Us v. Them

Imagine growing up Neanderthal. You would develop slightly faster than your human self; childhood would feel shorter. As such, you may not reach some of those important milestones during youth. You would go through growth spurts, walk long distances, play with your siblings, use your teeth to stretch hides into clothing, watch glaciers melt and reform. Looking at your reflection in a lake, you might see red hair, you might see freckles, you would likely see light skin. Your wide nose would help you take in air as your thick legs and shorter stature let you scale mountains or rocky terrain. As you grew into adolescence, you might have looked to the others in your group and noticed the women were smaller than the men, their thighs more developed than their calves. You might glance down at your right arm and notice your time throwing spears made it stronger than your left. You would go hungry, but not as frequently as your human counterpart during the same time might have. You might be injured or sick, though you would not need to fear your fellow man as humans had to. After all, your species wasn't as prone to violence as humans were. Time would go on, you would die, and we would find you, forgotten by time but not by your human cousins.

So, how can we tell all this from those bones left behind? Teeth play a massive role! Teeth, like trees, have growth lines called perikymata. These can be used to approximate the age of Neanderthal fossils. These perikymata can then be compared to human samples, which show that Neanderthals aged slightly faster. All these small accelerations resulted in Neanderthals having shorter childhoods, shorter youths, and longer adulthoods (Neanderthals did live about the same length of time as similarly dated humans.) Thus, childhood milestones like the development of pretend play or self-transcendence may not have been possible. Teeth also develop certain lines during times of starvation. Compared to humans, Neanderthals experienced less food shortage, which is an interesting contradiction to how Neanderthals are portrayed in media. Another thing to note regarding teeth is that ware on the front teeth of many fossils suggests children and women stretched hides with them for clothing production. If women and children were doing similar tasks, chances are that Neanderthal women, like human women in most of history, were responsible for child-rearing.

Investigations into brain size and DNA can be equally enlightening. Measurements of the skull and brain reconstruction show that Neanderthals had less developed frontal lobes than humans, a part of the brain responsible for social interactions. Still, they did have social structures and were, as suggested earlier, generally less violent. Of the few hundred Neanderthal samples available, only two showed potential assault wounds. The human record, however, is far less clean. DNA samples collected and assessed recently, especially when paired with the idea that Neanderthals primarily populated Eurasia, show that Neanderthals had lighter skin where we, their Homo sapien counterparts, would have had darker skin to thrive in our native Africa. Indeed, they showed a full range of different 'looks', some sporting darker hair, some blonde, some ginger. They would have been just as aesthetically varied as humans today!

If you're curious more about bone structure and a comparison of travel methods, check out my Neanderthals in Yellowstone vlog! If you're curious about the environment these fascinating people lived in, join me next week where I'll discuss that in more detail!