolution. One proponent of Replacement claimed the body
was merely a “chunky child,” a descendant of the sapiens who had
wiped out the Neanderthals of the Iberian Peninsula. That critic
sneered that the “brave and imaginative interpretation” of Zilhão,
Trinkaus and their fellow researchers amounted to “courageous
speculations.”
Undeterred, Zilhão and Trinkaus labored on. In 2002, cavers found

a human mandible in Pestera cu Oase, a bear cave in the
Carpathian Mountains of Romania. Carbon-dating determined the
mandible was between 34,000 and 36,000 years old, making it the
oldest, directly dated modern human fossil. Like the Lagar Velho
child, the find presented a mosaic of early modern human and
possible Neanderthal ancestry. Again, a paper was published.
Again, the pundits scoffed. But this time Zilhão and Trinkaus got the
last laugh. In 2015, DNA analysis showed that the owner of the
jawbone had a Neanderthal in his lineage as recently as four
generations back.
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“These days, you hardly see a genetics paper that is not all about
interbreeding,” says Zilhão. “Even so, a redoubt of ‘ardent
believers’ in the Replacement theory remains active, especially
among archaeologists who prefer to cling to received wisdom or
their own long-held views. Human nature, I guess.”
***
The glass-and-concrete Max Planck Institute rises amid the Soviet-

style housing blocks of old East Germany. This structure sports a
rooftop sauna, a grand piano in the lobby and a four-story climbing
wall. On the second floor is the office of Jean-Jacques Hublin,
director of the Department of Human Evolution. His work is devoted
to exploring the differences that make humans unique.
Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute is a skeptic about

Neanderthal artistic expression. Further evidence, he insists, is necessary.
(Alexa Vachon)
Sitting half in sunlight and half in shadow, Hublin has the thin,
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weary, seen-it-all sophistication that paleoanthropologists share

with homicide detectives, pool sharks and White House
correspondents. A longtime Replacement theorist, he’s one of the
“ardent believers” Zilhão refers to. Hublin, who’s 65, doesn’t buy
into the idea that Neanderthals had the capacity to think abstractly,
a capacity that, as Zilhão asserts, was fundamentally similar to our
own.
Skeptical by nature and zetetic by training, Hublin was 8 when his

family fled French Algeria in the final year of the war for
independence. The clan settled in a housing project in the Paris
suburbs. “Maybe because of my personal history and childhood, I
have a less optimistic view of humans in general,” he says.
Whereas Zilhão is interested in the similarities between sapiens

and Neanderthals, Hublin is more interested in the contrasts. “I
think somehow differences are more relevant for our understanding
of the evolutionary processes. In the end, to prove everyone is like
everyone else is maybe morally satisfying, but does not teach us
anything about the past.”
He’s especially hard on Zilhão, who he thinks is on a “mission from

God” to prove that Neanderthals were the equals of modern
humans in every respect. “In other words,” says Hublin, “that
Neanderthals did not use iPhones, but only because they lived
60,000 years before Apple was created. If not, they would probably
run the company today.”
Read back to Zilhão, that statement makes him chuckle. “I’m pretty
sure that Neanderthals would know better than that,” he says.
“Smart people do not let themselves be enslaved by Apple.”
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At the Neanderthal Museum, the figure of a woman created in the 1960s is

considered outmoded. New data indicate darker hair and skin tones. (Alexa
Vachon)
Nine years ago Zilhão reported that he had found solid signs that
Neanderthals were using mollusk shells in a decorative and
symbolic way. Some of the shells found in a Spanish cave were
stained with pigment; some were perforated, as if to accommodate
a string. Subsequent dating showed them to be 115,000 years old,
which ruled out modern humans. Hublin was not swayed. “João
thinks he has shells that have been used by Neanderthals in one
site in Spain. So where are the other sites where we can find this
behavior in Neanderthals? In Africa, there are many sites where we
found shells used by sapiens. With Neanderthals there has been
just one. To me, that kind of speculation is not science.”
This complaint elicits a brief response from Zilhão. “Not one site,
two,” he says.
Hublin is not satisfied that the Cueva de Ardales splotches are even
art. “The most pro-Neanderthal people like to reason in terms of
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present actions or features, which means they would say, ‘We

found a handprint, therefore Neanderthals had art.’ This implies that
if they had art, they could paint the Mona Lisa. The reality is that
using colors to make a mark with your hand or painting your body in
red ocher is not like painting a Renaissance picture of the
Quattrocento.” Hublin says he won’t be persuaded until he sees a
realistic representation of something by a Neanderthal. “Maybe it
will happen. I think it’s fine to speculate in your armchair about what
could exist, but until it exists, as a scientist, I cannot consider that.”
But must all cave art necessarily be representational? Even 64,800-

year-old cave art painted 45,000 years before the Paleolithic bison
and aurochs of Lascaux? Jerry Saltz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning art
critic, doesn’t think so. “Neanderthals made art, they had a material
culture where they traded stones,” he said in a recent City
University of New York interview. “They made tools and made them
symmetrical—they made them beautiful.” Though the early cave
people didn’t sell their finger paintings at Christie’s, Saltz is willing
to bet that they traded them for baskets or meat or better flint. “They
put value in it. We are God when it comes to art. We place its life
force in it.”
***
Before injecting himself with a transformative science juice, the

doomed professor in the 1950s horror film The Neanderthal Man
holds forth to a roomful of doubting naturalists on how much larger
the brains of early humans were: “Modern man’s boasting pride in
his alleged advancement is based upon one hollow precept, and
that is his own ego.” The naturalists jeer and walk out on him.
Alistair Pike’s lab at the University of Southampton in England is not
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unlike the professor’s. All that’s missing are the beakers and test
tubes. It was Pike’s crack team that dated the Spanish cave art and
proved it was painted by Neanderthals. Standing beside his trusty
accelerator mass spectrometer, he explains how the machine
analyzed the mineral crusts found on cave formations, which
contained the traces of uranium and thorium that revealed when the
deposits formed.
Zilhão believes Neanderthal artists may have blown ocher pigments from
the mouth onto the cave wall, creating vivid splatter patterning. (Alexa
Vachon)
Because the amount of uranium in calcite declines as it decays into

thorium, the ratio of those radioactive isotopes is like a clock that
starts ticking the moment the crusts form: the higher the ratio of
thorium to uranium, the older the calcite. Radiocarbon dating, on
the other hand, becomes increasingly unreliable beyond about
40,000 years. Restricted to organic materials like bone and
charcoal, carbon dating is unsuitable for drawings made purely with
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mineral pigments. “There are new technologies that just come

along that provide us new opportunities to interrogate the past,”
says Pike. “It’s now kind of reaching archaeology.”
He grew up in the village of Norfolk and got into the field at age 6.
His mother, an Australian, told him that if he dug a hole deep
enough he’d reach the land down under. So he dug and dug and
dug. At the bottom of his hole he found the foreleg bones of a
horse. “To get the rest out, I started to tunnel,” he says. “When my
mum found out I was tunneling, she shut the mine down.”
Pike is an affable guy with enough hair for four people. He’s been
collaborating with Zilhão and Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck
Institute since 2005. Unfortunately, governmental agencies won’t
always collaborate with them. Six years ago, they were enlisted by
archaeologist Michel Lorblanchet to date a series of red cave
blotches in south-central France. Based on stylistic comparisons,
Gallic researchers had estimated the art to be from 25,000 to
35,000 years ago, a period seemingly brimming with sapiens. The
preliminary results from Pike’s U-Th dating gave a very early
minimum age of 74,000 years ago, meaning the premature
Matisses likely could have been Neanderthals.
When Pike’s team asked permission to return to the site for

verification, the French authorities issued a regulation that banned
sampling of calcite for uranium-series dating. Outraged, Zilhão
hasn’t set foot in France since. “It seems that most of our critics are
French scholars,” muses Pike. “They really don’t like the fact that
Neanderthals painted.”
Ever since the findings of their Spanish cave art project appeared,
Pike and Zilhão have been pummeled in scientific journals. They
25 of 26 6/9/2019, 9:00 AM
have dealt swiftly with each indictment. “It’s quite easy to sell us as
people on a mission,” Pike says, “especially in the case of João,
who has said some very controversial things in the past.”
***
From a bench in the sunny Lisbon square, Zilhão says, “Facts are
stubborn. You have to accept them the way they are. Science is not
about telling people ‘I told you so,’ it’s about different people coming
to the same conclusion. It’s a collective endeavor.”
The scent of pastel de nata, the city’s beloved custard tart, hangs
sweetly in the air.
“The mistake you cannot make is to judge the past through the
eyes of the present. Judge the past on its own terms.”
You say, That’s very hard—our biases are almost impossible to

distinguish.
He says, “You have to be conscious of as many as you can.”
You ask, Is that what your critics are doing?
Zilhão flashes a grin as wide as the Lisbon waterfront. “I like it when

they are called critics because, for a long time, I was the critic.”
26 of 26 6/9/2019, 9:00 AM

Neanderthals What We Know

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What Do We Really Know About Neanderthals? about:reader?url=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-...

What Do We Really Know About

I’m scuttling through a shadowy fairyland of stalactites and

In a corner of the cave, cloaked in shadow, my fellow spelunker, the

splattered or spat on the walls and ceilings.

At Spain’s Cueva de Ardales site, archaeologist João Zilhão takes samples

Wielding drills and surgical scalpels, Zilhão’s international team of

fewer than 64,800 years ago, a whopping 20 millennia before the

“More than a dozen of the paintings have turned out to be the

Ever since the summer of 1856, when quarrymen in Germany’s

A new body of research has emerged that’s transformed our image

Evidence is mounting that Neanderthals had a complex language

The real game-changer came in 2013, when, after a decades-long

No recent archaeological breakthrough has confounded

assumptions about our long-gone cousins more than the dating of

Inside Ardales Caves in southern Spain (the entrance in first slide),

Inside Ardales Caves in southern Spain (the entrance in first slide),

Inside Ardales Caves in southern Spain (the entrance in first slide),

Inside Ardales Caves in southern Spain (the entrance in first slide),

Inside Ardales Caves in southern Spain (the entrance in first slide),

Inside Ardales Caves in southern Spain (the entrance in first slide),

Inside Ardales Caves in southern Spain (the entrance in first slide),

The squabbles over the intelligence and taxonomic status of these

The latest rumpus centers on whether the abstract patterns qualify

Zilhão has been the Neanderthals’ loudest and most persistent

“Nonsense, all of it.”

Zilhão is a plucked sparrow of a man, thin as a wand, with twin

“Was Fred Flintstone a Neanderthal?” asks a visitor from America.

“No, he was a modern human,” says the professor, deadpan. “He

Adaptation is key to Zilhão’s take on Neanderthals. He has long

East of the whitewashed village of Ardales lies a site where Neanderthal

On one hand Zilhão is a cogent voice of reason; on the other, a

pitiless adversary. “João has a forceful personality and he thinks

The eldest child of an engineer father and a psychiatrist mother,

Zilhão was barely a teenager when he started caving in the cliffs

In 1989, six years before completing his doctorate in archaeology at

The Upper Paleolithic tools and pendants discovered with the

That infuriated Zilhão. “Views of the Neanderthals as somehow

obvious to us that Neanderthals had created these things and that

The gentleman in the charcoal-gray suit is leaning on a railing in the

The museum, which houses a permanent exhibition about the

Cave bear, thought the quarry foreman who salvaged the

and fossil enthusiast. Fuhlrott sent a cast of the cranium to

Unprepared for the notion of a divergent species, most elite

The caricature of Neanderthals as shambling simians derives

By 1996, when Zilhão entered the fray, the question of human

At the Max Planck Institute, a French paleontologist’s early 20th-century

The competing view, Recent African Origin, or the Replacement

In the absence of clinching evidence either way, the argument

Few of the Replacement kingpins reacted in higher dudgeon than

Though Zilhão wasn’t fazed, his recall of the putdown, published

While under siege, Zilhão met Erik Trinkaus, a fierce advocate of

The meeting with Trinkaus turned out to be serendipitous. During

got there expecting to find the fossil of an early modern human.

Zilhão called in Trinkaus.

After an examination, Trinkaus surfaced with a radical verdict: the

Undeterred, Zilhão and Trinkaus labored on. In 2002, cavers found

The glass-and-concrete Max Planck Institute rises amid the Soviet-

Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute is a skeptic about

weary, seen-it-all sophistication that paleoanthropologists share

Skeptical by nature and zetetic by training, Hublin was 8 when his

Whereas Zilhão is interested in the similarities between sapiens

He’s especially hard on Zilhão, who he thinks is on a “mission from

At the Neanderthal Museum, the figure of a woman created in the 1960s is