February 2003 Books
The Neanderthal's Necklace: In Search of the First Thinkers By Juan Luis Arsuaga
Four Walls Eight Windows, $25.95
From the time quarrymen unearthed portions of a Neanderthal skeleton from a cave above the Neander Valley in Germany in 1856, the hapless hominid was an object of derision. Late 19th- and early-20th-century anthropologists imagined Neanderthal Man as big-browed, slope-headed, long-jawed, hairy, and ham-handed—a heavily muscled brute lacking anterior brainpower, a troglodyte hunched dumbly in a cold Paleolithic cave. The only thing the poor brute had going for it, according to the evolutionary reckoning of the day, was that it might be the missing link between primitive apes and modern humans.
During the last 20 years, the Neanderthal's image has undergone a dramatic makeover, thanks in large part to Juan Luis Arsuaga, a professor of human paleontology at the Complutense University in Madrid. "The Neanderthals were not simply primitive versions of ourselves," argues Arsuaga in this somewhat rambling survey of scientific data that he and others collected. "They were not lesser humans with very limited mental faculties. . . . In their particular epoch they were just as 'modern' as our ancestors, the Cro-Magnons." In Arsuaga's view, Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and Cro-Magnons (Homo sapiens) were "alternative human models." Both were intelligent, technologically adept species who evolved independently from the same ancestor and who, for a time, lived side by side. The title of Arsuaga's book refers to a necklace of perforated teeth found at Grotte du Renne, France. The fact that Neanderthals wore jewelry, he contends, is a clear indication of their self-awareness, even if they may have stolen the idea from Cro-Magnons.
