* NewScientist.com news service
* Dan Jones
Could Neanderthals speak? The answer may depend on whether they used
make-up.
Francesco d'Errico, an archaeologist from the University of Bordeaux,
France, has found crafted lumps of pigment - essentially crayons -
left behind by Neanderthals across Europe.
He says that Neanderthals, who most likely had pale skin, used these
dark pigments to mark their own as well as animal skins. And, since
body art is a form of communication, this implies that the
Neanderthals could speak, d'Errico says.
Working with Marie Soressi of the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, d'Errico has recovered
hundreds of blocks of black manganese pigment from two neighbouring
sites at Pech de l'Azé in France, which were occupied by Neanderthals.
These add to evidence of pigment among Neanderthal from some 39 other
sites.
The pigments were not just smeared onto the body like camouflage,
d'Errico says, but fashioned into drawing tools.
"The flat, elongated surfaces on the archaeological specimens are
consistent, as confirmed experimentally, with producing clearly
visible straight black lines, perhaps arranged to produce abstract
designs," says d'Errico, who presented his work on 15 March at the
Seventh Evolution of Language Conference in Barcelona, Spain.
Essential words
Body painting, argues d'Errico, is a "material proxy" for symbolic
communication. What's more, he says, the techniques for making the
symbols, and the meaning they carry, would have to be transmitted
through language.
And body painting isn't the only proxy associated with Neanderthal
remains. Neanderthals adorned their bodies with ornamentation, such as
necklaces made from shell beads.
The sorts of beads used by modern humans, and the ornaments they
fashioned from them, vary geographically. This is often interpreted as
a sign of ethnic and cultural diversity among humans, and a means of
symbolically binding groups and differentiating them from others.
D'Errico suggests that the same holds true for Neanderthals.
Other researchers agree, and point to a double standard of some
researchers in interpreting the archaeological record, including
evidence of burials, care of the infirm and social cooperation.
'Inferior ability'
"Some archaeologists are happy to associate these same features with
language if they occur with modern humans, but are not willing to
associate them with language among the Neanderthals," says
anthropologist Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St Louis, US.
"The double standard doesn't work - if they reflect language in one,
they must reflect in it both."
However, even if Neanderthals had language capabilities, that does not
mean they spoke in the same way as humans.
"The archaeological record does not show that they ever attained the
cultural level of the humans who could talk as we do," says Phillip
Lieberman, a linguist at Brown University, Rhode Island, US.
"Neanderthals possessed language, but their linguistic and cognitive
ability was inferior to the humans who replaced them," he says.
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