Who were the Neanderthals ?

The Neanderthals are commonly thought of as a bizarre variant of our own species Homo sapiens, even by many who do not consider them to represent a "stage" in our own ancestry. But careful scrutiny of the record indicates otherwise. Both fossil and molecular evidence suggests that Neanderthals and modern humans last shared an ancestor more than 500 kyr ago, and the enlarging European hominid fossil record suggests that Homo neanderthalensis is actually the last surviving species of a fairly diverse endemic clade that flourished in the subcontinent between that time and about 27 kyr ago. For the scattering of fossils making up this record, including the crania from Steinheim, Reilingen, and the Sima de los Huesos, all show some but not all of the Neanderthal cranial hallmarks. For example, Steinheim possesses many of the typical Neanderthal features of the cranial rear and upper face, but lacks the puffy and retreating midface, while the best Sima cranium has Neanderthal-like supraorbital morphology and pterygoid tubercles in the lower jaw, but lacks the typical Neanderthal medial nasal projections, the ovoid coronal profile of the cranium, and Neanderthal features of the cranial rear such as the strongly undercut occipital torus. The resulting cluster of morphologies strongly supports the notion not only that Homo neanderthalensis was indeed a distinctive species, but that it emerged from a local adaptive radiation that occurred subsequent to the first successful implantation of hominids in Europe at some time between about 1.0 and 0.5 myr ago. The distinctiveness of the Neanderthals is further underlined by a new composite reconstruction of an entire Neanderthal skeleton recently made at the American Museum of Natural History. Combining elements from a half-dozen skeletons from almost as many countries, this new reconstruction contains sufficient continuity of elements from a single individual (La Ferrassie 1) to impart considerable confidence as to the reliability of its body proportions as well as its morphologies. And it shows that Neanderthals would have cut a very distinctive figure on the landscape, particularly with its narrow-topped and wide-bottomed rib-cage that tapers out below to match its wide, flaring pelvis with virtually no waist. As to lifestyles, while it is clear that at least in pre-contact (with Cro-Magnons) times the lives of Neanderthals were largely symbol-free, it is less obvious that the Neanderthals exploited a different range of food resources than that used by their clearly symbolic successors. Indeed it has been argued recently that the major shift in hunting-gathering subsistence strategies took place in the early Holocene, rather than in the "transition" between Middle and Upper Paleolithic ways of economic life. The Neanderthals were clearly ecological opportunists, successfully coping with a wide variety of environments through flexibility of behavioral response. Yet equally clearly they did not perceive and interact with the world around them as we Homo sapiens do today. We do the Neanderthals no favors by classifying them as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis simply because they had big brains. Instead, we should be trying to understand these unique hominids as the unique and separate evolutionary entity they undoubtedly were.