In 2017, a telescope in Hawaii discovered a 400-meter-long, missile-shaped object traveling at full speed through space. It had reached us from a star beyond the Sun. Speculation about a possible alien visit skyrocketed. This behavior reveals one of the greatest shortcomings of current humans: we feel alone in the universe and we long to find another equivalent intelligence to communicate with and compare ourselves with.
The last time such an encounter happened was on our own planet, tens of thousands of years ago, when members of our species from Africa came face to face with Neanderthals, humans who had lived and evolved alone for hundreds of thousands of years. years in Europe. Despite more than a century and a half of scientific research, we still have no idea what that intelligence was like; that other way of being human.
French paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak defines himself as a Neanderthal hunter. He boasts of spending 30 years slipping into the “cracks and crevices” where those humans lived, ate and slept before becoming extinct forever, some 40,000 years ago. His desire to understand has taken him from the scorching Horn of Africa to the icy latitudes of the Arctic Circle in search of new fossil remains, a vital journey that he recounts in The naked Neanderthal. Understanding the human creature (Debate).
One of the places where new answers may be found are the great mammoth steppes of the Russian Arctic, Slimak writes. Tens of thousands of years ago, while an uninhabitable Europe was covered in kilometers-thick glaciers, the climate of the boreal regions of Eurasia and America was unusually favorable, and they were populated by numerous animals that made ideal game. In the north of Russia, enigmatic remains have been found that could demonstrate that Neanderthals were the first to live in the great north and that they had superior intelligence, such as the deep and serial marks on mammoth tusks or the traces of hunting and defleshing ago. 48,000 years, before any sapiens had arrived in this area. In the Russian Arctic, Slimak, who works at the French National Scientific Research Council, has found Mousterian stone tools, typically Neanderthal, from 28,500 years ago. This finding published in Science In 2011 he proposed the existence of a group of Neanderthals who continued to live peacefully in Siberia 12,000 years after their supposed extinction. While waiting to find more remains, this is one of the many enigmas surrounding the species, Slimak admits.
Another of the key places to delve into the Neanderthal mind is the Néron cave, in southwestern France, where Neanderthal bones were found that had been eaten by members of this same species. Cannibalism is a very human behavior, so much so that a cultural complexity exclusive to our species has been attributed to it. You can devour the enemy to make his power disappear and transform him into feces or eat with great respect the remains of a beloved family member. This cannibalism without hunger is deeply cultural. But in the 19th century, when the remains of Neanderthal cannibalism were found in the Néron Cave, it was concluded that it was an act of desperation due to hunger. Neanderthals were not civilized enough to be anthropophagous, one scientist summarized.
Slimak has found in a nearby site the remains of six Neanderthals, including two children, who were eaten. The marks on the bones show that they were defleshed with much more care than the animals that were consumed by simple hunger. In addition, there were marks on minimally nutritious parts, such as the phalanges of the fingers.
In 1854, the Scottish doctor and explorer John Rae warned that the Arctic Inuit had told him about their encounter with a group of humans. starving and sinister who had devoured several of their companions. They were the last survivors of the Terror and the Erebus, two British ships that had set sail in 1845 with the intention of opening the Northwest Passage and that had been lost in the ice. In 2015, analysis of some of the crew's bodies showed marks not only of dismemberment and cooking in pots, but also of intentional breaking to access the marrow. The story helps Slimak argue that cannibalism due to hunger only occurs among desperate humans who are outside their territory. The Inuit, for example, do not know cannibalism, despite living in a very harsh environment. The Neanderthals at the French site, who lived about 100,000 years ago, were highly adapted to their environment and it is unlikely that climate change will transform them so much as to leave them desperate and lost. Were they cultural cannibals then? Impossible to know for sure, according to Slimak.
One of the most human behaviors is to attribute meaning to objects. It is the so-called symbolic thinking that was believed to be exclusive to sapiens and that in recent years has also been granted to our Neanderthal cousins. But Slimak dismisses this possibility. “No one has yet managed to find a Neanderthal hole,” he writes, referring to the fact that the supposed shell or claw necklaces may just be artifice. He likewise thinks of feather ornaments for what he calls “the Neanderthal Mohican.” He also does not accept Neanderthal rock art, because, he says, the dating is not consistent.
Slimak attacks a “scarecrow Neanderthal” whom we have disguised as ourselves. It is often said that we would not be able to identify a member of this species if he were shaved and well dressed. The origin of this oft-repeated phrase lies in a 1939 image in which anthropologist Carleton S. Coon portrayed a Neanderthal wearing a hat. The headdress hid one of the most Neanderthal physical features: the pronounced arch of the eyebrows characteristic of this species, unmistakable. The French archaeologist compares this attempt to rehabilitate Neanderthals while they look like us with Tom Torlino, a Navajo Indian forcibly integrated into American society in 1882 after cutting his hair, removing his earrings and all his pendants, and putting him in a suit. “Definitely, today the Neanderthal is nothing more than a disjointed puppet, a macabre marionette in the hands of sorcerer's apprentices,” he writes.
![Navajo Tom Torlino in 1882, left, and three years later.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/77i6jbVNxxNgT-THhrToNT_I7cM=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/L4M4DYEWMNDGPGORIPG7EBJVXI.jpg)
The last stop in the Neanderthal hunt is Mandrin Cave, southeast of France. Here Slimak has made his most controversial discoveries: the traces of the presence of Neanderthals and Sapiens overlapping in time. Slimak's theory is that the extinction of the Neanderthals could not have been unrelated to the arrival of the sapiens and here, he says, is one of the key tests that differentiate one species from the other: the way of killing. Judging by paleoanthropological remains, Neanderthals made very few weapons. 99% of the stone tools they carved were used to cut meat or tan skins. It is thought that they hunted and killed hand-to-hand, skewering their prey with wooden spears (which have not been fossilized), which left them with many war wounds that have been identified in the fossils. Instead, Sapiens manufactured stone weapons in almost industrial quantities. Many of them, arrowheads and spearheads, are for killing at a distance.
In Mandrin there are arrowheads supposedly sapiens that show marks of having hit bones and that are 54,000 years old. It is thought that our species arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago, so this site is for now an enigmatic exception. Much earlier, about 100,000 years ago, and also later, about 55,000 years ago, sapiens and Neanderthals met in Asia and the Middle East, and had sex. The genetic analysis indicates that only the sapiens accepted the mestizo children who were born from these encounters into their tribes, since the last Neanderthals no longer had the sapiens genetic mark. Meanwhile, our species continues to have Neanderthal DNA that has given us a better immune system and a greater risk of suffering from depression, among other things. Given this evidence, Slimak believes that there was not one, but several waves of sapiens that arrived in Europe, encountered the Neanderthals and lost the battle for territory; until the last one triumphed, which meant the extinction of the last human intelligence other than ours that remained on Earth.
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