THE NEANDERTHAL’S NECKLACE

Whatever happened to that nice Neanderthal family that lived down the lane? Bad things, this lively prehistory tells us—courtesy, perhaps, of our Cro-Magnon ancestors.

As Spanish paleoanthropologist Arsuaga writes, prehistorians have long suspected that the Neanderthals, a northerly branch of the human family, were done in by the early modern humans who arrived in Europe from Africa about 40,000 years ago. The process may have taken thousands of years, he adds, and other factors may have had more to do with the demise of the Neanderthal line than Cro-Magnon nastiness, including the sad fact that Neanderthals didn’t live very long to begin with. (Life expectancy at birth was “well under thirty years.”) The competition was one-sided in any event. Neanderthals and modern humans, “alternative human models, each representing a different but effective evolutionary response to the identical challenges they faced,” had very different skills, and the brute strength of the former was in the end no match for the cunning of the latter. Writing of a climatologically confused time when tigers and wooly mammoths lived side by side, Arsuaga offers an engaging tour of prehistoric Europe and especially of ancient Spain and southern France, from which the bulk of the archaeological evidence comes. He explores some of the critical differences that obtained between Neanderthals and modern humans: physically compact, the first were better suited to life in a cold climate than the newcomers, but the second had the crucial tool of language and symbolic thought at their disposal. The Cro-Magnons were thus able to scheme up traps and fibs, but, more importantly, also to plan ahead, save for a rainy day, and “reap the maximum benefit from what nature had to offer at any given time of the year.” On such differences does extinction or survival hinge, and Arsuaga does a good job of detailing the particulars of evolution’s logic.

A satisfying, up-to-date outing for students of ancient humankind and its less fortunate cousins.