Are you smarter than a Neanderthal?

Pop culture depictions of Neanderthals largely involve grunting, ape-like pre-humans carrying around a club.

Eboni Westbury wants to challenge these stereotypes. The PhD scholar from The Australian National University (ANU) says her research is taking aim at “the human superiority complex”.

“There’s this concept that evolution is this linear progression from lesser, ape-like beings to us humans – the ultimate goal,” Westbury says.

While Neanderthals evolved about 300,000 years ago and homo sapiens (aka modern humans) can be traced back to 200,000 years ago, this evolution wasn’t a straightforward sequence. Instead, it involves overlapping and criss-crossing histories. Research shows that humans and Neanderthals interacted with each other for up to 200,000 years.

Westbury points to genetic studies that show non-African modern humans can have up to four per cent Neanderthal DNA.

“This just goes to show that we could obviously communicate with them in some way. They had to be smarter than what we originally thought,” she says

But where did the idea of unintelligent Neanderthals come from?

Skulls and skeletons in the closet

In 1864, amateur naturalist Johan Fuhlrott identified a skull found in the Neander Valley in Germany as what he called a new species – Homo Neanderthalensis.

Using phrenology, a now-discredited and racist pseudoscience that posited skull shapes could predict mental and behavioural traits, scientists of the time deemed the skull to be from a lesser human.

“They basically looked at this Neanderthal skull and said if it looks less like a white homo sapien, then it must be less complex,” Westbury says.

“Because of this, people thought that Neanderthals were more ape-like, rather than more human-like, and so they thought that Neanderthals weren’t able to do all of these things that have been relegated to ‘complex human behaviours’,” Westbury says.

These complex human behaviours include being able to communicate, make fire and hunt, rather than scavenging for food.

It took hundreds of years of scientific thought to counteract these initial assumptions.

“By about the 1950s, researchers started to consider Neanderthals as hunters rather than scavengers,” Westbury says.

“That was a big, pivotal moment in research because it is a more complex behaviour – they had an ability to work in groups and formulate ideas to capture food.”

It wasn’t until geneticist Svante Pääbo isolated Neanderthal DNA in 1997 that a wider group of researchers across a number of disciplines – archaeology, genetics, anthropology and more – began breaking down misconceptions of Neanderthals’ intelligence.

Changing the story

Westbury’s investigation into complex Neanderthal behaviour involves analysing animal bones to understand what Neanderthals hunted and ate.

“Now that Neanderthals are commonly accepted to have been hunters, there is still this conception that they stuck to large game like deer, bison and horse,” she says.

“But anything more difficult to hunt – particularly smaller, fast game like rabbit – that needed more complex hunting methods is still relegated to modern humans.”

Westbury’s initial data analysis of 250,000 bone fragments found during archaeological digs in Spain suggests Neanderthals were hunting a diverse array of animals, requiring different hunting techniques and an understanding of animal migration patterns.

“Neanderthals would have been living at the site at certain times of the year during periods animal migration, hunting young deer and horses as they were moving through,” Westbury says.

“But we also have rabbit bones that have cut marks and butchery marks on them.

“We don’t have any birds, but bird bones have been found at other sites as well.”

The recent discovery of the fossil of a Neanderthal child with Down’s syndrome suggests another complex behaviour – compassionate and altruistic caregiving.

For Westbury, updating the image of stereotypical Neanderthal behaviour is not only a scientific endeavour, but also a matter of ethics and a need for homo sapien compassion. It pushes back on understanding the world, and humanity, in a hierarchical manner.

“This goes way beyond science,” Westbury says.

“It helps to merge different cultures together to be more understanding. It is all about engaging with the wider world as it is, rather than something else that we control and manipulate.

“There is no real hierarchy – everything has its place, and we are part of that bigger place.”