Who Were the Neanderthals?

Samuel Beck
Biology 1010
Daniel Carpenter
March 26, 2019
 Neanderthals
520,000 years ago, a group of humans like primates migrated north to what we now know
as eastern Europe. These were the Neanderthals, or at least they would become then. Not all of
them traveled north from Africa. Some stayed, and we have them to thank for our own ancestor.
So here we are 520,000 years ago at the common ancestors of homo sapiens and Neanderthals,
this is the last meeting for quite some time. A group would travel to eastern Europe and a group
would stay in Africa, left alone to evolve and adapt on their own.
Those who stayed in Africa would become the homo sapiens. They would develop larger,
more complex brains over their norther cousins. Their skulls developed differently as well, with
the homo sapiens in Africa developing a narrower head with a vertical forehead whereas the
Neanderthals in the north would have longer, football shaped heads and a horizontally slanted
forehead. Those in Africa, with their higher level of functioning because of their bigger more
complex brain would further innovation in their society. As early as 160,000 years ago they were
collecting sea life for food and 90,000 years ago they made tools for fishing. 12,000 years ago,
our ancestors started producing food and changing the environment around them to fit their
needs. As they progressed, they continued farming and eventually domesticating animals and
keeping them as livestock. Animals are an invaluable resource as they provide a constant supply
of food and resources such as bones for tools or hide for clothing. Our ancestors had control of
fire, built shelters and communities, traded, and had ceremonial and ritual practices. They were
not just some monkeys walking around with sticks and stones, these were the early humans
innovating and exploring the world, mastering it and molding it to their use. Never before has a
species done it like the homo sapiens.
Those who traveled north some 500,000 years ago developed a little differently. They
have many similar traits and characteristics as their cousins in Africa but with hundreds of
thousands of years of separation, evolution played its game. This group would after some time
evolve into the species we recognize as homo Neanderthals, our distant cousins. One thing that I
found quite interesting is that they are not out ancestors, but instead our cousins, and in fact they
are our most recent living cousins. The Neanderthals developed smaller brawny bodies in
comparison to the homo sapiens does south. This shorter more massive body was equipped to
help match the harsh winters and rougher living conditions that come with living so far north.
Neanderthals hade similar brain sizes as homo sapiens, but they were not as developed. They had
tilted back foreheads and large noses. Their bodies were big boned and rather stocky. These
distant cousins of ours were no idiots, they had control over fire, they wore clothing, they had
tools and weapons. They often used spears for big game hunting in complex hunting expeditions
brining down game larger than themselves. There are even signs that the Neanderthals would
bury their dead, occasionally marking the grave sites or putting flowers on them. Something no
species as done previously. The Neanderthals were truly advanced for their time, comparable to
their cousins down south.
520,000 years ago, was not the last encounter between the homo sapiens and homo
Neanderthals. After a few hundred thousand years of separation and evolution, the homo sapiens
began their trek northward than would soon land them in an encounter with their distant cousins.
It is estimated that for about 40,000-90,000 years the two groups lived together all the way from
modern day Spain to Russia. The two species lived in the same regions but did not merge into
one united species. They had enough genetic differences from their time part to develop enough
change to become separate species but not enough that they would not intermingle. David Reich,
a geneticist from Harvard University said this when speaking on why the two did not often bread
together but there are still trace amounts of Neanderthal DNA left in the remaining human
population that is alive today. “All it would take, they concluded, would be for a Neanderthal
and a human to create a child once every 30 years. "It's not surprising to me," Reich says of that
finding. "Humans don't mix easily across group boundaries. People tend to mix with people who
look like them, who speak their language." The two species could live in relative harmony, a
coexistence of sorts, but this didn’t mean they were always interbreeding. Although this did
happen occasionally as seen by trace amounts of Neanderthals DNA still left in ourselves as
modern-day humans. The two species had not changed to much from each other that the
possibility of breading was out the door. It was still not a common practice.
The term cave man that is so often pawned to any ancient people is stemmed from the
Neanderthals. They lived in an ice age, and they adapted to it. Besides the shorter stocky bodies
for head consolidation or the big game they hunted, the ice age also brought another challenge,
that being the cold. To escape the snow and ice, Neanderthals would often live in limestone
caves for refuge from the harsh conditions. They often would live within their nuclear families,
and it is even thought that they would take care of the sick or wounded. The life expectancy of a
Neanderthals man was about 30 years old. At the peak or their existence, it is estimated their
population was up to 70,000 across Eurasia.
We know today that only one of these species survived. We know it was the homo
sapiens, us, but why? This is the question scientists and researchers are still trying to figure out
today. We don’t have the exact answer. One theory to why is competition with homo sapiens.
We know that humans were more advanced than the Neanderthals, maybe as evolution continued
to play its game, and survival of the fittest set in, only the strongest and more adept survived.
Maybe the homo sapiens simply outlasted out survived the Neanderthals. Another theory is that
the relationships between the two species may have not been so harmonious. Perhaps the two
species fought and hunted each other to the point of extinction for the Neanderthals. Could be the
numbers or the brains of the humans, but whatever it was, it put them on top. Other theories
suggest climate change. The Neanderthals bodies were so perfectly equipped to handle an ice
age, but as we can see today, the earth is no longer an ice ball. It very well could be that when
the ice age ended, so did the reign of the Neanderthals. A fourth theory suggests a spread of a
fata strand of some disease that swept threw the populations, decimating the Neanderthals.
Maybe the homo sapiens were immune or better adapted to handle such a disease and hence they
are the ones to survive. The homo sapiens, humans, are the sole survivors. Whether they
survived the end of an ice age, a war, or mass disease, they survived. We are homo sapiens; we
are those humans. Those are our ancestors. Our distant cousins the Neanderthals are gone today,
but we can still learn about them by what they left behind, by their drawings or their clothing, we
can learn what this great people was and what they did on this earth, tens thousands of years
before us.
 Works Cited

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Moncel, Marie-Hélène, et al. “Rocks, Teeth, and Tools: New Insights into Early Neanderthal
Mobility Strategies in South-Eastern France from Lithic Reconstructions and Strontium Isotope
Analysis.” PLoS ONE, vol. 14, no. 4, Apr. 2019, pp. 1–30. EBSCOhost
ZIMMER, CARL. “INTERBREEDING with Neanderthals. (Cover Story).” Discover, vol. 34,
no. 2, Mar. 2013, pp. 38–44. EBSCOhost,
Smithsonian. “Homo Neanderthalensis.” The Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program,
17 Oct. 2018,