The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [109]
Probably the most dramatic claim for the Neanderthals’ “humanity” is the burial of their dead, which often included flowers strewn over carefully laid-out bodies in fetal positions. I used this example in my book How We Believe, on the origins of religion,27 but new research is challenging this interpretation. Klein noted that graves “may have been dug simply to remove corpses from habitation areas” and that in sixteen of twenty of the best documented burial sites “the bodies were tightly flexed (in near fetal position), which could imply a burial ritual or simply a desire to dig the smallest possible burial trench.”28 Paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall agreed: “Even the occasional Neanderthal practice of burying the dead may have been simply a way of discouraging hyena incursions into their living spaces, or have a similar mundane explanation, for Neanderthal burials lack the ‘grave goods’ that would attest to ritual and belief in an afterlife.”29
Much has been made about the possibility of Neanderthal language—that quintessential component of modern intelligence. This is inferential science at best, since soft brain tissue and vocal box structures do not fossilize. Inferences can be drawn from the hyoid bone, which is part of the vocal box structure, as well as the shape of the basicranium, or the bottom of the skull. But the discovery of part of an apparent Neanderthal hyoid bone is inconclusive, said Tattersall: “However the hyoid argument works out, however, when you put the skull-base evidence together with what the archaeological record suggests about the capacities of the Neanderthals and their precursors, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that articulate language, as we recognize it today, is the sole province of fully modern humans.”30
As for the cranial structure, in mammals the bottom of the cranium is flat but in humans it is arched (related to how high up in the throat the larynx is located). In ancestral hominids the basicranium shows no arching in australopithecines, some in Homo erectus, and even more in archaic Homo sapiens. In Neanderthals, however, the arching largely disappears, evidence that does not bode well for theories about Neanderthal language, as Leakey concluded: “Judging by their basicrania, the Neanderthals had poorer verbal skills than other archaic sapiens that lived several hundred thousands years earlier. Basicranial flexion in Neanderthals was less advanced even than in Homo erectus.”31
Leakey then speculated, counterfactually, what might have happened had even earlier hominid ancestors survived: “I conjecture that if, by some freak of nature, populations of Homo habilis and Homo erectus still existed, we would see in them gradations of referential language. The gap between us and the rest of nature would therefore be closed, by our own ancestors.”32 That “freak of nature” is the contingency in our time line that allowed us to survive while no other hominids did, and thus Leakey concluded, “Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendant of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.”33 Ian Tattersall also reasoned in the contingent mode: “If you’d been around at any earlier stage of human evolution, with some knowledge of the past, you might have been able to predict with reasonable accuracy what might be coming up next. Homo sapiens, however, is emphatically not an organism that does what its predecessors did, only a little better; it’s something very—and potentially very dangerously—different. Something extraordinary, if totally fortuitous, happened with the birth of our species.”34
Had Neanderthals won and we lost, there