麻豆传媒

PUT Matt Pope in a valley apparently untouched by humans and he can tell you where Neanderthals would have built their home. 鈥淚t鈥檚 about a third of the way up a slope, with a really good vista and a solid bit of rock behind,鈥� he says. Anyone who goes camping will recognise these preferences: this is where you want to pitch your tent when you arrive in an unfamiliar place at dusk. It is also where aspirational types dream of buying a place to live. In other words, this is the spot that lures us with siren calls of 鈥渉ome鈥�.

There has long been an assumption that the concept of home is as old as humanity. But Pope, an archaeologist at University College London, is challenging that. 鈥淲e take for granted that early humans had a home, an address, but it wasn鈥檛 always with us,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 something we evolved.鈥� The invention of 鈥渉ome鈥�, Pope argues, marked a critical threshold in the long march towards civilisation. As well as being a practical advance, it was also a conceptual leap that shaped the way our ancestors thought and interacted.

What鈥檚 more, evidence is growing that home wasn鈥檛 exclusively the domain of Homo sapiens. In fact, Neanderthals may have been the original homebodies. A picture is emerging of their domestic life that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Far from being brutish, they may have enjoyed nothing more than spending time indoors around a cosy fire, doing a spot of DIY and inviting friends over for dinner.

For most of prehistory, there is almost no evidence of human presence in caves or rock shelters. Early humans instead must have occupied less permanent dwellings, but the ephemeral nature of organic matter means that the archaeological record is mostly silent on their whereabouts. Then, starting around 400,000 years ago, something changes. 鈥淚t鈥檚 something that sweeps across the hominin world,鈥� says archaeologist Clive Gamble at the University of Southampton, UK. 鈥淚t spreads like a virus, reorganising and changing as it goes.鈥� Given that more-permanent dwellings appear then, Pope thinks that 鈥渟omething鈥� was home. It is hard to say which species of hominin had the idea and, like most abstract concepts, 鈥渉ome鈥� probably took time to coalesce. However, there is no doubt that, in Europe, the transformation got under way long before 45,000 years ago, when modern humans arrived from Africa. Only Neanderthals could have been responsible.

Prehistoric perils

Necessity may well have spawned this particular invention because the Europe that Neanderthals inhabited from 500,000 years ago was far colder and more arid than it is today 鈥� and after 180,000 years ago, it became colder still, with temperatures falling to -20藲C at times, and not rising above 12藲C even in summer. But there must have been more to homemaking than necessity. After all, hominins began producing tools more than 3 million years ago. They were hunting and sharing meat in family groups for generations, but they weren鈥檛 living at their butchery sites because the mess and smell would have attracted scavengers, making them dangerous places to linger. A cave or rock shelter could have contained the smell while allowing its occupants to control access and stay safe, so why didn鈥檛 they take advantage of this?

Pope suspects the key was fire. It is very difficult to tell whether a prehistoric population could make fire, he notes. The archaeological record suggests that Homo erectus may have started using it a million years ago or more, but it is only around 500,000 years ago that our ancestors appear to control fire. Hearths have been found at many Neanderthal sites, some containing burnt bones. Armed with light and a means of warding off dangerous animals, Neanderthals could bring sleeping and food-sharing activities together in a single space 鈥� home.

Engineered environments

In general, they spurned the depths of caves as living spaces, staying close to their mouths. It is lighter there, but also draughtier. At the 70,000-year-old site of Tor Faraj in southern Jordan, they piled up stones and wood to create windbreaks inside the shelter. Later, they began building windbreaks in the open, using wood and even mammoth bones. At La Folie, a 60,000-year-old site near Poitiers in France, post holes preserved in sediment point to some kind of circular wooden structure, perhaps covered with skins or brush.

Neanderthals certainly had the technical skills to construct dwellings. They had mastered the art of combining different materials, binding stone points to wooden hafts with animal sinew or plant fibre to make spears, for example, and sealing the joints with resin or birch bark pitch. They worked animal hides too, turning them into leather and stitching them together with long strips of hide, so they could have made simple tents. By lighting a fire inside a tent, they could have raised the temperature from -20藲C to 20藲C and, through such engineering of their environment, endured a cold winter night. 鈥淔or hundreds of miles around, there isn鈥檛 going to be any bubble of warm, survivable air other than the one the Neanderthals have managed to capture and seal,鈥� says Pope.

As well as being cosy, other aspects of Neanderthal homes would have been familiar to us too (see 鈥�Home sweet home鈥�). 鈥淓arly living spaces are being divided into separate activity areas right from the beginning,鈥� says Pope. Rocks and animal bones were used to demarcate those proto-rooms, and though organic materials such as wood or hide have generally not survived, the rock alignments could have supported partitions made of these. Above all it was fire 鈥� the hearth 鈥� that structured the space, and this is seen most clearly at a Neanderthal rock shelter near Barcelona in Spain, known as the .

It opens out of an escarpment above a valley that would have been rich in vegetation and the kinds of stone that Neanderthals used to make tools. The valley would also have provided passage for deer, horses and a now-extinct ox called an aurochs migrating inland from the coast 鈥� useful for hunting. It was inhabited on and off for at least 70,000 years, until about 40,000 years ago, probably by family groups of 10 to 20 individuals each time.

The site is very well preserved because periodic flooding evicted the occupants and deposited minerals that make it easy to date the interleaved, sandy layers containing evidence of human habitation. Since excavations began in 1983, archaeologists have dug down more than 10 metres, uncovering 17 levels that represent different phases of occupation. To understand how Neanderthals organised their domestic space, Mar铆a Gema Chac贸n at the Catalan Institute of Human Palaeoecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, Spain, and her colleagues have uncovered most of the 300-square-metre floor at each level. One level, dated to 58,000 years ago, contains more than 40 hearths 鈥� the most they have counted in any of the levels. 鈥淢y students go down there and they鈥檙e amazed,鈥� says Chac贸n. 鈥淵ou can still smell the roasted deer.鈥�

At each level, the arrangement of hearths is the same. 鈥淭here are small ones, not more than 50 centimetres in diameter, around the outside, and much larger ones in the centre,鈥� she says. The small hearths are located between 1 and 2 metres from the walls, and the inhabitants probably slept and rested in that gap. Chac贸n鈥檚 group has found fossilised plant remains there, possibly traces of grass they brought in for bedding. The larger hearths would have been reserved for daytime activities, including knapping of tools and processing the spoils of hunting, and may have been constructed specially for each function. One kind is surrounded by stones, for example. In another, stones were placed under the combustible material to create more smoke 鈥� perhaps for smoking meat. A third comprises a shallow depression in the ground that could have been filled with water into which hot stones were dropped to boil it for cooking, or to generate steam. It seems that Neanderthals were quite sophisticated cooks. Digs have found evidence suggesting they boiled bones to extract nutrients, flavoured their meat with wild herbs such as yarrow, and even .

Life around the hearth is likely to have affected social interactions. Anthropologist Polly Wiessner at the University of Utah has described how , and has . During the day, the talk in camp is all gossip, complaint and practical exchanges of the 鈥淲hat鈥檚 for supper?鈥� kind. After dark, people gather around a single hearth, and the conversation turns to myth and stories. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e using the extra time that fire allows to talk about the things that really matter to humans, the things that bind emotionally,鈥� says Gamble. The fire also provides in the form of eye contact and who sits where, and for other social bonding activities such as singing and dancing. There is no reason why it couldn鈥檛 have done the same for Neanderthals, he adds. At the Abric Roman铆 site there are even hints that the occupants had dinner guests. Around certain hearths, says Chac贸n, the quantity of animal bones suggests a large gathering.

A home would have influenced social interactions in another way, too. There has been a tendency to imagine the past as populated exclusively by healthy adult males, says archaeologist Penny Spikins at the University of York, UK. But groups would have included toddlers, pregnant women, older people and sick people 鈥� and injury rates from hunting large animals at close quarters would have been high. Neanderthals cared for each other when sick or wounded, and they assisted with childbirth. They probably dressed wounds 鈥� perhaps with lemming skins, as the Inuit once did 鈥� and disinfected them with antiseptics including ochre. Their medical cabinet included painkillers and penicillin too. All this ministering implies that they had a place where they could remain sedentary 鈥� and safe 鈥� for extended periods. 鈥淗ome is that intimate place where you can feel ,鈥� says Spikins.

Neanderthals buried their dead under the floor of their caves or shelters, something that H. sapiens were still doing much later in the Neolithic period. Both groups also practised cannibalism, perhaps for ritual rather than nutritional reasons 鈥� , says Gamble. Unlike their human contemporaries, Neanderthals don鈥檛 seem to have buried their dead in the open 鈥� perhaps another indication of the significance they attached to home.

鈥淩ocks and bones were used to demarcate proto-rooms in Neanderthal homes鈥�

We don鈥檛 know whether Neanderthals were the first homemakers. There is plenty of evidence that H. sapiens were building similar shelters and inhabiting rock dwellings at much the same time. Their open-air camps soon took on an feel of semi-permanence, unlike those of Neanderthals, who kept moving in a seasonal round. But Neanderthals often returned to favourite caves and once there they lit fires and bedded down where they always had. Gamble likens such behaviour to the well-worn gestures we all make on returning home 鈥� switching the lights on, drawing the curtains and so on. 鈥淭here is a memory there,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hat sort of repetitive behaviour is very like ours.鈥�

One thing that has yet to be found in Neanderthal homes is anything resembling what is seen as art in the context of their H. sapiens contemporaries. Mysterious arrangements of snapped-off stalagmites were discovered two years ago in the pitch-black depths of Bruniquel cave in south-western France. Although created by Neanderthals, this doesn鈥檛 seem to have been a living space. Meanwhile, Pope is reluctant to attach the label 鈥渁rt鈥� to the large piles of mammoth bones his group found at a cave called La Cotte de Saint Br茅lade, a Neanderthal home in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, even though some of the piles are so well ordered it is tempting to seek meaning in their structure.

That doesn鈥檛 signify that Neanderthals were incapable of symbolic thought. In 2018, Jo膩o Zilh膩o at the University of Barcelona in Spain revealed that some living in the Iberian peninsula at least 65,000 years ago at least 115,000 years ago. Perhaps they felt less need to broadcast their symbolism than modern humans did, or perhaps it took different forms and served different purposes. For example, it is possible, says Gamble, that the stalagmites in Bruniquel form a prehistoric xylophone on which Neanderthals made music.

For Zilh膩o, the emerging story of Neanderthal domesticity is the logical culmination of the reassessment of who they were. They may have looked different, he says, but they were 鈥渏ust humans鈥� living at a time when anatomical diversity among human groups was greater than it is today. Spikins agrees. The rethink began with clues that they buried their dead, but the watershed came with the discovery that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred, she says. 鈥淪uddenly it was much more acceptable to see their more humanlike qualities.鈥� All this firmly overturns the idea that Neanderthals were brutish. 鈥淎 more accurate reconstruction would come from The Flintstones,鈥� says Pope.