48 Fun Facts About Neanderthals

Roughly when did Neanderthals become extinct?

About 40,000 years ago Neanderthals vanish from most of Europe and Asia, just as modern humans were spreading across the continent; a few Iberian groups may have held on somewhat longer.

Which feature of the modern human face did Neanderthals lack?

A projecting chin is a Homo sapiens trademark: the Neanderthal lower jaw sloped back without one, while the middle of the face, with its big broad nose, pushed forward.

After whom was the Neander Valley named?

A hymn writer: the valley was renamed in 1850 for Joachim Neander, a 17th-century pastor who wrote 'Praise to the Lord, the Almighty'. His surname is a Greek form of Neumann, 'new man'.

The Neander Valley that named the species lies near which German city?

Düsseldorf lies just west of the gorge, which limestone quarrying destroyed, cave and cliff alike; the find spot was pinned down again only in 1997, with more Neanderthal bone in the rubble.

Germany's 1901 spelling reform dropped which letter from the place name Neanderthal?

The letter H went when Thal, 'valley', became Tal, so the place is now Neandertal; the species name keeps its old th because zoology's rule of priority fixes the first published spelling.

Which geologist, working in Galway, proposed the name Homo neanderthalensis in 1863?

William King named the species at an 1863 meeting, then had second thoughts: within a year he was arguing for a separate genus, likening the braincase to a chimpanzee's.

Which pathologist argued in 1872 that Neanderthal features were signs of disease, stalling research for decades?

Rudolf Virchow examined the bones himself and judged them a deformed modern man, arthritic, rickety and scarred by old injuries; an opponent of Darwin, he never accepted that humans descended from apes.

Decades before the Neander Valley find, a Neanderthal child's skull was dug up in 1829 in which country?

Belgium: Philippe-Charles Schmerling found the Engis skull near Liège among the bones of extinct animals and saw that it was ancient, but it was recognised as Neanderthal only in 1936.

A Neanderthal skull found at Forbes' Quarry in 1848, before the more famous Neander Valley find, came from where?

Gibraltar 1 was labelled simply as an ancient human and left in obscurity; only in 1864, after Darwin's Origin of Species had revived interest in fossil humans, was it shown to scientists in Britain.

What is the bony projection at the back of a Neanderthal skull called?

An occipital bun is not a Neanderthal exclusive: some of Europe's early modern humans had one too, and so do some people alive today.

A 2020 find at Abri du Maras in France showed that Neanderthals could make what?

Twisted cord: a scrap of three-ply string spun from the inner bark of a conifer was found stuck to a stone flake, direct evidence that Neanderthals worked plant fibres.

How did average Neanderthal brain volume compare with that of people alive today?

Slightly larger than ours: Neanderthal brains were as large as ours and often larger, in proportion to their heavier, more muscular bodies.

A stretch of DNA inherited from Neanderthals has been linked to more severe cases of which disease?

COVID-19: a 2020 study traced the main genetic risk factor for severe illness to a segment of chromosome 3 inherited from Neanderthals, carried by about half of people in South Asia.

Which stone tool industry are Neanderthals associated with?

Mousterian tools, named after the Le Moustier rock shelters in France, were struck from a stone core shaped in advance; the method then went almost unchanged for over 100,000 years.

What adhesive did Neanderthals produce by the earliest known dry distillation process?

Birch tar comes from heating birch bark with little air; Neanderthals may have been making it as early as 200,000 years ago, using it to fix stone points to wooden shafts.

Which Croatian rock shelter, dug from 1899, yielded hundreds of broken Neanderthal bones?

Krapina's bones were so broken and jumbled that their excavator, Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger, proposed in 1901 that these Neanderthals ate their dead; whether they did is still an open question.

Which wood were the Clacton and Lehringen spears both made from?

European yew is both durable and elastic, qualities the spear makers may well have chosen it for on purpose.

At the 125,000-year-old Neumark-Nord site, which animal did Neanderthals hunt every five or six years?

Straight-tusked elephants were the biggest game of their day: the bones of at least 57 lie at the site, systematically butchered, and at another German site a wooden spear was found with one.

Which marine animals did Neanderthals eat at Vanguard Cave, on the southern tip of Iberia?

Dolphin and monk seal remains at Vanguard Cave show that Neanderthals exploited the sea; at Figueira Brava in Portugal they also roasted brown crabs to crack the shells.

In which French cave did Neanderthals arrange broken stalagmites into rings 176,000 years ago?

Bruniquel Cave in southwest France holds rings of broken stalagmites built about 176,000 years ago deep inside the cave, showing Neanderthals ventured far underground with fire long before modern humans reached Europe.

Which transitional tool culture of France is linked to the last Neanderthals?

The Châtelperronian is the one Upper Palaeolithic toolkit credited to Neanderthals, perhaps made as they picked up techniques from incoming modern humans; who made it is still argued over.

What does the 'rodeo rider' hypothesis blame for the many healed injuries on Neanderthal skeletons?

Close-range hunting: the fractures match those of rodeo riders, who tangle with big, dangerous animals. A rival view blames animal attacks, and early modern humans show similar injuries.

Which Neanderthal from an Iraqi cave lived for years with a withered arm, a damaged eye and probable deafness?

Shanidar 1 survived a crushing blow to the head that damaged one eye; he also had a withered right arm and was probably deaf. That he lived on suggests others in his group cared for him.

Ralph Solecki's famous claim about a Shanidar Cave burial involved what grave offering?

Flowers: pollen clustered around the Shanidar 4 skeleton led Ralph Solecki to argue that the man was laid to rest with blooms, though burrowing rodents or bees may have carried the pollen in.

The disputed Divje Babe 'flute' from Slovenia is made from the femur of which animal?

A cave bear femur pierced by spaced holes, found in 1995, is shown in Slovenia's National Museum as a Neanderthal flute; many researchers think a carnivore's teeth made the holes.

At Abric Romaní rock shelter, Neanderthals kept a row of evenly spaced fires, probably for what purpose?

Keeping warm while sleeping: the eight hearths line the rock wall at even intervals, leaving room for one sleeper on either side of each fire.

Which bone from the Kebara 2 skeleton, almost identical to ours, suggests Neanderthals could speak?

The hyoid, a small throat bone that anchors the tongue, was found with the Kebara 2 skeleton in Israel in 1983; it matches ours closely, though it can't reveal the whole vocal tract.

Scratches and heavy wear on Neanderthal front teeth show they often used their mouths as what?

A third hand: Neanderthals gripped food, hides and other materials between their big front teeth while working on them, leaving scratch marks on the enamel.

Bones from which cave provided the DNA for the first Neanderthal genome?

Vindija Cave in northern Croatia supplied three bones for the 2010 draft; early dates hinting that its Neanderthals overlapped with modern humans were later traced to contamination.

Which geneticist won the 2022 Nobel Prize for sequencing the genomes of extinct hominins?

Svante Pääbo began in 1984 by coaxing DNA from a 2,400-year-old mummy and went on to read the Neanderthal genome; his father, Sune Bergström, had won the same Nobel Prize in 1982.

Neanderthal DNA entered our gene pool only after modern humans had left which continent?

Africa: the mixing happened in Eurasia, so people with roots outside sub-Saharan Africa carry about 2 percent Neanderthal DNA, while the traces found south of the Sahara came with later back-migration.

Who wrote The Inheritors, a 1955 novel about one of the last bands of Neanderthals?

William Golding followed Lord of the Flies with this story told through Neanderthal eyes; only its last chapter switches to the newcomers, who turn out to be terrified of the people they are displacing.

To which other archaic human group are Neanderthals most closely related on nuclear DNA?

Denisovans, identified from a finger bone found in Siberia's Denisova Cave in 2008, split from Neanderthals after both had diverged from modern humans, making them Neanderthals' closest known relatives.

By roughly how much did the first modern humans in south-west France outnumber the Neanderthals before them?

About ten times, by one 2011 estimate built on the number of sites, the density of tools and the food remains left by each population; sheer numbers may have decided the contest.

During which geological epoch did Neanderthals live?

The Pleistocene was the epoch of the ice ages, ending 11,700 years ago; its glacial advances repeatedly squeezed Neanderthals into small refuges, which may have helped fix their distinctive traits.

Which cave complex, inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2016, preserves late Neanderthal occupation?

Gorham's Cave is thought to be one of the last places Neanderthals lived, and a ledge inside carries deeply cut criss-crossing lines found in 2012; UNESCO listed it with three neighbouring caves in 2016.

Which type of DNA in living humans shows no surviving Neanderthal lineages?

Mitochondrial DNA passes only from mother to child, and no living person carries a Neanderthal version; one reading is that the mixed children we descend from had Neanderthal fathers and modern human mothers.

Which bird did Neanderthals butcher disproportionately, suggesting to the Finlaysons a symbol of power?

The golden eagle shows more signs of butchery at Neanderthal sites than other birds of prey, which Clive and Geraldine Finlayson read as a mark of power; they also argue that Neanderthals wore black feathers.

Neanderthals' stocky build and short limbs are classically explained by which two ecological rules?

Bergmann's and Allen's rules predict stockier bodies and shorter limbs in cold climates; Neanderthals' barrel chests and short forearms and shins fit both, though some researchers suspect other causes too.

Which of these hair colours has been linked to gene variants found in some Neanderthals?

Red hair has been linked to a pigment-gene variant found in a Neanderthal from Italy and possibly one from Spain; it is not one of the variants behind modern red hair, and the trait seems to have been rare.

How old are the Sima de los Huesos fossils whose nuclear DNA groups them with Neanderthals?

The Sima de los Huesos bones are about 430,000 years old; a 2016 nuclear DNA study put them on the Neanderthal line, though their maternal-line DNA had earlier looked closer to a different archaic group.

Which name is given to the early modern humans who replaced Neanderthals in Europe?

Cro-Magnons take their name from a rock shelter in the Dordogne, where workmen building a road to a new railway station dug up five skeletons in 1868.

Which local schoolteacher first recognised the Neanderthal 1 bones as distinct from modern humans in 1856?

Johann Carl Fuhlrott, a schoolteacher and naturalist from Elberfeld, saw that the bones the quarrymen had saved were ancient and human-like; he and Hermann Schaaffhausen presented them jointly in 1857.

Which two plants may Neanderthals at El Sidrón, Spain, have used for flavouring or medicine?

Yarrow and camomile taste bitter, a flavour that usually warns of poison, so eating them looks deliberate, as seasoning or as medicine; the same Neanderthals probably cooked and smoked their food.

Which gene, linked to speech and language, has been recovered from Neanderthal DNA and compared with ours?

FOXP2, whose mutations cause a severe speech and language disorder, turned out to be largely the same in Neanderthals as in us; whether their version worked exactly like ours is still disputed.

In which Siberian mountain range did Neanderthals interbreed with another local archaic population?

The Altai is where a cave yielded 'Denny', a girl who died about 90,000 years ago with a Neanderthal mother and a father from the region's other archaic people: the only first-generation hybrid yet found.

Neanderthals' large, wide noses were probably an adaptation for doing what?

Warming cold air, and moistening it, is the likeliest job of the big Neanderthal nose, feeding a body with high energy demands; it brought no keener sense of smell, since their olfactory bulbs were smaller than ours.

Which garments are Neanderthals thought to have worn?

Blankets and ponchos, simple cape-like wraps, are the likeliest Neanderthal clothing, since no bone needles are known from their sites; their hide-working tools suggest skins were prepared rather than tailored.