Neanderthals' head anatomy was so distinctive that, even if a Neanderthal dressed in a business suit or a designer dress were to walk down the streets of New York or London today, everybody else (all the homines sapientes) on the street would be staring in shock. Imagine converting a modern face to soft clay, gripping the middle of the face from the bridge of the nose to the jaws in a vice, pulling the whole mid-face forward, and letting it harden again. You will then have some idea of a Neanderthal's appearance. Their eyebrows rested on prominently-bulging bony ridges, and their nose and jaws and teeth protruded far forward. Their eyes lay in deep sockets, sunk behind the protruding nose and brow ridges. Their foreheads were low and sloping, unlike our high vertical modern foreheads, and their lower jaws sloped back without a chin. Despite these startlingly primitive features, Neanderthals' brain size was nearly ten per cent greater than ours! A dentist who examined a Neanderthal's teeth would have been in for a further shock. In adult Neanderthals, the incisors (front teeth) were worn down on the outer-facing surface, in a way found in no modern people. Evidently, this peculiar wear-pattern somehow resulted from a use of their teeth as tools, but what exactly was that function? As one possibility, they may have routinely used their teeth as a vice to grip objects, like my baby sons, who gripped their milk bottle in their teeth and ran around with their hands free. Alternatively, Neanderthals may have bitten hides with their teeth to make leather, or bitten wood to make wooden tools. While a Neanderthal in a business suit or dress would attract attention today, one in shorts or a bikini would have drawn gasps. Neanderthals were more heavily muscled, especially in their shoulders and neck, than all but the most avid modern bodybuilders. Their limb-bones, which took the force of those big muscles when they were contracting, had to be considerably thicker than ours to withstand the stress. Their arms and legs would have looked stubby to us, because the lower leg and forearm were relatively shorter than ours. Even their hands were much more powerful than ours; a Neanderthal's handshake would have been literally bone-crushing. While their average height was only around 5 feet 4 inches, their weight would have been at least 20 pounds more than that of a modern person of that height, and this excess was mostly in the form of lean muscle. One other possible anatomical difference is intriguing, though its reality as well as its interpretation are quite uncertain. A Neanderthal woman's birth canal may have been wider than a modern woman's, permitting her baby to grow inside her to a bigger size before birth. If so, a Neanderthal pregnancy might have lasted a year, instead of our nine months. Besides their bones, our other main source of information about Neanderthals is their stone tools. Like the earlier human tools, Neanderthal tools may have been simple hand-held stones not mounted on separate parts such as handles. The tools do not fall into distinct types with unique functions. There were no standardized bone tools, no bows and arrows. Some of the stone tools were undoubtedly used to make wooden tools, which rarely survive. One notable exception is a wooden thrusting spear 8 feet long, found in the ribs of a long-extinct species of elephant at an archaeological site in Germany. Despite that (lucky?) success, Neanderthals were probably not very good at big-game hunting, because Neanderthal numbers (to judge from the number of their sites) were much lower than those of later Cro-Magnons, and because (as I will explain later) even anatomically more modern people living in Africa at the same time as the Neanderthals were undistinguished as hunters.
If you say 'Neanderthal' to friends and ask for their first association, you will probably get back the answer 'caveman'. While most excavated Neanderthal remains do come from caves, that is surely an artifact of preservation-, since open-air sites would be eroded much more quickly. Among my hundreds of campsites in New Guinea, one was in a cave, and that is the only site where future archaeologists are likely to find my pile of discarded tin cans intact. So archaeologists will also be deceived into considering me a caveman. Neanderthals must have constructed some type of shelter against the cold climate in which they lived, but those shelters must have been crude. All that remains are a few piles of stones and a pesthole, compared to the elaborate remains of houses built by the later Cro-Magnons.
The list of other quintessentially modern human things that Neanderthals lacked is a long one. They left no unequivocal art objects. They must have worn some clothing in their cold environment, but it had to be crude, as they lacked needles and other evidence of sewing. They evidently lacked boats, as no Neanderthal remains are known from Mediterranean islands nor even from North Africa, just eight miles across the Straits of Gibraltar from Neanderthal-populated Spain. There was no longdistance overland trade: Neanderthal tools are made of stones available within a few miles of the site.
Today we take cultural differences among people inhabiting different areas for granted. Every human population alive today has its characteristic house-style, implements, and art. If you were shown chopsticks, a Guinness beer bottle, and a blowgun and asked to associate one object each with China, Ireland, and Borneo, you would have no trouble giving the right answers. No such cultural variation is apparent for Neanderthals, whose tools look much the same whether they come from France or Russia.
We also take cultural progress with time for granted. The wares from a Roman villa, medieval castle, and 1990 New York apartment differ obviously. In the year 2000 my sons will look with astonishment at the slide rule I used for calculations throughout the 1950s: 'Daddy, are you really that old? But Neanderthal tools from 100,000 and 40,000 years ago look essentially the same. In short, Neanderthal tools had no variation in either time or space to suggest that most human of characteristics, innovation. As one archaeologist put it, Neanderthals had 'beautiful tools stupidly made'. Despite Neanderthals' big brains, something was still missing. Grandparenting, and what we consider old age, must also have been rare among Neanderthals. Their skeletons make clear that adults might live to their thirties or early forties, but not beyond forty-five. If we lacked writing and if none of us lived past forty-five, just think how the ability of our society to accumulate and transmit information would suffer. I have had to mention all these subhuman qualities of Neanderthals, but there are three respects in which we can relate to their humanity. First, virtually all well-preserved Neanderthal caves have small areas of ash and charcoal indicating a simple fireplace. Hence, although Peking Man may have already used fire hundreds of thousands of years earlier, Neanderthals were the first people to leave undisputed evidence of the regular use of fire. Neanderthals may also have been the first people who regularly buried their dead, but that is disputed, and whether it would imply religion is a matter of pure speculation. Finally, they regularly took care of their sick and aged. Most skeletons of older Neanderthals show signs of severe impairment, such as withered arms, healed but incapacitating broken bones, tooth loss, and severe osteoarthritis. Only care by young Neanderthals could have enabled such older Neanderthals to stay alive to the point of such incapacitation. After my long litany of what Neanderthals lacked, we have finally found something that lets us feel a spark of kindred spirit in these strange creatures of the last Ice Age—nearly human in form, and yet not really human in spirit.