My pet theory regarding the demise of the Neanderthals is that they were the victim of our Paleolithic ancestors’ more murderous impulses. I know that this sort of flies in the face of the shiny happy sentiment of my post last week regarding the inherent ‘goodness’ of human nature, but I’m nothing if not idiosyncratic.

This theory, let’s call it the genocide hypothesis, isn’t a very good hypothesis in the sense that there is neither much published data nor archaeological evidence to support it. But then I’m not a very good scientist – just ask my post-doctoral supervisor.

However, a shred of evidence for the genocide hypothesis turned up this week with the publication of a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Anthropological Sciences. (thanks to Jams of The Poor Mouth for the tip). Their study, led by Fernando Rozzi of CNRS in Paris, describes a reevaluation of human remains found in the French countryside in the late 1920s. Rozzi and his colleagues reassessed the dating of the bones as well as their taxonomy. They found that among the predominantly human remains, one of the bones – a portion of a mandible – is likely from a Neanderthal child. The sexy bit is that this jawbone was probably cut to remove flesh (including the tongue) and that the cut marks are similar to those used by our human ancestors at the time to butcher deer carcasses.

The authors propose that this juvenile Neanderthal jawbone provides some support for the idea that, in at least one case, our ancestors used Neanderthal children for ceremonial purposes or even ate them. In an interview with London’s Observer (which predictably opted for a glamorously gruesome headline) Rozzi takes this further, suggesting that thus orivudes evidence of cannibalism by Paleolithic humans. In the same article, Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London suggests that the Rozzi paper indicates that there were violent interactions between humans and Neanderthals and adds “to the evidence that competition from modern humans probably contributed to Neanderthal extinction.” It certainly isn’t a major leap to imagine that when times got tough, when the hunting and gathering business was in recession so to speak, that our human ancestors would turn to whatever happened to be around that would fill their stomachs.

However, as is the case with many archaeological reconstructions, there is some room for alternative interpretations. The authors themselves recognize that the ‘cannibalism’ hypothesis has some holes, stating that the remains may not in fact be from a Neanderthal child, but from a human child and that their may have been more anatomical variation in modern humans from this period. In previous reports, a fair amount of this variability in skeletal morphology in both humans and Neanderthals has been reported.

My go to guy on all things Neanderthal, Will Banks, directed me to John Hawks’ in depth critique on this paper. Hawks points out a number of the flaws in both the study design and the conclusions. The biggest issue seems to surround the dating of the remains, specifically that these remains are from a time that Neanderthals has basically disappeared from this part of Europe. This raises some major questions regarding the identification of the sample and the authors conclusions and raises the unfortunate fact that anthropology and archaeology are far from exact sciences.

And bear in mind that I would like to believe that this report is evidence of human genocide on the Neanderthals. I’m just hesitant to jump aboard the cannibalism bandwagon in this case.

If you’ll allow a bit of allegory, I was talking about this with some friends after dinner last night and one of them made a good analogy. If future denizens of the earth were doing archaeological digs around what used to be the west side of Milwaukee, say around what was formerly known as ‘North 25th Street‘, they might have stumbled on some remains that would indicate that our species in the late 20th century had a penchant for violent murder and cannibalism. But one set of remains does not necessarily speak for a society in general. The same holds true for this set of remains – as tempting as it is to do so – it would be dangerous to draw broad conclusions regarding the behavior of Paleolithic man based on chewed up jawbone.

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Image credits:

Cannibalism in Autumn

The Tree of the Cannibals

Eat Me

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