Elsevier

Quaternary Science Reviews

Volume 217, 1 August 2019, Pages 330-339
Quaternary Science Reviews

For a cultural anthropology of the last Neanderthals

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.12.019 Get rights and content

Abstract

The chronological and territorial expansion of neandertalian societies, their capacities of adaptation and expansion, show that their brutal extinction, which not only affects their ways of life but also their biological reality, cannot be rationally imputed to a natural process. As a result, we here propose that theories addressing these extinctions through these prisms cannot account for the adaptive ubiquity of these societies, or for the vast territories on which these groups settled. It appears more than ever essential to look for the processes in question in relation with thei cultural anthropology of the concerned societies. Neandertal extinction remains a purely speculative scientific field, but considering the remarkable adaptative abilities revealed by these populations, we assume on our own that climatic change, modification to environments, disappearance of traditionally hunted fauna or a subtle combination of all of these causes would thus be considered as extremely secondary in that extinction process. These factors, whose only limits are the imagination of researchers, who are distant spectators of this replacement, cannot account for the primary processes of this hominin disappearance.

The approach angle is considered here as a presupposition, yet research as a discipline does not require the alignment of concepts developed by researchers but rather the demonstration of their logical constructs. Should this process be above all, not to say exclusively, approached from the point of view of the history and the sociology of these past societies? How can we understand that, after 150 years of archaeology, one of the most recent and most important hominin extinction remains focused in the Natural Sciences sphere, with no fundamental construction of a Cultural Anthropology of the last Neanderthals?

More deeply, we must investigate the ethological and anthropological structures of these populations. Does a Neanderthalian ethology ever existed? The question of the identification of an ethology of biologically fossil societies cannot be evaluated on the notions of presence/absence of archaeological realities to which we subjectively confer a discriminating function (a bone tool, an ornament, a grave, - … -), but by exploring the logical identification of all the technical and cultural products of these societies. These heuristic paths are promising and still have to be scientifically explored.

Section snippets

Why we shall, finally, build a cultural anthropology of the last Neanderthals?

Neanderthalian societies colonized immense territories. They even may well be the first humanity to conquer and exploit most of the environmental diversity of the planet. The success of these implantations and their marked dynamism raise the fundamental problem of processes in relation to their rapid and synchronous eradication throughout Eurasia. Their millennial adaptation to all biotopes and climatic environments of the Eurasian supercontinent let the scientific community with no obvious

An introduction to the end … Overview of the last Neanderthals in Europe

The very long time period of the Middle Paleolithic closed for most of the European territories at the turn of the 42nd and 43rd millennia (Higham et al., 2014). In some geographical areas, perhaps situated at the periphery of the pattern generally documented on the continent, a few rare Mousterian groups could have experienced a perpetuation exceeding their continental extinction by ten millennia. Thus, both extremities of Europe, the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula (e.g. Zilhao et al.,

Rhodanian bricks to build a cultural anthropology of the last Neanderthals

The vast Rhône corridor currently offers major archaeological insights into the organization of Neanderthal societies prior to their extinction in the French Mediterranean area. The archaeological documentation from this region can be seen as particularly original in view of the data commonly referenced concerning the organization of the last Neanderthal societies. It has been demonstrated, a dozen years ago, that the Rhône corridor has a historical structure strictly differentiated from that

Acknowledgements

This paper was initially written for 3 sections of a local catalog linked to « The third Man » exhibit (2017) from the National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies, France. As so these ideas and concepts here exposed were essentially available to a more local scale. It has been updated and specially rearticulated for this issue. We warmly acknowledge the Service Régional de l'Archéologie Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region and the city of Malataverne (Drôme) for funding researches in Grotte Mandrin.

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