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Essay / Field Notes

Neanderthals Traversed Vast Distances

Stone tools reveal the expansive regions connecting Europe to Asia covered by our explorer cousins.
Chagyrskaya Cave holds clues about Neanderthal dispersals from what is today Eastern Europe to Southern Siberia.

Chagyrskaya Cave holds clues about Neanderthal dispersals from what is today Eastern Europe to southern Siberia.

Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) fossils were first discovered in Western Europe in the mid-19th century. That was just the first in a long line of surprises thrown up by our closest evolutionary cousins.

We reveal another in our new study of the Neanderthals who lived in Chagyrskaya Cave in southern Siberia around 54,000 years ago. Their distinctive stone tools are dead ringers for those found thousands of kilometers away in Eastern and Central Europe.

The intercontinental journey made by these intrepid Neanderthals is equivalent to walking from Sydney to Perth or from New York to Los Angeles, and is a rare example of long-distance migration by Paleolithic people.

Knuckleheads no more

For a long time, Neanderthals were seen as intellectual lightweights. However, several recent finds have forced a rethink of their cognitive and creative abilities.

Neanderthals are now believed to have created 176,000-year-old enigmatic structures made from broken stalactites in a cave in France and cave art in Spain that dates back more than 65,000 years.

Their intercontinental odyssey over thousands of kilometers is a rarely observed case of long-distance dispersal in the Paleolithic.

They also used bird feathers and pierced shells bearing traces of red and yellow ochre, possibly as personal ornaments. It seems likely Neanderthals had cognitive capabilities and symbolic behaviors similar to those of modern humans (Homo sapiens).

Our knowledge of their geographical range and the nature of their encounters with other groups of humans has also expanded greatly in recent years.

We now know that Neanderthals ventured beyond Europe and Western Asia, reaching at least as far east as the Altai Mountains. Here, they interbred with another group of archaic humans dubbed the Denisovans.

Traces of Neanderthal interactions with our own ancestors also persist in the DNA of all living people of Eurasian descent. [1] As an update: Recent studies have shown that modern populations across Africa also carry DNA from Neanderthal ancestry. However, we can still only speculate why the Neanderthals vanished around 40,000 years ago.

Banished to Siberia

Other questions also remain unresolved. When did Neanderthals first arrive in the Altai? Were there later migration events? Where did these trailblazers begin their trek? And what routes did they take across Asia?

neanderthal tools - This photo displays a Micoquian biface, a stone knife for cutting meat used by Neanderthals at Chagyrskaya Cave.

This photo displays a Micoquian biface, a stone knife for cutting meat used by Neanderthals at Chagyrskaya Cave.

Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Chagyrskaya Cave is nestled in the foothills of the Altai Mountains. The cave deposits were first excavated in 2007 and have yielded almost 90,000 stone tools and numerous bone tools.

The excavations have also found 74 Neanderthal fossils—the richest trove of any Altai site—and a range of animal and plant remains, including the abundant bones of bison hunted and butchered by the Neanderthals.

We used optical dating to determine when the cave sediments, artifacts, and fossils were deposited, and conducted a detailed study of more than 3,000 stone tools recovered from the deepest archaeological levels. Microscopy analysis revealed that these have remained intact and undisturbed since accumulating during a period of cold and dry climate about 54,000 years ago.

Using a variety of statistical techniques, we show that these artifacts bear a striking similarity to so-called Micoquian artifacts from Central and Eastern Europe. This type of Middle Paleolithic assemblage is readily identified by the distinctive appearance of the bifaces—tools made by removing flakes from both sides—which were used to cut meat.

Micoquian-like tools have only been found at one other site in the Altai. All other archaeological assemblages in the Altai and Central Asia lack these distinctive artifacts.

Neanderthals carrying Micoquian tools may never have reached Denisova Cave, as there is no fossil or sedimentary DNA evidence of Neanderthals there after 100,000 years ago.

Going the distance

The presence of Micoquian artifacts at Chagyrskaya Cave suggests at least two separate dispersals of Neanderthals into southern Siberia. Sites such as Denisova Cave were occupied by Neanderthals who entered the region before 100,000 years ago, while the Chagyrskaya Neanderthals arrived later.

The Chagyrskaya artifacts most closely resemble those found at sites located 3,000–4,000 kilometers to the west, between the Crimea and Northern Caucasus in Eastern Europe.

Comparison of genetic data supports these geographical links, with the Chagyrskaya Neanderthal sharing closer affinities with several European Neanderthals than with a Neanderthal from Denisova Cave.

Neanderthal remains and stone and bone artifacts offer a window into Neanderthal migrations.

Kseniya Kolobova, Maciej Krajcarz, Victor Chabal

When the Chagyrskaya toolmakers (or their ancestors) left their Neanderthal homeland in Eastern Europe for Central Asia around 60,000 years ago, they could have headed north and east around the land-locked Caspian Sea, which was much reduced in size under the prevailing cold and arid conditions.

Their intercontinental odyssey over thousands of kilometers is a rarely observed case of long-distance dispersal in the Paleolithic and highlights the value of stone tools as culturally informative markers of ancient population movements.

Environmental reconstructions from the animal and plant remains at Chagyrskaya Cave suggest that the Neanderthal inhabitants survived in the cold, dry, and treeless environment by hunting bison and horses on the steppe or tundra-steppe landscape.The ConversationThe Conversation

Our discoveries reinforce the emerging view of Neanderthals as creative and intelligent people who were skilled survivors. If this was the case, it makes their extinction across Eurasia even more mysterious. Did modern humans deal the fatal blow? The enigma endures, for now.

Kseniya Kolobova is an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She specializes in Neanderthal material culture. Kolobova receives funding from the Russian Science Foundation—Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Cooperation.

Maciej T. Krajcarz is an associate professor and a senior researcher at the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is also a head of the Stable Isotopes Laboratory at the institute. As a geologist, he is interested in the depositional processes and post-depositional disturbances of sediments in cave environments. Krajcarz’s particular focus is on the impacts of post-depositional geological processes on the taphonomy and preservation of archaeological and paleontological assemblages. He receives funding from the National Science Centre, Poland.

Richard “Bert” Roberts is the director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage at the University of Wollongong, where he is also a distinguished professor. He is interested in past interactions between hunter-gatherers and their environments in Africa, Asia, and Australia. Much of his career has been spent investigating turning points in human evolution and dispersal, including the timing, causes, and ecological consequences of archaic and modern human migrations. Given his multidisciplinary research interests, Roberts publishes across the fields of geochronology, archaeological science, human evolution, and terrestrial ecosystems.

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