Britney Spears is not a Neanderthal

 I have a fear of meeting Britney Spears. Yes I know, it’s completely irrational, but it’s a feeling I’ve had since I was a teenager, and one that I’ve never been able to shake. Here is someone who has worked tirelessly her entire adult life to bring me joy - album after album, breakdown after breakdown – and so what the hell would I bring to the relationship, supposing that one day we were to meet? I have nothing to offer Britney, and that is why I am yet to accept any of her invitations to collaborate. Perhaps if one day I  could be responsible for a pop behemoth as mighty as “…Baby One More Time” then I might feel worthy enough to join forces.

  Successful homo sapien relationships – such as the one eluding me and Britney - are based on our ability to collaborate and co operate, and it is arguably these traits that have defined the human success story. In his book “Sapiens”, Yuval Noah Harari tracks the homo sapien’s rise from just another insignificant animal 200,000 years ago to the supreme rulers of the planet. He attributes this world domination to our ability to co operate both flexibly and in large numbers.  Of course, other species show that they are able to co operate in large numbers – bees and ants do this immaculately, but they are incapable of being flexible. And then there are those animals that can co operate flexibly – elephants, monkeys – but not in large numbers. Although, I suppose if you sat 1,000 monkeys in front a typewriter and asked them to type for infinity, eventually one of them would produce a chapter from Genesis.

   Harari concludes that what allows the homo sapien species to do both lies in our special super power – our imaginations. Our species is the only one to have developed imagination, and we have used this ability to imagine to create what Harari calls ‘fictional stories’ – our legal systems, the idea of nationalism, the multitude of religious groups, and economics – ‘here, this piece of paper can be exchanged for goods and services!’ Homo sapiens have succeeded so dramatically because our ability to imagine and believe in these abstract concepts have allowed us to work cooperatively in large numbers. Other animals can only really react to things on face value, but as a collective group we can use our imagination to enable us to work within intellectual constructs that do not really exist.  

  So we’re the leading divas in the Animal Kingdom because we’re great at making things up and having our peers believe us.  But what about the cousins we’ve lost along the way?  One of the anthropological areas of study that has always fascinated me is the discovery of other species within the Homo genus. The evolutionary journey from our primate ancestors to where we are today has so far involved the discovery of seven other Homo species, all of which are now extinct.

   At 2.5 million years old, Homo Habilis is widely believed to be the oldest of the Homo groups, with its larger skull making it markedly different to its Australopithecus counterparts at the time. The other Homo groups all share the same unique features -  being able to walk upright on two legs, possessing large brains, and inventing and using tools make this group pretty special. Homo heidelbergensis (which sounds like something you might catch on holiday in an Austrian brothel) is thought to be the direct link to Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens.  350,000 years ago, a group of Homo heidelbergensis migrated into Europe and evolved in Neanderthals, another group wandered into Asia and became Denisovans, and those that stayed in Africa evolved into Homo sapiens. Here is a simplified family tree showing our journey:

 Of all the extinct Homo groups, it is the European wanderers Homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthals, that seem to have generated the most press. Bad press. Their name is synonymous with idiot chauvinistic behaviour, and if you’ve ever been down to Wetherspoons in Angel, Islington on a Friday night, you’ll know what I mean.

   But this reputation of the Neanderthal as lacking intelligence is misguided. 250,000 years ago Neanderthals appeared in Europe, and 40,000 years ago they were gone. Within that time frame of 200,000 years, Neanderthals survived in harsh northern landscapes, made tools, were successful hunters, and maintained emotional social relationships within their individual groups. Of all the species that have ever lived, this alone puts them up there in the intelligence stakes. The remains of 400 individual Neanderthals have so far been discovered, and from these we can piece together their way of life. Most of the bones found indicate an extremely difficult existence, one which was characterised by plenty of hand-to-hand combat and violence (again, just like a night in Wetherspoons)

    Neanderthals were physically bigger than their Homo sapien counterparts, but the remains of ten individual Neanderthals found in the Shanidar cave in Iraq indicate that, like us, the Neanderthals cared for their families and performed ritual funerals. 

One of the skeletons of an elderly male show deformity and bruising from an earlier point in his life, and tell us that he was cared for until his death. Another skeleton of a younger Neanderthal male was found in a grave marked deliberately by a pile of stones, indicating a ritual burial.

The arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe 45,000 years ago, and the extinction of Neanderthals just 5,000 years later has raised eyebrows. If we accept that Neanderthals were not unintelligent oafs but actually smart and emotional in the way that their Homo sapiens counterparts were, then the question becomes: what made us successful survivors, and the Neanderthals go extinct? For the answer to this, we must look back to collaboration and imagination.

 In his excellent book, “The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body”, Steven Mithen examines the Neanderthal’s hunting technology, and asserts that although they understood animal behaviour, they were not able to make specialised hunting weapons to target different animals in different situations, unlike us who basically became great at it. Mithen suggests that the extra neural circuits present in the Homo sapien brain, which have ‘the capacity for metaphor, which underlines art, science and religion’ – were absent in the Neanderthals, and so they were unable to problem solve in the way that we are. Neanderthals were smart in so far as they were able to make tools, but they weren't imaginative enough to adapt these tools to solve problems.

  Our larger prefrontal cortexes give us a better working memory, and this in turn allows us to do perform tasks that other animals can’t. Anthropologist Alison Brooks cites the presence of trade networks and social networking (think Facebook, but with a lot of walking) in early Homo sapiens as a key reason for their success, and the absence of which as a possible reason for the Neanderthal demise. Other theories suggest that Homo sapien disease wiped out the Neanderthals, and there is evidence to suggest that some of us carry Neanderthal DNA, indicating some level of interbreeding between the two groups. Pat Shipman in her book “Invaders” argues that the creation of a man-wolf alliance between our Homo sapien ancestors and canines meant that a sort of awesome Batman and Robin tagteam was created to slay the competition in Europe at the time – bye Neanderthals, see ya European lions, adios European mammoths, get gone European hyenas! This strong relationship between man and dog still exists today, although I doubt that most dog owners use their dogs to go around killing things.

The fate of the Neanderthals, who were clearly an intelligent group in their own right, tell us a lot about what makes us special. By working collaboratively, and powered by our unique gift of imagination and abstract thought, we have achieved many unbelievable things. The snag comes in making sure that the power of our collaborative forces are used for good, instead of evil. I think we all remember Madonna's "Hard Candy"

Maybe I should return Britney’s call after all.