Expert: John J. Shea - 4/4/2005

Question
It appears that most of the evidence which may show that Neandertals had culture (pollen and animal bones found at burials, pierced shells, powdered ocher) is fragmentary.  Do you think that, taken together, these add up to evidence that Neandertals had a primitive culture?  Or do you think these can all be explained using other theories?

Answer
Dear Lucy
I would say this evidence indicates that Neandertals had a symbolic capacity (no surprise there, rudimentary symbolic capacity [e.g., sign language] is present in chimanzees, so it's probably an evolutionarily primitive capacity among humans and apes).  The evidence you cite is present, but it is very patchily distributed, -only found at a minority of sites with good preservation.  Culture, as we practice it, however, is a more widespread, persistent, and all-pervasive phenomenon than what the Neandertal evidence suggests.  Similar kinds of symbolic/culutral evidence are nearly universal among Upper Paleolithic sites associated with modern humans.
A significant amount of the putative evidence for Neandertal "culture" (the burials, the beads, the ochre) is highly controversial (coming from older excavations that lacked the stratigraphic controls we use today).  Even if one allows this evidence to be counted, one is faced with the problem that possessing a cultural capacity did Neandertals no long-term evolutionary good.  They still became extinct ca. 30-40 Kyr.
Explaining the existence of such rudimentary cultural capacities (that is, why there would not be rapid and runaway natural selection for the kind of capacities we see among ourselves) is a major theoretical problem.  I think that right now the field of paleoanthropology is divided between those who see this as reflecting neuro-cognitive differences between Neandertals and ourselves and those who see population size differences as a possible factor.
These are not, however, mutually-exclusive hypotheses, so both may have played a role.
Cheers,
John Shea
(Sorry for delayed reply, -I was at Paleoanthropology Society meetings.)