SEVEN BODIES LAY scattered across the cave floor like leaves in the wind. Some were missing limbs or parts of their torsos or craniums. One’s detached head had rolled a few feet away. Standing at the mouth of the cave, I made out the first body in the haphazard line of corpses beginning directly in front of my line of vision. There lay a large man in his forties. His lifeless arms and legs were folded in toward his body as if, in his last moments, he had been trying to keep warm. To the left of where he lay was a similarly positioned person, a woman in her late twenties or early thirties. Scanning to the right from both were the remaining five, all children, splayed helter-skelter, two not far from the man, one a little farther away, and the last separated from them all at the opposite end of the cave. The two oldest children had been ages ten and three. The remaining three were infants eight months and younger.
Even though this was a cold case, one that I was reconstructing from black-and-white photos while the actual bodies were now in a lab in Paris, it was hard not to feel the visceral presence of these seven. I immediately connected to their humanity through what I imagined were their emotions in their last moments of life. My thoughts burned with a single question. What had happened to them?
A comforting breeze picked up, evaporating the beads of sweat that gathered on my brow and rustling the leaves of the oak and hazel forest overhead. I looked up to take in the whole rock shelf under which the bodies had been found. It was hidden in the depth of a quiet forest on a remote hillside in an unindustrialized part of southwestern France. Cell phone reception was impossible. It was hardly an ideal spot for an emergency.
But everyone was here today, milling busily about, each focused on answering the same question. Investigators, crew, and local volunteers knowledgeable about the land and geography all worked within the large rock shelf, excavating, gathering samples, and looking for clues.
I watched mesmerized as one of the team of specialists, a veteran geologist, stared at the rock face for several long and considered moments as if he were seeing a movie play out on its surface. He next walked to a pile of just-dug-up dirt and pinched a bit from the top. He closed his eyes and rubbed the soil between his fingers, sensing something esoteric but material in the earth. He then held the soil up to his nose and like a master sommelier explored the bouquet. At last he opened his eyes and held the soil under the magnifying glass hanging around his neck to confirm or negate what he’d already learned from his own senses. He then casually returned the pinch back to its bucket and moved on to his next interrogation, carefully viewing, touching, and smelling rocks and dirt across our excavation zone. Was it more sand than clay? Did it have certain telltale minerals, burnt bits, bone? Did it belong more to one layer than another?
His answers would begin the most important foundational work of understanding the events that this earth had undergone by both natural and human causes. His presence marked a new science and the difference between the current team and those who had investigated here in the past. This team drew from a very diverse mix of specialists from across the sciences and across the world, bringing the best of knowledge and techniques to re-create the human and natural context in which these seven had lived, and died.
We even had a film crew, a two-person team that worked at the perimeter and wove in and out between the investigators, documenting every moment and every piece of unearthed evidence. They focused on paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin, director of the Max Planck Institute’s department of human evolution in Leipzig, Germany, who was visiting for the week. The lens zeroed in on his infectious broad smile and what he held in his right hand.
While the team already had been here for five dig seasons over five years, today, during the last two weeks of the fifth and last season, three paleoanthropologists—Isabelle Crevecoeur from Bordeaux, Asier Gómez-Olivencia from Bilbao, and Antoine Balzeau from Paris—found something of significance to the cold case. They had just reopened the original hole where the three-year-old child had been found, hoping to find more of the child’s incomplete skeleton. Instead, they found an adult molar, and that in a part of the cave where no adults had ever been found, only children. It didn’t seem likely that the tooth was associated with the two adults over fifteen meters away in a part of the cave where it seemed unlikely that it would have arrived by natural processes. A new question surfaced. Was another adult buried nearby, perhaps under all the rockfall that still had to be cleared away from deeper in the cave?
The camera rolled. Filmmaker Sophie Cattoire checked the lensing before asking her first question. Celebrated in the region for her talent and skill in bringing out the local life of the southwest—especially the personalities behind its prehistory—she and her partner both in life and in profession, Vincent Lesbros, were behind the film company Ferrassie TV—named after where we worked, the site of La Ferrassie. Today, against the sauna-like summer heat, she wore a low-cut dark blue spaghetti-strap top and had piled her long, flaming red hair atop her head, accentuated further by the cherry-toned lipstick that she pulled off with the easy elegance so common among French women.
She stepped back and regarded Jean-Jacques in his perfectly pressed cobalt blue summer shirt that brought out his engaging brown eyes. Because La Ferrassie derived its name from the iron-rich soil, le fer ici, “iron is here,” being the most popular etymology offered by locals for the name, the burnt-orange earth that surrounded us popped with their blue tops. It was as if they’d planned this composition on a color wheel before enacting it. But like many things here, it was a part of the unplanned but perfect magic of the place, the people, and the work.
“Alors,” began Sophie, “please tell us, Jean-Jacques, about the tooth you are holding.”
“Donc, the tooth is probably the inferior molar of a Neandertal.” He beamed an infectious smile into the camera, one that likely had been with him since boyhood when he first discovered the fascinating world of prehistory. He then paused and reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out two gigantic plastic models of teeth, a Neandertal tooth and a Homo sapiens tooth—like you do—both from adults, to demonstrate how obvious it was to him who the owner had been. These two model teeth had coincidentally arrived for him in the day’s mail back at the dig house.
He pointed with his free hand and also explained that Neandertal molars tended to have larger pulp chambers, called taurodontism, a common feature in Neandertals and a rarer one among modern humans. Plus, the tooth had been found in a layer that preceded any modern humans to the area, so this was extra confirmation. He deftly held the models and the real tooth in his hands and offered the camera an extreme close-up.
While no one expected to find this adult tooth in the possible grave of a small child, what was in keeping with the known story of this cold case was that the tooth could only belong to a Neandertal because of the strata in which it was found, dating to between 50,000 and 70,000 years old—a date that the geologist was working hard to narrow down. This cold case was so old that it was perhaps one of France’s oldest.
All seven found here were Neandertals. The site of La Ferrassie was famous and had long been called the Neandertal Cemetery for the fact that a good many archaeologists, as well as laypeople, viewed this as a place where intentional burials took place. Not everyone agreed though, for the evidence has a lot of holes, and in contrast they think these bodies could have been buried by natural causes, perhaps from a single natural disaster that took them all at once—such as hunger or extreme cold—and then their bodies were eventually buried through the process of natural sedimentation and rockfall. Yet others see a middle-of-the-way scenario: that the dead bodies were set aside here by other Neandertals but that natural causes covered them up.
La Ferrassie is in many ways a microcosm of the raging issues engulfing Neandertals, and us, in the broader field of paleoanthropology and the broader geographical contexts of Neandertals—who lived as far east as southern Siberia, as far west as Portugal’s coast, as far south as Israel and Gibraltar, and as far north as Wales and the (now) island of Jersey. La Ferrassie is a site that concentrates not only the issues about whether Neandertals buried their dead but also issues about who they were as humans, especially those qualities we hold above all others as exceptionally human: our ability to think symbolically, to make complex tools, to speak languages, to create art, and along with these symbolic processes, the enactment of rituals such as burial, which implies a connection to the intangible, the afterlife, and the invisible spirit world.
La Ferrassie is in the Dordogne, not far from the town of Les Eyzies, and in the heart of the most concentrated region for human prehistory in Europe. Les Eyzies itself was a village whose rock shelves and prehistoric remains put it on the map and at the heart of European prehistory. It also became the natural location for France’s national prehistory museum. One of Les Eyzies’s rock shelves even gave us the name Cro-Magnon to refer to early modern humans, Homo sapiens. It was here in 1868, in the heart of the old village, where in the side yard of Monsieur Magnon road workers uncovered the burial site of five early modern humans who had lived here around 27,000 years ago. The Occitan word for hole, cro, was applied to the find. Occitan is an old Romance language originating in Latin and closely related to French and Spanish—the old language of the Troubadours—and was, and in many pockets remains, the region’s dominant rural language.
Since then, the name Cro-Magnon, old Mr. Magnon’s hole, has referred to the early Homo sapiens of the region, who arrived here perhaps around 45,000 years ago as a part of what is called “the transition” from Middle Paleolithic and Neandertals to the Upper Paleolithic and us. The Upper Paleolithic lasted until around 10,000 years ago. Neandertals disappeared from the fossil record around 35,000 years ago, the most dramatic event of the transition, one that seems to implicate us—this fast-moving, always innovating, environment-(over)manipulating version of humans, and the only one left walking the earth today. Around 100,000 years ago, there may have been at least six versions of humans walking the earth. Around 40,000 years ago, there were perhaps three, maybe four. Now it’s just us, a fact that ought to strike one as weirder than there once having been six varieties or more. Look at canines or felines or spiders. Everyone but us has got many versions of their basic model. And we Homo sapiens are a remarkably homogenous species, no matter how different we think we look from each other across the globe. As a whole, we are less diverse than even the chimpanzees, who are living in smaller groups and in smaller and more compromised environments.
That’s weird.
Neandertals lived in the Dordogne and across Eurasia long before any Cro-Magnons showed up. From the most recent estimates, they first emerged around 430,000 years ago (based on evidence from Atapuerca in Spain) and survived until around 35,000 years ago (in pockets all across Eurasia). The seven Neandertals from La Ferrassie probably lived between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, around the time early modern humans began to leave Africa and at times were meeting and interbreeding with Neandertals. These encounters probably happened in Southwest Asia. It is from many such meet-ups that we modern humans received somewhere from 0.7 percent to 2.1 percent of our genes from Neandertals. Eurasians today have on average about 1.5–2.1 percent Neandertal DNA within them, and Africans less than 1 percent.
(The picture is more complicated, though. Early modern humans made previous migrations out of Africa, somewhere between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, that were less widespread but had impacts on populations of people living in the Levant. These folks most likely went extinct, but not before leaving some of their early, early modern human genes in Neandertals found in southern Siberia.)
Sometime after the La Ferrassie seven died—either at once or separately, depending on whose stance on the evidence you agree with—the rock shelf on which we stood had been a full-blown, fully covered, large cave. Its roof had crumbled and collapsed over several episodes, separated by thousands of years each time, due to cyclical fluctuations in glacial cooling and warming. The slow collapse eventually created a hill that supported the overgrowth of forest, further masking the original cave.
Yet that roof fall did something very convenient for future archaeologists. It sealed each level of human occupation that had existed in the cave, interspersing several human occupations over several thousands of years with sterile rock and dirt that sealed each in as a sort of Paleolithic Pompeii.
Above the large cave was a small cave, one that was still intact and also full of signs that other humans had been here long before us. It also naturally flowed into the lower and larger cave, making one imagine a duplex-like living space with upstairs sun and balcony and downstairs butchering, dining, tool crafting, and, uh, burying.
All told, there were at least eight separate human occupations at La Ferrassie, the first five associated with Neandertals from 90,000 to 50,000 years ago, and the last remaining two with early Homo sapiens, from around 38,000 to 22,000 years ago. That level six was playing games with everyone. Called the Châtelperronian level, it was occupied around 45,000 years ago and possessed a style of stone tools that partook more of Homo sapiens blade technologies but occurred in a time that overlapped with Neandertals and in some places seemed to be made by Neandertals. Some archaeologists think Neandertals made them and others think Homo sapiens. A few think both may have, in an innovative and hybridizing kind of overlap. The jury is still out on this but this matter is also an important piece for understanding who the Neandertals were, what became of them, and the nature of our relationship to them.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, after the crew returned to work and the excitement over the new find was contained, Sophie asked Jean-Jacques for an extended interview in the forest, just above where we worked. They moved away from the center of activity to greater quiet, where only the occasional birdsong of the territorial red-throated European robin interrupted their conversation. I squinted up the hill, pricking up my ears to hear anything, but it was impossible. I could see Vincent quietly clicking production stills as Sophie coaxed prehistoric secrets from the grand master.
I remained curious as we retired to the village of Carsac, about twenty-eight miles away. This was where the archaeologists camped and pitched their tents in the large backyard where Harold Dibble, one of the key dig directors, had set up the camp and lab. My old archaeology professor in graduate school, he was the reason I was here. Harold had found a shack of a place in the village, an old tobacco-drying barn, a séchoir à tabac, and turned it into the archaeologists’ home base for his digs throughout the area. While better than pure camping—the dig directors slept under the séchoir’s roof while the crew pitched tents in what was an old farmer’s field—it was still pretty rustic. Crew showers and latrines benefited from the shelter’s hookup with indoor plumbing, but were so “prehistoric” that they had taken to painting Paleolithic designs of hands, bison, and a couple of shagging mammoths on the water closet walls.
The Dordogne had never been industrialized and to this day remains a place where people live close to the land. Once it had been famous for its high-quality tobacco, but today, with smoking falling out of fashion, other equally celebrated traditional crops have expanded into old tobacco fields, from corn and sunflowers to walnuts and wheat. It is a region also famous for the native black truffle, a seductive tuber we found at times growing just under the pebbles near oak tree roots at La Ferrassie when we cleared the ground to open a square. Once we even found a white truffle, near the surface of the back wall where the Neandertal man had been found. (Girolles and porcini also populated the forest, and I often saw the local volunteers using their break time to search for mushrooms for that night’s meal. The forest was also rife with black and yellow salamanders and frogs the size of quarters, and rabbits, fox, wild boar, and red deer. Though nothing like the Paleolithic climate of the past, these rich natural realities made it hard not to think about what smart and clever people Neandertals had been to make this land their home.)
HAROLD HAD CONVERTED the wooden tobacco barn into a lab where the site sediment could be brought back, processed, catalogued, and analyzed before going into storage. He also renovated a small stone structure that had been added to one side of the barn and made it into his little bungalow, his pied–à-terre in La France so profonde, it included Neandertals. The house and lab sat on the edge of one of two main roads through the village, passing the twelfth-century Romanesque church and leading to the cemetery. His backyard tumbled downhill from the road toward where the Enéa Creek flowed nearby. That creek was a hint as to why this village was so central to prehistory.
The original human inhabitants along the Enéa had been Neandertals. They had most likely been attracted to good water and the limestone caves overhead carved by the tributary of the Dordogne. They had lived in three of four caves a stone’s throw away on a ridge on the other side of the creek. They were collectively called Pech de l’Azé, with each cave distinguished with a number. Harold had dug at Pech IV with his mentors, François Bordes and Denise de Sonneville-Bordes. These two were the original Paleolithic archaeologist couple that had put Carsac on the map as an archaeologist’s home base, a tradition Harold carried on after their passing.
Rather than camping in Harold’s backyard, I was living in the Bordeses’ old stone barn. I rented its loft from their daughter, Cécile. It sat across the garden from the main house, where I crossed to greet Cécile each morning and evening, plus her two dogs and three cats, and to use the facilities. It was a five-minute walk to Harold’s dig house, along the same road that passed the church and led to the cemetery. There, François and Denise are buried in a limestone tomb covered by flint tools made by students who left them there as affectionate grave offerings, much as guitarists leave picks at the tombstone of Robert Johnson.
Carsac was so ideal and important in so many ways as an archaeological home base that it was worth the daily fifty-six-mile round-trip drive to La Ferrassie along sinuous country roads that made detours around the region’s infinite limestone outcroppings and forests. Those limestone formations and those forests were the reason why this was one of Europe’s most concentrated areas for prehistoric human habitations, as well as being a popular holiday destination for today’s hominids hell-bent on the same things: good shelter, great food, and beautiful landscapes and climate. As the region’s tourist office liked to advertise, the Dordogne has been “a vacation destination for 400,000 years.” The good life has deep roots here. Just ask Homo erectus, our earlier ancestor who is related to both Neandertals and us, as he ventured into Europe.
An international team drawn from diverse places such as Australia, Iran, Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Holland, the USA, Greece, France, and England, the crew prepared the daily dinners that reflected their homelands’ culinary inspirations. Harold also directed the menu plans and had his arsenal of tried and true recipes that made nearly everyone happy. These were French and American-style dishes he’d mastered and refined over decades of dig work. As the crew prepared dinner for thirty-five downhill in the backyard on outdoor gas burners and on an open fire, uphill, inside Harold’s little stone house, the dig directors present that day gathered to decompress, review the day, and plan for the next one.
The team’s directors were six scientists: Paleolithic archaeologists Harold Dibble from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Alain Turq from the Musée National de Préhistoire in Les Eyzies, Shannon McPherron from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Dennis Sandgathe from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and geoarchaeologists Paul Goldberg (aka the master soil sommelier) from Boston University and Vera Aldeias, also from the Max Planck in Leipzig. They also enjoyed input, collaboration, and visits from other respected scientists, such Jean-Jacques Hublin (Max Planck), Paul Mellars (Cambridge), Wil Roebroeks (Leiden University), and Gilliane Monnier (University of Minnesota), among many others.
Virginie Sinet-Mathiot, a bright rising star in paleoanthropology from Bordeaux, headed the lab. Her remarkable skills and unflappable cool kept it in remarkable order each day as it received numerous buckets of sediment from that day’s work at La Ferrassie. These had to be carefully processed, catalogued, and stored in the next twenty-four hours so the lab crew would be ready for the next daily delivery, when it all began again. While she was often at the lab and so deprived of visiting La Ferrassie, where everyone felt the excitement was, Virginie knew something that few outside of this work know: most of the biggest discoveries in archaeology, especially Paleolithic archaeology, are made in the lab, not in the field. Excavators are too burdened with digging and documenting most of the time to realize what they are finding, especially when it is a small piece of bone or flint or a soil sample that needs a microscope and long hours of analysis. That just-discovered molar was an exception.
Thanks to a software program Harold and Shannon wrote, each artifact at the dig was shot in with a laser that then fed into the program and noted the exact location of that item on a three-dimensional map of the site. When something was found in the lab, the original location and context could be pulled up through this program. The program also allowed a person to view the site in three dimensions and to begin to see patterns of where more flint or broken animal bones lay or what the spatial relationships of fire hearths were to each other, and the like.
Today five of the six core directors gathered upstairs along with our special visitor, Jean-Jacques Hublin. I looked in on what was for dinner downstairs—roast pork, sautéed red cabbage, a salad of greens, carrots, tomatoes, and cucumbers, and garlicky green beans—and then went up the hill and straight to Harold’s cottage living room. In between, I received exuberant greetings and hand-lickings from Gary, the neighbor’s black Labrador, who had decided to live with us and escape his life with three Shar-Pei. In his own way, he contributed to the work of the camp by chasing down and devouring the apples that fell into the yard from the two apple trees.
I myself was a sort of upstairs–downstairs person in the crew. My role as journalist and anthropologist had afforded me precious equal access to both worlds. And permission to drink, within reason, Harold’s scotch. I stepped inside his bungalow as he was pouring himself a scotch and soda on ice. I sidled up shamelessly and poured mine neat. Outside of the scintillation of touching Neandertal dirt, this was my favorite time of day.
Harold sat in his leather chair and swirled his drink before taking that first rewarding sip. The sound of good ferment tumbling through ice was as seductive as that tiny European robin in the forest, pleasingly punctuating the cadence of rich conversation.
Jean-Jacques was already seated with an aperitif of white wine set before him on the coffee table. I took my glass and sat next to him.
“What, may I ask, did you and Sophie talk about in the forest?”
He flashed his engaging smile. “I told her that we are all storytellers, and that we are drawn to origin stories. Of course, it is totally contradictory to the concept of evolution, because there is no ‘first’ anything. But people want the first stories. They want some sort of an Edenic moment. Somehow, it reconciles with the biblical perspective, with all these theories about the African Eve and the Garden of Eden. We want a first something. And then it’s also related to the notion of humans being different from the animal world and somehow being separated by a trench. So you have to be on one side of the trench or the other. I told her that this is the problem with Neandertals.” He took a sip of wine. “Neandertals for a long time were on the other side of the trench. So we emphasized the differences. But now somehow, they’ve passed over to this side of the trench. Now we are erasing all differences because we want all humans to be the same.”
“How did she respond to your answer?” I asked, loving how in a few breaths he’d summed up the root of most motivation, passion, and contention in the field. I had met Sophie through other prehistory circles two years prior to becoming a crewmember at La Ferrassie, and knew that her humanistic views of life included the Neandertals. Only the day before she’d had another brief chance to interview Jean-Jacques and had asked him about Neandertal and Cro-Magnon intermingling; the dreamy idea of romance and wooing, a rainbow coalition, seemed to be implied in the tone of her voice. He had disabused her of the idea. He explained that there probably weren’t any “flower bouquets and candlelight dinners,” that we really have no idea what these interbreeding encounters looked like, and that romance was less likely on the menu than fast food. I thought I could see the air seep out of her sails and felt the sting myself, for I too was a part of the rainbow coalition.
I confess I also carry a flame for the Neandertals. I even like to think my percentage of DNA from Neandertals in modern humans, that estimated average of 1.5–2.1 percent among people of Eurasian ancestry, is the full 2.1 percent. I even round it up to 3 percent. I liked them because to an introvert in a society that encourages extroverts, they seemed to be similar, living in smaller groups and possibly not needing to talk as much. We Homo sapiens are gabbing all the time, chasing away dinner without knowing it. I also noticed the same tendency among the local volunteers. One, Didier, even wore a T-shirt, black with white lettering, that simply said “4 percent de Neandertal.” (That was the top end of the percentage range when the genetic studies first came out, before they were later adjusted.) He and his fellow trench mate, Fabien, had confessed earlier their disenchantment with modern life as a big part of their draw toward prehistory; the world since the advent of agriculture some 10,000 years ago has been nothing but a hominid-made mess. As Vera succinctly said as we drove one morning to La Ferrassie, “Farming changed everything.”
Three percent or not, at the same time I know that I have to keep my wishful emotions separate from the actual science and let the evidence speak (Harold’s favorite mantra) about what was and was not possible. I also secretly suspected that everyone had their own dance with objective and subjective reality, and that those who were willing to admit it, the really honest ones, were best prepared not to mess up the actual data, or ignore the lack thereof. People jumped to conclusions with too little information and Jean-Jacques was right: this was rooted in our storytelling brain that desired origin stories.
Like Jean-Jacques, Harold was also deeply aware of and affected by this subjectivity in the field. When he called others on it, he was often criticized for not liking the Neandertals or for denying them their humanity, which was never his point. In fact, I’d found Harold far more sympathetic toward Neandertals than us Homo sapiens, a reality that would surprise many of his critics. Only two weeks earlier, at another “Scotch Time,” as Harold affectionately calls these early evening sessions, he leaned passionately into this theme when someone brought up the idea that we moderns are inclined to like Neandertals because they were similar to us, because they were, in Jean-Jacques’s language, on our side of the trench.
“Let’s go with the evidence,” Harold warmed into the topic with his familiar mantra, swirling the ice in his glass and rolling his eyes. “If the evidence shows Neandertals were like us, I’m all for it. But if the evidence does not show it, don’t give me ‘I like Neandertals.’ Who cares if you like Neandertals? The question is, do we have the evidence to say that they’re like us or not? Oh, and the other argument I just love is, ‘Oh, we don’t want to be mean to Neandertals, they’re like brothers to us. Oh, Neandertals, you’re just like us.’ Meanwhile, Neandertals lived over 250,000 years. We’ve been around for maybe 160,000 years and I think we’re going to extinction really fast. They didn’t do that. So what are you going to tell a Neandertal when you meet him on the street? Are you going to say, ‘Hey, aren’t you happy to be just like one of us?’ He’s going to look you in the eyes and say, ‘Fuck you. I don’t want to be like you.’ Why do you think it’s a compliment to make them like us? We’re not so great. I think it’s pretty bad that the only compliment you can give a fossil ancestor is to be just like us.”
“She was kind of amazed.” Jean-Jacques brought me back to the present Scotch Time. “And she said, ‘I didn’t know scientists were interested in this kind of thing.’ I said, ‘Yes, I think the problem is that scientists do science and they think scientists of the nineteenth century were totally biased by their preconceptions about this and that, but it is in fact exactly the same today.’ We project our fantasies about our values, nature, ecology, economy, family, and so forth onto what we study.”
Harold listened, smiling appreciatively and taking another sip of his drink. He was fully relaxed; he wouldn’t have to use his mantra, at least not today.
It was time to gather around the dinner tables in the backyard, but I was still mulling over this business of origins. It came up a lot, maybe a lot more than many researchers realized, in their own backstories.
I later caught up with Jean-Jacques to continue the conversation and asked if he wouldn’t mind elaborating more on the subjective nature of stories and perhaps his own backstory. He was generously forthcoming and I learned that he was born in Algeria, and as a child he and his mother had been expelled back to France during a time of violent upheaval and turmoil. His parents already had been divorced, and he didn’t see his father until he was a grown man. When he and his mother landed in Paris, they settled in the northern suburbs, in a pretty rough neighborhood. That childhood of separation, upheaval, and tough resettlement translated for him into issues of origins.
“Ancestry is a heavy question for me,” he said. “I grew up in an absolutely ugly world. When we arrived in France, we were settled in the worst neighborhood around Paris. I was a preadolescent. I was already very interested in natural history and for me it was a sort of escape from this grim environment. It gave me access to the beauty of the world. The beauty of life. The beauty of everything. I was attracted to all fields of natural history. I think I sort of combined the interest in the remote past and the notion of ancestry with the interest for the living world in understanding the past world. It was a way to multiply the beauty of the present world by accessing the beauty of other worlds that came before. There was this sort of fascination for this lost world.”
He paused for a moment and something else came to him. “This might sound funny, but doing something like paleontology has also something to do with the fear of death.” He laughed as if he’d surprised himself in saying this aloud. “The need for fighting oblivion, fighting complete disappearance of a past life. I find it amazing that we can sort of—of course it’s a sort of fantasy—to resuscitate it somehow, to take from death, from the ends of death, something that should have disappeared. To find a little piece of a human that lived a hundred thousand years ago, the tools he made, and the environment where he lived, to me, maybe it’s a bit too psychoanalytic, but I see it as fighting death. It also meets my own anxiety because I have been exposed to death maybe more than others. It’s a therapy.” He laughed again at this admission, but I was touched by his willingness to share it, his openness to confess such things. If backstory influences how scientists see life, this backstory was going to assure impeccable research into the truth, as far as we could access it. It also made Voldemort look like such a ninny for not finding a more creative way to defy death.
“It’s a way to say that even if you’re dead,” he concluded, “there is a chance somehow to survive, somehow, to extract from the nothing, the vacuum, the complete oblivion, things that are unknown.”
THERE WAS A tradition in the American school of anthropology, in the branch of cultural anthropology, that before going out to the field, an ethnographer was encouraged to undergo psychotherapy. The whole reasoning behind this was to excavate one’s own biases before heading into another cultural system where one risked becoming a mirror of one’s unexamined psyche, and thus tainting the data, rather than becoming a receiver or mirror of the actual society one was studying. While I was limited in my view as an outside observer, I got the sense that this dynamic was rampant in paleoanthropology, a mix of both unexamined psyches and actual data, getting mirrored into the same frame.
IT WAS TWO twentieth-century excavations prior to ours that had discovered the skeletons at La Ferrassie. French archaeologists Louis Capitan and Denis Peyrony first uncovered six Neandertal skeletons between 1896 and 1922, and Henri Delporte found the seventh, the three-year-old’s skeleton, during two separate seasons during excavations from 1968 to 1973.
The ancient human presence at La Ferrassie was exposed during roadwork in 1895 when workers cut open the side of the hill and uncovered stone tools and animal bones that implied a prehistoric human presence. The hill was already known for its iron-rich, ferrous earth, the soil the color of dark burnt orange. The upper cave had signs of an iron forge from the Middle Ages. It is essentially an orange, yellow, and brown layer cake of human evolution, from Neandertals to us.
The first excavation began a year later, in 1896, and cut deeply into the hill to open and pull off tons of stone from the collapsed cave ceiling. Though it applied the best excavation techniques of the time, it also jumbled and disrupted a good deal of strata, and hence, context about how people had lived and used this site. That precious data was lost. To their defense, it was and remains a tough site to excavate and the strata in the end may also have been jumbled by natural causes that geologists and archaeologists are still trying to reconstruct.
While the context was sacrificed in many key spots, the early excavators did succeed in uncovering perhaps the most intriguing elements, the rare skeletons of a past people both very much like us and sort of not like us, especially evident in the skull of the adult male. He had been someone with a very large brain, his cranium larger than that of nearly any living human male today. His body was so robust that even a modern-day professional wrestler should seriously question stepping onto the mat with him. He was someone who had wrestled woolly rhinoceros and mammoth for a living, using sophisticated and lethal spears effective only at extremely close range—including at times jumping on the animal’s back and thrusting—as is evident in the sorts of injuries preserved on Neandertals’ fossilized bones. Their hunts made today’s bullfighting look like swimming laps in an indoor pool.
While the stone tools also were seen as significant, not all of them were selected for the final sample, some of certain shapes being cast off as insignificant. It was only many decades later, with more advances in paleoanthropology, that investigators realized that those cast-off flakes and chips were as important as the pieces that were kept.
Next, from 1968 to 1973, the second excavation directed by Delporte added to the cuts into the hill and also disturbed a lot of strata rich in context: stone tools, bones, and soil and their spatial relationships to each other. In 1972, Delporte found a portion of the cranium of the three-year-old child, the seventh of the seven skeletons. For reasons still unanswered, it took him until the next year, in the last month of digging, to find and uncover the child’s body—even though it was only inches from its skull. The child’s body was missing its arms and other fragments of its skeleton, a fact that led physical anthropologists collaborating with our team during this third La Ferrassie excavation to go back in and look for anything Delporte might have missed. They found nothing. Maybe the child’s arms had been scavenged shortly after its death and dragged away by a hyena or wolf? But they did find that tooth that belonged to someone else.
In 1973, Delporte closed up the site for posterity and the next generation of archaeologists—which was Harold’s team. It is an established reality in archaeology that future teams will likely have better techniques and insights and so it is a good idea at immense sites such as this one to excavate as far as one reasonably can and then preserve it for future archaeologists to take to the next level.
Harold’s team opened La Ferrassie in 2010 and dug for five seasons, in the spring or summer, through to 2014, when they closed it up carefully for the next generation of archaeologists to reopen. They continue to work with the data and evidence they gathered during those five seasons, and they continue to puzzle through the haphazard records left by the prior two excavations from the twentieth century, a sort of archaeology of archaeology.
Archaeology from its beginnings has been and remains both an art and a science. In the sciences it suffers from what Dennis Sandgathe calls “crappy data.” Crappy data comes from imperfect, often un-replicable data-gathering techniques that define so much of what archaeologists are able to gather at best, given the difficulty of extracting human data from the time-altered earth. Half the time you don’t even know you’re in an old occupation site until you’ve destroyed half of it and are standing on top of it, much like what happened in the early twentieth century at La Ferrassie. In other sciences, Dennis further elaborated, other scientists can replicate experiments to support or negate the original findings. That’s rarely possible in archaeology, and when it is, there are missed opportunities because archaeologists aren’t being trained to think in such a way. Which leads to the art side of the equation. As an art, archaeology is riddled with contentious debates about what it is to be human that sort of do but sort of don’t stick to the crappy data, and that pull to the surface those uninvestigated beliefs and values to which Jean-Jacques referred.
La Ferrassie’s history, again, and these seven skeletons, were a case in point. From the moment those first six skeletons were uncovered there, some began to call the site a Neandertal cemetery and the six were referred to as intentionally buried, not for any hard non-crappy evidence, but for the fact that to the twentieth-century and culturally embedded minds of the excavators, that was how it looked, because they assumed everyone buried their dead, and if a body was found in a hole in the ground, it was buried. Yet all the evidence to prove such a claim—the foundation of true science—had been swept away, dug, hauled, tossed, and was not well documented by the very people claiming they saw evidence for a human-made hole that preceded their own hole dug to get the skeleton out. If the skeletons had in fact been in holes intentionally dug by Neandertal hands, rather than being unintentionally covered by natural processes, or laid in a creekbed slowly filled in over time by sediment, well, we’ll probably never know.
So why bother then? Because those skeletons exist, their stones and butchered animal bones exist, and La Ferrassie and sites like it exist and they still hold compelling pieces of the mystery of being human in the many forms that have been expressed on earth so far.
Harold calls La Ferrassie “the mother lode” of Neandertal sites in southwestern France and Europe, because of the skeletons and the burial debate. There are thirty or so nearly complete skeletons of Neandertals across the Old World—all other finds are small fragments of bones, such as a finger, a tooth, or a toe—and La Ferrassie has seven of those rare, nearly complete individual people.
La Ferrassie frames head-on numerous mysteries associated with Neandertals, especially those driving questions such as burial, fire use, fire-making, tool craft traditions, innovation and creativity, and the overlap, or transition, with us—because we Homo sapiens, we Cro-Magnons, show up at La Ferrassie at around 37,000 years ago. The current team’s mission has been both to reinvestigate the burial question at this site and to apply much improved state-of-the-art excavation techniques since the time of the original excavations, many developed by Harold and Shannon. These would be used to reconstruct as well as possible the context of the site at areas the dig directors determined were still undisturbed, intact spots from the original Neandertal occupations.
THAT AFTERNOON, AFTER Sophie’s camera stopped rolling and Jean-Jacques returned from the forest to look at the square that the just-uncovered adult molar had come from, I stood up from my excavation square and took another look at the whole scene: the golden yellow limestone rock wall before me with its sunspot-like lichen- and moss-speckled face, the imagined placement of the seven skeletons fitting together in my mind. And the new tooth. The breeze picked up again, only this time I shivered. As I looked pointedly at the remaining collapsed portions of the cave roof, new and demanding questions riddled my mind. Were there more undiscovered bodies here? What had their last days been like? What had happened to them and all their kin and friends and distant relations scattered across Europe and Asia? What had it been like to come into contact with early versions of us, newly arriving immigrants exploring the horizon beyond Africa starting perhaps around 120,000 years ago? Homo sapiens, who seemed to procreate more, move longer distances in one stretch, talk more, and use different technological traditions? What does all of this say about being human, and why are we, today, so particularly fascinated with the Neandertals? Was it because they were like us, or because they were not quite like us? Or because now that it is just us, the first time in hominid existence, we’re feeling the rub? Who they were, then, becomes a more pressing, as well as a more exotic, question.
I returned to my square, my little Cro-Beebe, to finish out the afternoon of excavating. I was assigned this day to a spot at the sediment Level 1, identified as being around 90,000 years old and just above the cave’s natural bedrock. Its top layer, which touched the 70,000-year occupation at Level 2, had a few Neandertal tools and butchered animal bones, signaling the possibility of a first Neandertal occupation at earlier than 70,000 years ago. My quadrant was just to the right of where the adult male, the forty-something Neandertal, had once lain. I’d recently held a replica of his nearly complete skull and felt intimidated by its magnitude. As I worked, I was always aware of him, as if his ghost hovered over my left shoulder, watching my work with amusement. I even began calling him Monsieur La Ferrassie to myself.
I was in heaven. I never got over the fact that as we excavated into undisturbed layers, ours were the first human hands to touch this same earth since these Neandertals had lived here, had breathed and died here. Over the many days, weeks, and eventually years—six years in all, with the fourth and fifth (2013 and 2014) as a crew member during the last two dig seasons at La Ferrassie, followed by a final data-analyzing post-dig summer season in 2015 in Carsac—I never got over the exhilaration of touching old dirt, bones, and stones. Each time, electricity shot through my fingertips with the knowledge that the last human hands to have touched that layer of soil had belonged to Neandertals. I could feel their fingertips fleetingly graze mine. Every time.
While here in my magical hole, I also noticed a lot of things about the culture of the natives, not just the Neandertals, but also the archaeologists and the local volunteers equally dedicated to them. They were as much a part of this story, and yet so often were left out of its telling. But it was they who influenced and defined very much how prehistoric research unfolded, not only here in one of France’s most beautiful and ancient places, but also around the world at other sites. This was a good place to focus the lens on this dynamic given the remarkably international nature of the team. Furthermore, here was a region where local amateur passion for prehistory was the strongest I’d witnessed anywhere.
I’d spent over two decades in Iberia, also a part of Europe with an inordinate concentration of Paleolithic sites, and never found such local passion for prehistory in Spain or Portugal as I did here. One early morning as we drove to La Ferrassie, one of the crew from Belgium echoed my suspicions.
“The French have an unusual amateur affinity for prehistory,” Jonathan said. “Other Europeans don’t have it. I haven’t seen it in Spain or Portugal or England. Pockets of Germany have it, but all of France has it.” He had just mentioned some of the other heavy-hitters for Neandertal and Cro-Magnon sites in Europe, making the difference with the French all the more interesting. French prehistory buffs with deep experience and knowledge worked alongside us, weaving in and out at the dig site, the lab, and enriching our experience.
This local passion for the human prehistoric past was not only unusual but so prevalent here that I overheard it often in conversations during local afternoon gatherings at cafés and on market days when the community was out in force. All I had to do was plunk down at a café table and say, “So, how about those Neandertals?” and listen to the natives argue with animation, intelligence, and accuracy the latest findings and conjectures as if it were the latest rugby match. That’s when I realized we all existed in a special place, one I called Café Neandertal.
The mixed objectivity and subjectivity of these natives—archaeologists and locals alike—turns out to contain in a microcosm a whole lot about what it is to be human. We think, we perceive, we feel things about others, whether they lived now or half a million years ago. It also reveals the workings of that mystery box between our ears, one guided as much by genes as by natural selection, the environment, and perception.
Equally intriguing in all this was the emerging reality that the world of Neandertals themselves was far more diverse than previously thought. The Western European Neandertals, for whom we have more fossils, are a small group compared to the numerous populations represented by larger collections of smaller fragmented bones, such as from places like Krapina, Croatia, where some 1,200 fossil fragments represent about ninety individual Neandertals—something paleoanthropologist James Ahern from the University of Wyoming drew to my attention. We are becoming more aware that French and Iberian Neandertals were as diverse as Central Asian, Middle Eastern, and Balkan Neandertals, as are living modern humans across the globe today, perhaps more so. It was time to give them and their diversity the same measure of respect and awareness.