Hey everybody, this is Professor Valdos and welcome to learning module 14. Okay, so now we're talking about Neanderthals. Let's take a look at the vocabulary and the learning objectives. Number one, be able to provide the primitive and modern traits of Homo Neanderthalensis, noting the traits that are unique to Neanderthals, particularly as they relate to cold weather adaptations.
Number two, understand what the assortment of Neanderthal subadult specimens reveal about their development patterns and how they compare to modern humans number three understand what the paleopathology of neanderthal specimens reveals about lifestyle activities and the caring of illness incapacitation and old age in neanderthal life before understand the evidence of neanderthal burial and be able to explain whether it indicates spiritual beliefs or not number five be able to describe the musterian stone tool culture particularly as it relates to the as well as what advances such as retouching, composite tools, and hafting would have allowed Neanderthals to do with tools. Okay, so now we're talking about one of my favorite species to discuss in hominid evolution, Neanderthals. And Neanderthals are really fun because they are often classified as a different species from humans, but... They did in fact live contemporaneously with modern Homo sapiens for about a hundred thousand years.
So there's actually quite a long period of contemporaneity with Neanderthals and humans and that of course raises all kinds of interesting questions about whether Neanderthals were the same species as us, were they different species, would we have been able to interact with them, would we have learned anything from them? And so We'll be addressing these questions in this These lecture videos as well as I have another video posted for you on blackboard called Neanderthals on trial which is actually a really good video and addresses a lot of these questions as well So Neanderthals are technically put within this pre-modern human category that we lump Homo heidelbergensis into as well First of all, let me say that Neanderthals are and this is a term that you may have probably heard it also as Neanderthals, which both, as far as I'm concerned, are totally appropriate ways to pronounce the name. I just pronounce it Neanderthals because some paleoanthropologists get really specific, oh no, no, no, the proper pronunciation is Neanderthal, and so forth.
So either way is appropriate, but you'll hear me refer to them as Neanderthals. So... Neanderthals are interesting because now for the first time in hominid evolution We're starting to get large numbers of specimens right up until this time We've seen maybe a few of different species a few different specimens early on in the fossil record But there weren't so many and the reason for that is because when we're talking in terms of millions of years You only get a few preserved specimens as we get more recent in time for example, starting from Homo heidelbergensis on, we're starting to get a lot more specimens because preservation is so much better when we're talking in terms of hundreds of thousands of years instead of millions of years. So we're starting to see larger numbers of specimens and that can give us all kinds of wonderful insight that we couldn't get otherwise.
So looking at Neanderthals once again, don't let the term pre-modern humans mislead you. Neanderthals actually coexisted with anatomically modern Homo sapiens for nearly the entire time of their existence. We find the earliest Neanderthal specimens at about 125,000 years ago at a site called Krapina in Croatia. So that's in Eastern Europe.
A couple of other famous sites that we're going to talk about include Shanidar in Iraq at about 70,000 to 60,000 years ago and La Chapelle in France at about 50,000 years ago. Now as you can see on this map, there's actually a lot more Neanderthal sites out there, but we're just going to cover a few interesting specimens here as we look at Neanderthals. So as you can see, the range of Neanderthals is quite large, extending from Western Europe all the way to the Middle East, but of course this is quite small in comparison to the range of the Neanderthal predecessors, right? If you recall.
Homo erectus made it all the way to eastern China and down into Indonesia. Even Homo heidelbergensis made it all the way to eastern China and Indonesia. So Neanderthals actually have a fairly limited territory or range as compared to to older hominids, Erectus and Heidelbergensis. So in many ways, the reason for this is because Neanderthals are a species that exhibits some very cold weather adaptations. We're going to be talking more about that here as we go along.
And of course, that would have made them ideally suited to Europe and the Middle East at... Starting from 130,000 years ago until about 40 to 50 50 thousand years ago We're looking at the retreat of glaciers, but you know in some of the northern areas of Europe there still would have been Glacial walls and that would have impacted the climate of Europe at that time So it still would have been quite cold in most of Europe at this time now looking at the some of the cranial features I'm sorry the post cranial features of Neanderthals. We're looking now at whole body specimens. We can now do wonderful whole body comparisons between Neanderthals and humans. So one striking thing that we see about Neanderthals is that they're bigger in overall size than humans.
Now I don't want you to get this confused with being taller per se. There are a lot of modern human specimens that are much taller than Neanderthals. There are a few. Neanderthals that are taller than modern humans at this time, but the vast majority of Neanderthals are either shorter or comparable to modern humans at this time in terms of height.
But by bigger, I mean bigger bones and bigger musculature. So we're seeing that Neanderthals have a much more robust skeletal structure. And that means that they are hugely muscled. Okay, so basically, if you pitted a Neanderthal... and a modern human together in the boxing ring, I would definitely place that bet on Neanderthals winning because they were stacked.
Okay, so going along with this overall robustness, we see that Neanderthals have kind of a barrel chest. If you look at the modern human on the right, you can see that our rib cage actually has kind of a tucked in shape, right? So it's fairly parallel. The ribs are fairly parallel to each other. And then at the bottom of the rib cage, it kind of comes in, it tucks in a little bit.
And that sort of lends to our sort of lankiness in general. As modern humans, you can sort of describe them as being lanky or gracile, right? Neodrotols, on the other hand, if you look at their rib cage, it actually flares out. It actually flares out at the bottom.
It does not tuck in. And what that does, it means a very solid, almost rounded type of core. And this would have given this kind of barrel chest shape that we don't see with modern humans.
Furthermore, you can see that the limbs are shorter proportioned, right? If you look at these two skeletons, I mean, maybe the Neanderthal is slightly, very slightly taller than the modern human. But if you look at their arm length. You can actually see that the modern human arm length is in fact longer than the Neanderthal arm length and the leg length is a little bit longer as well.
So the reason we're going to talk about having what shorter limbs does for Neanderthals, but overall you can see they're more robust, they have shorter limbs, they're barrel chested. There's a few other differences that we could go into. For example, if you just look at the pelvis, the pelvis shape is the ilium.
That upper blade of the pelvis flares out in a way that modern humans don't. That kind of lends to this core robustness as well. The pelvic inlet is larger in particularly female Neanderthals.
And we're going to talk about the significance of that here as we talk about cranial features. Okay, looking at the cranium of Neanderthals, we see that they have Very large brow ridges. Okay, so those brow ridges are hanging around.
We talked about how Homo erectus has large brow ridges. We talked about Heidelbergensis having large brow ridges. Neanderthals continue to have large brow ridges.
And modern humans at this time, the same time period, also have large brow ridges. The major reason for this is because the forehead area is not as filled in as you see with modern humans. So for example, if you look at this area in here, you can actually see there's brow ridges right here And then it kind of curves back and there's like this flattened area in here I mean, there's still a lot of volume up top here, but in in very modern humans you see in the last let's say 40 to 50 thousand years this frontal area the forehead area is all and it's very vertical. Although I do have to say that there are some human populations that exhibit sort of larger brow ridge areas or not as filled in forehead areas even today.
So it's not completely outside of the variation we see with modern humans as well. But these eyebrow ridges they really like flare out, they arch around the eye orbit. But The sagittal bone, very rounded up top, a lot of volume up top and on the sides, right?
The cranium in Neanderthals actually bulges out on the sides. If we recall, humans, the widest part of their cranium is at the top of the cranium. But even looking at that, they have very flat vertical parietals. And if you can feel this on even on the sides of your own head, if you just sort of feel on the side of your cranium, you don't really feel any.
bulges usually above the ear holes. They're fairly flat-sided. The parietals are fairly flat. In Neanderthals, on the other hand, the cranium actually bulges out.
So they have like sort of extra expansion at the top there. In Neanderthals, the cranium is larger and thicker. That goes with that whole robusticity thing that you see in the rest of the body. The dentition of Neanderthals very similar to humans only slightly larger really all the teeth look pretty much exactly the same maybe just slightly larger the nasal cavity of Neanderthals are very pronounced they have very large nasal cavities and sinuses we'll talk about the adaptive significance of that here in just a minute and then looking at the brain size this is really really exciting because if you recall the brain size of modern humans is anywhere between 1400 and 1500 cc.
I give you that as an average, right? That there are some human populations that have slightly larger brain sizes and some that have slightly larger, slightly smaller and slightly larger. And this is all within normal human variation.
It doesn't really have any correlation with, let's say, intelligence or anything like that. It's just sort of general trends. But looking at Neanderthals, Their brain size is 1520 on average, 1520 cc's.
So just looking on the surface, I don't know about you, but my automatic reaction is, whoa, we're looking at a brain size here that's actually larger than modern humans. Now, we also do have to take into account one important thing. Neanderthals in general seem to exhibit more robust, larger body sizes.
And so we do have to take that into account, right? That it's not so much about the size of your brain. It's about the brain size to body ratio, right? So even taking that into account, basically Neanderthals have an equivalent brain size to body size as modern humans, which is really exciting. We have not seen any evidence of that in Heidelbergensis, any evidence of that in Homo erectus.
And of course I need to include in here that we do not see any evidence of a chin in Neanderthals. We'll be talking about how a chin really only appears with modern humans and it only appears very recently in the last 40-50,000 years. We'll be talking more about why that's the case.
But in general we see that Neanderthals have more of a projecting snout area. There's a little bit more prognathism because they have Larger sinuses and not so much because they have that much larger teeth But just generally because that had those large sinuses and that's going to lend to the projection of the lower part of the face The prognathism now I mentioned here we go like here's the side-by-side Comparison we mentioned the verticality of the forehead in humans. It's pretty vertical if you can see here that We've got this almost totally vertical vertical forehead area in humans and In Neanderthals it kind of slopes a little bit But it is a more vertical forehead than you see in Homo erectus But slightly flatter than what you see in modern humans We're gonna have to continue talking about Neanderthal cranial features in the next segment.
So please follow me to segment two