Café Neandertal, page 1
Copyright © 2017 Beebe Bahrami
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eISBN 978-1-6190-2770-1
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CONTENTS
Author’s Note
1 THE LA FERRASSIE SEVEN
2 A BUNDLE OF SHALLOTS
3 CHEZ LES NEANDERTALS
4 THE INTERNATIONAL NEANDERTAL
5 A DIFFERENT SORT OF PILGRIMAGE
6 A MOVEABLE NEANDERTAL FEAST
7 GATHERED AROUND THE HEARTH FIRE
8 AS IF WRITTEN IN STONE
9 PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN
10 LOVE IN THE TIME OF NEANDERTALS
11 A FOOT IN THE GRAVE
12 MORPHING NEANDERTALS
Acknowledgments
AUTHOR’S NOTE
WITH SUCH A complex topic, involving so many people and places, past and present, I have made every effort to be meticulously accurate. If any errors have made their way in, they are wholly unintended. Also, at times I had to sacrifice the chronology of certain encounters to forefront clarity and present the wholeness and integrity of each chapter’s topic. The events here cover the period from 2010 to 2015. The main dig featured, at La Ferrassie, went for five years, from 2010 to 2014. The summer after, in 2015, the key researchers met in Carsac to discuss the findings and possible interpretations based on the current body of evidence. That year I also did some long-distance trekking across southwestern France and northern Spain and visited other Neandertal sites. In all, I have remained true to the knowledge and experience of the encounters described herein. And lastly, I spell Neandertal without an “h” for a very particular reason, which I explain two-thirds of the way in. If you really want to know why before then, there is no harm in flipping ahead to find out.
1
THE LA FERRASSIE SEVEN
SEVEN BODIES LAY scattered across the cave floor like leaves in the wind. Some were missing limbs or parts of their torsos or craniums. One’s detached head had rolled a few feet away. Standing at the mouth of the cave, I made out the first body in the haphazard line of corpses beginning directly in front of my line of vision. There lay a large man in his forties. His lifeless arms and legs were folded in toward his body as if, in his last moments, he had been trying to keep warm. To the left of where he lay was a similarly positioned person, a woman in her late twenties or early thirties. Scanning to the right from both were the remaining five, all children, splayed helter-skelter, two not far from the man, one a little farther away, and the last separated from them all at the opposite end of the cave. The two oldest children had been ages ten and three. The remaining three were infants eight months and younger.
Even though this was a cold case, one that I was reconstructing from black-and-white photos while the actual bodies were now in a lab in Paris, it was hard not to feel the visceral presence of these seven. I immediately connected to their humanity through what I imagined were their emotions in their last moments of life. My thoughts burned with a single question. What had happened to them?
A comforting breeze picked up, evaporating the beads of sweat that gathered on my brow and rustling the leaves of the oak and hazel forest overhead. I looked up to take in the whole rock shelf under which the bodies had been found. It was hidden in the depth of a quiet forest on a remote hillside in an unindustrialized part of southwestern France. Cell phone reception was impossible. It was hardly an ideal spot for an emergency.
But everyone was here today, milling busily about, each focused on answering the same question. Investigators, crew, and local volunteers knowledgeable about the land and geography all worked within the large rock shelf, excavating, gathering samples, and looking for clues.
I watched mesmerized as one of the team of specialists, a veteran geologist, stared at the rock face for several long and considered moments as if he were seeing a movie play out on its surface. He next walked to a pile of just-dug-up dirt and pinched a bit from the top. He closed his eyes and rubbed the soil between his fingers, sensing something esoteric but material in the earth. He then held the soil up to his nose and like a master sommelier explored the bouquet. At last he opened his eyes and held the soil under the magnifying glass hanging around his neck to confirm or negate what he’d already learned from his own senses. He then casually returned the pinch back to its bucket and moved on to his next interrogation, carefully viewing, touching, and smelling rocks and dirt across our excavation zone. Was it more sand than clay? Did it have certain telltale minerals, burnt bits, bone? Did it belong more to one layer than another?
His answers would begin the most important foundational work of understanding the events that this earth had undergone by both natural and human causes. His presence marked a new science and the difference between the current team and those who had investigated here in the past. This team drew from a very diverse mix of specialists from across the sciences and across the world, bringing the best of knowledge and techniques to re-create the human and natural context in which these seven had lived, and died.
We even had a film crew, a two-person team that worked at the perimeter and wove in and out between the investigators, documenting every moment and every piece of unearthed evidence. They focused on paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the Max Planck Institute’s department of human evolution in Leipzig, Germany, who was visiting for the week. The lens zeroed in on his infectious broad smile and what he held in his right hand.
While the team already had been here for five dig seasons over five years, today, during the last two weeks of the fifth and last season, three paleoanthropologists—Isabelle Crevecoeur from Bordeaux, Asier Gómez-Olivencia from Bilbao, and Antoine Balzeau from Paris—found something of significance to the cold case. They had just reopened the original hole where the three-year-old child had been found, hoping to find more of the child’s incomplete skeleton. Instead, they found an adult molar, and that in a part of the cave where no adults had ever been found, only children. It didn’t seem likely that the tooth was associated with the two adults over fifteen meters away in a part of the cave where it seemed unlikely that it would have arrived by natural processes. A new question surfaced. Was another adult buried nearby, perhaps under all the rockfall that still had to be cleared away from deeper in the cave?
The camera rolled. Filmmaker Sophie Cattoire checked the lensing before asking her first question. Celebrated in the region for her talent and skill in bringing out the local life of the southwest—especially the personalities behind its prehistory—she and her partner both in life and in profession, Vincent Lesbros, were behind the film company Ferrassie TV—named after where we worked, the site of La Ferrassie. Today, against the sauna-like summer heat, she wore a low-cut dark blue spaghetti-strap top and had piled her long, flaming red hair atop her head, accentuated further by the cherry-toned lipstick that she pulled off with the easy elegance so common among French women.
She stepped back and regarded Jean-Jacques in his perfectly pressed cobalt blue summer shirt that brought out his engaging brown eyes. Because La Ferrassie derived its name from the iron-rich soil, le fer ici, “iron is here,” being the most popular etymology offered by locals for the name, the burnt-orange earth that surrounded us popped with their blue tops. It was as if they’d planned this composition on a color wheel before enacting it. But like many things here, it was a part of the unplanned but perfect magic of the place, the people, and the work.
“Alors,” began Sophie, “please tell us, Jean-Jacques, about the tooth you are holding.”
“Donc, the tooth is probably the inferior molar of a Neandertal.” He beamed an infectious smile into the camera, one that likely had been with him since boyhood when he first discovered the fascinating world of prehistory. He then paused and reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out two gigantic plastic models of teeth, a Neandertal tooth and a Homo sapiens tooth—like you do—both from adults, to demonstrate how obvious it was to him who the owner had been. These two model teeth had coincidentally arrived for him in the day’s mail back at the dig house.
He pointed with his free hand and also explained that Neandertal molars tended to have larger pulp chambers, called taurodontism, a common feature in Neandertals and a rarer one among modern humans. Plus, the tooth had been found in a layer that preceded any modern humans to the area, so this was extra confirmation. He deftly held the models and the real tooth in his hands and offered the camera an extreme close-up.
While no one expected to find this adult tooth in the possible grave of a small child, what was in keeping with the known story of this cold case was that the tooth could only belong to a Neandertal because of the strata in which it was found, dating to between 50,000 and 70,000 years old—a date that the geologist was working hard to narrow down. This cold case was so old that it was perhaps one of France’s oldest.
All seven found here were Neandertals. The site of La Ferrassie was famous and had long been called the Neandertal Cemetery for the fact that a good many archaeologists, as well as laypeople, viewed this as a place where intentional burials took place. Not everyone agreed though, for the evidence has a lot of holes, and in contrast they think these bodies could have been buried by natural causes, perhaps from a single natural disaster that took them all at once—such as hunger or extreme cold—and then their bodies were eventually buried through the process of natural sedimentation and rockfall. Yet others see a middle-of-the-way scenario: that the dead bodies were set aside here by other Neandertals but that natural causes covered them up.
La Ferrassie is in many ways a microcosm of the raging issues engulfing Neandertals, and us, in the broader field of paleoanthropology and the broader geographical contexts of Neandertals—who lived as far east as southern Siberia, as far west as Portugal’s coast, as far south as Israel and Gibraltar, and as far north as Wales and the (now) island of Jersey. La Ferrassie is a site that concentrates not only the issues about whether Neandertals buried their dead but also issues about who they were as humans, especially those qualities we hold above all others as exceptionally human: our ability to think symbolically, to make complex tools, to speak languages, to create art, and along with these symbolic processes, the enactment of rituals such as burial, which implies a connection to the intangible, the afterlife, and the invisible spirit world.
La Ferrassie is in the Dordogne, not far from the town of Les Eyzies, and in the heart of the most concentrated region for human prehistory in Europe. Les Eyzies itself was a village whose rock shelves and prehistoric remains put it on the map and at the heart of European prehistory. It also became the natural location for France’s national prehistory museum. One of Les Eyzies’s rock shelves even gave us the name Cro-Magnon to refer to early modern humans, Homo sapiens. It was here in 1868, in the heart of the old village, where in the side yard of Monsieur Magnon road workers uncovered the burial site of five early modern humans who had lived here around 27,000 years ago. The Occitan word for hole, cro, was applied to the find. Occitan is an old Romance language originating in Latin and closely related to French and Spanish—the old language of the Troubadours—and was, and in many pockets remains, the region’s dominant rural language.
Since then, the name Cro-Magnon, old Mr. Magnon’s hole, has referred to the early Homo sapiens of the region, who arrived here perhaps around 45,000 years ago as a part of what is called “the transition” from Middle Paleolithic and Neandertals to the Upper Paleolithic and us. The Upper Paleolithic lasted until around 10,000 years ago. Neandertals disappeared from the fossil record around 35,000 years ago, the most dramatic event of the transition, one that seems to implicate us—this fast-moving, always innovating, environment-(over)manipulating version of humans, and the only one left walking the earth today. Around 100,000 years ago, there may have been at least six versions of humans walking the earth. Around 40,000 years ago, there were perhaps three, maybe four. Now it’s just us, a fact that ought to strike one as weirder than there once having been six varieties or more. Look at canines or felines or spiders. Everyone but us has got many versions of their basic model. And we Homo sapiens are a remarkably homogenous species, no matter how different we think we look from each other across the globe. As a whole, we are less diverse than even the chimpanzees, who are living in smaller groups and in smaller and more compromised environments.
That’s weird.
Neandertals lived in the Dordogne and across Eurasia long before any Cro-Magnons showed up. From the most recent estimates, they first emerged around 430,000 years ago (based on evidence from Atapuerca in Spain) and survived until around 35,000 years ago (in pockets all across Eurasia). The seven Neandertals from La Ferrassie probably lived between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, around the time early modern humans began to leave Africa and at times were meeting and interbreeding with Neandertals. These encounters probably happened in Southwest Asia. It is from many such meet-ups that we modern humans received somewhere from 0.7 percent to 2.1 percent of our genes from Neandertals. Eurasians today have on average about 1.5–2.1 percent Neandertal DNA within them, and Africans less than 1 percent.
(The picture is more complicated, though. Early modern humans made previous migrations out of Africa, somewhere between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, that were less widespread but had impacts on populations of people living in the Levant. These folks most likely went extinct, but not before leaving some of their early, early modern human genes in Neandertals found in southern Siberia.)
Sometime after the La Ferrassie seven died—either at once or separately, depending on whose stance on the evidence you agree with—the rock shelf on which we stood had been a full-blown, fully covered, large cave. Its roof had crumbled and collapsed over several episodes, separated by thousands of years each time, due to cyclical fluctuations in glacial cooling and warming. The slow collapse eventually created a hill that supported the overgrowth of forest, further masking the original cave.
Yet that roof fall did something very convenient for future archaeologists. It sealed each level of human occupation that had existed in the cave, interspersing several human occupations over several thousands of years with sterile rock and dirt that sealed each in as a sort of Paleolithic Pompeii.
Above the large cave was a small cave, one that was still intact and also full of signs that other humans had been here long before us. It also naturally flowed into the lower and larger cave, making one imagine a duplex-like living space with upstairs sun and balcony and downstairs butchering, dining, tool crafting, and, uh, burying.
All told, there were at least eight separate human occupations at La Ferrassie, the first five associated with Neandertals from 90,000 to 50,000 years ago, and the last remaining two with early Homo sapiens, from around 38,000 to 22,000 years ago. That level six was playing games with everyone. Called the Châtelperronian level, it was occupied around 45,000 years ago and possessed a style of stone tools that partook more of Homo sapiens blade technologies but occurred in a time that overlapped with Neandertals and in some places seemed to be made by Neandertals. Some archaeologists think Neandertals made them and others think Homo sapiens. A few think both may have, in an innovative and hybridizing kind of overlap. The jury is still out on this but this matter is also an important piece for understanding who the Neandertals were, what became of them, and the nature of our relationship to them.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, after the crew returned to work and the excitement over the new find was contained, Sophie asked Jean-Jacques for an extended interview in the forest, just above where we worked. They moved away from the center of activity to greater quiet, where only the occasional birdsong of the territorial red-throated European robin interrupted their conversation. I squinted up the hill, pricking up my ears to hear anything, but it was impossible. I could see Vincent quietly clicking production stills as Sophie coaxed prehistoric secrets from the grand master.
I remained curious as we retired to the village of Carsac, about twenty-eight miles away. This was where the archaeologists camped and pitched their tents in the large backyard where Harold Dibble, one of the key dig directors, had set up the camp and lab. My old archaeology professor in graduate school, he was the reason I was here. Harold had found a shack of a place in the village, an old tobacco-drying barn, a séchoir à tabac, and turned it into the archaeologists’ home base for his digs throughout the area. While better than pure camping—the dig directors slept under the séchoir’s roof while the crew pitched tents in what was an old farmer’s field—it was still pretty rustic. Crew showers and latrines benefited from the shelter’s hookup with indoor plumbing, but were so “prehistoric” that they had taken to painting Paleolithic designs of hands, bison, and a couple of shagging mammoths on the water closet walls.
The Dordogne had never been industrialized and to this day remains a place where people live close to the land. Once it had been famous for its high-quality tobacco, but today, with smoking falling out of fashion, other equally celebrated traditional crops have expanded into old tobacco fields, from corn and sunflowers to walnuts and wheat. It is a region also famous for the native black truffle, a seductive tuber we found at times growing just under the pebbles near oak tree roots at La Ferrassie when we cleared the ground to open a square. Once we even found a white truffle, near the surface of the back wall where the Neandertal man had been found. (Girolles and porcini also populated the forest, and I often saw the local volunteers using their break time to search for mushrooms for that night’s meal. The forest was also rife with black and yellow salamanders and frogs the size of quarters, and rabbits, fox, wild boar, and red deer. Though nothing like the Paleolithic climate of the past, these rich natural realities made it hard not to think about what smart and clever people Neandertals had been to make this land their home.)
