Normandy’s beaches bear more than memories of D-Day, the 1944 landing of some 130,000 Allied troops in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. Another human species once stalked those grounds.
About 80,000 years before WWII, when the shore lay several miles farther out, Neanderthals camped on the dunes of what is now Normandy. Butchering prey, fashioning stone tools, building fires — as the group busied themselves with daily chores, they left hundreds of footprints in the mud.
Sands swept over the tracks, which stayed buried for millennia, until 21st-century archaeologists uncovered nearly 600 of the footprints. Based on the size and shape of prints that likely had been laid within a few days, researchers reconstructed a unique snapshot of a Neanderthal community: A few adults accompanied about 10 teens and children, including a 2-year-old.
This portrait constitutes just one piece in the larger puzzle of Neanderthal social lives. For decades, researchers could not answer questions like how did Neanderthals choose mates, form communities, and care for one another?
But thanks to the Normandy footprints and to new clues from methods such as ancient DNA, the mysteries of Neanderthals’ relationships have recently started to resolve. The emerging evidence suggests Neanderthals formed tightknit communities, but may have been relative introverts, compared to our Homo sapiens ancestors. They lived “cozy, but without parties,” as archaeologist Penny Spikens, of the University of York in the U.K., puts it.
