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Fossil Friday: Human Nature of Neanderthals Supported Again

August 16, 2024, 6:44 AM
Photo credit: Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

In a recent Fossil Friday article (Bechly 2024) I discussed the many lines of evidence that have accumulated in the past decade in favor of a fully human nature of Neanderthal men. As I documented with many references to the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, we know that Neanderthals used fire, buried their dead, created stone circles and bone tools, made jewelry from eagle talons and used feathers as body decoration, made cave art with paintings and engravings, played music with bone flutes, used ochre as pigment and sophisticated fiber technology, produced flour from processed plants, dived for seafood, cooked food and self-medicated with herbal painkillers and antibiotics, and even produced glue from birch bark with a complex chemical procedure.

Hints of Compassion

Now, we can add compassion to this growing list of very human behaviors. A new study by Conde-Valverde et al. (2024) described fragments of hominin fossils from the Cova Negra cave in Spain, which have been dated by electron spin resonance (ESR)/U-series to an age of 273-146 thousand years ago. The age and the morphology clearly suggest an attribution to Neanderthals. But the truly remarkable finding was that the remains of a six-year-old child showed the typical congenital pathologies of the inner ear associated with debilitating Down syndrome. The authors suggest that this disabled child “would have required care for at least 6 years, likely necessitating other group members to assist the mother in childcare.” The press release emphasized that this “Fossil of Neanderthal child with Down’s syndrome hints at early humans’ compassion” (Reuters 2024).

It was known already that Neanderthals cared for sick and injured individuals (Hublin 2009, Noble 2010, Spikins et al. 2010, 2018, Tilley 2015, 2022, Thorpe 2016, Spikins 2022), but such behavior can also be found in some of the more intelligent and social animal species like the great apes, elephants, and whales. However, extended caregiving for a strongly disabled child is a highly non-Darwinian behavior that indeeds suggests compassion on a level only found in humans, because it is not driven by mere survival of the fittest and differential reproductive success. Elephants abandon or even kill disabled infants (Rodrigo 2011). Monkeys and apes usually neglect or reject disabled infants (Hogenboom 2015), or at best bother to care for a few weeks (Jackson 2023, Valença & Falótico 2023). There exists just a single report of maternal care for a 23-months-old disabled chimp infant with symptoms similar to Down syndrome (AFP 2015, Matsumoto et al. 2016). The compassionate caregiving of Neanderthals is clearly not intermediate between such animal behaviour and human behavior, but rather as Noble (2010) put it: Modern research “rejects the popular portrayal of Neanderthals as simple, unfeeling brutes and suggests that our closest ancient relatives may well have demonstrated a level of compassion that would put many modern humans to shame, caring for the infirm and the vulnerable for years at a time in organised groups.” 

Strongly Corroboration

As I discussed in my previous article (Bechly 2024), the strong evidence for significant and common genetic admixture with modern humans, also suggests that Neanderthals and modern humans belonged to the same species. This was recently strongly corroborated by a new genetic study published in the journal Science (Li et al. 2024; also see Choi 2024b and Starr 2024), which found clear evidence for a “recurrent gene flow between Neanderthals and modern humans over the past 200,000 years”, suggesting a decreasing Neanderthal population that “was ultimately being absorbed into the modern human gene pool” as already suggested by a previous study (Stringer & Crété 2022). This definitely goes far beyond just some rare instances of admixture. Instead, it confirms a shared gene pool of different subpopulations within the same biospecies. Neanderthals were not a separate species of primitive hominins that went extinct, but were one of us and are still with us in our genes. They only vanished as a distinct group just like many other ancient subpopulations of humans, such as the Jomon people in Japan.

A Somewhat Different Result

Strangely, another new genetic study by Iasi et al. (2024), which is still in preprint stage and not yet peer-reviewed, comes to a somewhat different result and “suggests that humans interbred with Neanderthals 47,000 years ago for a period lasting 6,800 years” (Choi 2024a), but that “interbreeding that occurred at other times, such as the earlier events that impacted the Neanderthal genome, likely did not leave a detectable trace in our genome” (Choi 2024b). Looks like there is still much room for disagreement and different interpretation of the data, leading to quite different speculative scenarios.

Anyway, neither compassionate human behavior nor a shared gene pool would by itself refute a Darwinian evolution of modern humans, but such evidence certainly better resonates with the views of Darwin critics, who have always championed the view that there is only one humankind and that it is unique and distinct from the animal kingdom. Neanderthals and other ancient representatives of our genus Homo are not “stepping stones” on the way from bacteria to Beethoven, but just examples of human diversity in space and time.

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