Skills in Communication Key for Defeat of Neanderthals

[Menydh]

Neandertals Beaten by Rivals' Word Skills, Study Says

by James Owen
National Geographic News
November 24, 2004

Ever since evidence of Neandertals was discovered in Germany in 1856, the question of what happened to them has captured the popular imagination.

This hairy, thickset species of human vanished some 35,000 years ago. Neandertals' disappearance coincided with an influx of modern humans (Homo sapiens) to Europe and western Asia, leading scientists to speculate that the two events are closely linked.

Now a new study, published tomorrow in the journal Nature, suggests that the modern humans' more sophisticated communication skills may have helped to finish off the Neandertals (Homo neanderthalensis).

The study's author, Paul Mellars, professor of prehistory and human evolution at Cambridge University in England, bases his theory on existing evidence.

Many scientists call the first modern humans to reach Europe from Africa the Aurignacians. Using archaeological clues such as bone tools and ivory ornaments, researchers have traced the Aurignacians' advance through the Middle East and Europe.

Radiocarbon dating of these finds suggests the Aurignacians' advance took place between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago.

Mellars says this is supported by radiocarbon dating of the earliest known remains of anatomically modern humans. Likewise, he said, recent DNA studies of present-day humans suggest that the modern humans spread across Europe during the same period.

And it was during this period that the Neandertals suddenly disappeared, despite 200,000 years of successful adaptation to the glacial conditions that would grip Europe for another 30,000 years.

So why were the Neandertals replaced so abruptly by Homo sapiens?

The answer, Mellars says, may lie in language.

He says the Aurignacian period "shows an apparently sudden flowering of all the most distinctive features of fully 'modern' cultural behavior."

The study cites archaeological remains that reflect a relatively sophisticated system of communication. Examples include the first carefully shaped bone tools, stone beads and other personal ornaments, and sophisticated forms of both abstract and figurative art. Aurignacians are thought to have created ivory statuettes of humans and animals found in southern Germany and elaborate cave paintings in southeastern France.

Complex Language

Mellars writes, "Expression at this level of complexity would be almost inconceivable in the absence of complex language systems and in the absence of brains structured very similarly, if not identically, to our own."

He adds that most experts agree that modern humans such as the Aurignacians had fully complex language, because the experts believe all modern humans today have complex language skills. Even today's most isolated populations, whether they be Australian Aborigines or Eskimos, possess the same levels of complexity of grammar.

Mellars said complex language would have given modern humans a crucial, competitive edge over Neandertals.

"The power to communicate with people makes almost all activities more efficient, from coordinating hunting activities to passing on information about the location of food resources," he said.

He suggests information on the location of wood for fuel would have been particularly important for surviving winter.

"We're right in the middle of the last major glacial period and the landscape in Europe was almost treeless," he added.

The study suggests the timing of the Aurignacians' arrival in Europe may have pressed home their language advantage.

Climatic records indicate temperature oscillations of up to 8 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) around the time the Neandertals (also spelled "Neanderthals") disappeared.

"Perhaps because they had better technology, were more innovative, and because of the language, modern humans may have been able to adapt to these rapid climatic changes quicker than the Neanderthals," Mellars said.

He adds that Neandertals had survived similar climatic oscillations in the past, when they wouldn't have faced modern human competition.

In contrast with Homo sapiens, there is no direct archaeological evidence for complex language among Neandertals, though most experts agree they probably did possess some form of basic language.

"It may well be that Neanderthals didn't have tenses and subjunctive clauses, and probably didn't have complicated sentences," Mellars added.

Skillful Toolmakers

And while archaeological finds show that Neandertals were skillful toolmakers and hunters, they don't appear to have produced any art or personal ornaments.

Mellars believes this lack of "symbolic activity" is characteristic of a people who lacked skilled communication and creative imagination and who had difficulty in being innovative. To us, he says, Neandertals may have appeared autistic.

"There may have been some kind of mutation in the brain after modern humans split off from Neanderthals," he added.

Previous studies indicate that no traces of Neandertal mitochondrial DNA (a type of DNA generally passed down by females) are present in human populations today. Mellars believes the DNA findings bolster the argument that Neandertals and modern humans were separate species.

"That's the strongest evidence that Neanderthals were incapable of interbreeding with modern humans," Mellars added. "Ninety percent of DNA specialists think that Neanderthals were a different species."

Chris Stringer is head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London. Stringer, who was not involved with the study, said he agrees with most of Mellars's arguments.

"I agree that the evidence still largely supports an influx of modern humans into Europe, followed by the replacement of the Neanderthals with, at most, a trivial amount of gene flow [interbreeding] between the populations," he said.

"The modern-human adaptive pattern allowed Homo sapiens to cope better with rapid climate changes than the archaic 'natives' of Eurasia, such as the Neanderthals," Stringer added.

Stringer, however, takes a different view from Mellars as to when competition between Neandertals and modern humans first began. Stringer says Homo sapiens probably started to penetrate Neandertal territories in Europe and western Asia from at least a hundred thousand years ago.

For Mellars, it was the advanced language and behavior of the modern humans that "provided the foundations of all the later developments in culture and advanced civilizations in Europe and elsewhere."

[Timo]

It stands to reason that the one with the better communcation will win the day in a battle or fight. Try this for a scenerio:

There is a group of Neanderthal men approaching a group of modern Human men. Each have the same numbers and are about as even as one could get in physical power. They each have similar weapons, that may have some minor differences but not enough to give either an advantage over the other. The human leader tells his men that he hears noses in the bushes, and he gives them commands to place themselves where they can ambush the Neanderthal group. They spring the trap when the Neanderthal men are in range and the Human group has the upper hand of suprise and when the fight. Simple things like the ability to tell others where an enemy is, his position, distances and how many of the enemy there are, is extreamly critical in gaining the upperhand in a battle or in simply hunting for food. Advancedments in communication would've been necessary for primitive modern man to form into groups and hunt united with strategy agianst a Mammoth, for example. Without commicating a strategy to take down the Mammoth, they could loose more of there tribesmen that was necessary. We all know it is better to come up with a plan that to charge in bull-headed. The Broca's area of a Neanderthal's brain is smaller than that of a Modern Human, that is the area which is the speech area of the brain (discovered by Pierre Paul Broca).

[Menydh]

Sounds plausible. However, before any such encounter the ability to better communicate would give the sapiens sapiens the possibility of better acquire knowledge and with it a technological leading edge over the neanderthals.

In the army, during a moment prior to action, you don't communicate through speech though, but through visual signs and if you are 'gifted' at it, onomatopeic noises. Something that we can assume that the neanderthals were able to produce too.

[Timo]

You think them developed enough to create a system of hand signals?

[Menydh]

150 years ago it was thought that the Neanderthals were a type of hominid. But modern research has pointed to them being a type of homo species, and they have been reclassified as such.

It they were able to develop very rudimentary tools, they could as well have developed a very simple and basic 'corporal' sign communication system:

"Anthropologists classify Neanderthal tools as Mousterian , a kit of stone-flake tools. Earlier Homo erectus Acheulean tools are made of hand axes. Some early humans also used Mousterian tools, as hand-axes, scrapers, borers, knives and points of stone, are found beyond the Neanderthal range and associated with non-Neanderthal fossils. Their tools, evolved little during their 100,000 year history, and they did not use bone, antler or ivory. They used wood, such a spears, and regularly used fire. Why they did not make tools from their prey is unexplained. At the end of their existence their tools became more complex, possibly through copying modern humans, trade, or as a direct response to this new competitor, but the change was too late. Some Neanderthals even started using bone tools, as in a beveled bone spear tip, found in Vindija, Croatia."

[Dr. Solar Wolff]

This article is a nice try but there are flaws. The evidence for advanced language rests in the archealogical record with cave painting, ivory carving, etc. What about the Tasmanians? They had none of these. They didn't even have fire when discovered by the White Man yet nobody ever suggested that these people were not sapiens. Black life, even today, barely exceeds Neanderthal culture and is probably inferior to it in some ways. Compare people who could thrive in glacial cold as compared to cosmopolitian life in Port au Prince. Who was more human? We have to face fact. Throughout most of the existance of sapiens, we lived just like Bushmen. It has only been in the last 40,000 years or so that we woke up and became what we are and it is only the sapiens who ventured out of Africa which have made this intellectual transistion.

Their are many allegedly good biological reasons (when applied to non-human primates) to actually seperate Africans and non-Africans into two seperate species. We shouldn't whimp and whine about the inability of pre-Aurignathic man, hell, they are still with us today.