Lone Survivors by Chris Stringer Page A

intermittently in regions like western Asia). I am sure there were differences (many unknown to us) in appearance, communication, expression, and general behavior that would have impinged on how Neanderthals and moderns saw each other. So when the populations met, did they perceive each other as simply other people, enemies, alien, or even prey? And since the Neanderthals disappeared at different times across Asia and Europe, the reasons why they disappeared from Siberia might be different from why they became extinct in the Middle East, and again different from the factors at work in Gibraltar or Britain—and these factors may not always have included the presence of modern humans.
    This brings us back to one of the favored explanations for the extinction of people like the Neanderthals: behavior. I am one of those who have often invoked the behavioral superiority of modern humans over other human species as the main reason for our success and their failure, but reconstructing such behavior from the archaeological record, let alone deciding who is superior to whom, is no easy matter. In the next chapter we will look at new methods of unlocking evolutionary and behavioral insights from the fossils, and then in the succeeding two chapters we will consider what the archaeological record now seems to be telling us.

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    What Lies Beneath
    The fossil record of the early history of our species and our close relatives such as the Neanderthals has grown tremendously in the last twenty-five years. But what has developed at an even faster rate is our ability to unlock secrets from those fossils, secrets that tell us about the biology and the lives of those long-dead people. In this chapter I will show how new techniques let us look at the size and shape of ancient skulls, and reveal hidden structures such as the inner ear bones that can tell us about the posture, movement, and senses of vanished peoples. Now we can look at butchery marks microscopically to examine details of ancient human behavior, daily growth lines in fossil teeth to reconstruct how children grew up 1 million years ago, and we can use isotopes to reveal how ancient humans in different parts of the world exploited their environments, and what they ate. In the last twenty years traditional methods of recording the size and shape of fossil bones and teeth have been complemented and increasingly superseded by techniques that capture such information on a computer, through digitizing or scanning. The medical technology of computerized tomography ( CT ) X-raying has been particularly successful in extending work into anatomical structures that either are difficult to measure through traditional techniques (for example, the shape of a curved form like a brow ridge) or are otherwise inaccessible (for example, fossils hidden inside rocks or unerupted teeth in a jawbone). And the computational technique of geometric morphometrics ( morphometrics simply means “measuring shape or form”) is allowing wider and more detailed comparisons of the size, shape, and even the growth patterns of fossil and recent samples.
    Most of these new techniques were not available when I began my research on human evolution, and they were still in their infancy when Recent African Origin models started to germinate in the 1980s. For example, when I made my four-month trip around Europe to measure about a hundred fossil skulls of archaic and modern humans in 1971, I carried a small suitcase full of metal measuring instruments, such as callipers, tapes, and protractors, and a camera to record the preservation and basic shape of the specimens I was studying. (A single well-preserved skull with a lower jaw might take up to half a day to record fully.) With no laptops or pocket calculators, all my data were slowly recorded by hand on paper sheets, and, without photocopiers, there was a great risk (unappreciated by me at first) that all the hard-won data on which my career depended could