Early Man in the New World

by Kenneth Macgowan; Joseph A. Hester

The Progressive Neanderthal

Let us get back to Europe and the next culture in Mortillet’s scale. This is the Mousterian; we know it better by the name of the place in Germany—Neanderthal—where, in 1856, the first skeleton of the Mousterian Age was found. It took thirty years for this skeleton to win scientific recognition, but now we have about a hundred admitted specimens.

The Neanderthal was not a pretty spectacle. He had the low forehead and heavy brow ridges of Java and Peking man, and the same lack of chin. And yet he was the cleverest fellow by far that had ever lived, and the most sensitive, which may seem rather odd, since some of the earlier skulls found in England, Africa, Java, and Australia come nearer the modern type of what we call thinking man, Homo sapiens.

On the evidence we have, the Neanderthal seems to have been the inventor of religion. In his caves we find burials for the first time, and burials accompanied by tools for the dead man to use in the other world. We also find shrines made of the skulls of cave bears.

As a chipper of flint, he was much more skillful than those that had gone before. He soon gave up making tools which, like the hand ax, would serve a number of purposes, but none very well. He invented the stone spear point. There is still considerable argument about his flint work, or at least about the technique which he may or may not have developed.

THREE TYPES OF OLD WORLD MAN

Note the progressive lessening of brow ridge and receding chin and the increase in the height of forehead and vault. Pithecanthropus robustus was found in the same general area as Pithecanthropus erectus, or Java man. (Robustus, after Weidenreich, 1946; Neanderthal, after McGregor, 1926; Cro-Magnon, after Verneau, 1906.)

MAN’S FIRST SPEAR POINTS

Two views of a flake of flint that has been chipped on one face and retouched along the edges by a Neanderthal man. To remove the tiny lateral chips, he probably held it with the smoother side against a chunk of wood, and struck small and careful blows with a hammerstone (as shown at the bottom of [page 91]). Acheulean man may have used this technique in making the best of his hand axes. (After Mortillet, 1881.)

When man began to make tools he pounded one rock with another. He hoped he would knock off just the right chip in the right spot. This is called the percussion method of flaking (see illustration, [page 91]). Some say the Neanderthal was not content with this. They think that he must have discovered how to place a piece of bone or very hard wood against a flint at the point where he wanted to knock off a flake, and then strike it with a hammerstone (see illustration, [page 92]). This might account for the small chips, or “retouches,” taken off the edge of some of his spear points as in the illustration below. Even the Acheuleans are occasionally credited with this invention because many of their hand axes are so symmetrical. There are those who say that the Neanderthal had progressed so far in flint work that he knew the art of pressure flaking—the third step in flint knapping—which involved the pressing off of small chips with the bit of wood or bone held in the hand (see illustration, [page 93]). It seems more likely that Neanderthals and men of Acheulean times used the anvil method of percussion flaking (lower drawing, [page 91]), not an inaccurate way of knocking off small chips.

PERCUSSION FLAKING

The first method by which early man shaped his tools. (After Holmes, 1919.)

THE SECOND STEP IN FLINT KNAPPING

For more accurate work, early man applied a small stick of hardwood or a piece of bone at the proper spot and hit the interposed tool with a mallet of heavy wood or a rock. No one knows who invented this technique—Acheulean, Neanderthal, or later man. (After Holmes, 1919.)

THE THIRD STEP—PRESSURE FLAKING

The discovery that gave early man complete control over the shaping of flints was that a slow and continued pressure would dislodge just the flake he desired. Above, we see how he worked on a small point, and below, to the left, how he chipped thin slivers from a core. (After Holmes, 1919.)

The Neanderthal—with his Mousterian culture—seems to have invaded Europe from Asia toward the end of the third and last interglacial, anywhere from 80,000 to 125,000 years ago, and to have left from 15,000 to 100,000 years ago, depending on what authority you choose, and how that authority dates the last interglacial. Unlike his predecessors, the Neanderthal lived in caves; but that was probably because he was the first man in Europe to survive a glacial winter—tens of thousands of them.

The Neanderthal seems to have disappeared quite suddenly from Europe, taking his Australoid features with him. There are traces of him in Africa, and also in Palestine where he is thought to have produced a hybrid among the Mount Carmel people. Sir Arthur Keith said, in 1915, that the Neanderthal never left Europe, but was merely absorbed into the next peoples. We can see the Neanderthal profile on an occasional passer-by.

Most anthropologists are rather cool to the Neanderthal. They cast him quite outside the sacred ranks of our ancestors. They say he was not Homo sapiens—merely Homo neanderthalensis. This means that he was a sort of dead end, a blind alley, up which one sort of ape-man ran, while another was taking a turn that ended in his being master of the atom but not of the atomic bomb. Other anthropologists do not agree. Like Keith, they take the Neanderthal into the sacred circle—at least at stud.