In the Alcoy Mountains, in the Mariola mountain range, are hidden El Salt and Abrique del Pastor, a rock shelter that was frequently inhabited by Neanderthals between 80,000 and 45,000 years ago. These sites are essential to understanding how they lived and why … Why did these groups disappear, most recently from the Iberian Peninsula before the arrival of modern humans in Eurasia? This is the aim of About Time, a multidisciplinary project spanning decades that has won the €80,000 IV Palarq National Prize for Archeology and Paleontology, the most important in the discipline in Spain.
The team, co-led by Cristo Hernandez Gómez and Carolina Malol, researchers from the University of La Laguna in Tenerife, found houses at the sites in an unusual state of preservation. “It seemed to us that someone had left a fire burning the night before,” Hernandez says. There are also multiple remains of butcher’s tools, flint tools, and teeth of a young man. But the strangest thing is what cannot be seen with the naked eye. Researchers have been able to “read” the Earth itself to distinguish between different occupations over the years with unprecedented accuracy and decipher how these extinct relatives related to the world. Hernandez narrates it hours before receiving the award from Queen Sofia.
– Neanderthals returned repeatedly to Salt and Abrique del Pastor for 20 thousand years. What attracted them to these places?
– They were small groups with great mobility. They moved across the valley and set up camps in different places. The Salt had a privileged location, with access to multiple resources: very close to the river, mountains and plains where they hunted horses. If we talk in current terms, it is like buying a very well located apartment in a central location. At Abrique del Pastor, in the interior of the mountains, they captured goats and collected juniper, yew, juniper, or boxwood for fuel.
Survival strategies
—During all that time environmental conditions were so variable, were Neanderthals able to adapt?
– Yes, absolutely. Neanderthals were present in Eurasia from 250,000 years ago until about 40,000 years ago, a very long period in which they had to face extremely variable climates. About 70 thousand years ago, Europe went through extremely cold conditions that were very difficult for them, but they faced them. For this reason, it is very interesting to study human experience in the past, to see how these problems were solved, in some way, the same problems that concern us today. Talking about Neanderthals is talking about sustainability, climate change and human migration.
-Were they innovative?
— For a long time, Neanderthals were accused of having a monotonous lifestyle, which deprived them of the ability to innovate, but that was because we were looking in the wrong direction. What happens is that the changes are not so much noticed in the tools they made, but in the way they exist in the world, in their survival strategies: how they organize space, how they move in the area, how they deal with animals… They led an ecologically sustainable way of life without depleting resources. They knew very well that this was important. For this reason, flint supply areas and fishing areas are changing…
“In 3 cm of excavation a thousand years may have passed. Our obsession is to differentiate between each profession.”
– Were they aware of how nature works?
These hunters relied on the food produced by nature. The archaeological record shows that they had knowledge accumulated and transmitted over generations about how the animals they were interested in behaved: when deer or mares give birth, what happens if you capture a group of animals and endanger their reproduction, where herds move… This observation of nature gives them knowledge that they use to their advantage to perpetuate a successful way of life. It is not opportunistic behaviour.
Record “Frankenstein.”
-How did they appreciate all that?
– This is one of the strengths of our project. Our methodology allows us to obtain microscopic and molecular information, opening windows to the past that were previously closed and seeing Neanderthals with a resolution that has never been achieved. At a Paleolithic site, occupations that occurred at different times appear together, like a “Frankenstein” record. This is what we call the muscular effect: you cannot distinguish between professions that correspond to generations that have never met. Consider that in 3cm of excavation a millennium may have passed, it is like mixing our objects with those of our great-grandparents: there is nothing to see. However, our multilevel methodology allowed us to separate these elements, and begin to see the different occupations and scrutinize the changes between them.
—They can tell the time between houses even with the precision of contracts.
-It is our obsession. We did an archaeological study, stratigraphy, and the location of all the objects and houses on the site, to see where the land on which Neanderthals walked was located. This gives us the possibility to order what came first and what comes later. To find out the amount of time that elapses from one moment to the next, we use archaeomagnetism. The Earth’s magnetic field is not constant. If we look at two fires and the magnetic particles are lined up differently, it means they did not originate at the same time. We were able to calculate the minimum time required for this deviation to occur. We are now repeating this work in a more complex context. It’s the way to push the boundaries of knowledge.
“They were skilled hunters, but vegetables were also present in their diet. They knew plant resources well.”
– They also discovered that the diet was more diverse than previously thought.
— Yes, the Neanderthals of this region were excellent hunters: their favorite prey were horses, deer and goats. But lipid studies have shown that vegetables were also present in their diet, although we don’t know which ones. They knew the plant resources well.
– What do these sites tell us about the disappearance of Neanderthals?
-They disappeared or were attenuated in Homo sapiens, as another team recently suggested… There is no single answer. It is possible that the specific causes are not the same in some areas as in others. In the Mediterranean, the disappearance was gradual. They were small groups, which may have weakened them in the face of climate change: cold and drought. The problem is not that they cannot tolerate the cold, but rather that the region’s resources have changed.
-And the arrival of Homo sapiens had nothing to do with it?
-We know that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were together in other areas, and they even interbred. But here is evidence of later modern humans. There is a gap period between the last Neanderthals and the first Homo sapiens.
“In the Mediterranean, the disappearance of these populations was gradual. They were small groups that faced significant climate deterioration.”
– What is the future of these deposits?
– We will continue with high-resolution archaeology. In Salt, genetic material was found in the soil, but we cannot advance further because it is awaiting publication. We are in a vulnerable environment, outdoors, and we have a sad memory of how torrential rains fell in the Valencian region, so we are also very concerned about protecting the sites. We want them to be able to visit.
– What do Neanderthals teach us about ourselves?-We have to know our world. This was one of the great evolutionary successes of Neanderthals: they knew how to listen to the planet. And that we are the result of a beautiful mixture, of a diverse world of people in motion.