Two Neanderthal brothers surround a bull Megaloceros with spears 100,000-50,000 years ago near Germany’s Unicorn Cave. Artifacts attributed to Neanderthals, including a carved knuckle bone from the giant deer, have been found in the cave and suggest our cousins were also capable of producing artwork.
The cave is flooded with sound—the roar of the torches, the howls of the men, the cry of the bear, the clatter of the stones, the echoes off the walls. The smoke blinds, chokes, intensifies the noise and the violence.
The bear’s eyes glint from the flames. She is losing. Blood seeps through the fur of her head. One leg will not move as it should; a boulder crushed it. The cave was quiet and dark before these gibbering fire-holders came—the only warmth was her own, the only sound was her heartbeat. Then fire and stones and sticks rained down. At first it was confusing, now it is terrifying. Another rock strikes her and sparks cloud her vision. The cave feels small now, or rather, it feels as if it’s getting smaller, folding, slowly, steadily, finally, like a great eye closing to go to sleep.
So, I’ve had a few people express that my penchant for calling my neanderthal ancestors uncle or granpa ‘Nandy’ is cute or unique, so I just want to clear up the origins of Nandy, because Nandy is actually the name given to a specific neanderthal by his excavators. This individual is Shanidar 1:
He was one of the earliest neanderthals found outside of Neander Thal itself, and is known for being severely disfigured and disabled, but lived to a very advanced age, for a hunter-gatherer. He was excavated in 1957, and was held at the National Museum of Iraq. Sadly, his current whereabouts are unknown, and he may have been destroyed in bombardments by Islamic State, leaving nothing more than casts of his bones.
Shanidar 1, or Uncle Nandy, is better known in popular culture as kind old shaman Creb from Clan of the Cave Bear, where he is lovingly portrayed as a father figure for the main character, a human foundling named Ayla. In the film version, he was portrayed with great empathy by James Remar. Because of this, Nandy is perhaps the most famous neanderthal individual known to us.
1300 - Pope Boniface VIII issues papal bull (decree) instating a Jubilee Year, granting forgiveness of sins and debts for those who fulfill various conditions
1909 - Great White Fleet, 1st US fleet to circle the globe, returns to Virginia
1997 - Dolly the Sheep, world’s 1st cloned mammal is announced
2018 - Neanderthals, not humans, were the 1st artists on Earth, producing red cave paintings 65,000 years ago in Spain (pictured)
2021 - US death toll from COVID-19 passes 500,000, higher than US deaths in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined
The Vindija cave is located in the Donja Voca municipality in Croatia and is a rich archeological site. Several remains of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens have been found here. The most unique aspect of this is the fact that these Neanderthal remains were the primary source for the first attempt to sequence the full genome of the Neanderthal DNA.
The cave itself consists of 13 levels and dates back to 150,000 years ago. During the first half of the 20th century, the cave was excavated and the remains of several animals appeared. Between 1974 and 1986 a more thorough and extensively research was conducted in this cave which led to the discovery of over 100 pieces and bits belonging to hominins such as us, Homo Sapiens, and Neanderthals in 4 of the 13 levels of the cave and countless of other animal bones.
In total the bodies of four Neanderthal individuals were discovered and excavated in two levels of the cave, level G3, the lowest level containing human remains which dates back to around 45,000-38,000 years ago and G1 a level which dates back to around 34,000-32,000 years ago. Modern humans were found in level F (31,000-28,000 years ago) and level D (less than 18,500 years ago).
Now this leads to an interesting question, did modern humans and Neanderthals live together in this cave? In 2017, researchers from the Oxford radiocarbon accelerator unit researched the remains of the Neanderthals by using a new technique. This technique involves using AMS ultrafiltration on hydroxyproline which has been extracted from the Neanderthal samples. To explain this more easily, the sample is put into an accelerator in which the ions of the sample are accelerated and then passed through a magnet so that a detector can then record the amount of C14 ions.
The AMS dating technique shows that the Neanderthals are older than 44,000 years, this is about 8000 years older than the first arrival of modern humans in the cave so we now know that both species did not intermix.
In the 2010’s several DNA researches were conducted on the Neanderthal remains. In 2010, scientists were succesfull in making a first draft of the Neanderthal genome based on mainly the Neanderthal remains found in the Vindija cave. In 2018 it was discovered that all four of the Neanderthals were genetically closest to each other than to any other Neanderthal found thus far. Modern humans living right now also share more DNA with the Vindija Neanderthals than other Neanderthals such as the Altai found in Siberia.
Here are images of: Entrance of the Vindija cave, Neanderthal remains from the cave, Reconstructino of Neanderthals living in the cave,
In de gemeente Maastricht kan je de Belvédère-groeve vinden. Deze groeve werd gebruikt om löss te winnen maar in de jaren 80 werden er toch belangrijke ontdekkingen gemaakt die onze kijk op de Nederlandse geschiedenis heeft veranderd.
Op de plek van de groeve lag een steenfabriek die actief was tot 1982. Resten van fossielen en zelfs een menselijke onderkaak werden al gevonden in 1823 maar de dateringstechnieken waren helaas niet goed genoeg ontwikkeld om de ouderdom vast te stellen. Pas sinds de sluiting van de steenfabriek werd het mogelijk om goed en uitgebreid archeologisch onderzoek te doen bij deze groeve.
Deze archeologisch onderzoek heeft 10 jaar geduurd, van 1980-1990, en daarna werd nog 20 jaar onderzoek gedaan naar de vondsten. De uitkomst van dit onderzoek is zeer interessant want het blijkt dat niet alleen de moderne mens in Limburg heeft geleefd.
De vroegste sporen van bewoning dateren terug tot 250,000 jaar geleden. Er zijn stenen werktuigen gevonden die zijn vervaardigd door de Homo Heidelbergensis. De Heidelbergensis is de directe voorouder van de Neanderthaler en van ons, de Homo Sapiens. Een van de gevonden voorwerpen is een vuurstenen mes die gebruikssporen vertoond. Deze gebruikssporen zijn onderzocht en het blijkt dat deze mes is gebruikt voor het slachten van een wolharige neushoorn.
Niet alleen zijn er bewoningsresten van de Homo Heidelbergensis gevonden, ook zijn er voorwerpen gevonden die zijn gebruikt door de Neanderthalers. Deze dateren terug tot ongeveer 80,000 jaar geleden. Het blijkt dat de Belvédère-groeve is gebruikt als een tijdelijke kampement door de Homo Heidelbergensis en de Homo Neanderthalensis.
Er zijn ook nog sporen gevonden van de moderne mens in de Belvédère-groeve. Deze sporen dateren terug tot rond het jaar 5500v.Chr. Hier leefden dus mensen die behoorden tot de Bandkeramische cultuur. Het is simpelweg fascinerend dat deze groeve al een kwart miljoen jaar functioneerd als een plek voor bewoning. Drie mensensoorten hadden zich hier gevestigd en nu zijn wij er alleen nog.
In 1996 functioneerde de groeve als een vuilnisstort en werd het grotendeels volgegooid met afval. Een paar kleine stukken, die nog potentioneel archeologisch interessant kunnen zijn, zijn nu afgedekt met plastic voor eventueel toekomstige archeologische onderzoeken.
Hier zijn afbeeldingen van: Archeologisch onderzoek in de groeve (1981), Belvédère-groeve mes, Vuistbijl gevonden in de Belvédère-groeve, Tekening van een Heidelbergensis vrouw,
These are Neanderthal tools found in the Netherlands in the province of Limburg near the Maas river. The shores of the Maas was an ideal spot for summer Neanderthal camps and several of such camps have been discovered. These tools are dated back to around 300,000-250,000 years ago. I took the picture myself.
This week in Audio News from Archaeologica (4/4): Study confirms pigments Neanderthals used to decorate Spanish cave. Learn more on our website, or on one of your favorite podcast services, like Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/38w5P0A.
Skeletons of hundreds of Ice Age hyena cubs found in Belgian cave highlight severe ecological event that struck northern Europe about 45,000 years ago
Researchers from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, have recovered more than 300 skeletons of cave hyena cubs from a prehistoric cave in southern Belgium. The remarkable number of cub fossils suggests that the cave was regularly used as a birth den by cave hyena mothers, but also points towards a well-known phenomenon in nature: siblicide in times of food shortage and high competition.
A team of international researchers re-examined a collection of thousands of prehistoric fossil remains from the Marie-Jeanne cave located near Dinant, Belgium. The site was originally excavated in 1943 by a team of Belgian paleontologists and were more recently dated by radiocarbon methods in Oxford. Results show that the site accumulated between 47,000 and 43,000 years ago. Not less than 15 different animal species were identified in this collection: horse, bison, woolly rhino, reindeer, as well as carnivore species such as wolf, cave bear, hyena and lion – a rather common faunal spectrum for that time period.
But something unusual caught the attention of the scientists. If cave hyena (Crocuta crocuta spelaea) was a common species found in the prehistoric ecosystems, archaeologists and paleontologists mostly recover adult individuals, sometimes associated with some younger individuals. At Marie-Jeanne cave, not less than 323 hyena cubs were identified – a large proportion of them only being a few weeks old.
For Elodie-Laure Jimenez, lead author of this study and archaeologist at RBINS and the University of Aberdeen, these fossils are an important paleontological discovery. “Whilst fossils of cave hyena are pretty common in prehistoric sites in Europe, the high concentration of newborn cubs here at Marie-Jeanne cave is a phenomenon never seen before on the fossil record… nor the modern one for that matter. It is pretty puzzling”, she confesses.
Hyena behaviours in perspective
The cave hyena is an extinct subspecies of Crocuta crocuta, the modern spotted hyena living in sub-Saharan Africa. We know today that female hyenas isolate themselves from their clan to give birth in order to protect their offspring from aggressive interactions with fellow hyenas that could be detrimental to the lives of the youngling. Once the cubs have become stronger – oftentimes around 4-8 weeks – the mothers return to the clan with their litter, usually composed of two or three cubs. “The fact that only very few adult individuals were found at Marie-Jeanne Cave and that the majority of hyenas were only a few weeks old indicates that the site was not where the clan lived, but instead was mostly used as an isolated birth den by the mothers. And they did so for many, many generations!” says Jimenez. "This is an exceptional discovery because up until now, we knew very little about the social and reproductive behaviour of this key species of the Paleolithic ecosystem”.
Murder in the den
Since the number of cubs at Marie-Jeanne cave is far greater than what you find in any other palaeo-sites – not even in modern spotted hyena dens – the researchers suspect that an unexpected phenomenon occurred in this region at that time. “During periods of strong ecological pressures and prey depletion in the local environment, the weakest of the siblings end up being killed by the dominant, who then gets access to more maternal resources”, explains Jimenez. “This usually occurs when the mother has to travel longer distances in search of prey and has to leave the cubs behind for longer periods of time”.
During this period of the last “Ice Age”, sub-arctic climatic conditions struck northern Europe and many species had to adapt their behaviour to survive. In the northern latitudes (Great-Britain, Belgium, and “Doggerland”, the vast plains that are now under water in the English channel) our ancestors the Neanderthals largely relied on mega herbivores such as bison, woolly rhino or mammoth to get enough fat, proteins and clothing material. Therefore they were sometimes in high competition with other large predators like cave hyenas and both had to adapt their strategies by migrating long distances or hunting different species.
Humans vs carnivores
Identified for the first time by the British geologist William Buckland in 1823, the cave hyena populated the whole of Eurasia until its disappearance in Siberia, about 14,000 years ago. Due to its odd silhouette and scary “laugh”, the hyena is an animal that is not very present in our social imaginary. However, it was an essential large carnivore of the prehistoric ecosystems in which it played an essential role in maintaining its balance.
The new knowledge generated by this unique discovery and ongoing analyses will allow us to better understand the dynamics between prehistoric human species and large carnivores in northern Europe and how they adapted to the climatic variations of the Ice Age. It’s important to note that the Neanderthals disappeared from our northern latitudes just a few millennia later - around 40,000 years ago – after Homo sapiens had arrived in Western Europe. A combination of various ecological pressures then triggered the “Quaternary mass extinction”, from 35,000 to 10,000 before present, during which most of the mammals weighing over 40kg got extinct.
Belgian Neanderthal remains, including the world-famous Neanderthals of Spy, are thousands of years older than previously assumed. This is the conclusion of an international research team that re-dated the Belgian Neanderthal remains with a new technique. This discovery implies that Neanderthals disappeared from Belgium much earlier than thought and are therefore no longer the youngest Neanderthals in Europe.
The robust Neanderthals dominated Europe and Asia until about 50,000 years ago, until modern humans replaced them. Neanderthals also lived in our regions. Numerous finds in the Walloon Meuse basin bear witness to this. The Neanderthals of Spy, which are kept in the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), are said to be the youngest in Europe at 37,000 years old. However, a new study led by Oxford University, in which the RBINS also collaborated, has now shown that Belgian Neanderthals disappeared from the region between 44,200 and 40,600 years ago, much earlier than previously assumed. Contamination of the samples would have been the cause of the incorrect dating.
A new method
A multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, geologists, geneticists, and anthropologists re-dated Neanderthal fossils from the Spy cave and two other Belgian sites, Fonds-de-Forêt ((including a femur preserved at the RBINS) and Engis. They used a new dating method in which only the amino acid hydroxyproline is dated. This method limits the risk of contamination by, for example, glue. The results show that Neanderthal remains are older than previously thought, in some cases even 10,000 years older.
For example, the team discovered that a shoulder blade from a Spy Neanderthal (preserved at the ULiège), which had previously yielded very recent data (around 28 000 years ago), was heavily contaminated with bovine DNA. The results suggest that the bone was preserved with an adhesive prepared from bovine bones. ‘These new chemical methods are the only way we can remove contamination from the samples with certainty,’ says Thibaut Devièse (University of Oxford), first author of the study. 'The molecules we date come only from the bone, and not from other sources.’
Cultural transition
'Dating is crucial in archaeology,’ stresses Tom Higham (University of Oxford), who leads the PalaeoChron research project, 'because without a reliable chronological framework, we can’t really understand the relationships between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. When Homo sapiens moved into Europe 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals began to disappear. These new methods are hugely important to investigate this transition’.
'Dating all these Belgian specimens was very exciting’, says Grégory Abrams, of the Scladina Cave Archaeological Centre in Belgium. 'They played a major role in the understanding and the definition of Neanderthals. Almost two centuries after the discovery of the Neanderthal child of Engis, we were able to provide a reliable age.’
The team is now analyzing archaeological evidence, such as bone tools, to further refine our picture of the cultural transition between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in our region.
So now Spy’s Neanderthals are no longer the most recent in Europe, but inevitably the young Neanderthal fossils from Gibraltar, Catalonia and south-west France will also be (re)dated using the new technique.
Deep in the caves of Goyet in Belgium researchers have found the grisly evidence that the Neanderthals did not just feast on horses or reindeer, but also on each other.
Human bones from a newborn, a child and four adults or teenagers who lived around 40,000 years ago show clear signs of cutting and of fractures to extract the marrow within, they say.
“It is irrefutable, cannibalism was practised here,” says Belgian archaeologist Christian Casseyas as he looks inside a cave halfway up a valley in this site in the Ardennes forest.
The bones in Goyet date from when Neanderthals were nearing the end of their time on earth before being replaced by Homo sapiens, with whom they also interbred. Read more.
“These findings suggest that H. sapiens was in Europe 10,000 years earlier than we previously thought, on the basis of evidence dating back 44,000 years from Bulgaria2. We think the H. sapiens at Mandrin stayed for only about 40 years, and, from soot-deposit analysis, they arrived just one year after the previous Neanderthals. They used the same distant flint sources, suggesting they had Neanderthal guides who passed their knowledge on to them. Others have proposed similar contacts elsewhere, but the pre-eminent view is that we, H. sapiens, taught the Neanderthals — not the other way around. There is a school of thought that sees Neanderthals as inferior apemen, and another that sees them as just like us. Both are, in my view, unhelpful. We should try to understand them on their own terms.”
