Thats Mr. Neanderthal to You
hundred years ago, a paleontologist from Zagreb University visited a cave
on the outskirts of the Croatian village of Krapina, where he found bits
of animal bones, a chipped stone tool and a single human molar. Excavations
at the Krapina cave would eventually turn up much greater treasures: 874
fossilized Neanderthal human remains.
Dr. Alan Mann and Dr. Janet Monge Gr80,
two physical anthropologists at Penn, recently had the first opportunity
to study x-rays of this extensive bone collection. And they found evidence
that would surprise many scientists who have dismissed Neanderthals as
sickly, dumb brutes on the brink of extinction when modern humans ambled
over to Europe from Africa. By and large, Mann says, "These guys
were really healthy."
Although Mann and Monge have used their
scholarly expertise on a number of occasions to assist in the legal defense
of modern-day humans (see main story), their primary focus is on Neanderthals,
a group of early hominids who occupied Europe between 130,000 and 30,000
years ago, and according to Manns engagingly pithy commentary, "had
"Neanderthals looked different from
living humans, its true," he says. "But their brains were
as big as modern humans, sometimes bigger. They buried their dead.
They used fire. They may have been superintelligent people. We dont
know. We play them down and look at them as subhuman."
Mann and Monge recently worked with a Penn
professor of radiology, Dr. Morrie Kricun GM79, to examine radiographic
images of more than 75 Neanderthals from the Krapina collection. They
determined from the bone density that most of these individuals were quite
robust. (Their findings are published in The Krapina Hominids: A Radiographic
Atlas of the Skeletal Collection, and were presented at an international
conference this summer on the centennial of the Krapina caves discovery.)
"We were able to document one of the earliest benign bone tumors
every found; one individual may have had a surgical amputation of his
hand; and several individuals had examples of osteoarthritiswhich
may have made them a little stiff in the morning," Mann says.
The two anthropologists have also done extensive
work on the histology, or microscopic anatomy, of Neanderthal teeth, finding
clues about human evolution in the patterns within hardy tooth enamel.
When he introduces classes to dental anthropologyordinarily not
the sexiest of topicsMann sets out bowls of apples and caramels
for his students to crunch and chew on. This, he explains, helps them
appreciate what important structures teeth arewhile simultaneously
preventing them from falling asleep.
For Monge, the excitement of her field lies
in its "string of never-ending questions
the fact that when
you test the hypotheses, you dont actually come to a truth in the
end. You just say that this or that hypothesis was not supported, and
then you can go on and generate more hypotheses."
Her study of human fossils, for example,
has even yielded evidence of domestic violence in antiquity. Monge has
found indications of spousal abuse from the prevalence of female skulls
with healed cheekbone fractures discovered in two Iron Age burial sites
of north-central Iran (part of the University Museums collection).
"People were getting smacked around," Mann says. What this suggests
is that "male aggression toward females is not something that just
appeared in our own society, but has a very unfortunate history."
The big question that both anthropologists
would like to answer one day centers on the ultimate relationship between
Neanderthals and modern humans. "I really feel that part of our ancestry
contains Neanderthals," Mann says. "That these brutish peoples
are in our backgrounds. To deny that is to give us a kind of pristine
origin, which in some ways [is] not in keeping with what biology and evolution
are all about."