New Study Reveals Neanderthals Were As Good At Hunting As Early Modern Humans

New Study Reveals Neanderthals Were As Good At Hunting As Early Modern Humans

The disappearance of Neanderthals is frequently attributed to competition from modern humans, whose greater intelligence has been widely supposed to make them more efficient as hunters. However, a new study forthcoming in the February issue of Current Anthropology argues that the hunting practices of Neanderthals and early modern humans were largely indistinguishable, a conclusion leading to a different explanation, also based on archaeological data, to explain the disappearance of the Neanderthals.
This study has important implications for debates surrounding behavioral evolution and the practices that eventually allowed modern humans like ourselves to displace other closely-related species.

"Each population was equally and independently capable of acquiring and exploiting critical information pertaining to animal availability and behavior," write the anthropologists, from the University of Connecticut, University of Haifa, Hebrew University, and Harvard University.

The researchers use new archaeological data from a Middle- and Upper-Paleolithic rock shelter in the Georgian Republic dated to 60,000?20,000 years ago to contest some prior models of the perceived behavioral and cognitive differences between Neanderthals and modern humans.
Instead, the researchers suggest that developments in the social realm of modern human life, allowing routine use of distant resources and more extensive division of labor, may be better indicators of why Neanderthals disappeared than hunting practices.

"The establishment of larger social networks allowed the replacement of Neanderthals in the Caucasus," write the authors. "Our study also indicates that this process of replacement by modern humans spread beyond the traditional biogeographical barrier [of] Neanderthal mobility represented by the Caucasus Mountains."

Source: Ohio State University
Date: 2004-09-03

Neanderthal Life No Tougher Than That Of 'Modern' Inuits

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The bands of ancient Neanderthals that struggled throughout Europe during the last Ice Age faced challenges no tougher than those confronted by the modern Inuit, or Eskimos.

That’s the conclusion of a new study intended to test a long-standing belief among anthropologists that the life of the Neanderthals was too tough for their line to coexist with Homo sapiens.

And the evidence discounting that theory lies with tiny grooves that mar the teeth of these ancient people.

Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis, were the dominant hominid inhabiting most of what is now Europe and western Asia.
Remains have been found as far south as Iraq and as far north as Great Britain. Fossil skulls reveal the distinctively prominent brows and missing chins that set them apart from later humans.

They thrived from about 200,000 to 30,000 years ago until their lineage failed for as-yet unknown reasons. Most researchers have argued that their life in extremely harsh, Ice Age-like environments, coupled with their limited technological skills, ultimately led to their demise.
Homo sapiens arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago and survived using more advanced technology. But the short lifespans of Neanderthals and evidence of arthritis in their skeletons suggests that their lives were extremely difficult.

That’s where Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg’s work comes in. An assistant professor of anthropology and evolution, ecology and organismal biology at Ohio State University, she published a recent study in the Journal of Human Evolution that changes our view of the Neanderthals’ unbearable lives.

Guatelli-Steinberg has spent the last decade investigating tiny defects -- linear enamel hypoplasia -- in tooth enamel from primates, modern and early humans. These defects serve as markers of periods during early childhood when food was scarce and nutrition was low.

These tiny horizontal lines and grooves in tooth enamel form when the body faces either a systemic illness or a severely deficient diet. In essence, they are reminders of times when the body’s normal process of forming tooth enamel during childhood simply shut down for a period of time.

“Looking at these fossilized teeth, you can easily see these defects that showed Neanderthals periodically struggled nutritionally,” she said. “But I wanted to know if that struggle was any harder than that of more modern humans.”

To find that answer, she turned to two collections of skeletal remains: One was a collection of Neanderthal skulls at least 40,000 years old from various sites across Europe; the other was a set of remains of Inuit Eskimos from Point Hope, Alaska. The Inuit remains, some 2,500 years old, are maintained by the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

She microscopically examined teeth from the Neanderthal skulls for signs of linear enamel hypoplasia, as well as other normal growth increments in teeth called perikymata, and compared their prevalence with those from the Inuit skulls.

“The evidence shows that Neanderthals were no worse off than the Inuit who lived in equally harsh environmental conditions,” she said, despite the fact that the Inuit use more advanced technology.

“It is somewhat startling that Neanderthals weren’t suffering as badly as people had thought, relative to a modern human group (the Inuits).”

Guatelli-Steinberg’s examination of perikymata offered snapshots of Neanderthal survival. Smaller than the linear enamel hypoplasia, perikymata are even tinier horizontal lines on the teeth surface. Each one represents about eight days of enamel growth so by counting their number, researchers can gauge the speed of tooth development – more perikymata mean slower growth of the tooth surface.

Guatelli-Steinberg counted perikymata within linear enamel hypoplasias, and was able to gauge how long these episodes of physiological stress lasted. The perikymata showed that periods of up to three months of starvation for both the Neanderthals and the Inuit were not uncommon. In fact, Guatelli-Steinberg found that Inuit teeth showed significantly more perikymata than did the Neanderthals, suggesting that the Inuit experienced stress episodes that lasted slightly longer than did those of the Neanderthals. She is looking ahead to do a similar comparison of tooth defects among the European Cro-Magnon who thrived after the Neanderthals disappeared. Coupled with the results of this project, and that of earlier work with non-human primates, she hopes to improve researchers’ understanding of just what information these tooth defects might reveal.

Along with Guatelli-Steinberg, Clark Spencer Larsen, professor and chair of anthropology at Ohio State, and Dale Hutchinson, associate professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, worked on this project. Support for the research came from the L.S. B. Leakey Foundation.

Neanderthals preferred close-quarters combat with their prey, using spears to stab at vital parts of an animal to bring it down, while Homo sapiens were thought to use throwing spears instead.

To each his own. Neanderthals were more heavily built, so they could have handled grappling with big critters better than homo sapiens could, so they might be able to bring down bigger prey. But then, since H. sapiens prefers ranged hunting (with throwing spears and the like), they would be able to sneak up on their quarry and hit them in a stealthy fashion. In a situation where they are hunting a herd of animals, this might hold some advantages, since a group of hunters could each focus on his own target, as opposed to the Neanderthal technique of attacking a single animal at close range in a coordinated group. Homo sapiens might score more food for their effort.

Or, they could toss their spears, miss, or only slightly wound their target, and then get mauled by whatever they were hunting. Since H. sapiens were better at long-range attacks, they were not as skilled as a Neanderthal would be when faced with an angry, charging animal. Plus, they would have already tossed their weapon, meaning they had better have an extra in reserve.

There are pros and cons for both species. Until we build ourselves a time machine, we'll just have to guess which method was more effective. Or maybe, as this article states, their hunting success was roughly equal, despite their different methods.

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