CLUMSY, stupid brutes with little in the way of developed culture. That harsh view of our sister species Homo neanderthalis is being tempered by findings suggesting that they were often forced to make the best of a desperately tough life.
A team led by Antonio Rosas of Spain鈥檚 National Museum for Natural Sciences in Madrid studied 43,000-year-old Neanderthal remains found in the El Sidr贸n cave in the Asturias region of northern Spain. The teeth of eight individuals from El Sidr贸n examined by the team showed evidence that during growth they had probably gone through a period of starvation (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0609662104).
Cuts on some of the bones examined by the team suggest that the Neanderthals practised cannibalism, but Rosas points out that this does not mean that the group concerned were savages. 鈥淥ne possible explanation is that ecological conditions forced these people to eat whatever was at hand,鈥� including their dead companions鈥� flesh, he says. Another possibility is that cannibalism had some symbolic meaning, as it has done for some human hunter-gatherers. 鈥淪igns of cannibalism could tell us something about the spiritual life of Neanderthals.鈥�
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Examination of fossils from El Sidr贸n also supports the idea that there were distinct Neanderthal populations. The cave is in a part of Spain linked with northern Europe but cut off by mountains from the rest of the country. When Rosas鈥檚 team compared fossils unearthed there with others from sites further south they found morphological differences, with southern individuals having broader faces and jaws. 鈥淚t makes sense that different environmental factors would lead to a demographic gradient,鈥� says Katerina Harvati of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Since the El Sidr贸n cave was discovered in 1994 it has yielded some 1300 Neanderthal fossils. 鈥淣eanderthals were seen as brutish, but I want to believe that our picture of them is being changed with new discoveries,鈥� says Rosas. 鈥淎ll palaeoanthropologists feel some kind of love for their study species,鈥� he points out. 鈥淚n my case, it鈥檚 the Neanderthals.鈥�
