Last stand of the hairy, dumb Neanderthal

I read an award winning paper, recently, that I want to take issue with.

http://xchar.home.att.net/n2a/medhyp.htm

Judith Rich Harris makes the case that humans are hairless because stone age members of Homo Sapiens wanted hairless babies. It is an intriguing hypothesis, but sadly, she constructs it on the edifice of the once traditional view that Neanderthals were hairless savages.

I think it is not particularly difficult to falsify her claims about Neanderthals, in fact, without going to a whole lot of trouble.

She points out, using a passage of Robinson Crusoe, that man has to go to a lot of trouble with animal hides to replace a feature that he has lost. While this is true, what she does not point out is that a lot of this is trouble we know that Neanderthals themselves went to. Neanderthal tooth wear pattern strongly suggests they used their teeth to soften hides, because their tooth wear pattern is almost exactly the same as those of pre-twentieth century Inuit. We know from the Mousterian toolkit that certain forms of Levallois flakes (scrapers) were used to clean hides.

Leaving aside that unclothed people of the modern variety have lived in the cold, such as Tasmania and Tierra del Fuego, Harris speculates that Neanderthal hairiness was needed because of all the generations they faced in the ice age without using needles; she writes, “The evidence strongly suggests that Neanderthals did not invent or use the needle and that they could not sew.”

But you don't need needles to make clothes. Look at how a deerskin shirt laces up! No – what you do need is an awl. And Neanderthals did make those. And borers, which can also punch holes.

She writes, “If I am correct in proposing that hairlessness is a characteristic only of our species of primate, then it would have arisen no longer ago than 200,000 years.”

And yet how then to explain the fact that, from the neck down, the hominid line from Homo Ergaster on down is almost completely modern? I don't mean a little bit modern, but very near completely. Human hairlessness is not a casual adaptation – hairlessness enables the most efficient heat dissipation system heretofore seen among mammals. We have more ability to sweat than any other mammal, and sweat dries fast enough due to hairlessness in such a way as to grant us a tremendous ability to dissipate heat. (Zihlman and Cohn, 1988)

It defies imagination to accept that Homo Ergaster seems to have adapted our 'built for endurance' physiology, and yet – simply so this author can get her paper right – lacks this one critical adaptation necessary for the well known prowess man has for endurance! And indeed, the evidence shows that the early Homo line did not lack the sweat wicking benefits hairlessness provides. Rogers, Iltis, and Wooding show that consistent dark pigmentation in modern African populations can be traced, at minimum, to about 1.2 million years ago – strong selection forces kept this gene uniform.

And yet in hairy chimpanzees, no similar pressures appear to have ever existed. This is not a coincidence. The pressure on humans to stay dark came from the fact that their skin was exposed to the sun.

Harris never touches on the apparent evidence of Neanderthal self-decoration – they made necklaces, and used ocher and manganese dioxide – substances which, at that time, had no non-decorative purposes. We know they were not using these paints to paint on cave walls, which seems to be the exclusive preserve of our own species. This strongly suggests they were only painting themselves. "Black pigments, mostly manganese dioxides, and to a lesser extent fragments of ochre, come from at least seventy layers excavated at forty Neandertal sites in Europe." (D'Errico, 2003)

There's a very clear picture emerging – not only were Neanderthals probably hairless (since if they were decorating their skin, they had bare skin to decorate), but we can even infer something about skin colour: they were pale (since they were drawing on themselves with dark manganese.)

The Neanderthal genome project notes, “Approximately 99% of the Homo sapiens genome is identical to the chimpanzee genome, our closest living relative. It is estimated that the Neandertal shares 96% of the 1% difference with Homo Sapiens. The Neandertal shares the remaining 4% of the difference with the chimpanzee.” (454 Life Sciences, see http://www.imakenews.com/cure/e_article000649656.cfm?x=b11,0,w)

At 99.96% - and knowing some morphological features of a Neanderthal are chimp-like (prognathus mid-face, brow ridges, receding forehead), and that the rest are human like, I think it is fair to guess that if Neanderthals share 96% of the specific adaptations we have made, that the heat dissipation of modern humans is one of them – the evidence for clothing and self decorating are far too strong to ignore.

The author at one point makes the completely speculative, wild, and unsupported claim that Neanderthals disappeared as a result of Homo Sapiens eating them because they were hairy. No evidence from the Middle or Upper Paleolithic has ever surfaced that this is so – we know what both species ate; examining the hearths of each species tells us a great deal about diet, and the cave paintings of Cro-Magnon man tell us even more. Ibex, auroch, shellfish are associated with the “last stand” Neanderthals of Gibraltar. Modern humans ate just about anything – but never, never have Neanderthals shown up in their hearths or campsites, and the only butchered Neanderthal remains ever recovered are associated with Mousterian assemblages (meaning their own kind did it.)

So if modern man does not show any evidence of having butchered and processed Neanderthals at their campsites, the reason is fairly obvious - they never in fact did so.

Sadly, the author trots out the tired notions about Sapiens intellectual superiority, largely unsupported by the fossil record. She refers to “better brains and a better toolkit.” The alleged superiority of Sapiens tools is in many ways undemonstrated – Levallois blades no more than a micron thick at the blade can't actually be improved on, not even with surgical steel. Then there's the fact that at the same time Sapiens were developing the Aurignacian toolkit, Neanderthals were developing the nearly equal Chatelperronian toolkit. And there are technologies Neanderthals developed that moderns did not develop until the Neolithic, such as developing an anaerobically manufactured tar to haft spear points in the Harz mountains, 70,000 years ago. (Koller/Baumer/Mania, 2001)

While it is true there is an aesthetic superiority to Aurignacian tools – nobody should mistake this for a functional superiority. For other than the advent of needles, there wasn't one.

As for the superiority of modern brains, Neanderthals had larger ones, and there is some evidence that a modern gene for regulating brain size comes from them. (Lahn/Evans/Mekel-Bobrov/Vallender/Hudson, 2006)