Neanderthals & Art: Interview with Dr. Wragg Sykes

everyone how's it going Stefan here whether Neanderthals made art or not is one of the most controversial but interesting aspects of modern research for sure luckily for me and you dr. rag Sikes Paleolithic archaeologist in the and earth all expert author and all-around good egg for hopping onto my channel agreed to talk through some of these issues from the controversy to the evidence and how it affects our perspective of Neanderthals and our relationship to them super interesting really changed how I viewed Neanderthals so sit back relax make yourself a cup of tea I'm sure you will enjoy what she has to say thank you so much for joining me on here and sharing your knowledge with my viewers I know we've all really appreciate it oh you're welcome it's always nice to talk about something that you're passionate from exactly yeah and we're all definitely passionate about Neanderthals here on my channel so can I start by asking how controversial is the idea of Neanderthal symbolism and art in the wider academic community and is it still very controversial or is it gaining acceptance um I think it's safe to say it's it's the key area where there is still large disputes and since really the past 10 years or just under 10 years since we had the ancient genetic evidence that has laid out that there were deep connections between our population and Neanderthals so when I say our population I mean Homo sapiens living people the majority of living people and have a small percentage of Neanderthal ancestry that didn't used to be believed to be the case the dominant theory in human origins was based on a lot of different evidence including the mitochondrial DNA which suggested that there wasn't any ancestry in us but it took the nuclear DNA which arrived in 2010 to show that that wasn't the case and they they are part of direct common in ancestry and until that point that was one of the big sort of issues of debate and now that has been pretty much you know laid to rest we can't argue about that the issue of symbolism cognition parallels in behavior has really remained debated over and quite contentious in some in some aspects definitely so what it what are there's the points of contention mainly revolving around the dating of the sights is that the issue and whether they sort of accurately dated enough to predate Homo sapiens in Europe is that where the controversy still lies um no not really I'd say I mean there is it depend the real controversy I suppose is is what one regards as evidence of particular levels of behavioral sophistication in terms of and if you want to talk about technological complexity but in terms of symbolic thought sort of abstract thought the ability to displace yourself in time and space and imagine other things and play in your imagination so you know play with categories of ideas and things like that and that that does still raise issues in that one scholar might see a kind of evidence say a site with with red pigment and interpret that in a particular way that would support symbolic behaviour whereas another scholar might see the same evidence and see it quite differently so nobody would be able to to have an argument that could be supported these days where you could say that there's drastic differences in the actual archaeology with the exception of a couple of sort of factors that I can go into more detail about so but in terms of comparing Neanderthals to temporary Homo sapiens so when I'm talking about contemporary I'm talking older than 40,000 years so that would be a homo sapiens from mostly the Middle Stone Age in Africa and 340 thousand and although that has begun to change and but generally the evidence that we used to regard as quite sort of striking and not shared within the antis also things like shells or pigments and bone tools that those borders between early homo sapiens and the ant atolls have really become fuzzy in terms of the actual evidence that we now have so the remaining argument is about what those those things mean and that's really where you kind of have to go off into understanding other fields like neuroscience or sort of art theory and things like this so it does become sort of bedded somewhat into particular scholars who may have long-standing theories that look very different with the evidence we have now compared to what they might have looked like twenty years ago so that's kind of where the controversy still exists mm-hmm okay that's interesting that's not where I thought it would be I thought the debate would be more that the the presence of symbolism wasn't up for debate it was about whether it could be accurately dated to in the end at all time period so that's what it's it's kind of both and I mean if you want to take if we take pigment and so pigment so I mean like minerals that produce color so that could be red ochre which will be like iron is produced in the color there and there's variations on that you can have yellowy ones or orange ones or very red ones or you can have black pigment which could be charcoal but you can also have mineral pigments and manganese pigments often but there are others and so the reason people get so excited about pigment obviously is because the use of color is a foundational thing that most people understand is a you know the visual basis of art visual art there's other kinds of art obviously so if we have a prehistory going way back where people are collecting minerals processing them into powders the question then is why and because we are coming from a position of hindsight we're looking back with the wonders of the Upper Paleolithic painted caves in our eyes and we're trying to see the origin of that looking for the use of pigment in the absence of any art it seems obvious as a place to begin trying to understand whether there was a sort of in a nascent symbolic understanding purely through the use of color the problem is that you can potentially use minerals like ochre for other things so in the history of sort of where we see pigment and when it's quite different now as I say than it was a few decades ago everybody you know was looking to see the earliest painted painted caves and things like that and that remains now the it's still about 40,000 39 40 that's the earliest dates that we have for any kind of painting on a wall the big change is that what was the really early sites which were Chauvet in Europe or some potential early pieces of stone in in Africa that had some figurative designs in black on that may have come off a wall they weren't so well dated but they could have been about 40 but that's not quite so sure so it was like Africa and Europe which seem to make sense if you were coming from a traditional understanding that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and then moved out of Africa so that made sense but the big change there is that we now have painted caves dated to exactly the same time 14 hours in East Asia Southeast Asia so that has changed but that still gives what we currently have there is still like a border there that we don't find any painted caves earlier than that and those are all as far as we can tell associated with homo sapiens so in terms of what we have for Neanderthals the age of what we have for Neanderthals is not really an issue because we have very old use of pigment in Europe between 250 to 200 thousand and that's that's interesting because it's not just sort of a lump of red stuff from a cave it's actually an open-air site where analysis of the sediments and pulled out very tiny basically splashes of what must have been a liquid red ochre essentially so that immediately sort of doesn't really fit in with the use of dry powders for something it still doesn't mean that that has to be related to kind of any kind of painting in the sense of of what we would be thinking of with Upper Paleolithic paintings but our Neanderthals processing pigment into liquids during a time when we have absolutely no evidence there's Homo sapiens around yes and there's no question that that was going on very very early but yeah the question then is well all these pigments that we find is there any evidence that would push it towards being something that is non-functional can I ask what what are these sort of old alternate uses of the pigment if they weren't using it for art what else could they have possibly you can use pigments for any range of stuff I mean it's it's once you start to kind of get your head that it color or just pigment doesn't have to be about art and you actually look at the graphic literature there is a lot of different things so you might use focus for hafting so these when you want to stick a stone tool to a wooden or some other kind of handle and you need to make an adhesive if we know Neanderthals we're in actually quite varied ways now we have multiple different materials they used bitumen natural bitumen they used birch tar and they used pine tar mixed quite amazingly with beeswax that's a very recent fine just this year that came out that's still blows my mind at you well I'm quite what to think about that but in ethnographic context and in the early homo sapiens sites in South Africa people were using hematite or other minerals in the adhesive and stuff that they had which was plant-based but different to what Neanderthals were using as because it improves basically the the material qualities so that's that's been an argument that maybe it was to do with haften we have never found any traces of minerals being used by Neanderthals in hafting so that's possible maybe not but you could only people use minerals traditionally on their bodies for protection in the Sun it doesn't have to be something that's to do with aesthetics it can just be to do with skin care that sort of never even crossed my mind before I'd have used this for something like that yeah you could be putting on you for camouflage purposes I mean we are assuming that based on sort of biological and and thermoregulation principles and a lot of the time when it was in the cooler periods in the glacial periods Neanderthals had to have been wearing some kind of reasonably tailored clothes so we're not talking about first wrapping around you know in the in the icy winds and that wouldn't have cut it but during the warmer periods because they did live in interglacials in times warmer than today even or rather where we where we are heading they wouldn't have needed those clothes and it was quite hot during some times so potentially if they had a fairer skin which we believed that they they did some of them did not all of them some had darker skin then some kind of covering of the skin using mineral pigments that might make sense to theirs and also you use one of the big things that we know that they spent a lot of time doing was processing animal skins and again that could be close but there's so many other things you can use skins for cluding bags you know had to carry their stuff around somehow and you know hide hide wraps for babies could be the original reason why you would begin to process skins but anyway using mineral pigments as an aid to processing animal skins is another real possibility so there are actually a lot of different angles that you might think of as to why powdered or liquid minerals could be in an entire site so what you want really is a context where the pigments are associated with something that doesn't have any obvious functional use I mean something really unambiguous well yeah I mean I mean that's the caveat there is the Western philosophical traditions like two separate things into binaries nature culture art practical you know everyday stuff that's not how all cultures think so it's perfectly possible for something to be massively symbolic and aesthetic and art and also just be something that you use every day and it's vital to your survival so bearing that in mind that something can be both we still as archaeologists want to have a situation where it's very difficult to say that pigment associated with something else is actually you know just something that they were using and there isn't some some other explanation so what that's what we need for Neanderthals and now there are sort of more cases of that than they used to be so let me let me ask you this and whilst run it what are some what are some of the more clear-cut examples of a Neanderthal symbolism or at least some of the most promising ones that we have okay well I can if I stick with the pigment because actually pigment sort of doesn't sound very exciting but it has been one of the areas where we've just slowly amassed a lot of different cases where we have this sort of setting where it's very difficult to see the practical purpose so one of these is in a site in Belgium there is some black pigment black pigment has been argued potentially in other sites where it's from manganese people have done some really cool experimental work recently that shown that actually manganese can be a useful accelerant when you're starting fires it can basically like reduce the heat the the point at which the fire will spark and every and it just makes your fire lighting easier so black pigment itself does have a practical purpose but in this site in Belgium they have small pieces of a silt stone basically that leaves nice marks when it's rubbed and it's it looks like in terms of the the size of the piece so everything they could have been used they actually washed them before they realized that they report them with the archaeologists so they can't see Hama traces on it but it's it's it's interesting so that's that's one case that there is a black pigment with no possible practical use that we can see but that's that's not sort of that impressive there are other sites where you get pigment on weird things so one of those is pigment being associated with stalagmites in romania in the Carpathians i think it's in romania yeah and there's a connection between a very weird geological object that was found it's basically it's a geode it's sort of about the size of a ball that would fit in your hand very very heavy but you would know if you picked up it's just odd you know like it it doesn't feel like a normal rock because it's just naturally heavy and it's very very dense and the research has found this I mean and they were digging this site and they scanned it and they found it was a geode but what they know was that they were remnants of color on the surface it had a crust a carbonate crust that had formed over it and when they removed parts of that and they could see that there was pigment and it was red red ochre and that was actually overlain by some sort of black as well which they could not identify what that was so this is a very odd geological object that would fit into a long tradition we see in the an tiles and in other hominids where they seem to be attracted to odd things so sort of rocks and basically it's usually rocks but fossils as well that cannot have come from the science that they are found in they had to have been brought in there's no you know like it wasn't a flood or anything like that they had to have been brought in there's no clear explanation for why they would bring those in and generally people just refer to them as curiosities this object would fit into that it's it could I think it could have come from the the local geology but the fact it has pigment on it it that's two strange things there's this odd geological object and then you've got the pigment associated with it so that's kind of like interesting but in the same cave from a different layer they were also found some small sections of stalagmites systemic mites are the ones that come up from the ground and if you get quite thick ones and you chop them in half or if they're still forming you can get like little bowls basically natural bowls and that you can sort of grind a little bit if you need to but some of those and there are eight of them I think that they found so far and some of those on only on the insides of the little Bowl area there's more of blacken and red residues so it's a different layer it's it's a later layer but it's just very interesting that this site you have pigments that's not naturally you know forming within the the the geology of the site that that pigment couldn't have got on there by accident basically and that's on two different strange things in that site and so that's an interesting case but if it was alone you'd be like okay strange but it would be an anomaly but it's not there are other cases in various sites where we see pigment associated with shells and shows where do we assume that they were sort of used as mixing bowls or something like that no well we don't know I mean in some cases it might be and generally it doesn't look like these are shells that are sort of food waste in some cases it's possible but in others it really doesn't look like that the this there's two nice examples one what is this a couple of sites from Spain and one of them has pigment mixes basically like recipes where they there's different kinds of pigment different colors reds and oranges and yellows and but they also have what is some kind of black carbon in it which might be charcoal or bone but also pyrite which is sparkly as fool's gold if you grind that up that's going to have quite a striking aesthetic quality if you mix it with other powders and these are associated with shells in in one particular site so there were a lot of headphones when that came out like oh Neanderthals had makeup or they had a special jewelry yeah you cannot say that but there was a mix of minerals that would have been visually striking on shells some of these were probably collected for food but other ones may not have been so that's interesting again if it was just one site with shells and pigment okay fine but it's not there is another really cool site which for me is it's a bit of a clincher really this is an Italian site called grata for money and in this well it's an amazing site anyway it has just vast amounts of cool evidence for many different kinds of behavior a familiar that's somewhere between about 47 or 45 thousand years just for the record sorry okay so the people listening unaware what sort of the rough time for homosapiens entering your just so we can have that in the back of our minds at the moment well the fossil evidence for early homo sapiens is really minimal but in terms of the combination of their archaeological signature what we would believe to be an archeological signature and any fossils there's no nobody in southern Europe pre 41,000 and similarly in northern Europe there may be in Eastern Europe it looks like sort of there at the fringe is more like 44 45 maybe maybe not that early or it's difficult to tell because there are a lot of I mean we'll have to get onto this later in terms of what transitional industries are but generally we would be assuming on the fossil evidence that there was no homo sapiens in Western Europe until 41 at the earliest more like 40 more than 40,000 just if you're talking 45 plus I think most people would accept that just on a date but also in infer money this is in this in a layer which is absolutely unarguably classic Neanderthal artefacts there would be no question about that so this object it's only one of them and it's a tiny fossil shell so it's a shell but more interestingly it's a fossil so it's nothing to do with food and that fossil came from deposits and outcrops roughly a hundred kilometers away so this was not that arrived by accident and microscopic very careful analysis found that there is red mineral pigment in tiny tiny little natural pits on the outside of this shell and if you zoom it right in you can see it it's only on the outside of the shell and sort of the little lip of the hole something that makes it sort of more exciting but it I don't think it even needs it to be a good evidence assemblers missing this shell may also have once been threaded onto something because there is some very sort of distinctive abrasion marks that appear to be sort of linear as if they were rubbed in the same direction on me on the lip of the shell just the tiny micro scratches you have to use like very high magnification and to see it but potentially it means that that shell had some kind of thread or something going through it in and out through through a hole in the side well but even without that you have a fossil which has nothing to do with food it came from a very long distance and it has pigment on it those three things if that was in a homo sapiens sight you wouldn't look - I should just be like yep okay that is something symbolic so oh yeah I mean you can't carry something for 100 kilometers by accident in terms of how many days that object was held on for hold on to for you know it's it's interesting we can't tell but given that Neanderthals were all of our evidence says that they were highly mobile they moved around a lot they don't seem to have stayed anywhere particularly long the stuff that they carried was meaningful to them whether it was vital for survival or something else but they were they they would have been very choosy about what they chose to carry because they had to carry everything they had no new transport no you know dogs or whatever - to help carry the load so it was all on their own backs so even if you're talking about a tiny shell that's still something that's got to be packed and carried with you so there's a choice happening there I can still think of a practical case in a sense if you I mean like potentially shells if they were all strung together it could have rattled and maybe that was some kind of thing to do with hunting but I can't really believe that I think this site this shell from firmani is really strong evidence for me and because you then look out from that site all the rest of this it's where we have pigment there's pigments where they clearly being rubbed on things some pigments have got strange sort of little lines engraved on them there's the association's of sheller other science this is strange geodes you know once you start to see the whole picture that we have now it really starts to look as if something is going on doesn't mean everything is symbolic and you know every sight but once you kind of have this accumulation of stuff it becomes difficult to say well we have nothing and we do have a record that is broadly I would say equivalent to what we have for early Homo sapiens in in the African contexts and there are shells then there's pigment there's that there's a much sort of a more impressive little pigment and processing kit from a South African site and early South African sites that's like about I think 80,000 where they have a shell and this pigment inside it and things like this and it's just like it was all found together and so that's kind of you know that's like the whole package they've got there but in terms of if those objects have been found distributed through the cave it's not that different and there's no painted art at all in South Africa so we have to sort of think well what were they using their pigment for some aesthetic things and and some practical things in as we can see in the hearty so there's no reason why the antennas couldn't have been doing both things in different sites in different places yeah that's amazing why the pigment is really a good example because the overall amount of stuff we now have means that we have to look at the individual sites differently I think yes I mean I'm talking to you now totally changed how I view Neanderthals in my mind's eye I mean I know I shouldn't get carried away like the newspapers always do with imagining them in sparkly makeup but well I didn't I mean color and visual appearance it's a really basic thing for mammals and you know and chimpanzees in in the world they're you know they're always brought up being our closest primate relative they don't really do anything like that in the wild but if you give them in a captive setting if you give them paint they go for it yeah but they are aesthetically stimulated by painting and that's kind of an interesting angle to look at things really because the other thing that has kind of been getting people excited about Neanderthals is engravings and sort of interactions about sort of you know cutting into materials rather than covering them with with a substance so she would be doing with pigment so I was just gonna say when I was researching the videos that I did on the Neanderthals one of the examples where I said people were debating and I think it was is a Gorham's cave yeah Roza weather sort of like a hash mark on the rock yeah yeah Goren's I mean different I think different people are still have different opinions about that sorry that was my cat okay yeah I mean in terms of the context of if that marking there had the hashtag errs yeah it was called in the headlines that is under a load of archaeology basically so it has to be pretty old and old enough to be Neanderthal I mean it's covered by layers that look as if they are Neanderthal archaeology and the question of well is the experimental archaeology that's been done to claim that that was created and intentionally it wasn't like a bear or something and I think for me I I I would buy that as a intentionally created form partly because there is a lot of evidence from other sites that they were interested in not only in sort of engraving but just in material properties of things so and this is the other thing that you kind of have to have in mind when you talking about aesthetics or art or engraving is that Neanderthals were like they were incredibly picky about what they ate and the materials they used for their practical tools so they were really careful generally to choose the best rocks for whatever they task they were doing they would carry the higher quality rocks as tools for further they would reach sharpen those preferentially they would only transport the bits of animals from kill sites that had the highest fat or marrow content and you know those patterns are repeated everywhere and then if they're making bone tools tools from bone they're really picky about the species or the actual part of the skeleton that they use so they're like they're like gourmets for materials you know they they know what they want very much so they're aware of the physical properties of things so that I think is interesting in that we we see across a number of sites not only this interested in pigments but if sort of cutting into bones and there's a lot of engravings on bones that people have debated for a long time some of those have really not held up they're just natural but other ones when they're examined with modern technologies modern microscopic analysis you can see that they're not they're not some sort of natural scratches and numerous cases have now emerged from sites that all in a good context you know they're not old and random stuff where you have parallel markings and it seems to be that there is in some cases a concern to create series of markings very careful they're not sort of graphic designs in the way that the Gibraltar thing seems to have a graphic character to it and with having you know lines that intersect each other they're just single lines they're either sort of having an origin point that they all come out for and it kind of looks like a fan shape or they have these small sort of cuts that seem to be that they're parallel and some really cool analysis has been done and like looking at whether you can argue that they're trying to keep the gaps between them consistent and on some pieces that does seem to be true so that it it's basic level that's an aesthetic activity you're trying to create a visual effect whatever the meaning of that is is uncertain but you have that in many sites it's on animal bones sometimes it's on animal bones from species that are not particularly interesting other cases it's from species that are a little bit less common like bears or Birds and in one case there's a Neanderthal skull that seems to have some of these markings on they're very small but they don't really fit into into butchery because this is from a site where they appear to have been butchering the dead as well which is a whole other topic but the interesting thing about engravings is it's it's an interaction with the material and you get lines in some sites not hardly any of the pigment sites but they are still there where there's pigment seems to have lines on it doesn't really necessarily fit in with trying to get powder off these lumps of pigment so there's a overlap between two different things that we would otherwise if it wasn't the undertones we would say that's potentially symbolic and it's overlapping between those two different sort of aesthetic realms if you want to call it that and um that really I think because we're getting so many different signals for behavior that doesn't really fit anything obviously practical it all starts to build up and in terms of comparing it to early Homo sapiens in some cases Neanderthals have got more depending on what sort of one you what area you look at that's incredible that's totally uh that sounds very convincing to me for their like you said it's a if it was found in a homo sapien site it wouldn't its symbolic nature ABB's wouldn't be questioned oh yeah me and in the and little ones it is important to remember as well that we talk about the Neanderthals as if they're sort of a monolithic thing and they definitely wouldn't have been and they lived across a massive geographical range you know from it was Pakistan to Wales into the elders Beca standard where Neanderthals story yeah you know it's a huge huge range of landscapes of environments of animals you know like what they ate in in Palestine compared to Germany would have you know probably surprised each other you know very different so we shouldn't expect everything to look the same everywhere we should expect that what Neanderthals were doing in one place would not have made sense to what other ones did somewhere else and it's the same thing we you know we wouldn't expect necessarily that to be the case for early homo sapiens and also there's the question of change through time as well it has been a trope for Neanderthals for a long time in sort of human origins textbooks that it's always claimed oh the middle Paleolithic so that's their their culture their broad culture basically did nothing and didn't evolve at all for the entire time that they were around from about 400 350 thousands until 40,000 and that's that's totally changed nobody I think who who knows the the stone tools and would would argue that and there was massive change over time in terms of sort of little flowerings of what was going on in particular ages there were there were technological traditions that were very long-lived but it wasn't just sort of one thing happening the entire time it was really varied and so we should expect that other things aesthetic traditions symbolic activities would have been changing over time as well as across space and I was actually going to say one of the other really intriguing sites that probably well I know it has because I asked colleagues to tell me what they thought the most sort of jaw-dropping recent thing was and basically everybody came out with the same site which is a French site and called plenty Cal in southwest France that doesn't have pigment but it does have static mites again and this is a site people can find it on like because there's lots of there's lots of images of it basically it's very deep cave 300 meters or so deep into this hill and there's a chamber where people cavers had found these bizarre large sort of rings of broken pieces of stalagmite and it was dated right accommodated it came out as older than 40,000 so people like oh okay well that's interesting but if you date really old stuff with radiocarbon it basically gives you infinite dates and it could be anything so when that was really examined that came out to be about 174 thousand years old oh wow yeah it's it's super interesting that site because it's kind of described as just arranged rings of stalagmites and then like with this little piles in the middle but it's a lot more than that it's a built structure albeit on a small level so it's not like a big built wall but in microscale it is a built wall because they don't they haven't just kind of like shoved them together there are parts in these rings where they've got like two or three things balanced on top of each other like verticals and then a flat one and then other ones on top of that and almost like several long ones all lined up together leaning against the wall that is a absolute sort of miniature megalithic structure if you want to call it that you know it's not just kind of like something it's not bears didn't let structure we don't we don't have the language for this it's interesting you know questions to what we actually cool it but it's not burning as well and in amongst this the style might some of them were really heavily burned and there seems to be like half that we've built a long way or in I don't know it's really hard it's so hard to know what's going on that site was very recently found and a couple years ago well not found but published an analysis is still ongoing there is a flow stone floor that this is basically on so we we can't see the surface of the of the cave floor because it's covered by the natural flow stone that came over afterwards that's also incidentally how some of this was dated because there was flow stone but was over these rings later in time so we the dating is very good for this site but nobody really would be living in that cave because it's 300 myths in you would have terrible smoke if you try to illuminate it not to mention sort of having to continually bring fuel in to have light do anything so there's no way this is a site that they were living in so and then if you add up it just goes to show the extraordinary amount of effort they must have had to put it into yeah you can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on on how long it would have taken to make that and even if you sort of assume several of them whom doing it's about two tons is the amount of stuff that is arranged it would be at least six or seven hours you know that's that's my little basic calculation they must have been under there like hours and hours maybe even days doing this we have no clue why so that that's not pigment it's not paintings on the wall it's not a carving but that is something I I don't even if I call that aesthetic because the VIS a little bit you know like the the arrangements of stones in in South America you can only see the visual effects from above but but the arrangement it's not necessarily the visual side of it is not the important thing that's Society the creation of it itself could have been the thing that was meaningful and this is where I want to come back to the engravings because for some of those we might be focusing too much from a cultural position which values final visual effects of things like paintings whereas actually that's not necessarily the thing that may have had the meaning it may have been the actual creative act itself could have had a meaning or an importance to the person doing it or people watching or whatever and so I think really we need to open up how our own expectations of what symbolic behavior might actually look like or feel like and/or sound like you know anything and so that's kind of where we are with Neanderthals for me that there is an abundance of archaeology that we have now is just bringing together what that means in terms of their minds is the really really difficult thing that's incredible so so let me ask you this we have all this evidence of symbolic behavior does this affect how we view the demise of the Neanderthals in any way in and perhaps transitional stone industries or our relationship with them how how does this affect our view of that well I guess there's there's two aspects to that one is the transitional industries which we don't really have time to talk about they are actually I would say even more contentious than the issue of symbolism and the question of who made what is still very much very much argued over and that would be something that would cause the biggest you know shouting matches where that doesn't happen if people were going to get into big debates at conferences it would be that and because the problem with those what they are basically is at the very end of the time that we see Neanderthals the very youngest fossils seem to be followed by stone tool cultures that appear to be presaging the Upper Paleolithic and very blady vilasa blades generally that's the main thing and they also have objects associated with them that we don't really see in the and tell Sonia Charles might have engraved bone put lines on them and things but they we haven't seen any like carved forms that are obviously not just changing the shape of your bone tool you know this there's no sort of pendants or anything whereas in the French case the shuttle Peron Ian there are apparently pierced teeth other carved bone things ivory and so that's just one of them so there's multiple of these weird what people call transitional because the assumption became that this was some kind of transition between Neanderthals and the incoming modern well I say Homo sapiens we shouldn't really say modern human because it's terrible too and that slipped out but yeah the question is those layers are often quite thin they're covering a very short period of time so dating them is difficult and in the sites where it appears that there may be in the anti-material as in fossil material with them bones or teeth they don't have the best contexts there is either uncertainty as to whether those layers are we're actually in the original position or whether there's been an ocean and for example some of the most quoted sites nobody's ever done full refitting so that's where you get all your stuff out across different layers and you check to see if anything is broken that is between two different layers if that is the case that that was one object that has now is now in two layers that tells you that that material has moved and that those things are not 100% reliable you know you can't be sure whether the pendant that is in that layer really wasn't that Leone so the sites where which have most of the very impressive stuff that also seems to have Neanderthal fossils also remain to be proven to be completely well we can't ever say completely but very confidently undisturbed basically so that's the problem with the transitional industries especially the classical ones in France and elsewhere so I would say for me I don't think there's great evidence then the anti tales made those whereas other people's public you the opposite but for me I like to be very cautious and I would like to see them already have refitting studies and I would like to only look at sites where we have very solid dating and then our old sites dug along time ago things like that so if you removal of those it doesn't leave a lot of great evidence than the ant atolls made that stuff so if we say okay we're not going to talk about the transitional industries if we're only going to talk about what we know which is that there certainly was some late interbreeding between the anti tiles and Homo sapiens looks like there was a lot of stuff going on much earlier but we know there was some some late interbreeding because there is a one human jaw from Eastern Europe that dates to about 39,000 and that individuals had a Neanderthal ancestor somewhere between four I think to six or seven generations before so that is very very close in time to when that interbreeding happened whether that was in Eastern Europe or not you know how much space could a group move over six or seven generations probably quite a lot but it's still the point is still there that we know that there was definitely interbreeding going on at a late period in time when we therefore have a big history of Neanderthals having aesthetic interesting things that they were doing whether it's with pigments or whatever the question there for me is what does that mean in terms of this symbolic capacity well it just adds to the reasons why we would want to make babies with each other that I don't I don't really buy the explanation that everything was some sort of territorial argument with you know forced intercourse between you know groups that got I don't know cut off and you can look at chimpanzee cases they sometimes do that but it's very rare as I understand it I'm not DNA specialist at all and but as I understand it the amount of material genetic material that is in living people is high enough that these can't have been sort of one-off encounters like a handful of them over 5060 hundred thousand years there's multiple phases of when it happened but we're probably looking at contexts where interactions were happening in reasonable numbers not for the case on that but but it wasn't an isolated incident so you have to talk about you know who is raising the babies and then you start you stop talking about sort of like physical encounters and you say well a baby that is brought into a group whether it was going into a Neandertal group or to a homo sapiens to group or whether they merge groups we have no idea if that was happening there had to have been enough of a comparable I guess broad cultural worldview that that those children would not sort of you know just be be left or abandoned or sort of grow up unable to function and you know they had two hybrids had to be able to function in whichever societies they were brought up in and therefore they had to have been they couldn't have been a massive Gulf is what I'm trying to say even if there were groups with different traditions or different aesthetic or symbolic understandings I think there had to have been some common ground in terms of there being more than simply they were hunting you know they could recognize that they were both hunters or something like that and you know that they were peoples that hunted and that would be a common ground I think there probably was something beyond that that would explain why you would have so many hybridizations that were successful basically and you know that those hybrids then went on to have their own children and stuff otherwise we wouldn't have that material in us today it's been able to fit in with their society for people to want yeah reproduce with them and continue having families it had to be a level of communication there had to have been yeah all those things so that's not necessarily I don't want to say they were the same because I don't think they're there are clear differences still in in the record I mean I think the way that Homo sapiens were living I think they were probably hunting differently I think they were organizing themselves in the landscape differently I think they they probably were and had more extensive social networks I think that's pretty well supported and the the the key difference by 40,000 is that as I said that's when you have the earliest dates for cave art that's representational images animals basically and handprints there is very new research that suggests that there may be handprint one handprint in Spain that much old and that sort of maybe 50,000 but at the moment that's those sites for me I would like to see a more extensive analysis of the of the caves where those are and to see if there's more of those and hand prints with the same similar ages before I want to sort of be sure about what those actually are but in terms of what we accept as was there anybody around that was Homo sapiens in Europe where these paintings on on walls and this potential hand and maybe it's not a print actually it's a negative it's so it's probably had the pigment blown around and they take your hand away yeah those those could be Neanderthal stuff or they could be odd little very brief incursions of Homo sapiens and that is possible because there is also a transitional industry before the transitioned if you want to call it that in France in southern France southeast France and called the Neronian which has some aspects that look similar to what the anti tells do but also not some of the stone tool technology there is it's comparable to what neon tells to you but it is much smaller and it has very definite similarities to the earliest transitional industries in Eastern Europe which are only about five to ten thousand years younger which okay I'm saying only five to ten thousand years younger but that's that's how we talk when we talk about the very thing yeah all the time that stands out that's a strange thing the Neronian so I think basically the red lines that we used to have that everything where I was saying earlier everything before forty thousand or we can be sure it's neanderthal in some cases it is a little bit uncertain but certainly and atolls were still around until 40,000 but there may be brief movements of people into Europe and before that that didn't go anywhere because that's also something we should remember that wasn't just Neanderthals that went extinct although technically they're not extinct because their material is still in US and John Hawkes who I guess some of your listeners might know his website he's had a great calculation he did worse like there's there's more genetic material in living people now than ever walked around you know in the Pleistocene named in terms of what's around now so they they're not actually as them by themselves walking around here but but they're still here in that sense and but there certainly are very early Homo sapiens in Eurasia where we can tell from the DNA that they have no living relatives so there were waves of people coming and going possibly coming and going backwards again through Eurasia we've only at the very beginning of trying to actually map out what the genetics means in terms of the sites that we have but some of those individual fossils that we have which we know are Homo sapiens then they went extinct more than the Neanderthals there's nobody life that has their material in now so in terms that yeah this this idea that we we succeeded and you know we were the victors and the upper panic marks you know is some kind of great victory you know it's it's not as simple as that at all that sounds extremely complicated but let's really changed my perspective on the Neanderthals because I am a very cautious guy as well I didn't want to sensationalize my view of the tales of Neanderthal art but that all sounds really very convincing and very interesting I know everyone who's listened to this has found it fascinating so I'd really like to thank you for coming on my channel and the help explaining that to me and the and the viewers I know we appreciate it a great deal so thank you it's difficult to explain because the stuff that has the headlines is often really exciting but it's kind of having that context around it and understanding the breadth of what we have it can really change you know what one site might mean and and that's what doesn't always sort of get communicated and in in the press or you know on TV or whatever like that so then yeah I mean that's that is what I I'm trying to do with with my book is is give people a deep dive into the data that will make more sense of why people you know why there's headlines coming out all the time that can seem contradictory like only on details when it's a stupid or oh that's why they died out you know that's that's a very contradictory for people to hear those two different narratives that they weren't so stupid but here's why they were rubbish and you know actually they're the symbolism and the aesthetics is is a really key area where it's not often explained well enough to people yeah and when is your book coming out um summer next year 2020 summer next year look out for it everyone dr. rag Sykes she's going to set the record straight on the other context is key okay thank you so much you

Channel: Stefan Milo

Views: 181,494

Keywords: History, Archaeology, anthropology, folk tales, stefan milo, american history, ancient history, world history, neanderthal documentary, neanderthals, neanderthal cave art, neanderthal art, symbolism in human evolution, human evolution, neanderthals vs, neanderthals vs sapiens, neanderthals vs homosapien, neanderthals vs humans

Id: i2pvd-L3weU

Length: 58min 27sec (3507 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 09 2019