First, Neanderthals were both "recognizable as a kind of human, but decidedly unconventional." They represent "two diverging pathways of being human." Their brains were as big as ours. This requires a nuanced approach for a number of reasons.
Then you try, piece by piece, to fit those fragments back together.Rebecca Sykes's magisterial volume rejects these caricatures in her complex and fascinating history of what we have learned about Neanderthals since 1856. It’s “slow archaeology”: you excavate meticulously and collect even the tiniest objects. One way is to study their technology through a technique called refitting – basically, putting things back together, looking at the sequences they used for knapping, the process of flaking stone blocks to make tools.
How do we glean information from these artefacts? In a sense, what we can do with those artefacts is limited only by our imagination. But there is a mass of information in the material they left behind.
Rebecca Wragg Sykes: Clearly, there are no Neanderthal texts, so we can’t hear descriptions of what they were thinking about the world around them in their own voices. She spoke to New Scientist about whether they bring us closer to understanding how Neanderthals thought about the world, and what clues they offer to the species’ mysterious disappearance.Ĭolin Barras: How can we get inside the Neanderthal mind? But in the past few decades we have discovered various things they made that had no clear practical purpose: a shell coloured with red pigment, a deer bone engraved with chevrons and a ring of stalagmites assembled deep inside a cave.Īrchaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes, honorary fellow at the University of Liverpool, UK, and author of Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art, is fascinated by these artistic – or what she calls aesthetic – objects. DID Neanderthals think like us? We used to assume that our closest ancient human relatives, who lived in Europe and Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, were concerned only with survival.
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