NOVA

They were the brutes of Ice Age Europe.

Although a branch of our human family tree,

they were seen as a dead end, deep in our prehistoric past.

They were called Neanderthals.

Neanderthals have the mother of all image problems.

They eked out a marginal existence,

hunting by brute force, with only simple stone tools.

They were considered primitive, with no language, art

or the higher-level thinking of advanced species like us.

They lacked the same intelligence as modern humans.

They began to disappear 40,000 years ago

as modern humans, our species, came on the scene.

But this primitive picture is being replaced

by a different image of Neanderthals.

It's bringing them much closer to us,

as genetic evidence revises our human family tree

and reveals their mysterious presence right within our genes.

We started to look at the problem from different angles.

They answer would come back, "It's Neanderthal."

That was quite shaking to me, and I thought,

"This must be a statistical fluke."

Now archaeologists are finding new evidence

to help resolve bitter debates.

This is the smoking gun.

We have the case to settle the controversy.

In toolmaking, they're seeing signs of language.

There is some sort of advanced talking going on.

A new Neanderthal mind emerges.

We're not talking about idiots.

And if scientists are finally finding the real legacy

of the Neanderthals buried deep in our history and our genes,

what does it say about all of us?

"Decoding Neanderthals," right now on NOVA.

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40,000 years ago, Europe is in the grip of an ice age.

In harsh, unforgiving terrain

live members of an ancient human species.

The Neanderthals.

It is a brutal time to be alive.

Only the toughest survive.

They were very muscular, short, wide, very stocky,

very powerfully built.

They were hunter-gatherers.

They had scarce game to find.

Most Neanderthals were probably dead

by 30 years old.

So it was a brief, brutal life.

Hunting was extremely dangerous.

They were confrontational hunters,

so they had to get close in to their prey with stabbing spears.

This required not only a lot of bravery

but a lot of sheer physical strength.

These Neanderthals could bench-press 300 to 500 pounds.

They had big thrusting spears

that they thrust into the side

of 2,000- and 3,000-pound animals.

The Neanderthals survived the harsh conditions in Europe

for at least 300,000 years.

Then, around 40,000 years ago,

a different human species arrives on the scene...

our species, Homo sapiens.

They migrated from Africa,

spreading across Neanderthal territory,

outnumbering them ten to one.

Suddenly you've got two species

competing for the same resources,

hunting the same animals,

collecting the same plant resources,

wanting to live in the best territories

and the best caves.

After another 10,000 years, the Neanderthals disappear.

The story of the Neanderthals is a murder mystery.

They were there and now they're gone,

and they go away

at about the same time as we are showing up on the scene.

So why did they vanish while we survived?

For years, many scientists believed we wiped them out,

a simple case of our brain outclassing their brawn.

This theory emerged when archaeologists unearthed

the very first Neanderthal skulls over 150 years ago.

To scientists at the time,

skulls like these looked primitive compared to ours.

Chris Stringer is one of the world's

preeminent Neanderthal experts.

We can tell a Neanderthal skull 100% of the time.

We've got a very broad skull,

this double-arched brow ridge,

and perhaps their most distinctive feature,

the middle of the face is pulled forwards,

the cheekbones are swept back.

One influential discovery featured a skeleton

crippled by acute arthritis, incorrectly reconstructed

with a hunched posture and a shuffling walk.

This early find helped shape popular perceptions

of Neanderthals for decades,

launching a wave of images of the Neanderthal

as a brutish caveman.

Neanderthals have the mother of all image problems.

They're brooding, they're stupid-looking...

they have no personality.

They were reconstructed as being much more apelike,

stooped, grasping big toes,

very hairy, head hung forward,

shambling in their gait.

Critically, scientists believed the Neanderthals lacked

the one thing that defines us... our brainpower.

They lacked the same intelligence as modern humans.

With only limited stone tools

and no art or personal ornaments, Neanderthals seemed

less advanced than modern humans.

But was that really the whole story?

Now, new discoveries in genetics and archaeology are challenging

this traditional view of the Neanderthals.

Metin Eren has spent six years studying Neanderthal technology.

These Levallois flakes,

named after the place in France where they were first found,

were the Neanderthals' tool of choice.

At first glance, they look rudimentary,

the product more of luck than judgment.

But when Eren tried to reproduce one, he got a surprise.

I find the Levallois technology much more difficult to make

than any of the modern Homo sapien technologies.

It took me about 18 months to master Levallois technology,

and this was after I'd been flint knapping

for a number of years.

The fact that there seems to be a goal involved.

They're not simply just striking flakes

to get a sharp cutting edge.

Eren began to realize this was no hit-or-miss process.

He wanted to discover just how they did it.

So he turned to morphometrics, a technique which analyzes

the exact shapes and angles of objects.

It revealed Neanderthals must have used

a precise set of strikes to turn a raw flint block

into a carefully shaped object known as the core.

The final crucial step involved striking the core

with a single precision blow.

Only if aimed just right would this create the perfect flake

and a remarkably versatile tool.

I shape this in such a way

that the core has a gentle convexity

such that the large flake that comes off has a sharp edge

all around its perimeter,

and that enhances the utility of this particular piece

in a number of ways.

Because it's uniformly thick, you can resharpen it

more times than you can other types of stone flakes.

We also found that the Levallois flake

is statistically more symmetrical.

That means when you use it, you basically reduce torque,

so it actually has ergonomic properties.

I can actually get a lot more force

with each cut and each slice.

I'll just put a little more pressure

and the Levallois flake goes right through it

and we got one big piece of gammon.

That took about a minute and a half.

No problem.

This is an amazing tool.

They were engineering their rocks to get particular products

that have specific properties.

They were able to discover a technique

that is incredibly difficult to do.

It is just a testament to how intelligent they must have been

to actually invent it in the first place.

Metin Eren's work reveals the complexity

of Neanderthal toolmaking.

But there's even more surprising evidence

of sophisticated Neanderthal technologies.

Dutch archaeologist Wil Roebroeks is studying

new finds, one of them dating back

a quarter of a million years.

This is a flint spearhead,

at its base, a large sticky black mass

most likely used as a glue.

Evidence from many sites had already shown

how Neanderthals attached stone flakes to wooden shafts,

first binding them with sinew or leather,

then securing the binding with a gluelike substance.

This turned the flake and its shaft into a robust weapon.

What you see there is a nice flint flake,

at least for an archaeologist, a nice, sharp,

razor-sharp flint flake, which is covered at the base

in this pitch material.

It is a material that they used

probably in many aspects of everyday life.

At first, it was thought this Neanderthal glue

was nothing more than sap from a pine tree,

easy for them to find and use.

But detailed analysis revealed something different.

It was a type of manmade pitch from birch trees.

Chemical studies have shown

that that material was produced from heating birch bark.

Neanderthals were producing these pitches.

So it is not something

like the stuff that you can retrieve from a pine