Neandertals were hunters and gatherers that lived during the Middle and
Upper Paleolithic. Their life was rough and rigorous. It was so harsh that
their average life span was from forty to forty-five years of age. Many
aspects of their behavior contributed to this. One of these was the way
in which these hominids hunted their sustenance. Neandertals participated
in close range kills, meaning that they were literally in less than a foot's
proximity of their prey when they attacked it. They hunted with wooden
spears, hafted with stone tips, and thrusted them into animals a few inches
away. In order to do this, Neandertals must have had outstanding stamina.
However, it was due to this close combat with larger game that they gained
several injuries that left permanent tell tale marks of pain on their bones.
For example, forty-years-old was an elderly age for a Neandertal. Their
forty years would be the equivalent of our sixty or eighty years.
Another hunting technique used by these ancestors was to drive a
large herd of animals over a cliff, or elevated surface, while their comrades
awaited at the bottom to slaughter the animal or animals. The carcasses
would be carved up and carried back to their living camps for the rest
of the clan. An example of this was found at the La Quina site in France,
where archaeologists found piled up bones "of bovids, horses, and reindeer
beneath a steep cliff as the aftermath of a 'cliff drive,' a cooperative
and therefore planned hunting technique" (Shreeve 1995:160).
Of course some paleoanthropologist do disagree with the fact that Neandertals
were capable of hunting for their own food. Louis Binford, more commonly
know as "the Father of New Archaeology," happens to be one of these individuals.
He believes that Neandertals did more scavenging than they did hunting.
Where did he get this assumption? Well, after analyzing evidence from the
Combe Grenal site, in the Dordogne region of France, he claimed that Neandertals
hunted medium-sized animals. such as reindeer and red deer, but that they
continued to scavenge larger animals, like horses and wild cattle. As a
result, Binford stated that the main staple of Neandertals "was not flesh
at all. Judging from the traces of pollen left on flake tools at the site,
it was aquatic plants plucked from the canyon streams. Cattails to be exact"
(Shreeve 1995:160). There only seems to be one problem with Binford's interpretation.
The site he examined was extremely close to an aquatic resource. The Dordogne
River happens to be right at the site he examined. Therefore the was an
bias in the interpretation. Basically this means that Binford's theory
cannot be applied to all Neandertals.
There is little evidence of Neandertals planning. It appears that they
were spontaneously setting out to hunt and forage, relying only on "running
into food" during the day. Erik Trinkaus, a professor at Washington
Univerity, St. Louis, analyzed Neandertal thigh bones and concluded that
they "were much more accustomed to moving continuously and in all
directions, side to side, up terrain and down, in an irregular pattern
quite unlike the straight-on gait of modern hunter-gatherers" (Shreeve
1995:156). Binford feels that "Neandertals might have lacked what he calls
'planning depth,' the ability to anticipate future events and future availability
of food. They could not predict patterns in a dynamic and changing landscape"
(Johanson, Johanson, and Edgar 1994:263). Binford specifically uses salmon
as an example of rich food exploited by modern people. It was plentiful
during the Paleolithic spring-time when Cro-Magnon greatly gathered it),
in the rivers of southwestern France, an area densely inhabited ny Neandertals.
This is quite revealing when looking at the Neandertal human diet. Not
only did they neglect taking advantage of the abundance of salmon, which
was highly nutritional, but evidence indicates that they "failed to exploit
the annual reindeer migrations, an even more abundant, if less predictable,
source of protein" (Shreeve 1995:155). According to Mary Ursula Brennen,
an anthropologist at New York University, Neandertals suffered from nutritional
stress. She stated that if people do not receive sufficient nutrients in
the first seven years of their lives, their teeth do not fully develop,
a condition known as hypoplasia (Rudavsky 1991:55). Brennen tested more
than 300 Neandertal remains for this disease and found that 40% suffered
from this ailment. This indicates that edible resources were definitely
scarce.
Andre Mariotti, a geochemist at the Marie Curie University in Paris, contradicts
Binford's cattail's theory by using chemical analysis to show ate little
other than meat. He derived his thesis from testing Neandertal bone collagen,
checking their levels of carbon-13 and nitrogen-15. There is more N-15
in carnivores than herbivores and C-13 ratios directly reflect corresponding
isotope ratios in plants, giving a host of clues about the types of plants
in the diet. From his results, Mariotti indicated that Neandertal "dietary
habits lay somewhere between those of the wolf and the fox--the wolf eats
almost entirely meat but the fox gets some of its protein from occasional
meals of fruits, grain, and even tree leaves" (Dorozynski and Anderson
1991:520).
Another example of this dietary behavior is that Neandertals apparently
remained all year in the same area, and were not seasonal followers, like
their successors. At the Near East site of Kebara, a Neandertal mixed selection
of refuse bones were discovered in a dump. When they were examined and
identified, they proved that, like the Neandertals in the Dordogne, who
remained in their areas year-round, "the Kebaran people were hunting and
scavenging whatever food was walking or flying around in the immediate
vicinity" (Shreeve 1995:185). These were medium and small sized animals
like deer, horses, tortoise, birds, and gazelle. This evidence points to
regionalistic individuals, who remained in an area of relatively plenty,
rather than migrating seasonally in pursuit of a particular kind of game.
Staying in one area for lengthy amounts of time posed many threats for
the Neandertals. The most dangerous being depleting their food supply,
which meant that each meal became more difficult to obtain (Allman 1996:54).
This caused difficulties such as bouts with starvation and malnourishment.
Neandertals were one of the first human groups to have the ability to decide
how they ate. They did this by controlling the use of fire and, more than
likely, cooked their food. Neandertals also used fire to produce warmth
to survive freezing Ice Age temperatures. Although they
knew how to construct cooking hearths, they "did not know how to coax more
heat from a fireplace by lining it with stones or digging ventilation channels"
(Shreeve 1995:184). Unlike Cro-Magnon Man, who heated and placed them beside
his body to keep warm, there is no evidence of fire-cracked rocks at Neandertal
sites to indicated that they acted likewise. They probably huddled close
to fires to stay warm during cold nights.
