Neanderthals: Life and Legacy of Europe's Ice Age Humans

Neanderthals were a group of ancient humans who lived across Europe and western and central Asia for several hundred thousand years before disappearing around 40,000 years ago. Strong, large-brained and highly adapted to Ice Age conditions, they made skilful tools, hunted big game, controlled fire and buried some of their dead. Once caricatured as brutish cavemen, they are now understood as close relatives of modern humans, and many people alive today still carry a small part of their DNA.

Discovery and naming

The first Neanderthal fossils to be found were not recognised for what they were. A child’s skull was recovered at Engis in Belgium in 1829-30, and an adult skull at Forbes’ Quarry in Gibraltar in 1848. The breakthrough came in August 1856, when quarry workers in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf in Germany dug out a skullcap and limb bones from the Feldhofer Cave, a find described in more detail in the Feldhofer Neanderthal.

The local teacher Johann Carl Fuhlrott and the anatomist Hermann Schaaffhausen recognised the bones as very ancient and unusual. Some critics, including the pathologist Rudolf Virchow, argued they belonged to a diseased modern man. In 1864 the geologist William King, working in Ireland, named the species Homo neanderthalensis, the first fossil human species ever named.

Origins, range and appearance

Genetic studies suggest that the lineage leading to Neanderthals split from the one leading to modern humans somewhere between about 550,000 and 750,000 years ago. Fossils from the Sima de los Huesos in northern Spain, about 430,000 years old, already show some Neanderthal features of the face and teeth, while the fully developed “classic” Neanderthal form is best known from about 130,000 to 40,000 years ago.

Neanderthals ranged from Portugal and Wales in the west to the Altai Mountains of Siberia in the east, and from northern Europe to the Levant. Important sites include Krapina in Croatia, La Ferrassie and La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France, Kebara and Amud in Israel, Shanidar in Iraqi Kurdistan, Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan, and the Denisova and Chagyrskaya caves in Russia. Their numbers were always small: genetic data point to low population sizes and small, scattered groups.

Neanderthals were shorter and stockier than most modern people. Adult men averaged roughly 1.64 metres in height and women about 1.55 metres, with broad chests, short forearms and shins, and powerful muscles. This compact build helped conserve body heat in cold climates, although Neanderthals also lived in warmer periods and in Mediterranean regions.

Their skulls were long and low, with a prominent double-arched brow ridge, a large nose, a forward-projecting midface and a characteristic bulge at the back, often called an occipital bun. They lacked a pronounced chin. Brain size averaged roughly 1,400 to 1,500 cubic centimetres, similar to or slightly larger than the modern average, though the shape of the braincase differed.

How Neanderthals lived

Neanderthals are associated mainly with the Mousterian stone tool tradition, named after the site of Le Moustier in France. They used the Levallois technique, a demanding method of preparing a stone core so that a flake of predetermined shape could be struck off. They hafted stone points onto wooden shafts using adhesives, including birch-bark tar, which has to be produced by heating bark under controlled conditions.

They were accomplished hunters of large animals such as red deer, reindeer, horses, bison, wild cattle and occasionally mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses. Healed injuries on many skeletons suggest that close-range hunting was dangerous. Yet their diet was not only meat: studies of plaque on teeth from sites such as El Sidrón in Spain and Shanidar in Iraq have identified traces of cooked plants, and coastal sites in Gibraltar and Portugal show that they collected shellfish and caught fish and seabirds.

Fire was part of everyday life. Many Neanderthal sites contain hearths, and Abric Romaní in Spain preserves a series of fireplaces arranged across a rock shelter floor. Neanderthals also made simple shelters, used animal hides, almost certainly for clothing and covers, and moved seasonally across wide territories.

Burial, care and symbolism

At least some Neanderthals buried their dead. The best-known case is the skeleton found in 1908 at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France, in a pit that researchers in 2014 reconfirmed as a deliberate grave. Other burials are known from La Ferrassie in France, Kebara in Israel and Shanidar Cave in Iraq.

At Shanidar the archaeologist Ralph Solecki, who excavated the cave in the 1950s, reported with the palynologist Arlette Leroi-Gourhan in 1975 that pollen around one skeleton suggested a burial with flowers. Later research suggests the pollen may have been carried in by burrowing rodents or bees, so the “flower burial” is uncertain. Shanidar 1, however, an older man who had survived a crushing blow to the head, a withered arm and probable deafness, shows that injured individuals could be supported by their group for years.

Evidence for symbolic behaviour has grown. Eagle talons with cut marks from Krapina, about 130,000 years old, may have been worn as ornaments. Deep in Bruniquel Cave in France, rings of broken stalagmites were built some 176,000 years ago, presumably by Neanderthals. Claims that Neanderthals painted red markings in Spanish caves more than 64,000 years ago remain controversial, but most specialists now accept that they could make abstract marks and used pigments.

From brute to relative

The popular image of the shambling caveman owes much to the French palaeontologist Marcellin Boule. Between 1911 and 1913 he published a study of the La Chapelle skeleton that portrayed Neanderthals with bent knees, a stooped posture and an ape-like gait. In 1957 the anatomists William Straus and A. J. E. Cave showed that the individual had suffered severe arthritis and that Neanderthals had walked fully upright like us.

Since then, archaeology and genetics have steadily narrowed the gap between Neanderthals and modern humans. They shared with us a version of the FOXP2 gene linked to speech and language, and a hyoid bone from Kebara 2 in Israel resembles ours. Whether they had language as complex as ours cannot be determined, but they were capable of cooperation, planning and the transmission of skills across generations.

Neanderthal DNA

In 1997 a team led by Svante Pääbo extracted mitochondrial DNA from the original Feldhofer bones. In 2010 the same group published a draft of the Neanderthal genome and showed that people with ancestry outside Africa carry a small proportion of Neanderthal DNA, today usually estimated at around 1 to 2 per cent. Pääbo received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022 for this work.

Genetics also revealed the Denisovans, a sister group of the Neanderthals in Asia, and a girl from Denisova Cave with a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. The story of mixing between Neanderthals and our own species is told in Neanderthal interbreeding. Some Neanderthal gene variants influence modern traits such as immune responses, skin and hair, and susceptibility to certain diseases.

Disappearance

Neanderthals vanished from most of Europe around 41,000 to 39,000 years ago, after modern humans had arrived, and the two populations overlapped in some regions for several thousand years. Explanations include competition for resources, climate instability, very small and isolated populations, disease, and absorption into modern human groups through interbreeding. Most researchers think a combination of factors was responsible.

The timing comes largely from a 2014 radiocarbon study led by Tom Higham, which dated material from about 40 sites from Spain to Russia. Later survival has been proposed for southern Iberia and for Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar, with dates as young as about 30,000 to 28,000 years ago, but these claims are contested because samples near the limit of radiocarbon dating are easily contaminated by younger carbon.

The arrival of modern humans was not a single event. Teeth from Grotte Mandrin in the Rhône valley of France suggest a brief modern human presence there around 54,000 years ago, followed by renewed Neanderthal occupation, while at Bacho Kiro Cave in Bulgaria modern humans were present by about 45,000 years ago. Across Europe, distinctive “transitional” tool industries such as the Châtelperronian in France have been attributed by some researchers to late Neanderthals, possibly influenced by contact with newcomers, although this attribution is also debated.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 430,000 years ago: Early Neanderthal-line people are deposited at the Sima de los Huesos, Spain.
• c. 130,000 years ago: Classic Neanderthals are established across Europe.
• c. 50,000-45,000 years ago: Main episode of interbreeding with modern humans.
• c. 41,000-39,000 years ago: Neanderthals disappear from most of Europe.
• 1856, August: Bones are found in the Feldhofer Cave in the Neander Valley.
• 1864: William King names Homo neanderthalensis.
• 1908: The La Chapelle-aux-Saints burial is excavated in France.
• 1957: Straus and Cave overturn the stooped-posture image.
• 2010: The draft Neanderthal genome is published.
• 2022: Svante Pääbo wins the Nobel Prize for his work on ancient genomes.

Why it matters

Neanderthals are our closest known extinct relatives, and studying them shows which traits are uniquely ours and which we shared with other humans. Their story overturns the idea of a single ladder of progress: for much of prehistory several kinds of humans lived side by side. And because their DNA lives on in billions of people, the Neanderthals are not entirely gone.