THUMBS UP FOR THE NEANDERTHALS

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

All,

Nature has just come up with the following, which is already making the round of the press agencies. It will certainly not come as a surprise to many of the people who have an intimate knowledge of Middle Palaeolithic technologies and, especially, of the Châtelperronian.

Nature 422, 395 (2003); doi:10.1038/422395a

Digital analysis: Manual dexterity in Neanderthals

WESLEY A. NIEWOEHNER, AARON BERGSTROM, DERRICK EICHELE, MELISSA ZUROFF & JEFFREY T. CLARK

Department of Anthropology, California State University, San Bernardino, California 92407, USA
Archaeology Technologies Lab, North Dakota State University, Fargo, North Dakota 58105, USA

e-mail: wniewoeh@csusb.edu

Abstract:
Despite their ability to make and use stone tools, Neanderthals were presumed to have had limited manual dexterity on the basis of the anatomy of their thumb and forefinger — a contention that has been called into question. Here we investigate the likely extent of Neanderthal thumb function by using a three-dimensional dynamic simulation that is based on the anatomical details and articular morphology of the thumb and index finger. We find that these digits could make tip-to-tip contact, and conclude that manual dexterity in Neanderthals was probably not significantly different from that of modern humans.

Macmillan MagazinesNature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2003 Registered No. 785998 England.

[lagarvelho]

All:

This certainly doesn't come as any surprise to me.  OTOH, people have been making all sorts of claims about Neandertals that supposedly "explain" why they disappeared:  they "only" scavenged, they didn't know how to make "real" fire or hearths,  they didn't "really" bury their dead, their tools were unimaginative and crude. . . .they couldn't "really" use their hands the way "we" do, and each and every one of these things has had to be reexamined by somebody to "prove" that yes, Neandertals were capable humans.  I suppose somebody will question this computer model, though.  It's inevitable.
Anne G

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

All,

Not much new, here, but the following is from the ScientificAmerican.com -- WEEKLY REVIEW, April 01, 2003.

I wonder what C. Loring Brace and a few others would have to say about the rather facile last sentence of the concluding paragraph.

If you want to see the article with the nice picture CLICK HERE

Jacques Cinq-Mars

Nimble-Fingered Neandertals

by Kate Wong

Scientific American
March 27, 2003

By any measure, the Neandertals have suffered a bad rap. Historically portrayed as dim-witted and brutish, it made perfect sense to scholars of yore that these ancient humans eventually disappeared from the European landscape, outcompeted by anatomically modern invaders. But recent research has revealed a more refined Neandertal--one that was a lot like us--making the demise of this group harder to explain.

New findings further blur the distinction between Neandertals and moderns. According to one school of thought, Neandertals may have lost out to our kind in part because they lacked the manual dexterity necessary for crafting sophisticated tools--an assertion based on earlier studies of the anatomy of the Neandertal thumb and forefinger. Researchers writing today in the journal Nature have reached rather a different conclusion. Wesley A. Niewoehner of California State University at San Bernardino and his colleagues studied the range of movement of the Neandertal thumb and index finger with the help of a three-dimensional computer simulation (see image). They found that even if Neandertals had only a small range of movement relative to what moderns have, they would still have been handy. Indeed, the scientists suggest that these hominids were probably just as nimble-fingered as we are, capable of the tip-to-tip contact that gives us our all-important precision grip.

Taking the new results into consideration along with archaeological evidence that later Neandertals used tools made in an advanced style known as the Chatelperronian, the team argues that these archaic Europeans did not vanish as a result of an inability to make or utilize fancy implements. Exactly how modern humans got the upper hand remains a mystery, however.

[lagarvelho]

Jacques:

Nope.  Nothing particularly new here, except the pictures, which, as you say, are quite nice.  Although why anybody would think, in view of the fact that Neandertals made some rather complex tools, that they *didn't* have a precision grip is beyond me.
Anne g

[colin]

Anne and all,
The answer to your question why anybody would think that neanderthals may have lacked a precision grip is a result of trying to maintain the old old story, which must be upheld at all costs: AMH replaced neanderthals because they were superior in some way, so the trick is to come up with explanations of  that superiority.

I first read the story in a 1930s book (no I'm not that ancient - it was an  old book!) and, despite all the discoveries in the meantime,  the essential narrative for many has never changed: Neanderthals ruled Europe with their Mousterian culture for thousands of years until along came AMH with their superior UP culture and displaced them by 30,000ya.

Discoveries over the last seventy years have cast a lot of question marks over this story of course  -  UP industries were not exclusively the work of AMH as had been thought  (so neanderthals must have copied them, comes the explanation)  and  AMH  were around 100,000ya at Skhul, but using the same old-fashioned Mousterian as neanderthals (AMH didn't aquire their superiority until a genetic transformation 50,000 years later, explains Klein) - but still people want to cling to it: thus the  suggestions  that neanderthals  were less dextrous/ less imaginative/less articulate, you name it. The attempts by some to maintain the essence of the old story in the face of new evidence have been truly painful to watch.

BTW, Klein's attempt to explain why AMH didn't prevail over neanderthals much earlier - they didn't have their "genetic miracle" which made them "intellectually modern" until 50,000ya - is rather undermined by the fact that the earliest remains of AMH after that date ( at Okladnikov,37-38,000bp) were associated in fact with the old-fashioned Mousterian.  13,000 years after being intellectually transformed! I guess no one had told them.
Cheers
Colin

[lagarvelho]

Colin:

I remember reading a similar old book when I was a child, which showed sad-looking, half-clad Neandertals wandering around Ice Age Eurasia.  I felt sorry for them(I was a child, remember),b ecause they didn't seem to have any clothes, and I thought they must be awfully cold.  

When I began my own investigations, as research background for my book(s), I knew next to nothing about Neandertals.  But like you, I discovered any number of inconsistencies, not the least of which were things like AMH using "Mousterian" tools in Israel --- just like Neandertals, and Neandertals using more "modern" toolsIthe Chatelperronian ones).  These discoveries were made about the same time as the original "African Eve" stories began to circulate.  And that was about the same time as these hoary old stories relating to Neandertal "inferiority" began to get resurrected, after I, personally(after starting tro do some real research), thought they had been permanently put to rest.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.  Certainly not in the "popular" world, but distressingly, still also prevalent in the thinking of some in the "academic" world, as Klein's notions demonstrate.  At present, I am somewhat "pessimistic" that these stories will finally die the death they deserve, but am at least hopefiul that such stories will be counterbalanced by other, more reasonable ones like t he "precision grip" story.
Anne G

[Daryl Habel]

One of the more interesting things about Niewoehner et al. (2003)  concluding "that manual dexterity in Neanderthals was probably not significantly different from that of modern humans", is that it follows another by the same author:

Niewoehner, W.A. (2001). Behavioral inferences from the Skhul/Qafzeh early modertn hand remains. PNAS 98 (6): 2979-2984.

In this earlier paper, it was concluded "that the Skhul/Qafzeh hand remains were adapted to Upper Paleolithic-like manipulative repertoires," and that "[T]hese results support the inference of significant behavioral differences between Neanderthals and the Skhul/Qafzeh hominids and indicate that a significant shift in human manipulative behaviors was associated with the earliest stages of the emergence of modern humans."

Although I've not yet read beyond the abstract for this new paper, I've read Niewoehner (2001), which is freely available from the PNAS website, and this paper did not base its conclusions on differences in Neanderthal vs. Skhul/Qafzeh "dexterity" but that the differences in manipulative behavior reflected in the anatomy of the hand were related to grip strength and grip positions, and these in turn showed that: "...one must logically conclude that the Skhul/Qafzeh hominids habitually engaged in significantly more Upper Paleolithic-like rather than Neanderthal-like upper limb behaviors," not forgetting to add, "...regardless of the archaeological evidence to the contrary" (Niewoehner 2001:2983).

So, in this new paper, Niewoehner et al. (2003) apparently concede Neanderthal dexterity, but I don't read in the abstract (and lack of access to the entire text makes me curious) anything about the behavioral differences implied in the earlier (Niewoehner 2001) PNAS paper.

So I think there's still a search going on here for, as Colin puts it, "explanations of that superiority."

In the accompanying commentary:

Churchill, S. E. (2001). Hand morphology, manipulation, and tool use in Neandertals and early modern humans of the Near East. PNAS. 98 (6): 2953-2955.

Steven Churchill cites Daniel Lieberman's (1998) suggestion that Neanderthals and early modern humans may be associated uniquely with different variants of the Levantine Mousterian (Tabun B and Tabun C, respectively), but Churchill (2001:2954) is not yet convinced this has been demonstrated.

BTW, Colin, what's your ref for 38-37 ka early moderns at Okladnikov (not that I'm disputing this - just curious)?

[colin]

Dar, Anne,
I love that quote "regardless of archaeological evidence to the contrary"!
The ref for the Okladnokov finds was: Shpakova & Derevianko "Interpretation of Odontological features of Pleistocene human remains from the Altai", Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia 1: 133-136.

The whole thrust of the "old old story" was to emphasise the difference between the crude Mousterian and the sophistication of the Aurignacian, Lascaux etc. Clearly the contrast was such that they could not be the products of the same species, so the thinking went. This was clearly a false premise: rather like saying that Michaelangelo's Cistine chapel could not be produced by the same species responsible for Australian rock art. And as we noted in earlier discussions there have been plenty of cultures created by AMH that never did produce an equivalent of the UP. The field has always tended to confuse the cultural with the biological, and this it seems to me has led to a good deal of confused thinking.
Cheers
Colin

[lagarvelho]

Colin and Dar:

The problem with paleoanthropology and prehistoric archaeology that deals with early humans is, that it kind of "meets at a crossroads"  The crossroads that it meets at are biological and "anthropological".  And the nearer you get to "modern" humans in "modern" times, the more culture seems to kick in.  

Now the problem  here, in a nutshell, is that the reasoning goes, that the farther back in time you go, the more "biological" the humans in whatever time period are likely to be.  Therefore, Neandertals must have been more "biological" than "cultural" or "anthropological", if you follow this reasoning.  Trouble with that is, that, as you and many others have pointed out, the tool types you find at prehistoric sites don't fit neatly into categories of "Mousterian =Neandertal" and "whatever else = modern human".   But a lot of people still like typological thinking where everything fits into neat little categories.  Given this, I suppose I shouldn't wonder why there is so much resistance to the idea that Neandertals had capabilities identical or similar to ours.  Still, it makes me sad.
Anne G