April 2011, Daily News

The Last Neanderthals?

By Dan McLerran   Thu, May 12, 2011

As if deciphering human evolutionary chronology isn't complicated enough, recent discoveries at a site in the foothills of the Ural Mountains of Russia have thrown yet another wrinkle in the developing fabric of the human ascent through the Ice Age.  

While excavating at Byzovaya, Russia, an archaeological site in the cold western foothills of the Ural Mountains at the edge of the Arctic Circle, Dr. Ludovic Slimak of the Université de Toulouse le Mirail, France, along with a team of colleagues, had unearthed a total of 313 human artifacts, along with a massive accumulation of remains of mammoths and other animals, (such as reindeer, wooly rhinoceros, musk ox, horse, wolf, polar fox, and bear). Examination of the mammoth remains indicated that they had been butchered using human-made tools. But these artifacts, a stone tool technology known as Mousterian and associated most commonly with Neanderthals, were dated to about 28,500 BP, too late for the Neanderthals.  The dating didn't seem to match the nature of the technology, as the newly discovered artifacts defined a toolkit that belonged primarily to the Middle Paleolithic period (300,000 to 40,000 years ago), and Neanderthals are generally thought to have become extinct after that time period -- replaced, as many scientists have suggested, by Homo sapiens (anatomically modern humans) around 75,000 to 50,000 years ago with a more advanced stone tool industry.  

Says Slimak, "Byzova is considered an Upper Paleolithic (40,000 - 10,000 years BP) site because it [the artifact assemblage] dates to 28,500 years ago and in all of Europe -- all of Eurasia, in fact -- we only see Upper Paleolithic sites [sites with Upper Paleolithic-type stone tool assemblages always dated to this time period]........so, while working on these Russian lithic assemblages with our Russian colleagues, we realized that we were not finding all of the archaeological indicators we expected to see from this period, and that in place of the classic products from the Upper Paleolithic we were finding other products that were just as classic, but from the Middle Paleolithic, from what we call the 'Mousterian' culture.  This culture was thought to have disappeared from all of Eurasia at least 7,000 years earlier. The biological bearer of this culture known in Europe was......Neanderthal."

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Byzovaya site. This picture shows a section through the gravely sediments with artifact and bone finds. [Photo by John-Inge Svendsen, Courtesy Science/AAAS]

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Photo of mammoth ribs with butchery cut marks. [Photos by Alexis Brugère]

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Photo of a dated antler with human modification. [Photos by Alexis Brugère]

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Photographs of two stone artifacts from Byzovaya. 1: Keilmesser; 2: Levallois core, preferential method. [Photos by Hugues Plisson, courtesy of Science/AAAS]

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Photos of large quartzite side-scraper from Byzovaya with Quina-type retouch. [Photos by Ludovic Slimak]

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Is all of this perhaps the result of a huge error in the dating process?

Not according to Slimak.  "There were different laboratories using different methods, all giving very convergent [the same] dates.......we are not dealing with a radiometric measuring error, but with a historic and anthropological reality."   

To date, no associated human fossil evidence has been recovered from the site.  This makes it currently impossible to conclude who made the stone implements.  The occupants were either a late, surviving remnant of Neanderthals occupying the fringes of habitable territory during a time when Homo sapiens were dominating and populating most of Europe/Eurasia, or they were a group of Homo sapiens who had adapted or retained the "old style" stone tool technology developed and so successfully used by the Neanderthals that came before them. Either way, it presents an important new development that raises a profusion of new questions about the evolution of human material culture in this part of the world and the range of prehistoric human activity on the Eurasian continent.  It may also beg reconsideration of currently held theories about the spread of Homo sapiens in Eurasia and the extinction of Neanderthals.

"Located near the Arctic Circle," Slimak told Popular Archaeology, "it is by far the northernmost [extension] of Mousterian industry ever recorded, crossing the previous known geographic limits known for such cultures by more than a thousand kilometers.  All these discoveries are challenging what we previously thought about this culture and have direct and profound implications on our understanding of the extinction of these societies. The colonization of the far north requires a strong social organization and technical abilities, like those of the sub-actual inuit groups. For a group, or a full society, to be able to adapt itself to the hardest environments of the planet is a clear sign of a strong ability to scope every environmental and climatic context.  Such demonstration has not been previously indicated in the Mousterian. This discovery definitively challenges some theories that proposed that the Mousterian extinction [and thus perhaps by extension the Neanderthals] was related to, or due to, a technical inferiority or inability to adapt to climatic or environmental constraints. So these results are suggesting that Neanderthals did not disappear due to climatic shifts and that their cultures were able to scope any landscape on the planet, in all of its diversity, including the harshest ones. Regarding "cultural inferiority", it is clear that, by showing such adaptability, the Mousterian cultures can no longer be considered 'archaic'."  

Moreover, according to the recently released report, Slimak et.al. maintains that the discoveries at Byzovaya also challenge the long-held hypothesis that there was a total replacement of Middle Paleolithic culture in Europe by around 37,000 B.P., and that it is possible that the time period for coexistence of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens was longer than previously thought.*

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 

Map showing the location of the Byzovaya site, close to the northern Urals. Other sites are also shown. The red stippled line circumscribes the area with known Neanderthal sites; here only some selected young sites are marked. The maximum extent of the Eurasia Ice Sheet (about 26,000 to 20,000 years B.P.), according to Svendsen et.al. (2004), is also shown. [Image courtesy Science/AAAS]

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A section of the Northern Hemisphere illustrating the known distribution of Neanderthals and the suggested extension to the Byzovaya site, near the Arctic Circle in northern Russia. The age of this site is 34,580 - 31,370 B.P. with a 95% confidence interval. The assumed size of the Scandinavian Ice Sheet at this time is shown. Photos of artifacts from the Byzovaya site are inserted on top. [Image courtesy Science/AAAS]

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This is not the first time that investigations in this area of the Urals have been conducted. Russian archaeologists had explored it earlier. In 2000, Norwegian-Russian teams began a field campaign at Byzovaya, and Pavel Pavlov of the Russian Academy of Sciences had already accumulated a number of artifacts that featured characteristics more akin to the Mousterian industry, found presumably within Upper Paleolithic contexts. Renewed field missions were initiated in 2006, utilizing the expertise of a french specialist in lithic technology to confirm Pavlov's hunch that they were really looking at a Mousterian technology. What has now emerged from the excavations is no less than astonishing, providing the impetus for further exploration.

Slimak was asked by Popular Archaeology about what the future holds for the work now being done at the site and elsewhere in the area.  "About 500 square meters have already been excavated," he said, "but the site is very large and rich. Future surveys in these Arctic landscapes could reveal huge surprises.  Arctic landscapes in Russia remain mainly unexplored and could reveal more unexpected revelations. [I believe that] most of these very last Mousterian groups on the planet remain to be discovered......."  

*Ludovic Slimak, John Inge Svendson, Jan Mangerud, Hugues Plisson, Herbjorn Heggen, Alexis Brugère, Pavel Yurievich Pavlov, "Late Mousterian Persistence near the Arctic Circle," Science, 13 May 2011, Vol. 332, p. 844.  

Photo Top Cover: Peri-arctic landscape around the Byzovaya site. [Photo by Ludovic Slimak, ©Science/AAAS]

Information for this article was obtained from Science and the AAAS, the nonprofit science society. The detailed research report appears in the 13 May 2011 issue of Science. 

By Dan McLerran

As Founder and Editor of Popular Archaeology Magazine, Dan is a freelance writer and journalist specializing in archaeology.  He studied anthropology and archaeology in undergraduate and graduate school and has been an active participant on archaeological excavations in the U.S. and abroad.  He is the creator and administrator of Archaeological Digs, a popular weblog about archaeological excavation and field school opportunities.