New Light on the Neanderthals: Music, Art, Rope-Making, and now a possible link to COVID-19
by Professor Patrick Boylan, School of Arts and Social Sciences, City, University of London
The Middle and Upper Pleistocene Neanderthals have generally had a bad press through more than a century and a half. Until comparatively recently Neanderthals were widely regarded and caricatured as primitive, clumsy and probably brutal, creatures. Knowledge, and more important, attitudes have changed remarkably in the last 20 years or so, through many additional discoveries and new interpretations of this Hominin species.
We now know that Neanderthals were dominant across most of Europe and beyond from around 400,000 to 40,000 years ago, with significant populations stretching from the Mediterranean and beyond out into what is now known as “Doggerland” – the vast area of land under what is now the North Sea, while DNA studies show that Neanderthal genes survive in many present-day European and Asian populations.
More and more is also being discovered about the culture and traditions of these populations. I was able to help in a minor way with one of the most remarkable finds in a Slovenian cave: a 60K year old Neanderthal flute made out of the thigh bone of a young Cave Bear. Even more remarkably this would have played the notes of the present-day diatonic (Do, Re, Mi) musical scale. Also, recent work on the earliest Neanderthal site – Gough’s Cave, Gibraltar, has found evidence of both art and personal adornment with feathers.
In March 2020 an equally significant technological discovery was made in France during excavations of Neanderthal levels within the Abri du Maras Cave located in the southern France Ardèche valley. Due to preservation conditions organic remains other that bones and teeth are generally extremely rare. However, the excavators have found a tiny fragment of a double 3-ply twisted cord adhering to a stone tool, made from fibres from the inner bark of trees (Hardy et al. 2020).
This was not just the only startling Neanderthal discovery announced in 2020. Two medical reports of investigations into possible genetic risk factors for COVID-19 published in leading medical Journals show that a Neanderthal derived gene cluster on chromosome 3 is linked to respiratory failure in severe COVID-19 infections (Ellinghaus et al. 2020; Zeberg & Paabo 2020). There is clearly very much more to learn about the Neanderthals more than 30,000 [CW1] years after they finally became extinct.
References
Finlayson, C. 2019. The Smart Neanderthals: bird-catching, art & cognitive revolution. (Oxford University Press)
Ellinghaus, D. et al. 2020. Genomewide association study of severe COVID-19 with respiratory failure. New England. Journal of Medicine, 15th October 2020. [CW2]
Hardy, B L et al. 2020. Direct evidence of Neanderthal fibre technology and its cognitive and behavioral implications. Nature Scientific Reports, 20th April 2020.
Zeberg, H & Paabo, S, 2020. The major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals. Nature, 30th September 2020.