Archaeology Magazine - July/August 2000 - 2

4*July/August
Volume
2000
53.Number
The

Game

Mating

Did They or Didn't

They?

the prologue to his revised edition of The Last Neanderthal, Ian Tattersall offers
two "extreme" accounts of the final days of the species. In one, an elderly woman
recalls being 12 when the "tall, slender, and odd-looking strangers" arrived in the
next valley and soon absorbed her people. In the second, spear-bearing Homo sapiIn ens attack a party of Neandertais, killing all but one, a male who slips away behind
a screen of low bushes, the last of his species. Tattersall believes circumstantial evidence points to the second scenario as closer to the truth, having concluded that there
is little or no evidence that Homo sapiens shared the same hearths with Neandertais,
let alone mated with them, and thus could not have absorbed them.
Tattersall,of the American Museum of Natural History,is among a distinguishedgroup
of scholars who contend the Neandertais were an evolutionary dead-end, that modernday Europeans are descended entirely from anatomically modern human populations
that evolved in Africa
from ancestral Homo
erectus stock. He and
others, however, are
now being challenged
by new evidence that
suggests absorption, i.e.
interbreeding, actually
did take place.
Exhibit A, as reported
by Portuguese archaeologist João Zilhão in our
cover story on page 24,
is the 25,000-year-old
Ol
skeleton of a child
An artist's representation of possible Neandertalfound two years ago in a
rock-shelter north of
Cro-Magnoninteraction
Lisbon. Analysis of the
bones by Washington University at St. Louis anthropologist Erik Trinkaus suggested
that the child's anatomy could only have resulted from a mixed Neandertal-early
modern human ancestry. Zilhão and Trinkaus concluded from this that the Neandertais must have interbred with the newcomers and become part of our modern
human family.
Is this the "smoking gun" that will finally resolve this fascinating, yet highly contentious issue? In our September/October issue, Jean-Jacques Hublin of Paris Musée
de l'Homme will present climatic change as an explanation for the disappearance of
the Neandertais. "At the dawn of the last glacial age," Hublin writes, "competition
increased between the two groups for natural resources.... If some genes were
exchanged, they are not more visible in the later Upper Palaeolithic populations than
a drop of milk in a bowl of coffee. The Palaeolithic world was an empty one, and
chances are a Neandertal had little opportunity to even meet the aliens' within his or
her lifetime."

Peter
A. Young
Editor-in-Chief
2

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Archaeology Magazine - July/August 2000

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