The Neanderthals were closely related to us. Despite this, they just couldn’t produce technology as good as ours. Until they met us, that is. Once humans arrived in their homeland Neanderthals started making tools a lot like ours. Coincidence? Or maybe Neanderthals stole human technology.
Explaining this technological leap has been a controversial subject for decades. Some even argue it never really happened. The more complex “copied” technology could be an intrusion from more recent human layers.
However, an examination of the complex “Neanderthal” technology has finally honed in on the real answer. And it turns out Neanderthal thievery may be the best explanation.
The Châtelperronian revolution
For hundreds of thousands of years Neanderthals lived alone in Europe. During this time they developed a toolkit that was cutting edge (and produced a pretty good cutting edge, hahahaha).
This tookit was called the Mousterian and its crowning glory was the Levallois technique. This was an inventive way of rapdily producing standardised tools. A rock was carefully shaped beforehand. It was prepared in such a way that a single blow would knock off the desired tool. The really inventive part was that the rock was pre-prepared so that the removal of this tool would set up the next tool. Which could then be instantly removed, setting up the next tool. And so on and so on.
I like to imagine Neanderthals wandering around the landscape, “reloading” their tools with new points from an ammo-core. Neanderthal Call of Duty anyone?
Meanwhile humans were off developing their own toolkit. This came to be known as the Aurignacian and was thought to be vastly superior to the Mousterian. It turns out that it wasn’t quite that good, but still had a few key advantages over the Neanderthal toolkit. In particular, it frequently employed blades and bladelets. These are very thin tools, longer than they are wide. Whilst that might sound simple, it offers a number of key important advantages. Like having a larger cutting surface and using less raw material.
Neanderthals sometimes made blades, but never bladelets (and humans sometimes made Mouseterian tools too). Still, it must have been quite a shock for both parties when they met each other. Each dominated by an unusual technology.
This shock doesn’t seem to have had too much of an impact on humans. They kept making their Aurignacian tools. However, things began to change amongst the Neanderthals. They began swapping out their Levallois tools for the blades and bladelets the humans made. Before modern humans arrived >50% of tools at a Neanderthal blade site were still Levallois. Afterwards the blades were in the majority. The Neanderthals also adopted a human technique called “retouching”, which was rare in the Mousterian. As the name suggest, this involved “touching up” tools. This kept them sharp so they could keep being used.
The “human” toolkit adopted by the Neanderthals is called the Chatelperronian.
French Neanderthals stole our stuff
How did the Neanderthals get their hands on the human toolkit? The Chatelperronian has been the subject of intense debate.
Maybe the Neanderthals acquired technology made by humans. Perhaps through trade or just outright stole it from our campsites. Yet – apart from our interbreeding – the evidence for interaction between the two species is frustratingly scarce. Even interbreeding may have been relatively rare.
What if the Neanderthals invented it all on their own? They weren’t exactly dumb, despite their reputation. For sure they did independently invent one “human” tool. It was manufactured by Neanderthals before humans arrived. So not everything was traded. However, the timing of the rest of the Chatelperronian is very convinient. It’s all after humans arrived.
Others have “solved” this problem by claiming there’s no problem. The Neanderthals never made the Chatelperronian. Most of the sites were later inhabited by modern humans. What if human technology just got mixed in with the Neanderthal remains underneath. Except this wasn’t the case for all the sites. No Aurignacian humans occupied the site of Quicay, France. Yet there is Chatelperronian stuff there. It can’t all be a later intrusion.
Whilst Quincay refutes one idea, it might hold the key to what really happened. Archaeologists examined the Chatelperronian tools from the site, focusing on how they were made. This revealed a curious fact. Whilst the blades and bladelets mimicked the form seen in the Aurignacian, the technique used to produce them was very different.
In fact, these differences can be quantified. The archaeologists noted that a combination of 24 variables went into making the tools. The interplay between these variables produces a highly distinctive “fingerprint” on the manufacture of each tool. And the tools from Quincay lack the human fingerprint. This confirms humans weren’t making the tools.
So it can’t be the case the Neanderthals were trading or stealing these tools from human camps. They were actually making them. And they were making them deliberately. How else to account for the fact a different technique was making the same end product?
This confirms Neanderthals were copying human technology. Of course, more Chatelperronian sites need to be examined to show that this wasn’t just a one off. But the evidence still seems pretty clear cut.
French Neanderthals stole our tools. It’s the worlds first case of copyright infringement.
Human-like tools were found at a Neanderthal site. But humans didn’t make them. This reveals our designs were stolen by those meddling hominins.
Bar-Yosef, O. and Bordes, J.G., 2010. Who were the makers of the Châtelperronian culture?.Journal of human evolution, 59(5), pp.586-593.
Delagnes, A., 2000. Blade production during the middle paleolithic in northwestern Europe. InProceedings of 1999 Beijing International Symposium on Paleoanthropology (Vol. 181, p. 181). Acta Anthropologica Sinica Beijing.
Roussel, M., Soressi, M. and Hublin, J.J., 2016. The Châtelperronian conundrum: Blade and bladelet lithic technologies from Quinçay, France.Journal of Human Evolution, 95, pp.13-32.