The Smart Neanderthal: bird catching, cave art & the cognitive revolution

I am extremely interested in the Neanderthals, so I’ll read any book that gives me more information about them. I’ve already written a review of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art (post of February 24, 2022) and The Neanderthals Rediscovered (post of February 3, 2023).

I recently read The Smart Neanderthal: Bird catching, cave art & the cognitive revolution by Clive Finlayson, 2019, and learned a fascinating aspect of the Neanderthals that I hadn’t read in other books. The book is appropriate for the category Science for the 2024 Nonfiction Reader Challenge.

Finlayson is a zoologist and a paleontologist, as well as the Director of the Gibraltar Museum. This book is based on his excavations of Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar, which is believed to be the last known site of the Neanderthals. He explains that his two scientific passions are the study of birds and of Neanderthals, and his research shows that these two passions are closely connected.

Discoveries about the Neanderthals in the last ten to twenty years have shown us that they were intelligent, excellent tool makers and capable of art. They survived far longer than modern humans have existed so far. However, many of the misunderstandings about their abilities still influence many archaeologists. An example is the belief that Neanderthals did not eat birds or use their feathers because they were too slow or clumsy to be able to catch such fast, flying prey. Finlayson’s research disproves this by studying the habits and characteristics of the birds that existed in the time of the Neanderthals of Gorham’s Cave and still exist today.

In fact, Finlayson points out that many archaeologists make assumptions about Neanderthals without knowing much about the flora and fauna they lived with. He writes:

“In interpreting the past and the abilities of our ancestors in the remove Pleistocene we have not given due weight to the myriad interrelationships that would have existed between humans and animals. We have focused our attention on the study of archaeology and palaeoanthropology but we have not done natural history. Our distant ancestors were the best natural historians that ever lived and we will not understand them fully if we limit our research to the study of skulls, stone tools, or butchery marks on bones. We have to understand them from within by getting into the field and observing the animals which they also saw and hunted, and in some cases probably revered. We will not find this out by studying field guides or handbooks; we will only do it if we are prepared to get muddy, frozen, or sun-baked as circumstances might dictate.”

And he certainly has been prepared to get muddy and more. He focuses on birds, of course because he already had a passion for studying them, but also because “even though many of the mammal species that our ancestors saw are now extinct and beyond our reach, the same is not the case with birds.” So his travels are to places where these birds exist, and he studies their behavior to get an insight into how the Neanderthals would have seen, hunted, eaten and made use of them. This information is written like a travel journal, describing the places Finlayson travelled to. But it doesn’t distract from the main information.

The beginning of Chapter 16 sums up Finlayson’s focus of the book very well:

“It’s clear from what we have seen so far that the traditional techniques and methods applied by archaeologists are insufficient when trying to answer questions about some aspects of human behavior, especially when looking at a distant past. We have already seen the benefits of a natural history approach. This approach, in combination with taphonomic work, can really advance our understanding of human behavior in the Pleistocene.”

Perhaps the only weakness of the book is the final chapter, The Hashtag and the End of the Long Road to Neanderthal Emancipation, in which he discusses the carving found in bedrock of Gorham’s Cave composed of crossed lines that look like a “hashtag.” The section of the cave was clearly used by Neanderthals, and the carving had been made by hand (not naturally).  This indicates that it could be the first example of cave art made by Neanderthals, who have been considered incapable of such behavior. This is the “cave art” referred to in the book’s title. However, most of the chapter describes the finding without much further information confirming what it is. It seems like an afterthought to the book, and has nothing to do with the book’s main ideas.

However, I found most of the book to be fascinating. There is more about birds than about the Neanderthals, but in total the book certainly supports Finlayson’s hypothesis that Neanderthals hunted birds – and used them for more than food.