The Neanderthal Mystery

By LEON JAROFF

At first the German workmen thought they had found the remains of an extinct cave bear. Quarrying for limestone on a summer day in 1856, they had blasted open a small cave on the side of a gorge called Neanderthal (Neander Valley), near Dusseldorf, and were digging up the cave floor with pickaxes when they came upon the strange skull and sturdy bones. Setting the skeletal remains aside, they kept digging, never dreaming that their discovery would soon spark confusion, dismay and heated debate that has continued to this day.

Those bones (and others since unearthed as far away as England in the north, Uzbekistan to the east and Israel in the south) are the remains of what have come to be known as the Neanderthals, a primitive people who lived from around 200,000 to 27,000 years ago. And while many misconceptions and mysteries about Neanderthals have been resolved, one question remains unanswered: Were the Neanderthals a branch on the evolutionary tree that withered and died while Homo sapiens -- modern human beings -- continued to evolve? Or were they really ancestors of at least some people living today?

At the time of the Neander Valley find, Charles Darwin had not yet published his famous The Origin of Species, and evolution was still, at best, only a hazy conjecture among a handful of scientists. Indeed, most people then believed that human beings had remained essentially unchanged since creation.

Examining the skullcap, ribs, part of the pelvis and some limb bones taken from the cave, Dr. William King, an Irish geologist, suggested that the fossil might be an extinct form of humanity, a different species. The skull, with its prominent brow ridge, led him to declare that "thoughts and desires which once dwelt within it never soared beyond those of a brute."

But most scientists of the time disputed even the Neanderthal man's antiquity. Rudolf Virchow, a respected German anatomist, pronounced the caveman to be a modern Homo sapiens, whose deformations were caused by rickets in childhood and arthritis later in life. And his flattened skull? He had suffered powerful blows to the head, Virchow opined.

Virchow's views were widely accepted until 1886, when two more Neanderthal skeletons were discovered in a cave in the Spy region of Belgium. While Virchow claimed that these too were the remains of diseased modern humans, other scientists regarded such a coincidence as unlikely; they were more impressed by primitive tools and the remnants of extinct animals found near the skeletons. The Neanderthals, they agreed, were ancient. Still, they insisted that, Darwin's controversial new theory notwithstanding, the strange creatures could not possibly be ancestral to exalted human beings like themselves.

Then, in the early 1900s, large numbers of Neanderthal skeletons were discovered, mainly in the Dordogne region of southern France. With these specimens in hand, scientists felt that they could better describe the physical appearance of a Neanderthal man, and the task of reconstructing one fell to noted French paleontologist Marcellin Boule.

Apparently burdened by preconceptions and the prevailing bias against the notion of Neanderthal ancestors, Boule concluded that a Neanderthal had prehensile feet, could not fully extend his legs, and thrust his head awkwardly forward because his spine prevented him from standing upright. In his scientific papers, Boule described the "brutish appearance of this muscular and clumsy body." This almost simian image persisted largely unchallenged for decades. Indeed, vestiges of it remain today in such manifestations as textbook illustrations, the Alley Oop cartoon strip, and in the pejorative use of "Neanderthal."

But the image was wrong. In 1957 American and British researchers re- examined the skeleton that Boule had studied and concluded that Neanderthals stood upright; the stooped posture of Boule's specimen was attributable to arthritis. Also the feet were not prehensile, nor was the | spine curved. They further noted that the Neanderthal's brain was as large as that of early modern humans, a fact that Boule ignored in his publications.

In the past few decades, the perception of Neanderthals has undergone still more changes. Evidence from various digs has revealed that they wielded simple tools, wore body ornaments, had religious rites and ceremoniously buried their dead.

But for all the research into Neanderthals, the relationship between them and modern humans is still a topic for hot debate. Some textbooks classify Neanderthals as a subspecies within Homo sapiens; others list a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis. British paleontologist Christopher Stringer is convinced that Neanderthals evolved in Europe from Homo erectus and suddenly became extinct between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago, unable to compete effectively with Homo sapiens originating in Africa. "In my view," he says, "they are a dead end -- highly evolved in their own direction but not in the direction of modern humans."

Among the experts who agree is Yoel Rak, an anatomist at Tel Aviv University. He believes "Neanderthals have nothing to do with our history." They may well have become extinct, he says, because they were too highly specialized -- probably well adapted to survive the frigid temperatures of Ice Age Europe. But when such conditions change, he notes, "the highly specialized creatures are at a tremendous disadvantage."

Other scientists say Neanderthal genes survive today. Milford Wolpoff, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, points to Neanderthal features in early Europeans as evidence that considerable interbreeding took place between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, who coexisted for tens of thousands of years in some regions.

Ofer Bar-Yosef, a Harvard University anthropologist, believes the intermingling occurred when the advance of Ice Age glaciers forced Neanderthals to move south into Homo sapiens' regions and when retreating glaciers allowed early Homo sapiens to follow Neanderthals back into northern climes. Still others, citing anatomical changes in the most recent Neanderthals, think they evolved independently into early Europeans.Wolpoff suggests a Solomonic solution for resolving the Neanderthal debate: phrasing the question correctly. "We can't be asking, 'Are Neanderthals the ancestors of humans?' " he says. "We should be asking, 'Are some Neanderthals ancestral to some Europeans?' And the answer is yes."

With reporting by Alice Park/New York, with other bureaus