Says Herbert Wendt: “It was in the time of cave bears that the first cultural and religious ideas arose, that the first magicians appeared, that Man achieved dominion over Nature and began to believe in the support of supernatural powers.”
What did they look like?—these people we faintly abhor and seldom think about, yet who seem always to be not far away.
Museum dioramas are familiar: shambling, hairy, ape-faced monstrosities wearing animal pelts, the males holding spears or clubs, the females usually crouched beside a fire. This is the image, but it may not be accurate. Our impression is based on a skeleton reconstructed and studied in 1908. The relatively uncorrugated inner surface of the skull suggested that the brain had been simple, with convolutions resembling those of apes. The 1908 examiners also deduced a “simian arrangement” of spinal vertebrae and concluded that Neanderthal man slumped along with knees bent, on feet very much like the feet of a gorilla.
In 1957 this skeleton, which was that of a male, was reexamined. The gentleman was not exactly typical. He might have been fifty years old, which in those days was very old indeed. He suffered from arthritis of the jaws and spine, and perhaps of the lower limbs. The 1957 inspectors issued this statement: “There is no valid reason for the assumption that the posture of Neanderthal man . . . differed significantly from that of present-day man.”
And in museum displays their faces are never painted because it was assumed that Neanderthals had not crossed that threshold of humanity where the idea of decorating something—a wall, or themselves—would occur to them. Well, maybe. But powdered black manganese, yellow ocher, and various red pigments are found at their campsites, frequently in stick-shaped pieces that appear to have been rubbed on a soft surface.
As for other artistic efforts, probably there were none. No sculpture has been found, nothing but tantalizing hints. A bone with a hole drilled in it. An ox rib with a collection of unnatural streaks. A bit of ivory polished and artificially stained.
Yet these same people, struggling toward a new plateau, seemed unable or unwilling to distinguish between animal meat and the carcasses of their neighbors. Twenty mutilated skeletons were discovered in a Yugoslav cave, skulls bashed, arm and leg bones split lengthwise to get at the marrow. And in France another grisly accumulation turned up—some of the bones charred, implying a barbecue.
Neanderthal front teeth, when examined under a microscope, often show a number of parallel scratches, the result of an eating habit. Even today certain primitive people stuff big chunks of meat into their months and use a knife to hack off what they are not able to chew, which leaves scratches on their teeth. These scratches almost always run diagonally from upper left to lower right, proving that the gourmets in question are right-handed—as you will see if you act out the scene. Now this information is not as useless as you might think, because man is the only animal that prefers one hand to another, and neurologists suspect there may be some kind of relationship between this preference and the development of speech. If that is correct, those minuscule marks on Neanderthal teeth could help to solve one of the most fascinating questions about our predecessors—whether or not they could speak.
The answer would seem to be: Yes.
Yes, but only a little. So say linguist Philip Lieberman and anatomist Edmund Crelin who reconstructed the vocal tracts of some fossilized men. They concluded that European Neanderthals did not have much of a pharynx, and without a decent pharynx it is impossible to articulate g or k or several vowel sounds. Consequently a Neanderthal’s power of speech would be limited. Furthermore, say Lieberman and Crelin, he could not have pronounced his few sounds in quick succession. He spoke slowly, about one-tenth as fast as we do, perhaps one-twentieth as fast as a Spaniard.
It is alleged that Pharaoh Psamtik in the seventh century B.C. had two infants reared beyond the sound of human voices on the theory that when they began to talk they would necessarily resort to man’s earliest language. One child finally said “bekos”—which is the Phrygian word for bread. But that k would seem to preclude Phrygian as the Neanderthal language.
James IV of Scotland conducted an almost identical experiment. He gave two babies to a mute woman who lived alone on Inchkeith Island, and we are told that the children grew up speaking perfect Hebrew. However, with a stunted pharynx it would be exceptionally difficult to speak Hebrew. At the moment, therefore, all we can do is speculate.
But the absorbing question about Neanderthals is not what they spoke; it is what became of them.
Did they vanish because of some inability to meet a changing climate?
Could they have been slaughtered, liquidated, terminated with extreme prejudice, by the Cro-Magnon people?
Or could these two supposedly distinct races be, in fact, the same?
Present wisdom holds that the last unadulterated Neanderthal died 40,000 years ago. However, one April evening in 1907 some Russian explorers led by Porshnyev Baradiin were setting up camp in an Asian desert when they noticed a shaggy human figure silhouetted against the late sun on a ridge just ahead. Whatever the thing was, it appeared to be watching them. After a while the creature turned and lumbered away, so they ran after it but were quickly outdistanced. This was the first meeting between Westerners and Yeti, or Sasquatch as the beast is called in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
Soviets do not treat these encounters with as much levity as do Americans; there are Soviet anthropologists who believe that a few Neanderthals have survived in the deserts and mountains. European and American scientists doubt this. More significant than such reports, they say, are the features of people around us. In other words, although the race is extinct, Neanderthal characteristics have endured.
So they are among us at least in a vestigial sense, and just possibly as an isolated race that exists like the giant condor in remote pockets of the earth. Frequent reports of midnight brushes with humanoid monsters indicate a certain tremulous anticipation—which is to say, an abiding belief—but thus far no hairy pelts have been tacked to the wall.
In any event, while Rudolf Virchow and his nineteenth-century colleagues were disparaging Fuhlrott’s caveman, a most outrageous book was published. Its author—a tall, bald, white-bearded gentleman—subsequently became known as the Shy Giant. He read so slowly, wrote so slowly, even thought so slowly, remarks biographer William Irvine, “that he always felt desperately behindhand, like a tortoise concentrating every energy on the next step, as he creeps in frantic haste toward impossible horizons. . . .”
This sounds exactly like a living Neanderthal, but of course it was Charles Darwin. And twenty-eight years earlier he almost did not get to sail on the Beagle because Captain Fitzroy, who believed one could pretty well judge a man by his features, mistrusted the shape of Darwin’s nose. He thought the young man looked indecisive. We can only guess what might have happened, or failed to happen, had Fitzroy himself been more decisive and stamped his foot and lifted the gangplank so Darwin could not slip aboard.
Then the Scopes trial, that little masterpiece of idiocy, might never have been staged.
Nor should we have had that immortal debate between Thomas Huxley, on behalf of Darwin, and Bishop Wilberforce, known unkindly as Soapy Sam, on behalf of God:
“It would be interesting to know,” said the bishop, “whether the ape in question was on your grandfather’s or your grandmother’s side.”
But it is not a sound idea to prick a man as intelligent as Huxley, who whispered, “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands.” And getting to his feet he answered aloud: “If you ask me whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, then I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”
Whereupon, we are told, a lady in the audience fainted. And good Captain Fitzroy, trembling with honorable Christian rage, picked up a Bible and was just prevented from throwing it at Huxley. Fitzroy later was promoted to vice-admiral,