Fastidious Females

Neanderthals are those individuals and they are legion in any society, who prefer to grudgingly live in a state of intolerance with others among them in a pluralist society. They are constantly aggrieved, combative, irritatingly patriarchal in their attitudes, exhibiting miserable temperaments. They're the truculent miseries one would prefer not to live next to in a neighbourhood.

A throwback to a primitive era when Homo Sapiens lived alongside, but didn't much concern themselves with those sub-humans called Neanderthals.

Neanderthals butchered animals, made tools and gathered round the fire in different parts of their caves.Photo: AFP 

 

So wasn't there a comeuppance not that long ago when science and paleoarchaeology revealed that those low-browed, hulking, hairy sub-humans were possessed of a larger brain -- ostensibly for reasoning -- than their slighter, more humanly-advanced cousins, Homo Sapiens Sapiens... There appears also to be some scuttlebutt of a truly irritating quality that they had concerns and motivations and appreciations that should really be the purview of fully human creatures.

And now, the humiliating news that Neanderthals had a sense of aesthetics, and of the utility of basic hygiene practices. Oh, and a practical sense as well. Recent excavation of a Northern Italy cave where Neanderthals were said to have lived led to the discovery that they arranged their living areas for particular purposes. Their caves, in other words, were designed purposefully to have specific areas for meal preparations and for sleeping, and never the twain did meet.

Archeologists excavate Neanderthal levels at Riparo Bombrini in northwest Italy.
Credit: Fabio Negrino

Sharp-edged weapons and culinary objects were kept well away from possible casual contact to avoid accidents. Fires were lit for warmth and comfort at the back of the cave so the heat would circulate (and doubtless the suffocating smoke particles) throughout the cave, finally ventilating at its opening. And the areas where sleeping took place were void of the detritus and waste that might accumulate through the butchering of game meant to please the savage palate.

But it's true enough, these findings by Professor Julien Riel-Salvatore of the University of Colorado-Denver, and published in the Canadian Journal of Archaeology, that areas for working and preparing food were maintained quite separately from sleeping areas. "Instead of Neanderthals just discarding artifacts everywhere, there was some kind of pattern in terms of where they did their activities", he explained.

"The distribution seems to have followed some kind of logic. We see that stone tools are found to be concentrated towards the outside, so that sharp pieces of stones wouldn't injure them. Most animal bones also seem to be concentrated outside the shelter. They are segregating activities so as not to have rotting bones inside." Obviously, the early civilizing attempts by female Neanderthals on their hunting spouses.

"We often get a sense that before Homo Sapiens there's some kind of qualitative difference in behaviour among prehistoric humans. This ability to organize has been seen as a key difference. Well, this study is chipping away at the preconception that Neanderthals were just like another species of large primates, rather than modern humans", explained Professor Riel-Salvatore.