Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [85]
We are the hominid analogue of the Cataglyphis ant, except that we had a significant internal as well as external heat load and we not only scavenged dead animals as these ants do—but eventually also incapacitated and hunted down our prey.
Mobility generates body heat, and that requires sweat to continue the chase, but you can be profligate with sweat only if you have lots of water. Out of view of the eland or kudu we killed, there was undoubtedly a lake, a stream, or some other water.
Several years ago an issue of Geo magazine contained a photograph that is indelibly imprinted on my mind. It shows the bloody mass of a dead elephant whose trunk has been hacked off. Around it swarm more than a dozen armed men who are cutting into the animal with knives and spear blades. The scene is in open bush country, under bright sunshine. African elephants are as naked as men—unlike the woolly mammoths, mastodons, and rhinoceroses, former residents of the northern ice age steppes. Along with those images I also see a petroglyph in a small rock shelter in East Africa showing running hunters chasing a wildebeest, just as the present-day Bushmen chase kudu and run them into submission.
We are not exempt from the physical and biological laws of necessity and constraint that govern all organisms. But this generalization applies especially to our exterior. The remarkable similarity of the DNA signatures of human groups living today suggests that our external differences are trivial; we are all derived from a small founder population, which lived as recently as about 89,000 years ago. We were arguably modest agents promoting species diversity by being responsible for splitting off a second species of louse, where two had sufficed previously and one fewer might suffice even now. However, we were never much “into” tolerance or promotion of diversity. Indeed, there is a puzzling if not disturbing record of disappearance of other human as well as other animal species whenever Homo sapiens arrived on the scene.
IN THE NORTH, THE HUMANS COMING OUT OF AFRICA encroached on the domain of the Neanderthal people, who had lived there for perhaps 250,000 years, over three ice ages. And by 30,000 years before the present we had replaced Homo neanderthalensis. This northern species was physiologically and behaviorally superbly adapted to a cold climate. Neanderthals had a brain as large as, or possibly slightly larger than, ours. We now consider them not to have been as innovative as Homo sapiens, by our standards (which include imagining supernatural beings, drawing pictures, etc.), but there is evidence that they did use fire, decorate their dead with flowers, and perhaps blow on bone flutes. They probably sang, talked, and played. As I will shortly suggest, they were probably also as hairy as bears. They didn’t succumb to the weather. They succumbed to something else.
The reason for the Neanderthals’ demise is extremely murky, and perhaps that is just as well for our collective ego. But there has been no lack of speculation about what they looked like and how they lived. Primarily, it is thought that since they did not change their stone implements, they were less imaginative than the invaders and would therefore have been outcompeted or killed off or both. I will here add my own two cents’ worth, which is not contrary to what has been found and said before, but it adds a zoological twist to the more common paleontological and anthropological perspectives.
First, I will return once more to body hair. If there is one thing which almost everyone agrees on (but for which there is not a stitch of direct evidence), I think it is that Neanderthals were furry. If even some Homo sapiens coming north possibly started to become furry (my speculation, from a limited sample of specimens) despite having invented clothes, then the Neanderthals living in the north for 200,000 years or more would have been furry. It might even be a fairly solid inference that they were more furry than any of us are now. Could they have been as furry as other northern mammals?