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The“NeanderthalEnigma” andthe structureof thought
By John MacBeath Watkins
Much speculation has been made about the reason Neanderthal Man disappeared once our ancestorsentered Europe. I'll add to that speculation with this essay, and draw a parallel between the biologicaland cultural aspects of Neanderthal's demise. Neanderthal and our ancestors appear to have had a common ancestor about 700,000 years ago.When our ancestors came to Europe, they do not seem to have interbred with them to any appreciabledegree. Of course, if you chose 100 people at random from New England, you might find a similar
result in regards native Americans, and we know that they were numerous before Europeans came andquite capable of interbreeding with Europeans, so no definitive conclusion can yet be drawn as towhether Neanderthal and modern humans could interbreed. There are other parallels as well.The indigenous population of the North and South American continents crashed after firstcontact in part because of new diseases; often the great die-offs occurred before the Europeans arrivedin a new area, because the plagues they brought with them traveled faster than the Europeans.Estimates of the level of the die-off go as high as 95 percent. Native Americans had been cut off from Eurasia for something on the order of 10,000 years,except for the occasional contact that must have occurred between Siberians and Eskimos, theoccasional castaway from Oceania, the Norse expedition, and other such small and incidental contactsthat would not have been capable of bringing on the health crisis that came when Europeans arrived inforce, and with pigs and other disease-carrying domesticated animals that could get loose and spreadnew diseases beyond the range of those who brought them. In terms of disease given to the newcomers by Native Americans, the exchange was quite one-sided. They gave Europeans syphilis (even this iscontroversial,) we gave them smallpox, hepatitis, influenza and a number of other diseases that quicklydevastated their populations. In this sort of meeting, the organism that evolved in the bigger Petri dishusually wins.How long was the Neanderthal population separated from the rest of humanity? Perhaps100,000 years or more. The possibility that they could not deal with the diseases that spread acrossAfrica and Asia though the rest of humanity cannot be ignored.There are other questions, of course. Why, if their brains were at least as large as ours, wastheir culture less complex? We have few signs of symbolic activity on the part of Neanderthal, andtheir tools were far less varied. They do not seem to have had needles, which means their clothingcannot have been as complex, though their climate was harsh.My position is that the fact that they lived in small, isolated communities restricted the
complexity their cultures could support. In
Thoughts on Structuralism and the Death of 'Ghosts
' Iexplored the notion that it takes a larger number of minds interacting with other minds to build acomplex society.
Adam Powell, Stephen Shennan and Mark Thomas of University College, London,have theorized that the reason modern 'upper paleolithic' behavior appeared and disappeared severaltimes in the archaeological record is that it takes a large enough population and enough contact withother groups of people to support UP culture.
My take on this, in
Thoughts on Structuralism and the Death of 'Ghosts'
was that this reflects anentity, a sort of intellectual edifice, in which individual minds take part, but which no individual braincan encompass entirely. Individual minds interact, struggle with and against one another, and in the process build a structure of thought that enables us to live a life that is very different from any other animal. Modern humans came from an environment that would support larger populations than the Neanderthal. They developed a more complex society at least in part because they had the populationto do so. The Neanderthal were top predators, hunting large mammals for the most part and living for the most part as predators rather than omnivores. It should be noted that the Eskimo and Inuit way of life is also heavily dependent on meat. Such a diet may not be ideal for the human metabolism, butvitamin A and D are fat soluble and raw organ meats are rich in vitamin C, so such an adaptation is possible without any great change in metabolism. (The comparison to the Inuit way of life breaksdown at some point, because the Inuit are a highly sophisticated neolithic culture.) Consider that the Norse did very well in Greenland during the medieval warm period, and succumbed to the cold near the beginning of the little ice age. The Inuit thrived through the little ice age in Greenland.Given a warmer climate, Greenland could support a larger population with the Norse way of life, but when the ice closed in the Inuit way of life showed its superiority. It would support fewer
1http://www.scribd.com/doc/19407908/Thoughts-on-Structuralism-and-the-Death-of-Ghosts
2
Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior
Powell et al.Science 5 June 2009: 1298-1301DOI: 10.1126/science.1170165
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