In Brief
- Scientists have traditionally considered Homo sapiens the only species to invent and use symbols.
- But over the past few decades archaeologists have discovered a handful of enigmatic artifacts hinting that our cousins the Neandertals—long dismissed as intellectually inferior—might have engaged in symbolic activities, too. Experts dismissed the finds, however, attributing them to modern humans instead.
- The recent discovery of Neandertal jewelry and body paint from two sites in Spain provides unequivocal evidence of Neandertal symbolism and suggests that modern human behavior has ancient roots.
For the past two decades archaeologist João Zilhão of the University of Bristol in England has been studying our closest cousins, the Neandertals, who occupied Eurasia for more than 200,000 years before mysteriously disappearing some 28,000 years ago. Experts in this field have long debated just how similar Neandertal cognition was to our own. Occupying center stage in this controversy are a handful of Neandertal sites that contain cultural remains indicative of symbol use—including jewelry—a defining element of modern human behavior. Zilhão and others argue that Neandertals invented these symbolic traditions on their own, before anatomically modern humans arrived in Europe around 40,000 years ago. Critics, however, believe the items originated with moderns.
But this past January, in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Zilhão and his colleagues reported on finds that could settle the dispute: pigment-stained seashells from two sites in Spain dated to nearly 50,000 years ago—10,000 years before anatomically modern humans made their way to Europe. Zilhão recently discussed the implications of his team’s new discoveries with Scientific American staff editor Kate Wong. An edited version of their conversation follows.
This article was originally published with the title Did Neandertals Think Like Us?.
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30 Comments
Add CommentIt is generally accepted that Homo Habilis evolved the opposable thumb in advanced hominids.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll paleontologists place us in the same category with other "monkeys":
Lemur:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Suborder: Strepsirrhini
Chimpanzee:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Family: Hominidae
Subfamily: Homininae
Tribe: Hominini
Subtribe: Panina
Genus: Pan
Modern Human:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Family: Hominidae
Subfamily: Homininae
Tribe: Hominini
Genus: Homo
Species: H. sapiens
Even the Neanderthal:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Family: Hominidae
Genus: Homo
Species: H. neanderthalensis
Dr. Zilhao was saying that Neanderthals were capable of some abstract thought like humans. I am convinced that he believes that humans and Neanderthals and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. Natural selection is an elegant and beautiful process that has been overwhelmingly accepted by scientists of many different disciplines. That some people continue to reject it is expected...some people are void of rational thinking.
I'm still waiting for any evidence whatsoever that indicates that every other species with a functioning brain isn't incapable of some amount of abstract thought. from behavioral testing it would seem quite the opposite is true.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOur own anthropocentric arrogance would have us believe we are the only species in the universe that thinks, while the rest are merely meat on autopilot.
I see no reason why Neanderthalensis would not develop abstract thought, in fact, I'd wager without it, they'd have never survived as long as they did.
@hotblack: while in general I share your belief that perhaps modern human beings are not the only creatures capable of some degree of abstract thought, I have to question your assertion none the less. Isnt is equally as arrogant to believe that any one feature of modern humans is basically too important to have been a mere statistical fluke? Perhaps 50,000 years from now our Termite Based Overlords will have debates over how advanced cognitive abilities were or were not when it came to interpretting signals from our advanced phermone receptors.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm not even convinced that all modern humans have thought processes...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this... that said, it's almost certain Neanderthals could "think." It seems absurd to assume they couldn't.
As their most similar and closely related species, one should presume that neanderthalensis shared most things in common with sapiens and that the differences are minor.
For all extensive purposes (beyond the superficial) there seems to be very little differences between the species- so, logic should point towards them being very similar to us in thought process.
It wouldn't surprise me if a decade from now people consider us the same species. There is already some evidence we likely interbred.
Actually, that's already been suggested, in a previous article in this very magazine.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps modern humans and neanderthals co-developed their symbolic reasoning capabilities as a result of their social interactions, if not interbreeding. The seems to be some significant developments in language and art in modern humans around the time of their likely interactions with neanderthals...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNeanderthals were of course thinking and were cultural relatives to us. Why that?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe oldest profession of the world must have been ... no.not what you think ... the midwife.
Without midwives, our species can not survive because our brains are so big that we are getting born very immature, compared with other primates. Women need help to deliver.
Neanderthals had the same or even larger brain size than "Sapiens". They must have had midwives too.
If they had professions, they had specialization, language and education. Culture. Just like us.
It is a very old notion that we are somehow incredibly special, and so various attempts at drawing sharp borderlines between us and them have been made, all rather stupid. First we have a soul, they don't. Then - we have language, they don't. Next - we have symbolic thinking, they don't. The neandertals have also since their discovery been depicted as extremely ugly, and in a televised interview a leading paleontologist said that he couldn't imagine himself ever as being related to them. So much for scientific openmindedness. Since the neandertals were rather close to us, anyhow, on the evolutionary scale, one should expect them to have been closer to us, mentally, than homo habilis, which was already pretty close an ancestor or relative. So three or more cjeers to a scientist not afraid to say the obvious! And to document it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's all speculation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are two basic types of Imagination - Creative & Learning imagination. Modern humans had both of these imaginations - they could create new tools and weapons, invent new words. Neandertals had only the learning imagination. They could copy the tools and weapons but could not invent new ones. It would be interesting to find advanced neandertal artifacts before they came in contact with the modern humans. If this was the case the neandertals would truly be a creative species, otherwise they would have just learned from the modern humans that they came in contact with.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this<a href="novan.com/imagine.htm">Human imagination</a>
donzzz,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismodern humans during stone age were not inventive at all.
They used the same tools over thousands of years without changing them, made the same tools again and again. At least those tools that have survived times, most probably haven't.
There are structural reasons why three focal points of mental activity must always be present to some degree in intelligent social creatures anywhere in the universe. These three mutually independent yet complementary focal points are as follows:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1.) They must have a capacity to draw on past experience, including ancestral experience. For example we are indebted to our animal ancestors for our primal emotional drives. The vertebrate structure is harnessed to a quadruped limb structure and similar internal organs and nervous system arrangement throughout the lineage from crocodiles to humans. The energies that emotionally fuel behavior are similarly patterned accordingly. We can sense behavioral patterns across vertebrate species. Our recall processes has access to them via our Limbic brain.
2.) There must be some non-linguistic conceptual appreciation of constraints and opportunities presented by the environment consistent with potential behavioral responses that may be perceived as most appropriate in context. This requires an integrating worldview of some kind. This is an intuitively integrating right-brain function in humans.
3.) Social intelligence even at a rudimentary level requires a capacity to mutually communicate in some explicit way to achieve a common result. This requires common referents and mutual expectations that left-brain language makes possible in humans.
It therefore seems highly likely that Neanderthals had language of some kind and socially creative abilities that go with it.
There is more on this at www.cosmic-mindreach.com. See the website article Inside Our Three Brains.
Producing a flake or a blade predetermined in its shape and form need a projecting skill, although the two technologies differ in their "chaine operatoire". So neanderthals and early H.sapiens had both a "projectin brain" although they applied in different technological traditions (the so called "levallois" was at leatst 100-200.000 years older than the blade producing one).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo we can assume that they were both able of functional abtraction (using and teaching projects through thousands of gemnerations), although we are still unable to understand or measure their way of thinking.
Aren't we too "sapiens-centric" to do it?
Producing a flake or a blade predetermined in its shape and form need a projecting skill, although the two technologies differ in their "chaine operatoire". So neanderthals and early H.sapiens had both a "projectin brain" although they applied in different technological traditions (the so called "levallois" was at leatst 100-200.000 years older than the blade producing one).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo we can assume that they were both able of functional abtraction (using and teaching projects through thousands of gemnerations), although we are still unable to understand or measure their way of thinking.
Aren't we too "sapiens-centric" to do it?
Producing a flake or a blade predetermined in its shape and form need a projecting skill, although the two technologies differ in their "chaine operatoire". So neanderthals and early H.sapiens had both a "projectin brain" although they applied in different technological traditions (the so called "levallois" was at leatst 100-200.000 years older than the blade producing one).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo we can assume that they were both able of functional abtraction (using and teaching projects through thousands of gemnerations), although we are still unable to understand or measure their way of thinking.
Aren't we too "sapiens-centric" to do it?
Sorry for inserting my comment 3 times, probably owing to login trials.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAny dentist can tell you of finding Neanderthal teeth in modern jaws, and plenty of other Neanderthal physical characteristics appear in modern humans. Isn't it time we gave up the notion that Neanderthal was a separate species, and admit that Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon and Java Man were only different *races*? They all interbred to produce modern man. What's the problem with admitting this?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt the risk of sounding silly … Why do we presume that Neanderthals were a different species rather than a different race? Genetic diversity of modern-day Homo sapiens is substantial, the diversity of our phenotype equally so. Someone of 5 foot is short, and someone of 7 foot is tall … but neither is exceptional and both are perfectly normal examples of healthy adult humans. We range in skin colour from blue-black to glow-in-the-dark-white … but we’re most definitely the same species! Our height, skin colour, or language does not provide any indication as to our intelligence or capacity to think.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGenetic tests (and a previous article in SA) suggest Homo sapiens had the occasional romantic rendezvous with Neanderthals. Doesn’t that suggest that we were the same species – that viable offspring could be produced? Wouldn’t that suggest simular capability to consider culture and abstract thought?
So why did they die out then? If we’re the same species you ask…
We probably shared diseases – and potentially for poor Neanderthal the Homo sapiens may have had a better immunity so within a very short space of time Neanderthal tribes died from disease, hooked up with the local Homo sapiens tribes or lost the war for territory, food or whatever else was being fought over at the time. (Think of the devastating impact of Eurasian diseases such as small pox, measles, chicken pox, syphilis, a strain of influenza etc upon aboriginal populations that had been isolated for thousands of years).
When Darwin wrote “the Descent of Man” many were offended because they still felt that blacks were a different species to whites. It was an attitude that Darwin disagreed with and is clear in his writings. Isn’t it just natural selection that determines if two races might become separate species, or if one race might be absorbed by another and that branch of evolution cease? So why do we think we are so wonderful and unique? Why do we believe Neanderthals were some dim-witted doomed-to-failure branch of the evolutionary tree rather than another race with simular intelligence and potential as Homo sapiens that existed 28,000 years ago?
Neanderthals' use of ornaments and body art is interesting but is it significant? Their hunting technology seems to have been crude with little if any change over many thousands of years. They seem to have adhered to the run-up-and-stab-it-in-the-side school of hunting technique and had the broken bones to show for it. Contemporary Homo Sapiens used a lighter throwing spear and spear-thrower or atlatl for additional range and penetrating power. I suspect Neanderthals pretty much lived in the present and couldn't visualize the future. They couldn't visualize the flight of a spear through the air and so never threw the spear. They may have been like us in some small ways but not where it really counted.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey thought like Democrats
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNeanderthals were more symbolic than we are. We are more analytic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't know it was late and I read your magazine almost from cover to cover and Steve Mirsky's article on the back page about Presidential Harrisment brewed with this article. I just have to joke that the artist rendering of Neandertal reminds me of Democrats- small brains with big mouths.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI hope more evidence is discovered showing Neandertal having a developed sense of design or art/ornamentation like has been found. A studious mind this our species has for appreciating patterns and symbolism. I wonder if this is how religion came about? Attributing power to something through association in attempts to symbolize and search for patterns with meaning.
Suppose this body, well we don't have to suppose, when this body was a young man or a young woman suppose a parent became ill and went to sleep on the ground with a fever. Suppose the young woman brought a special feather to give her father and laid it down next to him. When he awoke his body had broken the fever and defended itself. But family attributed the healing to the feather. Well if the feather could do that, they reasoned, imagine what the whole bird could do. Next, we are a step away from a symbol of the bird when the real thing can't be found and a religion is born.
What thinkest thou?
Hyperstig - That's brilliant. You are a very intelligent man and the reason I say that is because you are nothing like the people that sell Four Wheel Drive swamp trucks on Craigslist. They misspell every other word and even the brand of their own vehicle. So I compliment you on your writing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLike myself you were created from dust and to dust you will return one day. Your theory is very well thought out but it hints of the Hindu religion in which the world is made and re-made and people are given 2nd, 3rd and 4th chances. This is why cows roam the roads in India because they don't want to hit old Uncle Bart or, heaven forbid, eat Uncle Bart.
The 2nd trait I noticed of your treatise is that you mention repeatedly that basic structure of our world is factually as we say it is. This is called relativism and leads to moral relativism a state in which right and wrong do not exist precisely nor can there be an physical property that we can rely on. Someone in our field once said "I exist because I stub my toe thus!" On the other hand in the Bible it says that we are a mist that is around for a little while then disappears.
I like a mixture of science and philosophy because it makes a more complete person out of us. We aren't just an organized collection of molecules with conscienceness we are a little higher than the animals around us and a little lower than the angels. Call it what you will but that conscienceness does last forever whereas our pets like my beloved dog Coquetta does not. My dog is my servant and my companion but not a complete one, the Bible says.
You know its funny that we are all searching for the meaning, origins, and organisation of the universe but we won't be able to achieve this until we die in a certain way. That 'certain way' is called dying to self. The 3rd trait of your essay was a certain self-centeredness that elevates one to god-like status. Jesus said if you pick up your cross and followed him he would make you fishers of men. Even more than that you would face the positive infinity that I think you did mention. In the positive infinity time does not exist and all your questions would be answered and all your needs met. This is much
more desireable than Islam in which you get 70 virgins. After all what would you do on day #2 of infinity?;)
Let me leave you with this because you are human and I have only 124 characters remaining- Jesus said "I am the way the truth and the life and nobody comes to the Father but through me."
Hyperstig - That's brilliant. You are a very intelligent man and the reason I say that is because you are nothing like the people that sell Four Wheel Drive swamp trucks on Craigslist. They misspell every other word and even the brand of their own vehicle. So I compliment you on your writing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLike myself you were created from dust and to dust you will return one day. Your theory is very well thought out but it hints of the Hindu religion in which the world is made and re-made and people are given 2nd, 3rd and 4th chances. This is why cows roam the roads in India because they don't want to hit old Uncle Bart or, heaven forbid, eat Uncle Bart.
The 2nd trait I noticed of your treatise is that you mention repeatedly that basic structure of our world is factually as we say it is. This is called relativism and leads to moral relativism a state in which right and wrong do not exist precisely nor can there be an physical property that we can rely on. Someone in our field once said "I exist because I stub my toe thus!" On the other hand in the Bible it says that we are a mist that is around for a little while then disappears.
I like a mixture of science and philosophy because it makes a more complete person out of us. We aren't just an organized collection of molecules with conscienceness we are a little higher than the animals around us and a little lower than the angels. Call it what you will but that conscienceness does last forever whereas our pets like my beloved dog Coquetta does not. My dog is my servant and my companion but not a complete one, the Bible says.
You know its funny that we are all searching for the meaning, origins, and organisation of the universe but we won't be able to achieve this until we die in a certain way. That 'certain way' is called dying to self. The 3rd trait of your essay was a certain self-centeredness that elevates one to god-like status. Jesus said if you pick up your cross and followed him he would make you fishers of men. Even more than that you would face the positive infinity that I think you did mention. In the positive infinity time does not exist and all your questions would be answered and all your needs met. This is much
more desireable than Islam in which you get 70 virgins. After all what would you do on day #2 of infinity?;)
Let me leave you with this because you are human and I have only 124 characters remaining- Jesus said "I am the way the truth and the life and nobody comes to the Father but through me."
Beavers and racoons have 'thumbs' but not sure if it meets yur criteria for. Beavers do make dams and lodges and they do destroy a lot of land. Maybe we are alike. On the other hand are they as smart as dolphins?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlas, it is a lonely world. ... having presumed to have enslaved a hypersphere to encapsulate all roots ... some day ... the hypersphere shall be recognized and acknowledged.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDid Neandertal use better grammar than we?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDid Neandertals use better grammar than we?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAhhh, ... trick question?! They used oral communication - which doesn't have stringent grammatical rules. Nevertheless, the various dialects would have had culturally imposed 'grammatical' characteristics within the overall symbolic relational construct.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am sure it is the case of monkey see, monkey do. While I am also sure that abstract thought was in the purvey of Neandertals as it is for many other mammals. A quick survey of my fellow human beings leads me to understand that the capacity for abstract thought is not enough to ensure an imaginative and creative culture. I think the paint cups were just an attempt to imitate us-- and by us I mean only some of us. I would be surprised if Neandertals as a group had any more desire to make art than most modern humans. Even in, say a modern latino street gang the actual producers of gang art are a rather small minority. The rest of the taggers are really just engaging in imitation, and without the example of those other few would, I think, not otherwise interested in the practice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this