Neanderthals and humans were engaged in brutal guerrilla-style warfare across the globe for over 100,000 years, evidence shows

Neanderthals and Homo sapiens evolved from one ancestor 600,000 years ago 

Two species co-existed together until Neanderthal extinction

Dr Nicholas R. Longrich of the University of Bath explains it for The Conversation

By NICHOLAS R. LONGRICH FOR THE CONVERSATION

PUBLISHED: 3 November 2020

Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were closely related, sister species who evolved from the same ancestor and co-existed for millennia.

But scientists have tussled with trying to explain why Neanderthals went extinct around 40,000 years and humans lived on.

Several theories have been put forward to explain how this happened, including competition for the same resources, such as food and shelter; Neanderthals being unable to adjust to rapid climate change; and direct confrontation.


Now it is believed a combination of all of these things contributed to the Neanderthal extinction.

But the latest data reveals the two hominin species were fighting grisly guerrilla-style battles for 100,000 years.

Dr Nicholas R. Longrich, a senior lecturer in evolutionary biology and palaeontology at the University of Bath explains more in an article for The Conversation.

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This graph, created by study author Dr Longrich, shows the global battles which waged for millennia between Neanderthals and humans, both archaic (blue) and modern (red)


Far from peaceful, Neanderthals were likely skilled fighters and dangerous warriors, rivalled only by modern humans

Around 600,000 years ago, humanity split in two. One group stayed in Africa, evolving into us.

The other struck out overland, into Asia, then Europe, becoming Homo neanderthalensis – the Neanderthals. They weren’t our ancestors, but a sister species, evolving in parallel.

Neanderthals fascinate us because of what they tell us about ourselves – who we were, and who we might have become.

It’s tempting to see them in idyllic terms, living peacefully with nature and each other, like Adam and Eve in the Garden.

If so, maybe humanity’s ills – especially our territoriality, violence, wars – aren’t innate, but modern inventions.

Biology and paleontology paint a darker picture. Far from peaceful, Neanderthals were likely skilled fighters and dangerous warriors, rivalled only by modern humans.
Top predators

Predatory land mammals are territorial, especially pack-hunters. Like lions, wolves and Homo sapiens, Neanderthals were cooperative big-game hunters.

These predators, sitting atop the food chain, have few predators of their own, so overpopulation drives conflict over hunting grounds.

Neanderthals faced the same problem; if other species didn’t control their numbers, conflict would have.

This territoriality has deep roots in humans. Territorial conflicts are also intense in our closest relatives, chimpanzees.

Male chimps routinely gang up to attack and kill males from rival bands, a behaviour strikingly like human warfare.

This implies that cooperative aggression evolved in the common ancestor of chimps and ourselves, 7 million years ago.

If so, Neanderthals will have inherited these same tendencies towards cooperative aggression.




Neanderthalensis were skilled big game hunters, using spears to take down deer, ibex, elk, bison, even rhinos and mammoths. It defies belief to think they would have hesitated to use these weapons if their families and lands were threatened. Archaeology suggests such conflicts were commonplace

Homo sapiens WERE to blame for Neanderthal extinction

A supercomputer may have finally ended the debate over what caused the extinction of Neanderthals.

Mathematicians used the enormous processing power of the IBS supercomputer Aleph to simulate what happened throughout Eurasia around 40,000 years ago.

It revealed that the most likely explanation for Neanderthal extinction is that Homo sapiens, who migrated into Europe around the time of the extinction of Neanderthals, were better hunters and out-competed them for food.

Humans and Neanderthals are known to have overlapped, and even mated, but the superior brain power of Homo sapiens eventually wiped out their distant cousins.

Experts have long quarrelled over whether it was tumultuous climate patterns, competition for food with Homo sapiens or the interbreeding with this new species that ultimately led to the demise of Neanderthals.

All too human

Warfare is an intrinsic part of being human. War isn’t a modern invention, but an ancient, fundamental part of our humanity.

Historically, all peoples warred. Our oldest writings are filled with war stories.

Archaeology reveals ancient fortresses and battles, and sites of prehistoric massacres going back millennia.

To war is human – and Neanderthals were very like us. We’re remarkably similar in our skull and skeletal anatomy, and share 99.7% of our DNA.

Behaviourally, Neanderthals were astonishingly like us.

They made fire, buried their dead, fashioned jewellery from seashells and animal teeth, made artwork and stone shrines.

If Neanderthals shared so many of our creative instincts, they probably shared many of our destructive instincts, too.
Violent lives

The archaeological record confirms Neanderthal lives were anything but peaceful.

Neanderthalensis were skilled big game hunters, using spears to take down deer, ibex, elk, bison, even rhinos and mammoths.

It defies belief to think they would have hesitated to use these weapons if their families and lands were threatened.

Archaeology suggests such conflicts were commonplace.

Prehistoric warfare leaves telltale signs. A club to the head is an efficient way to kill – clubs are fast, powerful, precise weapons – so prehistoric Homo sapiens frequently show trauma to the skull. So too do Neanderthals.

Another sign of warfare is the parry fracture, a break to the lower arm caused by warding off blows. Neanderthals also show a lot of broken arms.

At least one Neanderthal, from Shanidar Cave in Iraq, was impaled by a spear to the chest.

Trauma was especially common in young Neanderthal males, as were deaths.

Some injuries could have been sustained in hunting, but the patterns match those predicted for a people engaged in intertribal warfare- small-scale but intense, prolonged conflict, wars dominated by guerrilla-style raids and ambushes, with rarer battles.


The Saint-Césaire Neanderthal skull (pictured) suffered a blow that split the skull around 36,000 years ago in France

A map showing the relative dates at which humans arrived in the different Continents, including Europe 45,000 years ago. Humans and Neanderthals co-existed for about 8,000 years before Neanderthals went extinct
The Neanderthal resistance

War leaves a subtler mark in the form of territorial boundaries. The best evidence that Neanderthals not only fought but excelled at war, is that they met us and weren’t immediately overrun.

Instead, for around 100,000 years, Neanderthals resisted modern human expansion.

Why else would we take so long to leave Africa? Not because the environment was hostile but because Neanderthals were already thriving in Europe and Asia.

It’s exceedingly unlikely that modern humans met the Neanderthals and decided to just live and let live.

If nothing else, population growth inevitably forces humans to acquire more land, to ensure sufficient territory to hunt and forage food for their children. But an aggressive military strategy is also good evolutionary strategy.

Instead, for thousands of years, we must have tested their fighters, and for thousands of years, we kept losing. In weapons, tactics, strategy, we were fairly evenly matched.

Neanderthals probably had tactical and strategic advantages.

They’d occupied the Middle East for millennia, doubtless gaining intimate knowledge of the terrain, the seasons, how to live off the native plants and animals.

In battle, their massive, muscular builds must have made them devastating fighters in close-quarters combat.

Their huge eyes likely gave Neanderthals superior low-light vision, letting them manoeuvre in the dark for ambushes and dawn raids.
Sapiens victorious

Finally, the stalemate broke, and the tide shifted. We don’t know why.

It’s possible the invention of superior ranged weapons – bows, spear-throwers, throwing clubs – let lightly-built Homo sapiens harass the stocky Neanderthals from a distance using hit-and-run tactics.

Or perhaps better hunting and gathering techniques let sapiens feed bigger tribes, creating numerical superiority in battle.

Even after primitive Homo sapiens broke out of Africa 200,000 years ago, it took over 150,000 years to conquer Neanderthal lands.

In Israel and Greece, archaic Homo sapiens took ground only to fall back against Neanderthal counteroffensives, before a final offensive by modern Homo sapiens, starting 125,000 years ago, eliminated them.

This wasn’t a blitzkrieg, as one would expect if Neanderthals were either pacifists or inferior warriors, but a long war of attrition.

Ultimately, we won. But this wasn’t because they were less inclined to fight. In the end, we likely just became better at war than they were.

The original article was published on The Conversation and can be read here.

A close relative of modern humans, Neanderthals went extinct 40,000 years ago


The Neanderthals were a close human ancestor that mysteriously died out around 40,000 years ago.

The species lived in Africa with early humans for millennia before moving across to Europe around 300,000 years ago.

They were later joined by humans, who entered Eurasia around 48,000 years ago.

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The Neanderthals were a cousin species of humans but not a direct ancestor - the two species split from a common ancestor - that perished around 50,000 years ago. Pictured is a Neanderthal museum exhibit

These were the original 'cavemen', historically thought to be dim-witted and brutish compared to modern humans.

In recent years though, and especially over the last decade, it has become increasingly apparent we've been selling Neanderthals short.

A growing body of evidence points to a more sophisticated and multi-talented kind of 'caveman' than anyone thought possible.

It now seems likely that Neanderthals had told, buried their dead, painted and even interbred with humans.

They used body art such as pigments and beads, and they were the very first artists, with Neanderthal cave art (and symbolism) in Spain apparently predating the earliest modern human art by some 20,000 years.

They are thought to have hunted on land and done some fishing. However, they went extinct around 40,000 years ago following the success of Homo sapiens in Europe.

War in the time of Neanderthals: how our species battled for supremacy for over 100,000 years

Neanderthals Went Extinct in Iberia, and Were Replaced – by Other Neanderthals

Armed with advanced tools, Neanderthals may have been able to reconquer territory they had abandoned 1,500 years earlier – but not for long


Excavating the open-air late Neanderthal site, Aranbaltza II

.Credit: Joseba Rios


Ruth Schuster
Apr. 5, 2022 

When did the Neanderthals die out once and for all? Some argue they never did because our ancestors mixed with that subspecies, so bits of their genome live on. The fact remains that you can’t meet a Neanderthal because they are gone, forever more. But one question is the manner of their passing. Now, a new paper posits that the different stone tool technologies at a site in northern Spain indicate migration by Neanderthals, and population replacement of Neanderthals – by other Neanderthals.

For whatever reason – and we shall get to that – by about 45,000 years ago Neanderthals using Middle Paleolithic stone technology seem to have disappeared from Cantabria, including from the open-air Northern Iberian Peninsula site called Aranbaltza II, write Joseba Rios-Garaizar of the Archaeology Museum of Bilbao and colleagues in PLOS One.

There is a “sterile” period, a gap, in the archaeological record there. And then, 1,500 to 1,000 years later, more Neanderthals arrived and replaced them.

These new Neanderthals were armed with more advanced, finer tools known as the Châtelperronian technology, the team posits. Châtelperronian flint tools have a distinctive single cutting edge and a curved back.

A map showing Neanderthals in Iberia.Credit: PLOS ONE

The archaeological layers – Middle Paleolithic; nothing; Châtelperronian – are distinct, the archaeologists write. Moreover, this is far from the only hominin site in the region where Middle Paleolithic and Châtelperronian layers are distinct, showing no continuity.

Neanderthals at work

The Neanderthals-replacing-Neanderthals theory is based on stone tool discoveries at Aranbaltza II, an open-air site (an area clearly used by hominins that is not in a cave or rock shelter). A huge number of tools was found there: in fact, the archaeologists suspect that Aranbaltza II was a Neanderthal stone-working factory, partly because it’s close to a flint outcrop.

In short, this isn’t where the Neanderthals lived, they suggest: it was their industrial zone. Separately, archaeologists have reported on Neanderthal-era hunting camps and cave dwellings in the region.

Unfortunately, no bones have been found at Aranbaltza II that could have shed a more categorical light on the human species involved, because the soil of Cantabria is too acid for preservation, Rios-Garaizar explains.

Much of this remains controversial, including the contention that Neanderthals were the inventors, the authors, the manufacturers of Châtelperronian-type tools, which so far have been found in France and northern Spain dating to a range of about 44,000 to 40,000 years ago. Not everybody even agrees that there is such as thing as a distinct Châtelperronian industry. And among those who accept its uniqueness, some suspect sapiens involvement, influence, or actual authorship of these tools.


Studying tools from Aranbaltza II in the lab.Credit: Joseba Rios

(The name “Châtelperronian” derives from the site where it was first identified as a distinct industry: Châtelperron in central France, where it was preceded by the Mousterian industry.)

We are pretty sure that anatomically modern humans, we Homo sapiens lot, had reached Bulgaria by 45,000 years ago – the remains uncovered at Bacho Kiro leave little room for doubt. So if sapiens had reached Spain too by that time, could they plausibly be responsible for the Châtelperronian tools found at Aranbaltza?

We do not know but, Rios-Garaizar says, the thinking is they got to western Europe “a little bit” later, definitely by 42,000 years ago. So he remains confident that the Châtelperronian assembly found in northern Spain is of Neanderthal origin.

To shore up that argument, previous work – including paleo-protein analysis – at the site of Arcy-sur-Cure in north-central France indicates Neanderthal authorship of the Châtelperronian techniques, Rios-Garaizar points out.

So for the purposes of this article, let us assume that the occupants of Aranbaltza were Neanderthals, whether post-hybridization with sapiens or not; and that Neanderthals were indeed the party responsible for bringing Châtelperronian technology to the world.


A Chatelperronian flake from Aranbaltza.Credit: Joseba Rios

If so, what happened at this open-air site in Spain tens of thousands of years ago?

Howling storms

If we assume that all the personalities involved in this story of prehistoric Aranbaltza are Neanderthals, then the presence of Mousterian stone technology, replaced a millennium later by Châtelperronian, suggests that the first group of Neanderthals went extinct. Other Neanderthals, late Neanderthals, arrived 1,500 to 1,000 years later, likely migrating from Aquitaine, southwestern France, the team suggests.

Does the cultural change – in stone technology – necessarily translate into Neanderthal migration? Not in the mind of Israeli anthropologist Prof. Israel Hershkovitz, an expert on that era: it’s an interesting speculation but there’s no evidence for it at this point, he argues.

That said, there is no argument that hominin species had wanderlust; various types were leaving Africa as much as 2 million years ago and quite speedily reached the farthest edges of continental Asia. Also, in 2020, separate work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows Neanderthal migration from Bavaria to southern Siberia. That thesis is based on similarity in tools at specific sites in the two regions, and on DNA analyses of Neanderthal bones and sediments from the Siberian cave Chagyrskaya – which show the Neanderthals there were significantly different from other Neanderthals in Siberia living in Denisova Cave.


Sample of the many tools found at Aranbaltza.Credit: PLOS ONE

Apropos of which, Denisovans – the cousins of Neanderthals – are also believed, based on genetic evidence, to have dispersed widely in central and eastern Asia, even if proven bone evidence for them is extremely scanty: only in Siberia and Tibet. The extraordinarily high component of Denisovan DNA in indigenous Filipinos today is otherwise hard to explain.

So it seems Neanderthals would and did get about, and if Rios-Garaizar and his colleagues are right about the cascade of events at Aranbaltza, localized extinctions and replacements may have played a role in the ultimate total extinction of their species, which would be pretty soon after Châtelperronian technology appeared.

There is no consensus for the timing of the Neanderthals’ extinction, but most agree they “barely” crossed the 40,000-year boundary, possibly surviving until about 37,000 years ago in some places, Rios-Garaizar says. Châtelperronian was one of the last technological and cultural expressions of Neanderthals.

No, their work cannot indicate which of the postulated causes – endogenous, climate change, we nice folk moving into the neighborhood – were responsible. But if Neanderthals went extinct in Cantabria for a thousand-plus years and then came back, we can suspect the howling vagaries of climate at the time were involved.

In any case, by this time in their story, the Neanderthals were in decline, their small groups under stress – various reports show evidence of pathologies suggesting they were procreating through incest in the absence of more appealing options; that at least some were stricken by kuru after eating the brains of their own dead; that sapiens appeared with its mega-kicky brain – not as big as a Neanderthal’s, but somehow qualitatively improved in a way that led us to create figurative art while they did not; or simply that we sneezed on them and infected them with germs to which they had no natural immunity.


A Chatelperronian flake from Aranbaltza.Credit: Joseba Rios

And while everybody is speculating, Rios-Garaizar suggests a wonderful theory.

By 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals were clearly under stress. They vanished from Cantabria, possibly because of resource stress. This was a time of intense climatic variability, with very rapid, dramatic changes and, likely, howling storms. There may have been drastic environmental changes in northern Spain, leading to change in the fauna and, therefore, in those who hunt the fauna. Perhaps they needed to go farther to obtain the food they needed and, whether they died out or just left, Cantabria would remain free of Neanderthals until the next set came along armed with Châtelperronian technology.

Possibly these Neanderthals armed with Châtelperronian blades were so successful that they could be fruitful and multiply (hopefully beyond the nuclear family), and occupy new territories, Rios-Garaizar suggests. But not for long. They too disappeared, and fast.

Why? We do not know. Theories continue to compete but plausibly, at some point in Africa we the sapiens sapiens species crossed some sort of barrier, threshold, in brain evolution that rendered us intellectually superior to the Neanderthals. We gained abilities they may not have had, and after thousands upon thousands of years of “trying” (not that there was a declared aspiration), we made it past the Neanderthals and left Africa and spread madly throughout the world.

They, meanwhile, had been suffering from vagaries of climate and armed with Châtelperronian technology or not, we outcompeted them, and perhaps dealt better somehow with the environmental stressors, possibly due to better sociability. They grew more and more stressed; we may have coexisted cheek by jowl in some areas, especially in the Middle East, for thousands of years – but the upshot is that here we are today, while they are not.

And we may never know just how culturally advanced they were. We may never know whether they really could swim like fish. We may never be sure they really did have digging sticks, whether they had religion or just wanted to emulate big birds; whether they could cook soup, or whether it really was a custom, as has been postulated in one case of late Neanderthals in Iraq, that they buried their dead with flowers. The only thing for sure is that they're extinct.

Did human diseases kill the Neanderthals? Tropical illnesses carried by Homo sapiens from Africa to Europe and Asia may have wiped out our distant cousins 40,000 years ago

Homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived alongside each other in the Levant

The two species existed in an 'equilibrium' for tens of thousands of years

A 'disease barrier' kept Homo sapiens from Neanderthal territory


By RYAN MORRISON FOR MAILONLINE November 2019

Neanderthals may have been wiped out by tropical diseases carried by homo sapiens as they migrated out of Africa more than 130,000 years ago, a new study has revealed.

Archeological evidence suggests that Eurasian Neanderthals first came into contact with our human ancestors in an area known as the Levant in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The two species survived together for tens of thousands of years before the Neanderthals began disappearing and modern humans expanded beyond the Levant.

In a new report, researchers from Stanford University suggests that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were locked in a 'disease stalemate' for tens of thousands of years.

Neanderthals and homo sapiens co-existed for tens of thousands of years in the Levant but a breakdown in an invisible disease barrier may have led to modern humans overwhelming the Neanderthals and then spreading out

The Levant includes a number of modern countries including Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Iraq.

Gilli Greenbaum from the Stanford team said: 'Our research suggests that diseases may have played a more important role in the extinction of the Neanderthals than previously thought.

'They may even be the main reason why modern humans are now the only human group left on the planet.'

The team used mathematical models of modern disease transmission to show how the unique diseases held by Neanderthals and modern humans could have created an 'invisible disease barrier' between the two species.

This would have discouraged homo sapiens from entering enemy territory for fear of contracting a disease they had no immunity over.


Researchers believe the mutual fear of contracting diseases held by both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens is behind their ability to co-exist for tens of thousands of years

The researchers claim this 'uneasy equilibrium' was eventually broken due to interbreeding between the two species.

The hybrid humans born of these unions may have carried immune-related genes from both species, which would have slowly spread through modern human and Neanderthal populations.

As these protective genes spread, the disease burden or consequences of infection within the two groups gradually lifted.

Eventually, a tipping point was reached when modern humans acquired enough immunity that they could venture beyond the Levant and deeper into Neanderthal territory with few health consequences.

At this point, other advantages that modern humans may have had over Neanderthals — such as deadlier weapons or more sophisticated social structures — could have taken on greater importance.

It is believed that their inefficient stone tools (recreation pictured) saw Neanderthals perish 40,000 years ago, while the homo sapien community boomed to become the origin of modern day humans

The reason modern humans replaced Neanderthals and not the other way around, is to do with the severity of the diseases that both species carries, according to the researchers.

'The hypothesis is that the disease burden of the tropics was larger than the disease burden in temperate regions,' said study co-author Noah Rosenberg.

'An asymmetry of disease burden in the contact zone might have favoured modern humans, who arrived there from the tropics.'

He said the modelling found that even small differences in disease burden between the two groups at the outset would have grown over time, eventually giving homo sapiens the edge.

Dr Greenbaum said: 'It could be that by the time modern humans were almost entirely released from the added burden of Neanderthal diseases, Neanderthals were still very much vulnerable to modern human diseases.


After the disease barrier no longer affected modern humans they would have been able to overwhelm the Neanderthals with their superior tools and weapons

'Moreover, as modern humans expanded deeper into Eurasia, they would have encountered Neanderthal populations that did not receive any protective immune genes via hybridization.'

The way the Neanderthals succumbed to homo sapiens is similar to what happened when Europeans arrived in the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries and decimated indigenous populations with their more potent diseases.

If this new theory about the Neanderthals' demise is correct, then supporting evidence might be found in the archaeological record.

'We predict, for example, that Neanderthal and modern human population densities in the Levant during the time period when they coexisted will be lower relative to what they were before and relative to other regions,' Greenbaum said.

The full findings of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Neanderthals And Humans Were at War For Over 100,000 Years, Evidence Shows

The Saint-Césaire Neanderthal skull suffered a blow that split the skull. (Smithsonian Institution)

NICHOLAS R. LONGRICH, THE CONVERSATION
3 NOVEMBER 2020

Around 600,000 years ago, humanity split in two. One group stayed in Africa, evolving into us. The other struck out overland, into Asia, then Europe, becoming Homo neanderthalensis – the Neanderthals. They weren't our ancestors, but a sister species, evolving in parallel.


Neanderthals fascinate us because of what they tell us about ourselves – who we were, and who we might have become. It's tempting to see them in idyllic terms, living peacefully with nature and each other, like Adam and Eve in the Garden.

If so, maybe humanity's ills – especially our territoriality, violence, wars – aren't innate, but modern inventions.

Biology and palaeontology paint a darker picture. Far from peaceful, Neanderthals were likely skilled fighters and dangerous warriors, rivalled only by modern humans.
Top predators

Predatory land mammals are territorial, especially pack-hunters. Like lions, wolves and Homo sapiens, Neanderthals were cooperative big-game hunters. These predators, sitting atop the food chain, have few predators of their own, so overpopulation drives conflict over hunting grounds. Neanderthals faced the same problem; if other species didn't control their numbers, conflict would have.

This territoriality has deep roots in humans. Territorial conflicts are also intense in our closest relatives, chimpanzees. Male chimps routinely gang up to attack and kill males from rival bands, a behaviour strikingly like human warfare.

This implies that cooperative aggression evolved in the common ancestor of chimps and ourselves, 7 million years ago. If so, Neanderthals will have inherited these same tendencies towards cooperative aggression.

All too human

Warfare is an intrinsic part of being human. War isn't a modern invention, but an ancient, fundamental part of our humanity. Historically, all peoples warred. Our oldest writings are filled with war stories. Archaeology reveals ancient fortresses and battles, and sites of prehistoric massacres going back millennia.

To war is human – and Neanderthals were very like us. We're remarkably similar in our skull and skeletal anatomy, and share 99.7 percent of our DNA.

Behaviourally, Neanderthals were astonishingly like us. They made fire, buried their dead, fashioned jewellery from seashells and animal teeth, made artwork and stone shrines. If Neanderthals shared so many of our creative instincts, they probably shared many of our destructive instincts, too.
Violent lives

The archaeological record confirms Neanderthal lives were anything but peaceful.

Neanderthalensis were skilled big game hunters, using spears to take down deer, ibex, elk, bison, even rhinos and mammoths. It defies belief to think they would have hesitated to use these weapons if their families and lands were threatened. Archaeology suggests such conflicts were commonplace.

Prehistoric warfare leaves telltale signs. A club to the head is an efficient way to kill – clubs are fast, powerful, precise weapons – so prehistoric Homo sapiens frequently show trauma to the skull. So too do Neanderthals.


Another sign of warfare is the parry fracture, a break to the lower arm caused by warding off blows. Neanderthals also show a lot of broken arms. At least one Neanderthal, from Shanidar Cave in Iraq, was impaled by a spear to the chest.

Trauma was especially common in young Neanderthal males, as were deaths. Some injuries could have been sustained in hunting, but the patterns match those predicted for a people engaged in intertribal warfare- small-scale but intense, prolonged conflict, wars dominated by guerrilla-style raids and ambushes, with rarer battles.
The Neanderthal resistance

War leaves a subtler mark in the form of territorial boundaries. The best evidence that Neanderthals not only fought but excelled at war, is that they met us and weren't immediately overrun. Instead, for around 100,000 years, Neanderthals resisted modern human expansion.

The out-of-Africa offensive. (Nicholas R. Longrich)

Why else would we take so long to leave Africa? Not because the environment was hostile but because Neanderthals were already thriving in Europe and Asia.

It's exceedingly unlikely that modern humans met the Neanderthals and decided to just live and let live. If nothing else, population growth inevitably forces humans to acquire more land, to ensure sufficient territory to hunt and forage food for their children.


But an aggressive military strategy is also good evolutionary strategy.

Instead, for thousands of years, we must have tested their fighters, and for thousands of years, we kept losing. In weapons, tactics, strategy, we were fairly evenly matched.

Neanderthals probably had tactical and strategic advantages. They'd occupied the Middle East for millennia, doubtless gaining intimate knowledge of the terrain, the seasons, how to live off the native plants and animals.

In battle, their massive, muscular builds must have made them devastating fighters in close-quarters combat. Their huge eyes likely gave Neanderthals superior low-light vision, letting them manoeuvre in the dark for ambushes and dawn raids.
Sapiens victorious

Finally, the stalemate broke, and the tide shifted. We don't know why. It's possible the invention of superior ranged weapons – bows, spear-throwers, throwing clubs – let lightly-built Homo sapiens harass the stocky Neanderthals from a distance using hit-and-run tactics.

Or perhaps better hunting and gathering techniques let sapiens feed bigger tribes, creating numerical superiority in battle.

Even after primitive Homo sapiens broke out of Africa 200,000 years ago, it took over 150,000 years to conquer Neanderthal lands. In Israel and Greece, archaic Homo sapiens took ground only to fall back against Neanderthal counteroffensives, before a final offensive by modern Homo sapiens, starting 125,000 years ago, eliminated them.

This wasn't a blitzkrieg, as one would expect if Neanderthals were either pacifists or inferior warriors, but a long war of attrition. Ultimately, we won. But this wasn't because they were less inclined to fight. In the end, we likely just became better at war than they were.

Nicholas R. Longrich, 

Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology and Paleontology, University of Bath.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Humans' ancient ancestors developed bows and arrows 20,000 years earlier than thought – allowing them to survive while the Neanderthals were wiped out

Archaeologists excavated some 140 fossils from Grotta del Cavallo cave in Italy

Homo sapiens had weapons 40,000 years ago, not 20,000 years as believed

This could therefore have seen the species thrive while Neanderthals perished

By JACK ELSOM FOR MAILONLINE October 2019

Neanderthals were wiped out because they lacked the cutting-edge hunting weapons wielded by homo sapiens, archaeologists have suggested.

An excavation of animal bones in the Grotta del Cavallo cave in southern Italy found our ancestors' superior spears and bows and arrows allowed them to kill animals more easily than the primitive cavemen.

It's believed that their inefficient stone tools saw Neanderthals perish 40,000 years ago, while the homo sapiens community boomed to become the origin of modern day humans.

Professor Stefano Benazzi, at the University of Bologna in Italy, said: 'The advanced hunting strategy is related to a competitive advantage.

Neanderthals (drawing pictured) were wiped out because they lacked the cutting-edge hunting weapons wielded by homo sapiens, archaeologists have suggested

'This study offered important insight to understand the reasons for the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans.'

The team excavated more than 140 fossils of animal remains from the Grotta del Cavallo, home to the first known 'Upper Paleolithic' settlement in Europe.

Scientists have found evidence that early homo sapiens were using spears, arrows and darts at least 40,000 years ago - 20,000 years earlier than previously believed

They used a digital microscope and found 'cut marks' on the animal remains, which confirmed the animals had been hunted and killed intentionally with refined tools.

Dr Katsuhiro Sano, of Tohoku University in Japan, said: 'The impact fractures showed similar patterns of experimental samples delivered by a spear thrower and a bow, but significantly different from those observed on throwing and thrusting samples.'

It is believed that their inefficient stone tools (recreation pictured) saw Neanderthals perish 40,000 years ago, while the homo sapien community boomed to become the origin of modern day humans

The team also found traces of ochre, plant gum and beeswax, which were likely used as homemade glue to steady the arrow heads.

Researcher Chiaramaria Stani said soil samples retrieved from the cave ruled out any 'organic contaminants' from the site and confirmed the presence of a mixture of silicate and iron oxides.

Neanderthals are known to have used spears and even arrows to hunt, but never mastered the bow and arrow.

While our ancestors lived with Neanderthals in Europe for more than 5,000 years, little is known about why Neanderthals went extinct.

Different theories include violence, disease, natural catastrophe, interbreeding and competition.


An excavation of the Grotta del Cavallo cave in southern Italy found our ancestors' superior spears and bows and arrows allowed them to kill animals easier than the primitive cavemen (Neanderthals preparing food pictured)

Dr Sano said: 'Modern humans migrating to Europe equipped themselves with mechanically delivered projectile weapons, such as a spear thrower-darts or a bow and arrow, which allowed modern humans to hunt more successfully than Neanderthals.'

The findings, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, come just days after 257 fossil footprints were found in Western France, which suggested Neanderthals were much taller than was first believed.

The prints were likely made by a group of young individuals along the shoreline around 80,000 years ago.

Dr Isabelle de Groote at Liverpool John Moores University said: 'The discovery of so many Neanderthal footprints at one site is extraordinary.'


WHO WERE THE NEANDERTHALS?

The Neanderthals were a close human ancestor that mysteriously died out around 50,000 years ago.

The species lived in Africa with early humans for hundreds of millennia before moving across to Europe around 500,000 years ago.

They were later joined by humans taking the same journey some time in the past 100,000 years.

The Neanderthals were a cousin species of humans but not a direct ancestor - the two species split from a common ancestor - that perished around 50,000 years ago. Pictured is a Neanderthal museum exhibit

These were the original 'cavemen', historically thought to be dim-witted and brutish compared to modern humans.

In recent years though, and especially over the last decade, it has become increasingly apparent we've been selling Neanderthals short.

A growing body of evidence points to a more sophisticated and multi-talented kind of 'caveman' than anyone thought possible.

It now seems likely that Neanderthals buried their dead with the concept of an afterlife in mind.

Additionally, their diets and behaviour were surprisingly flexible.

They used body art such as pigments and beads, and they were the very first artists, with Neanderthal cave art (and symbolism) in Spain apparently predating the earliest modern human art by some 20,000 years.

SEE 

The Bow: A Techno-Mythic Hermeneutic: 

Ancient Greece and the Mesolithic (1981)

James Harrod

1981, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49,3: 425-446

Religion,

Ethnology,

Mesolithic,

Arc

Neanderthals and humans may belong to the same species, say scientists. It could rewrite the history of our evolution.


Marianne Guenot

Business Insider
Mon, 1 January 2024 

An employee of the Natural History Museum in London looks at model of a Neanderthal male.

Will Oliver/PA Images/Getty

Up until recently, the consensus was that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were separate species.


But most humans carry around 2% of Neanderthal DNA, challenging the view that we are different.


Other studies suggest Neanderthals weren't inferior to Homo sapiens and should be considered human.

Neanderthals have long been portrayed as dim-witted, brutish monsters who were genetically inferior to our direct ancestors, early modern humans.

These ape-like creatures spoke in grunts, were beset with illnesses, and died out 40,000 years ago after losing the evolutionary battle against Homo sapiens.

Or at least, that's what we've been told. Recent discoveries, however, are upending that view and reigniting a debate among scientists about whether Neanderthals should be considered to be the same species as early modern humans.

If Neanderthals belonged to our species, it could reshape the history of human evolution and challenge how we define what makes us human.

Most of us have some Neanderthal DNA

The first fossils of Neanderthals were identified almost 200 years ago. By now, you would think scientists would have made up their minds about whether they should be defined as a separate species from Homo sapiens.

But it turns out this is a matter of fierce debate, Antoine Balzeau, a paleontologist from the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in France, told Business Insider.

"When we were at first discussing the fossils in the 19th century, there was no real debate about specific species or not, simply because at the time, humans were seen as a species but by default," he said.

The cast of a Neanderthal skull is displayed in the Chemnitz State Museum of Archaeology.Hendrik Schmidt/picture alliance via Getty Images

As more fossils emerged, scientists started questioning the strict separation between the species.

Still, up to recently, the consensus was mostly that Neanderthals should be seen as separate. The hominins, who roamed Europe as early as 430,000 years ago, only briefly interacted with Homo sapiens emerging from Africa, who reached Europe about 50,000 years ago.

The lineages separated about 500,000 years ago — relatively recently in the story of human evolution, but long enough ago that they looked significantly different. For many, that evidence was enough to close the debate: Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were separate species.

That view started to change in 2008 when Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo achieved something that was thought to be impossible: he sequenced the genome of a Neanderthal by extracting DNA from ancient bones.

Through his research, Pääbo was able to show that there's a little Neanderthal in most of us. In fact, he showed most living humans carry around 2% of Neanderthal DNA.

The evidence also suggests that human ancestors and Neanderthals likely had children together when they cohabitated about 50,000 years ago.

This news created a dogmatic rift, opening up the possibility, once again, that Neanderthals and humans should be considered to be the same species.

After all, according to the strict biological definition of species, animals from different species shouldn't be able to produce fertile offspring.

"It definitely was a big game changer at that point," Laura Buck, an evolutionary anthropologist studying hybridization between hominin species, told BI.

"I think it has sort of brought that discussion to the forefront again," she said.
Were Neanderthals more than just our distant cousins?

The idea that species can't reproduce is "intuitively attractive because it's sort of clear cut," Buck said, "but biology isn't clear cut."

She points to several examples of mammals that have been known to interbreed and have fertile offspring, like wolves and dogs, despite being clearly defined as separate species.

For her, a better definition of Neanderthals, the most scientifically tried and tested, is the first one: the characteristics of their bones separate them from modern humans and their direct ancestors.

Hyperrealistic face of a Neanderthal male is displayed in a cave in the new Neanderthal Museum in the northern Croatian town of Krapina.

REUTERS/Nikola Solic

"I know there are various different papers saying if you shaved a Neanderthal, put him in a suit, and put him on the tube or the subway in New York, no one would notice, I don't think that's true," she said.

"I think we'd definitely think they looked a bit weird," she said.

Balzeau agrees. "There may be some discussion between specialists about how we define the different groups but from a paleontological point of view, Homo neanderthalensis and almost Homo sapiens are very clear anatomical differences," said Balzeau.

For others, however, the genomic information should be another argument to liberate the Neanderthal from its knuckle-dragging stereotype.

That's the case for Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist who specializes in the Paleolythic at Durham University in the UK.

"It would be guesswork to use that evolutionary divergence to assume that there are different species," he told BI.

Can culture define a species?

Over the past two decades, digs started emerging showing Neanderthals may have been much more sophisticated than had been previously thought.

Pettitt counts himself among those who, until recently, were skeptical that Neanderthals could have any sense of sophistication.

"Until say 20 years ago, Neanderthal behavior was looked on as fairly stupid, or at least fairly limited, and Homo sapiens were, by contrast, seen as quoting Shakespeare, as they dance across Europe," he joked.

"Which is, of course, nonsense, but it's a very entrenched view," he said.

This is thought to have been Neanderthal jewelry created using eagle talons 130,000 years ago.

After all, relative to their size, some studies suggest Neanderthals had a brain at least the same size, if not bigger, than our ancestors, indicating that they may have been very cerebral, Pettitt said

"You don't buy a top-of-the-range computer simply to use it as an alarm clock. There's got to be an evolutionary reason why Neanderthals had selected for this remarkably, metabolically expensive tissue," he said.

Studies have suggested that Neanderthals were skilled hunters, and hide workers, created rudimentary jewelry, had a complex lythic industry, and even worked with pigment.

Some scientists even believe they may have had some form of spiritualism, and would bury their dead, revere lions, and may have even created cave paintings — though that evidence is still a matter of debate.

For Pettitt, this suggests that as Neanderthals and humans lived alongside each other in Europe, there's a good chance they shared a culture or learned from observing each other.

If they spoke, he said, "we can assume they probably spoke different languages. But that similarity suggests there was in fact a shared meaning, however simple."
Could Neanderthals be called human?

There's a bigger picture question at stake here: should Neanderthals be considered humans?

"What humanity is very much depends on which group of people you're talking to," Buck said.

"It's something that is culturally defined, but it's also something that has sort of value judgments. We talk about inhumanity. We talked about humanity. It's not something that just refers to different types of organisms," she said.

With the sheer number of people who are alive today, there is arguably more Neanderthal DNA on Earth than there ever was before.

Angela Saini, author of "Superior: the Return of Race Science," argues that there is a real risk of getting this wrong. Those who are thought to have more Neanderthal DNA today could be wrongly thought of as inferior.

Early studies have linked these Neanderthal genes to modern health effects like autoimmune diseases, diabetes, and some cancer— though how these genes exactly affect the health of the person who carries them is still mostly unclear. Neanderthal genes have also notably been associated with catching COVID-19.

Because East Asian populations have been found to carry slightly more Neanderthal DNA on average, there is a real danger that this information will be used for discrimination.

The flip side is that our interpretation of Neanderthal culture has changed dramatically in recent years. Saini notes that the Neanderthal image was rehabilitated just as people started to draw them closer to populations in Europe, and genetic information started suggesting they were fairer skinned with red hair.

"That's what I find particularly galling. A hundred or so years ago, the supposed similarity between Neanderthals and Aboriginal Australians was used as a justification to draw living modern humans out of the circle of humanity," she told WNYC.

"Now, because we see that Neanderthals have some relationship to modern-day Europeans, Neanderthals themselves an extinct species has been thrown into that circle of humanity."

Rewriting our history

We are still in the process of understanding Neanderthals and our relationship to them. As we begin to unpick the history of human and Neanderthal evolution, new scrutiny is being placed on the decision of scholars to separate the two and depict one as superior.

When he revealed his research, Pääbo reflected on how humans living on the Earth today are rather exceptional — not necessarily because Homo sapiens are intrinsically better, but because there is very little time in the history of human evolution when Homo sapiens were the only hominin or human on the planet.

"Had Neanderthals and Denisovans survived, how would we deal with that today?" Pääbo said.

"Would we experience even worse racism against them than what we experience among us today — because they were in some respects really different — or could we think differently and say if we had them here today we would not just have one type of humans?" he added.

"I think both things are possible and it sort of reflects our view of humans and how we speculate about that."

  

Cook like a Neanderthal: Scientists try to replicate ancient butchering methods to learn how Neanderthals ate birds

A pilot study indicates that fire-roasted birds are easier to process, but only birds butchered raw show cutmarks — evidence that we can use to understand Neanderthal diets

Frontiers

 

image: 

A scientist defeathers one of the birds. Image by Dr Mariana Nabais.

view more 

Credit: Dr Mariana Nabais.

It's hard to know what Neanderthals ate: food preparation, especially when it comes to smaller items like birds, can leave few archaeological traces. But understanding their diets is critical to understanding these incredibly adaptable hominins, who thrived for hundreds of thousands of years in wildly varied environments. To learn what food preparation could look like in the archaeological record, scientists tried cooking like Neanderthals.

“Using a flint flake for butchering required significant precision and effort, which we had not fully valued before this experiment,” said Dr Mariana Nabais of the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social in Spain, lead author of the article in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. “The flakes were sharper than we initially thought, requiring careful handling to make precise cuts without injuring our own fingers. These hands-on experiments emphasized the practical challenges involved in Neanderthal food processing and cooking, providing a tangible connection to their daily life and survival strategies.”

You are what you eat

Although the big game hunting practiced by Neanderthals is well known, we know less about the birds that some Neanderthals hunted. But recent discoveries and new techniques allow us to investigate this more deeply. By testing food preparation methods that Neanderthals could have used, to see what traces these might leave on bones and how those traces compare to damage caused by natural processes or the actions of other animals, the scientists created an experimental database that can be compared to real archaeological sites.

The scientists collected five wild birds that had died of natural causes from the Wildlife Ecology, Rehabilitation and Surveillance Centre (CERVAS) in Gouveia, Portugal. They chose two carrion crows, two collared doves, and a wood pigeon, which are similar to species that Neanderthals ate, and selected cooking methods using archaeological evidence and ethnographic data.

All the birds were defeathered by hand. A carrion crow and a collared dove were then butchered raw, using a flint flake. The remaining three were roasted over hot coals until cooked, then butchered, which the scientists found much easier than butchering the raw birds.

“Roasting the birds over the coals required maintaining a consistent temperature and carefully monitoring the cooking duration to avoid overcooking the meat,” said Nabais. “Maybe because we defeathered the birds before cooking, the roasting process was much quicker than we anticipated. In fact, we spent more time preparing the coals than on the actual cooking, which took less than ten minutes.”

Putting flesh on prehistoric bones

The scientists cleaned and dried the bones, then examined them microscopically for cutmarks, breaks, and burns. They also examined the flint flake they had used for evidence of wear and tear. Although they had used their hands for most of the butchery, the raw birds required considerable use of the flint flake, which now had small half-moon scars on the edge. While the cuts used to remove meat from the raw birds did not leave traces on the bones, the cuts aimed at tendons left marks similar to those on birds found at archaeological sites.

The bones from the roasted birds were more brittle: some had shattered and couldn’t be recovered. Nearly all of them had brown or black burns consistent with controlled exposure to heat. Black stains inside some bones suggested that the contents of the inner cavity had also burned. This evidence sheds light not just on how Neanderthal food preparation could have worked, but also how visible that preparation might be in the archaeological record. Although roasting makes it easier to access meat, the increased fragility of the bones means the leftovers might not be found by archaeologists.

However, the scientists cautioned that this research should be expanded to gain a fuller understanding of Neanderthal diets. Future studies should include more species of small prey, as well as processing birds for non-food products, like talons or feathers.

“The sample size is relatively small, consisting of only five bird specimens, which may not fully represent the diversity of bird species that Neanderthals might have used,” noted Nabais. “Secondly, the experimental conditions, although carefully controlled, cannot completely replicate the exact environmental and cultural contexts of Neanderthal life. Further research with larger samples, varied species, and more diverse experimental conditions is necessary to expand upon these results.”

Usewear on the flake used for butchery. Image by Dr Marina Igreja.

Credit

Dr Marina Igreja.

Bones recovered from the birds. Image by Dr Mariana Nabais.

Credit

Dr Mariana Nabais.

Journal

Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology

DOI

10.3389/fearc.2024.1411853 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Experimental replication of early human behaviour in bird preparation: A pilot-study focusing on bone surface modification and breakage patterns

Rare archaeological site reveals ‘surprising’ Neanderthal behaviour at Pyrenees foothills

Australian National University

 

image: 

ANU archaeologist Dr Sofia Samper Carro says the insights found at Abric Pizarro challenge widespread beliefs that Neanderthals only hunted large animals. 

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Credit: Photo: Sofia Samper Carro

An unchartered area in the foothills of the Southern Pyrenees in Spain is providing insights into a poorly known period of Neanderthal history, offering clues that could help archaeologists uncover the mystery of their downfall, according to new research from The Australian National University (ANU).
 
Abric Pizarro is one of only a few sites worldwide dating from 100,000 to 65,000 years ago during a period called MIS 4. The researchers have gathered hundreds of thousands of artefacts, including stone tools, animal bones and other evidence, providing significant data about the Neanderthal way of life during that time -- largely unknown in human history until now.

The findings reveal Neanderthals were able to adapt to their environment, challenging the archaic humans’ reputation as slow-footed cavemen and shedding light on their survival and hunting skills.

Lead author and ANU archaeologist, Dr Sofia Samper Carro, said that the findings show that Neanderthals knew the best ways to exploit the area and territory and were resilient through harsh climate conditions.

“Our surprising findings at Abric Pizarro show how adaptable Neanderthals were. The animal bones we have recovered indicate that they were successfully exploiting the surrounding fauna, hunting red deer, horses and bison, but also eating freshwater turtles and rabbits, which imply a degree of planning rarely considered for Neanderthals,” she said.

According to the researchers, these new insights challenge widespread beliefs that Neanderthals only hunted large animals, such as horses and rhinoceros.

“Through the bones that we are finding, which display cut marks, we have direct proof that Neanderthals were capable of hunting small animals,” Dr Samper Carro said.

“The bones on this site are very well preserved, and we can see marks of how Neanderthals processed and butchered these animals.

“Our analysis of the stone artefacts also demonstrates variability in the type of tools produced, indicating Neanderthals’ capability to exploit the available resources in the area.”

Shedding light on this crucial transitional period helps archaeologists edge closer to solving a mystery that has plagued researchers for decades: what drove the Neanderthals to extinction?

According to the researchers, finding sites like Abric Pizarro, from this specific and not well-recorded period, gives information about how Neanderthals lived when modern humans were not in the area yet and shows that they were thriving.

“The unique site at Abric Pizarro gives a glimpse of Neanderthal behaviour in a landscape they had been roaming for hundreds of thousands of years,” Dr Samper Carro said.

“Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago. Suddenly, we modern humans appear in this region of the Pyrenees, and the Neanderthals disappear. But before that, Neanderthals had been living in Europe for almost 300,000 years.

“They clearly knew what they were doing. They knew the area and how to survive for a long time.

“This is one of the most interesting things about this site, to have this unique information about when Neanderthals were alone and living in harsh conditions and how they thrived before modern humans appeared.”

Thanks to modern excavation techniques, Abric Pizarro and other nearby Neanderthal sites provide fine-grain data to understand Neanderthal behaviour.

“We 3D plot every single remain found larger than one to two centimetres. This makes our work slow, and we have been excavating some of these sites for over 20 years, but it turns into a uniquely precise recording of the sites,” Dr Samper Carro said.

“We are interested in how the different data relates to each other, from stone tools to bones and hearths. This more thorough excavation gives archaeologists information on how Neanderthals lived and how long they were in an area.

“It’s not only the individual materials that give us clues, but also where exactly they are found in relation to other materials on the site that helps us understand how and when Neanderthals were visiting these sites. Were they settled there or just passing through?”

The research team also included scientists from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (CEPAP-UAB). Research in the Catalan Pre-Pyrenees is supported by The Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Culture Department of the Catalan Government.

The research is published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

---

Journal

Journal of Archaeological Science

DOI

10.1016/j.jas.2024.106038 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Living on the edge: Abric Pizarro, a MIS 4 Neanderthal site in the lowermost foothills of the southeastern Pre-Pyrenees