War in the Time of Neanderthals

Did Neanderthal military superiority delay our migration out of Africa?

Neanderthals by Charles R. Knight, 1920

Around 600,000 years ago, humanity split in two. One group, our ancestors, stayed in Africa, becoming Homo sapiens. The other struck out overland into Asia and Europe. They became Homo neanderthalensis -Neanderthals- not our direct ancestors, but a sister species, evolving in parallel.

            Neanderthals fascinate us because of what they tell us about ourselves- who we once were, who we might have become. So it’s tempting to see them in idyllic terms- living in peace with nature and each other, like Adam and Eve in the Garden. If that were the case, then maybe modern society’s ills- particularly our tendencies towards territoriality, violence, war- might be modern aberrations, not innate and ancestral. But biology and paleontology paint a darker picture. Far from peaceful, Neanderthals were probably highly skilled fighters and dangerous warriors, rivalled only by modern humans. If so, then our tendency towards violence is likely both ancient and instinctive, not a recent invention.

Violent Animals

Predatory land mammals, especially pack-hunters, are territorial. Neanderthals were cooperative big-game hunters, like lions, wolves- and modern humans. These animals, at the top of the food chain, have few predators of their own to control their numbers. That means due to competition for food, they fight over hunting territory. Neanderthals probably faced the same problem- if other species didn’t control their populations, conflict between them would have.

            What’s more, territorial conflict is also common in primates. And it’s particularly intense in our closest relatives, chimpanzees. Male chimps routinely gang up to attack and kill males from other bands, a pattern strikingly similar to the warfare practiced by Homo sapiens. This hints that cooperative aggression evolved in the common ancestor of chimps and ourselves, ~6 million years ago. If so, Neanderthals inherited the same tendencies towards social violence.

All Too Human

Warfare, meanwhile, is an intrinsic part of being human. War isn’t a modern invention, but an ancient, fundamental part of our humanity. Historically, all peoples- Aztecs, Zulus, Aboriginal Australians, Maori, Pygmies, Inuit, Celts- waged war. Our oldest stories, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad, Herodotus’ histories- are full of war stories. Archaeology reveals ancient hill forts, the sites of prehistoric raids and massacres, going back millennia.

To war then, is human- and Neanderthals were very, very human. We’re remarkably similar in the anatomy of our skeletons and skulls, and share 99.7% of our DNA. Behaviorally, Neanderthals were incredibly like us. They made fire, engaged in ritual burial, fashioned jewelry from seashells and animal teeth. They used ochre pigments, possibly for makeup, made art and stone circles. Given that they shared so many of our creative instincts, they probably shared our destructive instincts as well.

Violent Lives

The archaeological record tends to support what we might guess from biology and anthropology-Neanderthal lives were anything but peaceful.

Neanderthalensis were skilled big game hunters, using spears to take down deer, ibex, elk, bison, even rhinos and wooly mammoths. It defies belief that Neanderthal hunters would have hesitated to use these weapons, if their loved ones and lands were threatened. Archaeology suggests that such conflicts were commonplace.

The Saint-Césaire Neanderthal skull. The skull, 36,000 years old, shows evidence of a blow delivered with a sharp implement.

            Prehistoric warfare leaves telltale signs. A club to the head is one of the quickest ways to kill someone- a club is a fast, powerful, precise weapon- and prehistoric human populations often show high frequencies of trauma to the skull. So too do neanderthals. Another sign of warfare seen in tribal humans is the parry fracture- breaks to the lower arm, defensive wounds caused by warding off blows. Neanderthals also show a lot of broken arms. At least one Neanderthal, found in Shanidar Cave in Iraq, was impaled by a spear to the chest. Some of these injuries could concievably have been sustained in hunting, but the patterns are entirely consistent with what one would predict for an ancient people routinely engaging in warfare.

The Neanderthal Resistance

            Last, warfare leaves a less obvious mark in the form of territorial boundaries. The strongest evidence that Neanderthals not only waged war, but were good at it, is that they met us and weren’t immediately overrun.

Instead, for perhaps 100,000 years or more, Neanderthals resisted modern human expansion out of Africa.

Why else would we have taken so long to leave Africa? Not because we weren’t clever enough. Neanderthals and Homo erectus left Africa long before us. The only plausible reason that humans didn’t occupy the Middle East was that it was already occupied- by Neanderthals.

            Neanderthals must have had tactical and strategic advantages. They’d occupied the Levant for millennia, doubtless gaining an intimate knowledge of the terrain, the seasons, how to live off the native plants and animals. In battle, their massive, muscular builds must have made them devastating fighters in close-quarters combat. Their huge eyes likely gave them superior low-light vision, letting them maneuver in the dark for ambushes and dawn raids, like Navy SEALs equipped with night-vision goggles.

Napoleon’s direct ancestors faced Neanderthals- and met their match

            Whatever the reason, it’s unlikely that modern humans- a people whose descendants included Alexander, Caesar, Sitting Bull, Sun Tzu, Rommel and Patton- would have met the Neanderthals and decided to live and let live. If nothing else, population pressures inevitably forced humans to acquire more land, to ensure enough territory to hunt and forage food for their children. An aggressive military strategy is also good evolutionary strategy- Genghis Khan left 16 milllion descendants, one in every 200 people on Earth. For thousands of years, we must have tested their fighters- and for thousands of years, we kept losing. In terms of weapons, tactics, strategy, we were fairly evenly matched.

Sapiens victorious

Finally, the stalemate broke, the tide of war shifted. We don’t know why. Perhaps the development of superior projectile weapons- spear-throwers, bows, throwing clubs- let lightly-built sapiens harass the stocky Neanderthals at a distance using hit-and-run tactics. Or perhaps superior hunting and gathering techniques let Homo sapiens feed larger tribes, creating a numerical advantage in battle.

Bows and arrows appear about the time humans broke out of the Middle East.

Even so, after Homo sapiens broke out of Africa into the Levant some 200,000 years ago, it took over 150,000 years to fully conquer Neanderthal lands. In some cases, Homo sapiens seem to have taken ground in the short term, only to fall back in the face of Neanderthal counteroffensives. This wasn’t a blitzkrieg- as one would expect if Neanderthals were either pacifists, or far inferior to modern humans in their ability to wage war- but a long war of attrition.

In the end, however, the Neanderthals probably weren’t defeated because they were less inclined to wage war. Instead, we just became better at it than them.

References

Diamond, J., 2013. The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee: how our animal heritage affects the way we live. Random House.

Keeley, L.H., 1996. War before civilization. OUP USA.

LeBlanc, S.A., Register, K.E., 2004. Constant battles: Why we fight. Macmillan.

Longrich, N.R., 2019. Were other humans the first victims of the sixth mass extinction? The Conversation.

Milks, A., Parker, D., Pope, M., 2019. External ballistics of Pleistocene hand-thrown spears: experimental performance data and implications for human evolution. Scientific Reports 9, 1-11.

Patou‐Mathis, M., 2000. Neanderthal subsistence behaviours in Europe. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 10, 379-395.

Richards, M.P., Trinkaus, E., 2009. Isotopic evidence for the diets of European Neanderthals and early modern humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, 16034-16039.

Zollikofer, C.P., De Leon, M.S.P., Vandermeersch, B., Lévêque, F., 2002. Evidence for interpersonal violence in the St. Césaire Neanderthal. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99, 6444-6448.