Homo neanderthalensis

The species in brief

The Neanderthals are the best known of all extinct humans, and the closest relatives we have. They lived across Europe and western Asia, from Portugal and Britain to the Middle East and Siberia, for several hundred thousand years, through repeated ice ages. They died out about 40,000 years ago, but not without leaving some of themselves behind in us.

“Neanderthal” is also often used as an insult for someone slow or brutish. That picture is wrong. It comes from the way the first fossils were interpreted more than a century ago, and almost everything learned since has pushed against it.

Discovery

In August 1856 workers quarrying limestone in the Neander Valley, near Düsseldorf, found some bones in a small cave called Feldhofer. They gave them to a local teacher, Johann Carl Fuhlrott, who recognised that the thick skullcap with its heavy brow was unlike a modern human’s. With the anatomist Hermann Schaaffhausen he announced in 1857 that it came from a very ancient, primitive kind of human. The Irish geologist William King gave the species its name, Homo neanderthalensis, in 1864.

Earlier finds (a child’s skull at Engis in Belgium in 1829, and an adult skull in Gibraltar in 1848) had been overlooked. The Neander Valley find came just before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, and so the debate about it ran side by side with the debate about evolution. See the Neander Valley page.

What a Neanderthal looked like

• Build. Short and stocky, probably around 1.65 m (5 ft 5 in) for men, with a broad, deep barrel-shaped chest, wide hips and relatively short forearms and lower legs. They were powerfully muscled. This body keeps heat well and suits cold climates.
• Head and face. A long, low skull with a bulge at the back (the “bun”), a heavy double-arched brow ridge, a big nose and a large, forward-set midface. Many had no real chin.
• Brain. Large, averaging roughly 1,450 cubic centimetres for women and 1,600 or more for men, as big as ours or bigger. The shape differs from a modern human’s, more elongated and less globe-like, which may mean different arrangement of brain areas.
• Colouring. DNA suggests that some had pale skin and red hair, and that others were darker. We should expect them to have varied.

The old image of a hunched, shuffling “caveman” came largely from a reconstruction of the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton, found in France in 1908 and described by the anatomist Marcellin Boule. The man had severe arthritis. In the 1950s Neanderthals were shown to have stood and walked as upright as we do.

Life and tools

Neanderthals made a distinctive set of stone tools called the Mousterian, using a technique called Levallois, in which a flake of a set shape is struck from a prepared stone core. They also made stone-tipped spears, and some had handles fixed with a glue made from birch tar, which has to be produced by heating bark in a controlled way. They controlled fire, built hearths and, in some caves, made structures.

They hunted big animals such as horses, deer, bison and sometimes mammoth or rhino, usually at close quarters, which fits with the number of healed fractures on their skeletons. They also ate plants, shellfish, seals and fish where they were available. Studies of the plaque on their teeth show they ate cooked plants, and in at least one case possibly used herbal remedies for pain. At a few sites, such as El Sidrón in Spain and Krapina in Croatia, cut marks show that Neanderthals sometimes ate other Neanderthals.

Mind and culture

Researchers disagree about how symbolic Neanderthals were, and new finds keep moving the line:

• Jewellery and pigment. Eagle talons with cut marks and polish from Krapina, about 130,000 years old, look like parts of a necklace. Pierced shells and ochre pigment come from several Neanderthal sites.
• Art. Cave paintings in three Spanish caves have been dated to more than 64,000 years ago, before modern humans reached Europe, and attributed to Neanderthals. The dating is hotly contested. A crosshatched engraving in Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar, dated to about 39,000 years ago, is also credited to them.
• Care for others. The man known as Shanidar 1, from a cave in Iraq, lived for years with a withered arm, a damaged leg and a head injury that probably left him blind in one eye, which suggests others helped to feed and protect him.
• Burial. Several Neanderthal skeletons lie in what look like graves, at places like La Chapelle-aux-Saints, La Ferrassie in France and Shanidar. Whether these were deliberate burials with a ritual meaning, or the bodies were covered by natural processes, is argued case by case. The famous “flower burial” at Shanidar, based on pollen, is widely doubted today, since burrowing animals could have moved the pollen.

The DNA story

Ancient DNA has transformed the field. In 2010 a team led by Svante Pääbo (who won a Nobel Prize for this work in 2022) published a first draft of the Neanderthal genome. It showed that people with ancestry from outside Africa carry roughly 1 to 2 percent Neanderthal DNA, evidence that the two groups met and had children, probably around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Some of those inherited genes are linked to skin and hair, immunity, and a few modern conditions.

The same work found a third group, the Denisovans, who were Neanderthals’ close cousins. Their remains were first found in Denisova Cave in Siberia, and Neanderthals and Denisovans also interbred. Contact went both ways: modern human DNA entered the Neanderthal line much earlier too, perhaps 200,000 years ago or more.

Where they lived and how they ended

Key Neanderthal sites include Spy in Belgium, La Ferrassie and La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France, El Sidrón in Spain, Krapina in Croatia, Tabun, Amud and Kebara in Israel, Shanidar in Iraq and Denisova and Chagyrskaya in the Altai. Some of the oldest fossils in the Neanderthal line, about 430,000 years old, are from the Sima de los Huesos at Atapuerca in Spain, where DNA shows they were early members of the Neanderthal branch.

By roughly 40,000 years ago, the last Neanderthals had gone. Dating of bones and tools from dozens of sites suggests a gradual fade, with modern humans and Neanderthals overlapping in Europe for a few thousand years. Their groups were small, and the DNA shows inbreeding in some of them. The most likely explanation is not a single cause, but a mix of climate changes, tiny populations, competition from modern humans and absorption through interbreeding. Debate on how much each mattered continues.

Where to see Neanderthals

The Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, close to the Neander Valley, is built beside the find site. The Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn holds the original Feldhofer bones. Museums such as the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, the Natural History Museum in London and the Smithsonian’s Hall of Human Origins display casts and reconstructions.

Sources

• Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Human Origins Program. Homo neanderthalensis.
• Natural History Museum, London. Who were the Neanderthals?
• Green, R. E. and others (2010). A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome. Science 328: 710 to 722.
• Higham, T. and others (2014). The timing and spatiotemporal patterning of Neanderthal disappearance. Nature 512: 306 to 309.
• Meyer, M. and others (2016). Nuclear DNA sequences from the Middle Pleistocene Sima de los Huesos hominins. Nature 531: 504 to 507.
• Hoffmann, D. L. and others (2018). U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art. Science 359: 912 to 915.
• Radovčić, D. and others (2015). Evidence for Neandertal jewelry: modified white-tailed eagle claws at Krapina. PLoS ONE 10: e0119802.