searching for cave women

January 26, 2021 8:17 AM

"Let's begin at the start. Hold two crumple-faced newborn girls, one human, one Neanderthal, and you’d have to look closely to see differences. Both equally vulnerable, fitting the smallest-size onesies, their skin velvety-soft. The Neanderthal baby doesn’t yet have heavy brows and, lit by a hearth’s dull glow, her eyes are probably as slate-dark and limpid as any human newborn’s. But cradle her downy head, and it will feel slightly longer, with a bony nobble discernible above her neck." Archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes explores what we know about the lives of female Neanderthals for Aeon.
posted by ChuraChura (6 comments total)

This is a beautiful article, saved for closer reading later.

I'm reminded of the work of Tom Björklund, a paleoartist/visual artist who paints Neanderthal and other early people to try to help us understand and "humanise" these ancestors. His portraits of Neanderthal women and girls in particular are beautiful. We need to dismantle these ideas that early people were simple animals and remember that we're not so distant after all.
posted by fight or flight at 10:41 AM on January 26, 2021 [9 favorites]

After the reverse being true:

Nobody today has mitochondrial DNA like that in Neanderthals and, since it’s passed only maternally, this implies that interbreeding was more often between their men and our women.

Can we rule out N-woman S-man children being as common in the first generation but less likely to have surviving descendants?

Thanks for the article, what an enormous range of time and research it summarizes! I get kind of dizzy thinking about culture measured over 10^5a spans.
posted by clew at 10:50 AM on January 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

It might be something like Covid that changed things. Also it might be the head shape that made birth difficult, it they think Neanderthal women birthed differently. Craig Venter of the human genome project stated that sometime in the last 50,000 years, human populations the world over consisted of a group of 1200 individuals. Something awful happened here. I saw the NOVA in which Craig Venter made this statement. He said they at first thought it was down to about 5,000 individuals, then the evidence showed it was much less more like 1,200.
posted by Oyéah at 6:09 PM on January 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

I only got a few chapters into Rebecca Wragg Sykes book Kindred before I had to return to the NYPL e-library (my ability to read since COVID is spotty, either voracious, like 4 books a week, or super slow). It was really fascinating as far as I got. I reserved a hard copy and can’t wait to pick up where I left off. Thanks for this, it will tide me over.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 6:31 PM on January 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Can these bones live?

Evidently, yes.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:40 PM on January 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is a really interesting article, thank you for posting it. The whole thing is full of thought-provoking snippets.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:50 PM on January 26, 2021 [1 favorite]