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…
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…
Did Neanderthals marry? Not in any form we would recognise today — there were no ceremonies, no rings, no vows preserved in the archaeological record.…
I split a marrow bone once with a hammerstone — a real one, at an experimental archaeology session. The crack was louder than I expected.…
I used to imagine Neanderthals as fixed to their caves — born in one, living in it, dying in it. That image is completely wrong.…
I sometimes wonder what a disagreement looked like. Not a fight — we have the skeletal evidence for those — but the quieter kind of…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I keep thinking about fingers pressed into soft stone. Not the kind of accidental smudge you leave on a windowpane, but deliberate, organized strokes —…
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…
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.…
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…
Here is a thought experiment worth sitting with. Take a modern structural engineer — someone with a postgraduate degree, two decades of field experience, and…
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,…