Did Neanderthals Have an Incest Taboo? What Ancient Genetics Reveals
Did Neanderthals have an incest taboo? The question sounds almost too modern to ask of a species that vanished 40,000 years ago — but the…
Neanderthals
Did Neanderthals Marry?
Did Neanderthals marry? Not in any form we would recognise today — there were no ceremonies, no rings, no vows preserved in the archaeological record.…
What Did a Neanderthal Eat for Breakfast? Reconstructing a Day of Ice Age Meals
I split a marrow bone once with a hammerstone — a real one, at an experimental archaeology session. The crack was louder than I expected.…
How Far Did Neanderthals Travel? The Geography of an Ice Age Life
I used to imagine Neanderthals as fixed to their caves — born in one, living in it, dying in it. That image is completely wrong.…
Who Led a Neanderthal Band? Power, Influence, and Survival Politics
I sometimes wonder what a disagreement looked like. Not a fight — we have the skeletal evidence for those — but the quieter kind of…
Did Neanderthals Have “School”? How Ice Age Children Learned to Survive
I once watched a nine-year-old try to split a river cobble with a hammerstone at an experimental archaeology workshop. She swung hard, missed the platform…
What a Winter Night in a Neanderthal Camp Might Have Sounded Like
I try sometimes to strip the noise away. The electrical hum. The road traffic. The distant aircraft. I try to hear what someone sitting beside…
When Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens Shared the Same Valley
I once stood at the mouth of a limestone cave in southern France and tried to imagine two different peoples watching the same herd of…
Did Neanderthals Bury Their Dead? What Flowers in a Cave Might Mean<
In 1960, deep inside a cave in the Zagros Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, an archaeologist uncovered the skeleton of a Neanderthal man lying on his…
Neanderthal Art Wasn’t an Accident: What Cave Marks Reveal About Their Minds
I keep thinking about fingers pressed into soft stone. Not the kind of accidental smudge you leave on a windowpane, but deliberate, organized strokes —…
They Lived to 50 and 60: How Neanderthals Kept Their Elders Alive
I once stood in a museum gallery staring at a plaster cast of a skeleton so battered it looked like it had been through a…
Clothing Before Needles: How Neanderthals Survived Ice Age Winters
Think about putting on a coat this winter. You reach into a closet, pull something off a hanger, and zip it up in three seconds.…
Did Neanderthals Have Animal Allies? What Wolves and Ravens May Have Noticed
I once stood at the edge of a forest clearing in central Germany, watching a pair of ravens circle overhead while a fox picked through…
They Made Synthetic Glue 200,000 Years Ago. We Called Them Primitive
Here is a thought experiment worth sitting with. Take a modern structural engineer — someone with a postgraduate degree, two decades of field experience, and…
After the Hunt Was Over: The Social Life of a Neanderthal Band
We have reconstructed the hunt. We have mapped the hearths, measured the scrapers, catalogued the bones. We know what Neanderthals ate, what tools they made,…