News ash: negative evidence convicts

Neanderthals of gross mental

incompetence

John D. Speth

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of
conjecture out of such a triing investment of fact.
(Mark Twain)

As this is an issue of World Archaeology whose overall aim is to promote lively discussion,
I hope with this rather smallish contribution to do likewise. In the process, I will stick my
neck out far enough that some of my readers will no doubt be delighted to perform the
obvious surgery. And, although my tone may seem rather heavy-handed at times, this is
done not with the conviction that my ideas are right and those I question are wrong, but
with the hope that this will stimulate dialogue that is both productive, and at the same
time constructive, about an aspect of modern human origins that has been, and continues
to be, most sorely neglected. Stripped to its essence, at issue is the fact that we have
convicted Neanderthals of gross mental incompetence almost entirely on the basis of
negative or missing evidence. Put in more academically acceptable terms, there are many
plausible reasons why some trait or behavior might be absent in the Middle Paleolithic
and, while inadequacy of the cognitive machinery may ultimately prove to be the correct
one, there are other quite plausible scenarios that we havent even begun to consider
seriously yet, let alone falsify alas, the all-too-familiar and ever-present demon of
equinality to which we may have succumbed hook, line and sinker. As I will try to show,
the jurys nearly unanimous guilty verdict is woefully premature and perhaps wholly
unwarranted. Before proceeding, however, I should point out to the reader that I have
taken the rather unorthodox step of leaving out all formal scholarly referencing in what
follows, a step I take with the fortunate and very welcome blessing of this volumes editor,
to whom I am most grateful. My reason for this deliberate omission is simple: I want to
challenge some deeply entrenched orthodoxies, and I take some rather blatant literary
liberties in doing so. This obviously increases the risk that my exuberance will be seen as
personal attacks on those who have put forward the points of view I am questioning. This
is neither my intention nor my desire. Many are long-time friends whom I respect greatly
and I would very much like to keep things that way. Now, to place my head squarely on
the platter. . .
By most recent accounts, Neanderthals would have had considerable diculty chewing
gum and walking at the same time. In fact, to most contemporary paleoanthropologists,
they simply didnt cut the mustard as humans. Their lights were on but nobody was

World Archaeology Vol. 36(4): 519 526 Debates in World Archaeology

# 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online
DOI: 10.1080/0043824042000303692
520 John D. Speth

home. This view of Neanderthal mentality is virtually a given nowadays (one need
consider only the colloquial meaning of the appellation itself to get the picture); it is
seldom seen as the hypothesis that it should be, one that is still very much in need of
testing. It doesnt seem to worry those who would give Neanderthals a two-digit IQ that
almost all of the damning evidence is actually negative (I beg the readers indulgence
while I drag out the very shop-worn but still apropos phrase absence of evidence does
not constitute evidence of absence). A few deliberately embellished examples should
suce to make the point (pardon my use of a literary sledgehammer now and then).
Neanderthals didnt make blades, or at least not as often, or maybe not as well, as
moderns did (they didnt make microliths either, or stainless steel for that matter, but they
did make great triangles; unfortunately rectangles are in these days, not triangles). They
didnt carve bone or ivory (nor did they work berglass, though they may have carved a
lot of wood, judging by recent use-wear evidence). They didnt paint the walls of their
caves, despite ample opportunity to do so (but, then, painting cave walls, even in the
Upper Paleolithic, was truly the exception, not the rule). They did have spears, we have
some of them (this, no doubt, is what all of their woodworking was about), but try as they
might they just couldnt throw them (the points that somehow managed to nd their way
through hair and hide of sizeable prey to become squarely embedded in solid bone
notwithstanding). They had no large formal replaces (whats wrong with some of the
hearths at Kebara?), so they couldnt sit cozily face-to-face around the re at night holding
hands, roasting marshmallows and singing campre songs, hence they must have lacked
true language (and Girl Scouts; in fact, the conspicuous absence of marshmallows
throughout the Upper Paleolithic clearly testies to the lack of language as we know it
until very late in the Holocene).
We have been told that Neanderthal sites lack any internal planning or structure that
would distinguish them from the simple bio-mechanically based division between living
and dumping areas that one nds in the lairs of hyenas and many other carnivores (aside
from replaces of course). Im afraid that many cherished hunters and gatherers of the
ethnographic present would have to surrender their hard-earned membership in the
World Association for Modern Humans because their traditional seasonal camps often
displayed this same sort of carnivore pattern. And many of those really bizarre habits that
make humans truly human have little or no impact on the internal structure of a site and
will be exceedingly dicult to ferret out of the archaeological record, even a modern one.
How, for example, are we going to see such things as trance dancing; or tattooing ones
chest; or subincising young male initiates; or relating stories to eager kids about how the
strangely shaped mass of rock in the distance is really the body of an ancient spirit who lay
down there to rest in the Dream Time and never got back up; or reverently chanting a
prayer over the carcass of a freshly killed deer, all the while sprinkling pollen on it,
blowing the breath of life back into its nostrils, and genuecting three times to each of the
six cardinal directions (the zenith and nadir are included, of course), before tossing its
bones into the nearest trash dump? Incidentally, what we dismiss as mere trash or
garbage in our own culture is often highly charged with spiritual potency in traditional
ones; ergo, those dumping areas that we cavalierly brush aside as nothing more than what
any ordinary carnivore might generate in its daily activities could in fact be the very
symbolism we are searching for in the Middle Paleolithic, or so fervently denying. Yet,
 News ash 521

these peculiar sorts of spiritually charged acts and beliefs, curiosities that have fascinated
the Western world since the days of conquest and colonialism and now ll the pages of
countless ethnographies and glossy coee-table tomes, are as much the meat and potatoes
of the symbolic realm as painting mammoth on cave walls or placing beads in the grave of
a loved one. So why do we make just a few such arbitrarily selected traits the ultimate
litmus test for granting Neanderthals full membership in the human community? We seem,
of course, to expect symbolic acts to be like ashing neon billboards illuminating the night
sky so brilliantly that we couldnt possibly miss their dazzling display even with our eyes
shut; when, instead, many, perhaps most, symbolic acts and beliefs, like ascribing female
gender to the household replace, scarifying an initiate with an unmodied ake or
uttering an incantation to the spirits of the forest before embarking on the days hunt, are
hard to detect and understand, even with the aid of living informants, let alone in
someones 100,000-year-old trash. We truly have a formidable task before us.
Let us examine some of the grounds for convicting those mental midgets of the Middle
Paleolithic a little further. Neanderthals didnt adorn themselves with ornaments (for that
matter, neither did most Upper Paleolithic folk in the vast area of the Middle East, the
cradle-to-be of one of the worlds great civilizations. A sign of symbolic dementia?
Hardly. . ..). What about those pesky little Chatelperronian baubles? Those, as we all
know, were either stolen from modern humans or, if we grant Neanderthals the
wherewithal to make them, bless their industrious little hearts, those morons couldnt
possibly have comprehended their symbolic signicance. Besides, theyre late.
We are repeatedly reminded of the fact that Neanderthals werent specialized hunters.
What this really means, at least when youre standing in Europe, is that they didnt
groove on reindeer steaks like those modern Magdalenian folk did. This is a rather
strange standard to use to judge Neanderthals status as a human being. Why should a diet
breadth of one be indicative of modern-ness? Should we assume, as a consequence, that
broader diets are a sign of subhuman status? This revelation will surely come as a shock to
most modern hunter-gatherers as they nd themselves rudely expelled from the Modern
Humans Club because their diets are too eclectic. I also doubt that the evolutionary
biologists, to whom we are indebted for optimal foraging theory, had this sort of
relationship in mind when they developed the diet breadth concept. The specialization-
equals-modern view is all the more curious if one considers that, among recent hunter-
gatherers of the northlands, those who were most heavily dependent on Rudolfs free-
ranging kin had some of the lowest population densities ever recorded among foragers,
and faced repeated and potentially devastating periods of deprivation, population
displacement and decline as their four-legged staple the reindeer (a.k.a. caribou)
crashed. I wonder about those Magdalenian paragons of modernity and specialization. . .
Neanderthals surely took their well-deserved place on the lowest rung of the cultural
and intellectual ladder when they indulged in eating their neighbors (we have bona de cut
marks on the bones of conspecics, some genuine positive evidence at last). After all,
what could be clearer testimony of their less-than-human status than eating each other?
Yet among our very own kind nothing could be more blatantly symbolic than the
statement a victorious warrior makes when he partakes of the esh of his vanquished
enemy (if you have any doubts, look at the voluminous literature on this practice among
the historic Iroquois and Huron they even made their enemies eat parts of themselves
522 John D. Speth

before they died); or when a bereaved relative ingests a sacred morsel of some revered
loved one who has recently departed the world of the living. Some among us even do it
piously every week in church as part of Holy Communion. Except for a few genuine
anomalies like the Donner Party disaster, we just dont eat people for calories (alas, but
foragers are too skinny and too bellicose to achieve the status of a highly ranked
resource in anyones optimal diet). But of course for our beastly, beetle-browed
Neanderthals, hapless conspecics surely must have been counted among their highly
ranked foods. Why else would they have eaten their neighbors? They couldnt possibly
have attached any symbolic signicance to such a barbaric act, could they? Not with brow
ridges like that.
But believe it or not we havent reached the bottom of the proverbial barrel yet. In terms
of their social graces, Neanderthals were complete and utter failures. If youre looking for
analogies, dont look to the San or the Hadza; turn instead to bison. Thats right, bison,
that dim-witted heavy-browed lawnmower of the North American plains (looking at their
frontals, perhaps the comparison is not so farfetched after all). Lacking a division of labor
and food sharing, Neanderthals, we have been led to believe, lived pretty much like bison
in what amounted to cow-calf groups (the women and kids) and bull groups (the adult
males). I assume the two groups must have come together at least once in a while for the
rut, or Neanderthals would never have lasted as long as they did.
We are told that in Africa pre-modern humans of the Middle Stone Age (MSA) were
cognitively deprived because they didnt take on dangerous warthogs, while the modernity
and humanness of their Later Stone Age successors is proved by the very fact that they
did. Lets hear it for the origins of machismo! Surely this was a contribution made by our
ancestors for which we can be truly proud. And perhaps archaeozoology has stumbled
upon the rst convincing piece of evidence that college fraternities came into being well
before the onset of the Holocene. . .
We are also told that communal eland drives conducted by MSA hunters oer further
evidence of cognitive impairment (yes, I said impairment, not savvy) because eland are
docile. What exactly does that mean? Are we to understand that these horse-sized critters
stood patiently atop the nearest convenient cli just waiting for the mental morons of the
MSA to come ambling along and shove them o? If the eland is truly the four-legged
African counterpart of the dodo bird, then perhaps. . . I suspect, however, that the San,
who hold this animal in extraordinarily high esteem, might take exception to such a view.
Having combed the ethnohistoric literature on communal hunting in Native North
America, a literature which documents the myriad ingenious methods concocted by
American Indians to trap not just bison, but also white-tailed deer, that diminutive and
docile denizen of the forest (thats right, Bambis kin), I can attest to the fact that these
techniques were anything but kid stu. They entailed careful planning, co-ordination of
large numbers of participants, and, yes, language as well. Communal deer hunts hardly
constitute evidence of a North American refugium for the cognitively impaired.
As seen through the archaeologists microscope, those poor dim-witted Neanderthals,
and their equally dull though less beetle-browed MSA cousins, must surely have been
mental retards. Perhaps, however, a more compassionate and understanding view is in
order; after all, for thousands upon endless thousands of years they suered, speechless,
under the debilitating, bone-deforming eects of rickets and iodine deciency disease (yes,
 News ash 523

Neanderthals were the original cretins), and even schizophrenia. It is truly a wonder that
their lights were ever on.
In my enthusiasm, Im surely overstating matters here, probably unfairly so. For sure,
Im painting a single sweeping panorama that in reality is cobbled together using many
separate images that appeared at very dierent points in time, some still in vogue, others
long since abandoned by the wayside. Nonetheless, despite the comings and goings of the
individual parts that make up the picture, the panorama itself somehow remains
remarkably intact and resilient. Neanderthals were dummies when they were rst
discovered; and now, some 150 years later and cushioned by todays much more
politically correct parlance, they lacked symbolic capacities.
My readers, if they have stuck with me this far, will almost certainly be convinced that
Im one of those diehard liberals who, despite overwhelming (negative) evidence to the
contrary, still clings to the obsolete notion that Neanderthals were our cognitive equals.
Let me set the record straight right here I dont subscribe to this position, but I dont
subscribe to the opposite one either. In point of fact, Im deliberately sitting on the fence; I
dont subscribe to either view, not yet anyway (although I must confess to riding the fence
side-saddle). Then what is my point? Simply put, the evidence that we presently have
concerning Neanderthals cognitive wherewithal is so imsy, and in most regards so utterly
untestable, that vows of wedlock to either position are at best premature. The primary
reason for this state of aairs, in my view, is the fact that we rely so heavily on the absence
of evidence. Neanderthals have been so readily convicted of so much on the basis of so
little. Yet, judging by the near unanimity on the matter across the length and breadth of
the discipline, not to mention the sideline cheering from the media, the mental vacuity of
our Neanderthal cousins must surely be intuitively obvious. Or is it? When academics tell
you something is obvious, nine times out of ten its a red ag for something they either
dont understand or havent bothered to look at yet. In fact, my advice to graduate
students, as they voraciously devour the latest theoretical titbits, is to pay special attention
to words like clearly and obviously, as they often are smoke-screens camouaging an
underlying problem just itching to be recognized.
As someone who also does research in North America my other hat in academia I
have good reason for remaining skeptical about arguments based so heavily on negative
evidence. Let me explain by example. Human presence in North America begins about
12,000 years ago, perhaps earlier. These rst inhabitants of the New World are generally
known as Paleo-Indians. Many Paleo-Indian sites, particularly in the mid-continent
region of North America, testify to the considerable prowess of Paleo-Indian hunters, who
brought down mammoths and perhaps mastodons, as well as a jumbo-sized and now-
extinct form of bison (Middle Paleolithic practitioners may nd it comforting to know that
North American archaeologists, when discussing the role of the proboscideans in Paleo-
Indian economies, have been immersed in their own hunting-vs.-scavenging debate). By
about 8,000 years ago, these headline-making big-game hunters gave way to much less
newsworthy Archaic-period foragers, who eked out a meager existence harvesting seeds,
nuts and smaller animals in the vast deserts, prairies and forests of North America.
What is the relevance of the North American record to the question of Neanderthals
mental hardware? Simply this: most sites that date to the Paleo-Indian and early Archaic
periods periods that together last some 5,000 to 6,000 years and represent nearly half of
524 John D. Speth

the known occupation span of the New World have little or no evident internal structure
(unless you want to count patches or scatters as structure; the rare high-resolution
examples share the same humdrum carnivore dichotomy that was used to torpedo the
poor Neanderthal); there are few if any formal hearths (isolated patches and lenses of ash
are much more the norm); burials are extremely rare or absent altogether, and those few
that exist have little or nothing in the way of ornaments or grave accompaniments; huts
are generally absent or very controversial; and art of any non-perishable sort is virtually
non-existent (they certainly didnt paint cave walls; in fact, we are hard put in most cases
to nd anything that even remotely smacks of symbolism). If we were to use the same
criteria that we apply to Neanderthals, we would have to conclude that the inhabitants of
North America up until only a few thousand years ago were to put it in politically
correct terms cognitively challenged. The parallels with the record of the Middle
Paleolithic are even more striking if we exclude from consideration the few dry caves in
western North America and waterlogged sites in Florida of late Paleo-Indian and early
Archaic age which have miraculously preserved tantalizing traces of perishable basketry,
textiles and other unusual items.
Then around 5,000 years ago, give or take a millennium, came North Americas
counterpart to Eurasias Upper Paleolithic revolution. We suddenly see an explosion of
art intricately shaped or carved and sometimes engraved exotica of shell, antler, bone,
stone, tortoise shell and native copper, including cups, tubes, pendants, beads, pins,
rattles, atlatl hooks, bannerstones and gorgets; there are also remnants of probable
medicine bags, traces of textiles, decorated baskets and ubiquitous red ochre the whole
nine yards. Many of the raw materials came from distant lands marine shell from the
Gulf of Mexico, sharks teeth from the mid-Atlantic states, copper from Lake Superior,
galena and mica from Illinois and the Appalachians. This is also the time when we begin to
see burials clustered together in real cemeteries, not just peppered here and there over the
archaeological landscape; and many of these burials are elaborately decked out with
ornaments and other exotica, so much so at times that we begin to speculate about the
beginnings of prestige enhancement and wealth display, about big men, about reduced
mobility and increasing conict, about the growing importance of inter-group exchange
and political alliances, about the very seeds of societal inequality and hierarchy. This is the
bread and butter of North American archaeology. And, while there is lots to disagree and
argue about (particularly about what is cause and what is eect), all seem to agree that
in some form or other what we are seeing over the course of the Archaic is the playing out
of gradually increasing populations that were slowly lling in the landscape, reducing
peoples ability to vote with their feet when things got tough, and thereby compelling
them to begin playing with alternative economic, social and political strategies for
maintaining the delicate balance between war and peace in a word, social, technological,
economic and political intensication. No one, of course, would believe for a nanosecond
that in the artless and styleless silence of the early Archaic we are dealing with a cognitively
impaired proto-human.
In fact, many of North Americas regional archaeological sequences bear witness to the
same general developmental trajectory: the sequences almost invariably begin with small,
highly mobile populations, with little evidence of long-distance exchange, very little in the
way of non-perishable art, and artifact assemblages that display little spatial or temporal
 News ash 525

stylistic dierentiation. Late in the sequences, populations have grown much larger,
mobility is greatly curtailed, long-distance trade has become much more evident and
involves large quantities of ornately decorated and exotic items, and stylistic
dierentiation in projectile points, and especially in ceramics, reaches the point where
nearly every valley has its own distinctive styles, and time-slices sometimes as short as
twenty-ve to fty years can be distinguished on stylistic grounds alone. What I have just
described could easily serve as a description of the major contrasts between the Middle
and Upper Paleolithic. There is at least enough similarity here to be cause for concern.
But if one is willing at least to entertain the possibility that the dierences between the
Middle and Upper Paleolithic are largely the result of intensication, not biological
evolution, are we then in fact denying the existence of human evolution altogether? After
all, could we not view the Middle Paleolithic as merely an intensied expression of the
Acheulian, and the Acheulian an intensied expression of the Oldowan? Perhaps. But then
where did all this begin? Since Ive stepped this far out on the proverbial limb, why not
venture out just a little farther and oer my readers the opportunity to saw it o.
Suppose. . .just suppose. . .that all this intensication was set in motion with one epochal
speciation event, the event that gave rise to the genus Homo some 2 to 2.5 million years
ago. Suppose thats where our basic cognitive hardware took its essential form, not a mere
40,000 or 50,000 years ago, and virtually all of the cultural change that has occurred since
then reects the incremental accumulation of human know-how together with gradual
social, political and economic intensication propelled by humankinds slow but
inexorable growth in numbers. Ill leave it to the biologists and evolutionary psychologists
to explain how all this was possible for a hominid that began its conquest of the globe with
a brain barely half the size of our own. If there is any shred of truth to the yarn I have just
spun, then Neanderthals were no more cognitively impaired for not knowing how to paint
their cave walls or carve bone than our Magdalenian forebears were for not knowing how
to make the wheel or stainless steel, or our great grandparents for not knowing how to
blow their neighbors to smithereens with an atomic bomb or do their holiday shopping
online, or ourselves for not knowing how to beam Scotty up yet.
de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

Acknowledgements

In keeping with the rest of this paper, my acknowledgements are also a tad unorthodox.
The arguments or unbridled prejudices if you prefer that I have just presented have
been brewing in my psyche for a long time but never dared surface, let alone nd their way
to paper. But three things changed this. The rst was a seminar in which the participants,
myself included, agellated ourselves for fourteen excruciating weeks as we slogged our
way through more than 1300 pages of Stephen J. Goulds monumental tome, The
Structure of Evolutionary Theory. It was a literary experience somewhat akin to wading
through miles of waist-deep muskeg in the Canadian subarctic. Goulds prolixity was
certainly a challenge to both my attention span and my eyes. However, despite the fact
that I had to look up an unfamiliar word (including an untold number of Latin ones) on
almost every one of those interminable 1300 + pages, Goulds obvious air for the
526 John D. Speth

language was gradually, almost imperceptibly infectious as well, and, as the semester wore
on, I found myself feeling an ever-growing urge to write something that wasnt cobbled
together in the all-too-familiar NSF-style grantsmanese mumbo-jumbo that had always
been my staple (on the other hand, maybe its just senility nally seeping through). The
second event that triggered this outpouring was an undergraduate lecture course that I co-
taught with my colleague, Milford Wolpo, on modern human origins. We referred to
ourselves as Tweedle-dee (Milford) and Tweedle-dum (me, who else?). Throughout the
term I stuck pretty much to the straight-and-narrow, presenting the monumentally
unconvincing archaeological evidence both for and against the prevailing view of
Neanderthal the Dummy. But our last lecture for the semester was to be a joint song and
dance in which we each got up in front of the class and said what we really thought, the
hard evidence be damned. And thats what is presented in these pages.The third factor that
was essential in bringing this paper to light came courtesy of the Apple Corporation and
US Airways. I sat in the Detroit airport waiting for a long-delayed ight with my laptop in
front of me, and I just couldnt resist . . .

Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan,

Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1079

John D. Speth (BA, geology, University of New Mexico, 1965; PhD, anthropology,
University of Michigan, 1971) is a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of
Anthropology and Curator of North American Archaeology in the Museum of
Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He studies hunter-gatherers, past and
present, New World and Old World. He is interested generally in the evolution of forager
diet and subsistence strategies and, more specically, in the ways that hunter-gatherers
(and small-scale farmers) cope with seasonal and inter-annual unpredictability in their
resource base. Largely through fauna, he also is exploring the nutritional and economic
basis of Plains-Pueblo interaction in the American Southwest and Middle Paleolithic
(Neanderthal) hunting in the Near Eastern Levant.