There has been a mass, swag, or, as we would say here in New Zealand ‘raft’, of articles recently in the international press about the DNA that modern Eurasians have inherited from interspecies matings with Neanderthals. It seems that some 4% of our genes come from this source. And it has also been proven that the mating of Homo sapiens males with Neanderthal women would not give rise to viable offspring. The DNA comes from mitochondrial connections between Neanderthal males and modern women.
Bob Brockie, the Dominion Post newspaper’s marvellous NZ octogenarian science writer is of the opinion that the matings probably resulted from force majeure, on the lines of the rape of the beautiful, wise and sensitive Ayla by the thuggish Neanderthal clan leader Broud in Jean M. Auel’s ‘The Clan of the Cave Bear’. Well, Bob’s a scientist, so I am making a leap of faith about Ayla’s attributes and the fantasy that she looked like Cate Blanchett, Scarlet Johannson or Kate Middleton.
I cannot include any Black females from Sub-Saharan Africa here as they are likely to be 'Pure' Human Beings.
I cannot include any Black females from Sub-Saharan Africa here as they are likely to be 'Pure' Human Beings.
But 4% 'Non-human' is a large share for us Eurasians. In the round, we share 50% of our DNA with our mother, 25% with each of our 2 grandmothers, 12.5% with each of our 4 great grandmothers and 6.25% with each of our 8 great, great grandmothers.
Thanks to the digitization of historic Births, Marriages and Deaths records and of the Censuses in England since 1841, and their availability online, I can actually tell you the names of my 8 great, great grandmothers [and the additional four that I inherited from my stepfather]:
Ann Collinge b 1824, Lancashire
Eliza Jackson b 1831, Lancashire
Clara Elstob, b 1830, Norfolk
Mary Ann Henderson, b 1831, Cambridgeshire
Ann Hughes, b 1823, Northamptonshire
Sarah Robishaw, b 1825, Lancashire
Elizabeth Palfrey, b 1825, Devon
Martha Whatley, b 1843, Wiltshire
Mary Galley, b 1807, Cheshire
Ann Williamson, b 1823, Cheshire
Sarah Ellson, b 1815, Cheshire
Frances Miller b 1811, Cheshire
And I also know the names of a number of their mothers.
So the composite share we inherit from our ‘big-framed, barrel-chested cannibal and immensely powerful’ Neanderthal forebear is what we might expect from matings somewhere between the 'Great-great' and 'Great-great-great' generations. Not that far away if you are a keen family historian!
In the work that I have done on my own family, I spent comparatively little time on genealogy. I just used this as a framework for stories about the various families that I could build up from social and economic history sources, by placing my ancestors in their occupational, class and regional milieus. I have done this for pretty much all the families back to the G-G generation. The results are scattered around this blog if you are interested [together with similar stories for other families to which I am linked – including the family of Kate Middleton to which I am linked only by her fame].
Like Kate, I have ancestors back in the 1820s – 1840s who were half-starved agricultural labourers and peasant smallholders – and others who were modestly prosperous in a Middling Sort of way.
Anyhow, I can’t let the opportunity pass for me to record a story about 'G-G-G-father' Broud’s family. And what better way than to let H.G. Wells take us back to prehistory in his monumental book from 1920: ‘The Outline of History’. Both Wells and Brockie surmise that Neanderthals could speak and that they possessed complex patterns of thought that led them to inter their dead in the hope of an afterlife.
If there is an afterlife, and Broud has a spare moment to put down his harp on his cloud, I’m sure he will enjoy a quiet laugh at Wells’ account [my headings inserted].
‘OLD MAN SAVAGE DETHRONED
'In Worthington G. Smith's: 'Man the Primeval Savage; his haunts and relics from the hilltops of Bedfordshire to Blackwall’ (1894), there is a very vividly written description of early Palaeolithic life, from which much of the following account is borrowed. In the original, Mr. Worthington Smith assumes a more extensive social life, a larger community, and a more definite division of labour among its members than is altogether justifiable in the face of such subsequent writings as J. J. Atkinson's memorable essay on Primal Law.
For the little tribe Mr. Worthington Smith described, there has been substituted, therefore, a family group under the leadership of one Old Man, and the suggestions of Mr. Atkinson as to the behaviour of the Old Man have been worked into the sketch.
Mr. Worthington Smith describes a squatting-place near a stream, because primitive man, having no pots or other vessels, must needs have kept close to a water supply, and with some chalk cliffs adjacent from which flints could be got to work. The air was bleak, and the fire was of great importance, because fires once out were not easily relit in those days. When not required to blaze it was probably banked down with ashes.
The most probable way in which fires were started was by hacking a bit of iron pyrites with a flint amidst dry dead leaves ; concretions of iron pyrites and flints are found together in England where the gault and chalk approach each other.
The little group of people would be squatting about amidst a litter of fern, moss, and such-like dry material. Some of the women and children would need to be continually gathering fuel to keep up the fires. It would be a tradition that had grown up.
The young would imitate their elders in this task. Perhaps there would be rude wind shelters of boughs on one side of the encampment.
The Old Man, the father and master of the group, would perhaps be engaged in hammering flints beside the fire. The children would imitate him and learn to use the sharpened fragments. Probably some of the women would hunt good flints; they would fish them out of the chalk with sticks and bring them to the squatting-place.
There would be skins about. It seems probable that at a very early time primitive men took to using skins. Probably they were wrapped about the children, and used to lie upon when the ground was damp and cold. A woman would perhaps be preparing a skin. The inside of the skin would be well scraped free of superfluous flesh with trimmed flints, and then strained and pulled and pegged out flat on the grass, and dried in the rays of the sun.
Away from the fire other members of the family group prowl in search of food, but at night they all gather closely round the fire and build it up, for it is their protection against the wandering bear and such-like beasts of prey.
The Old Man is the only fully adult male in the little group. There are women, boys and girls, but so soon as the boys are big enough to rouse the Old Man's jealousy, he will fall foul of them and either drive them off or kill them. Some girls may perhaps go off with these exiles, or two or three of these youths may keep together for a time, wandering until they come upon some other group, from which they may try to steal a mate.
Then they would probably fall out among themselves. Some day, when he is forty years old perhaps or even older, and his teeth are worn down and his energy abating, some younger male will stand up to the Old Man and kill him and reign in his stead.
There is probably short shrift for the old at the squatting-place. So soon as they grow weak and bad-tempered, trouble and death come upon them.
‘EATING CATERPILLARS LIKE THE CHINESE, SNAILS AND FROGS LIKE THE FRENCH AND ROTTING GAME LIKE THE NOBS
What did they eat at the squatting-place?
"Primeval man is commonly described as a hunter of the great hairy mammoth, of the bear, and the lion, but it is in the highest degree improbable that the human savage ever hunted animals much larger than the hare, the rabbit, and the rat.
Man was probably the hunted rather than the hunter.
"The primeval savage was both herbivorous and carnivorous. He had for food hazel-nuts, beech-nuts, sweet chestnuts, earth-nuts, and acorns. He had crab-apples, wild pears, wild cherries, wild gooseberries, bullaces, sorbs, sloes, blackberries, yewberries, hips and haws, watercress, fungi, the larger and softer leaf-buds, Nostoc (the vegetable substance called 'fallen stars' by country folk), the fleshy, juicy, asparagus-like rhizomes or subterranean stems of the Labiatae and like plants, as well as other delicacies of the vegetable kingdom.
He had birds' eggs, young birds, and the honey and honeycomb of wild bees. He had newts, snails, and frogs the two latter delicacies are still highly esteemed in Normandy and Brittany. He had fish, dead and alive, and fresh-water mussels; he could easily catch fish with his hands and paddle and dive for and trap them. By the seaside he would have fish, mollusca, and seaweed.
He would have many of the larger birds and smaller mammals, which he could easily secure by throwing stones and sticks, or by setting simple snares. He would have the snake, the slow worm, and the crayfish. He would have various grubs and insects, the large Iarva of beetles and various caterpillars. The taste for caterpillars still survives in China, where they are sold in dried bundles in the markets.
A chief and highly nourishing object of food would doubtlessly be bones smashed up into a stiff and gritty paste.
"A fact of great importance is this primeval man would not be particular about having his flesh food over-fresh. He would constantly find it in a dead state, and, if semi-putrid, he would relish it none the less the taste for high or half-putrid game still survives.
If driven by hunger and hard pressed, he would perhaps sometimes eat his weaker companions or un-healthy children who happened to be feeble or unsightly or burthensome. The larger animals in a weak and dying state would no doubt be much sought for; when these were not forth-coming, dead and half-rotten examples would be made to suffice.
An unpleasant odour would not be objected to; it is not objected to now in many continental hotels.
"The savages sat huddled close together round their fire, with fruits, bones, and half-putrid flesh. We can imagine the old man and his women twitching the skin of their shoulders, brows, and muzzles as they were annoyed or bitten by flies or other insects. We can imagine the large human nostrils, indicative of keen scent, giving rapidly repeated sniffs at the foul meat before it was consumed ; the bad odour of the meat, and the various other disgusting odours belonging to a haunt of savages, being not in the least disapproved.
"Man at that time was not a degraded animal, for he had never been higher; he was therefore an exalted animal, and, low as we esteem him now, he yet represented the highest stage of development of the animal kingdom of his time."
That is at least an acceptable sketch of a Neanderthal squatting-place. But before extinction overtook them, even the Neanderthalers learnt much and went far.
‘DISPATCHING AND MATCHING – MONKEY-FACED AND HORSE-FACED STRANGERS ON THE BUS
Whatever the older Palaeolithic men did with their dead, there is reason to suppose that the later Homo Neanderthalensis buried some individuals at least with respect and ceremony.
One of the best-known Neanderthal skeletons is that of a youth who apparently had been deliberately interred. He had been placed in a sleeping posture, head on the right fore-arm. The head lay on a number of flint fragments carefully piled together "pillow fashion." A big hand-axe lay near his head, and around him were numerous charred and split ox bones, as though there had been a feast or an offering.
This sort of men may have wandered, squatted about their fires, and died in Europe for a period extending over 100,000 years, if we assume, that is, that the Heidelberg jaw-bone belongs to a member of the species, a period so vast that all the subsequent history of our race becomes a thing of yesterday.
Along its own line this species of men was accumulating a dim tradition, and working out its limited possibilities. Its thick skull imprisoned its brain, and to the end it was low-browed and brutish.
The Neanderthal type of man prevailed in Europe at least for tens of thousands of years. For ages that make all history seem a thing of yesterday, these nearly human creatures prevailed. If the Heidelberg jaw was that of a Neanderthaler, and if there is no error in the estimate of the age of that jaw, then the Neanderthal Race lasted out for more than 200,000 years!
Finally, between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago, as the Fourth Glacial Age softened towards more temperate conditions, a different human type came upon the scene, and, it would seem, exterminated Homo Neanderthalensis.
This new type was probably developed in South Asia or North Africa, or in lands now submerged.
The opinion that the Neanderthal race (Homo Neanderthalensis) is an extinct species which did not interbreed with the true men (Homo sapiens) is held by Professor Osborn, and it is the view to which the writer inclines and to which he has pointed in the treatment of this section; but it is only fair to the reader to note that many writers do not share this view.
They write and speak of living "Neanderthalers" in contemporary populations. One observer has written in the past of such types in the west of Ireland; another has observed them in Greece. These so-called "living Neanderthalers" have neither the peculiarities of neck, thumb, nor teeth that distinguish the Neanderthal race of pre-men. The cheek teeth of true men, for instance, have what we call fangs, long fangs; the Neanderthaler's cheek tooth is a more complicated and specialized cheek tooth, a long tooth with short fangs, and his canine teeth were less marked, less like dog-teeth, than ours.
At present we can only guess where and how, through the slow ages, parallel with the Neanderthal cousin, these first true men arose out of some more ape-like progenitor. For hundreds of centuries they were acquiring skill of hand and limb, and power and bulk of brain, in that still unknown environment. They were already far above the Neanderthal level of achievement and intelligence, when first they come into our ken, and they had already split into two or more very distinctive races.
No doubt the ancestor of Homo sapiens (which species includes the Tasmanians) was a very similar and parallel creature to Homo Neanderthalensis. And we are not so far from that ancestor as to have eliminated not indeed "Neanderthal," but "Neanderthaloid" types. The existence of such types no more proves that the Neanderthal species, the makers of the Chellean and Mousterian implements, interbred with Homo sapiens in the European area than do monkey-faced people testify to an interbreeding with monkeys; or people with faces like horses, that there is an equine strain in our population’.
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