Echoes of the Ancients: A Journey through Neanderthal Lives

For a long time,

fables are all we imagined of Neanderthals,

our closest genetic cousins.

And strange ideas began to develop

about who Neanderthals really were.

The folklore is that they wore little clothing,

made grunting sounds, and were feeble-minded and aggressive.

These ideas were based on pure imagination, not fact.

And so, Neanderthals exist

as fleeting images of simple cavemen.

Like cartoons, they resemble half naked caricatures

of our most primitive, least interesting selves.

Dare we imagine that they were capable

of building lives that also had love, craft, music, and art?

They certainly were successful at life in Europe.

They lived there for almost 300,000 years,

something that we may not be able to match.

And out of these imagined

and extremely simplistic images,

we have decided that we know

what they and their lives were like.

But are these ideas correct?

Can we really know how Neanderthals looked,

dressed, and acted?

First, there's the problem of time scale.

Thinking about the past,

we can imagine a few thousand years back.

But the beings we call Neanderthals

lived hundreds of thousands of years

before our most distant imagination,

and went extinct 30 to 40,000 years ago.

There is no memory of this time

and of these people.

They left almost nothing, except their bones,

marks, and some objects.

We are looking at the popular view of Neanderthals

as cave people wearing animal skins.

We don't know that this is how they looked.

Recent evidence has uncovered

the presence of woven strings,

so they could have worn elaborate costumes,

for example, none of which would have survived

after eons of weather exposure.

So is this a real Neanderthal,

or a merely a modern imagination of one?

Look closely at your screen.

What we see here is what, until the 19th century,

we knew of our distant past.

Like a black sheet of paper with no clues,

no timeline, it remained that way until 1856,

when the first Neanderthal fossil was found,

the first evidence of a distinct, archaic human relative.

And then, something emerged in 1974,

40% of a skeleton of a creature that,

like us, walked on two legs,

but was much older, having lived about 3 million years ago.

The skull belonged to a species of human ancestor

that roamed the landscapes of South Africa,

and is known as Australopithecus africanus.

These beings were small,

their heads were about the size of a grapefruit.

The lower half of their faces was pushed forward,

as is true of present day monkeys.

But monkeys have brow ridges that this creature lacked.

In that sense, it seemed more human,

even millions of years ago.

There are problems classifying primates

that are non-human, like apes and chimps,

along with species that were human-like.

Unfortunately, science doesn't help with language,

since these differences have names

that sound almost exactly the same.

The big category is that of hominids,

which includes all great apes,

humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans,

as well as their ancestors.

Under this umbrella is a smaller group,

the hominins, which pertains only to humans

and their closest extinct relatives.

But the difference between hominids

and hominins can be subtle.

A chimpanzee's skull shows a small brain case

and a very large jaw for eating and chewing.

But the Australopithecus afarensis,

perhaps the first hominin to walk upright,

has a smaller eyebrow ridge and larger eyes.

The teeth are also human-like.

Modern humans' jaws are much smaller

in proportion to their brain size,

which now takes up the largest area in the skull.

From these small differences,

we can begin to understand human evolution

from fossils and bones back in time.

In fact, even though Australopithecus afarensis

lived 3 million years ago, it wasn't the oldest pre-human.

It's just one in a long line of beings

who walked upright millions of years ago,

and they are all connected to ourselves.

This is what the ancestors to humans

were thought to look like in the 1700s

because no other upright species

was discovered before the mid 1800s.

Neanderthals, which evolved 400,000 years ago,

looked nothing like this.

Our evolutionary lineage is a much more interesting story.

Admittedly, our ancient past is a jigsaw puzzle

with many missing pieces.

To organize the clues, we turn to paleoanthropology,

the field that studies the origins

and evolution of humans and their ancestors

through fossils, artifacts, and other evidence.

This can bring Neanderthal questions to life.

We have learned of our ancestors

from relatively few skulls, skeletons, and stones,

and so our account, like their history,

is incomplete and fragmentary.

But it's a start.

First, we need a timeline, not in centuries,

but in millions of years, in order to allow us

to understand the succession of these ancestral species

that led to the evolution of ourselves

as the latest version of upright beings on this planet.

As our timeline reaches into the past,

we turn back the clock on earth

one, two, three million years ago, and more,

until we arrive at the earliest known time

at which upright beings appear on earth,

just about seven million years ago.

The prevailing view is that it all began here,

in a north central part of what is today

the African continent.

It was here that the first hominin emerged,

on two legs, making tools,

living distinct to other apes and monkeys.

This is Sahelanthropus tchadensis,

the first of many species on the genetic road

to us modern humans.

We know that despite a small brain

and highly protruding brow ridge like some apes have,

he walked upright and made his life on the ground,

rather than up in the trees.

The discovery of this species was followed

by another significant find,

Australopithecus anamensis,

who lived two million years later,

about four million years ago.

Its fossils have been discovered

at several sites in Kenya and Ethiopia.

It had a large, protruding face with a robust jaw

and a brain size similar to that of modern chimpanzees.

And with smaller canine teeth compared to apes,

he probably lived on a diet of harder,

tougher foods like nuts and seeds.

Living in a similar region of Africa

but a million years later still

appears Australopithecus afarensis,

who lived about 3 to 4 million years ago.

Afarensis could be a direct ancestor

to the family that includes us, Homo sapiens.

Its footprints were recorded

in wet volcanic ash three and a half million years ago,

and so we know how it walked.

It is also the precursor of Australopithecus africanus.

Africanus was a kind of bridge

between earlier and later human species.

He had some primitive traits:

A small brain, long arms,

and curved fingers that suggest he could climb trees.

But he also had more advanced features,

like a rounder skull and a flatter face,

making him look more human.

His brain was bigger than that of afarensis,

the species before him,

showing a step forward in intelligence.

His hips and legs show that he could walk upright,

but he probably still spent time in the trees.

We don't know exactly where he lived,

but he gives us early clues about the shift

from ape-like ancestors to early humans.

Not every lineage led successfully to us, Homo sapiens.

Consider Paranthropus aethiopicus,

which lived with africanus,

but which showed none of his more human like qualities.

It's a fact of evolution that several subspecies

can follow parallel but unrelated genetic branches.

Almost a million years later came sediba in Southern Africa.

Where its predecessor had massive jaws and molars,

sediba has smaller teeth and jaws,

which strongly indicates it was living on a broader diet.

Sediba's pelvis and hands also looked more human-like.

It seems to have become capable

of fine motor skills and possibly tool use.

Having a broader diet

also seems to have helped its evolution,

as it probably became interested in eating other animals.

In all of this, there is a change

in the way sediba sees the world.

It starts to seem more and more human than ape in nature.

About a half million years later, in East Africa,

a new species appeared, Homo rudolfensis.