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[Neanderthals] are not a failed version of us, and the trajectory from them to us is not teleological: the fact that we are here and they are not is not the point and purpose of her story, or indeed of history. And yet, and yet ... the fact is that we are here and they aren’t, and although that is not the punchline of evolution, the question of why and how this happened is still interesting.

The first thing to note is that something changed in H. sapiens around 70 ka. At that point our material culture is not self-evidently on a different level from that of the Neanderthals. We had probably mastered the skill of sailing, though not necessarily out of the sight of land; that would certainly explain how we had got as far as we did around the coasts of Asia. But there is nothing to suggest a mastery of complex and symbolic thought. The oldest drawings that have been found are abstract patterns in a South African cave, and date from 73 ka. The oldest recognisable figurative art was found in caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi; it dates from 44 ka. These drawings are immediately and obviously something new in human history. We can argue about their purpose and whether they are ‘art’ in any meaningful contemporary sense, but really the question doesn’t matter: what they clearly are is evidence of a new kind of cognition. Something happened to human consciousness: a ‘light-bulb’ moment. For the first time in its 4.5 billion-year history, Earth was populated by people with minds like ours, who think the way we do. From that point onwards, the record of our material culture grows more and more complex and our creative imagination begins to leave famous traces such as the Lion-man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel at 35-40 ka, the Venus of Willendorf at 30 ka, the cave paintings of Chauvet at 30 ka and of Lascaux at 17 ka.

By​ that point the Neanderthals had disappeared. They vanish from the archaeological record with shocking abruptness around 40 ka. H. sapiens had by that point spread all through Africa, Asia and Australia, but had not yet made significant inroads into the part of Europe settled by H. neanderthalensis. Then, suddenly, we’re everywhere, and the Neanderthals are gone. So, what happened? For a long time it has been thought that the possibilities boil down to three. The first and most lurid is the idea that there was full-scale genocidal war between the two species of human. A recent article at BBC Future spelled out the idea under the heading: ‘Did Neanderthals go to war with our ancestors?’ There is no evidence for this, and the theory fits into patterns of thinking that see the archaeological record in terms of racial hierarchies and contests for dominance. Wragg Sykes thinks these ideas are culturally determined and of limited utility, and she is probably right.

The second possibility is that we did not defeat the Neanderthals, but simply outcompeted them. The climate was getting colder fast at 40 ka, and (contrary to the stereotype) the Neanderthals did not love the cold. They were shorter than us, heavy-set and strong, and they had extraordinarily high energy requirements: some seven thousand calories a day. For a band of 25, that’s a reindeer a day, every day, all year round. In a climate changing faster than it had in the memory of any living individual, that might have been impossible to sustain. There is also evidence that Neanderthal genetic diversity was weakening and bands growing smaller and sparser. All of this would have been happening as H. sapiens was for the first time making significant inroads into Europe, increasing competition for resources at an already difficult moment. Wragg Sykes thinks some version of that is what did for the Neanderthals – though she notes that ‘finishing this book in the late spring of 2020, it’s impossible not to wonder if a terrible contagion might have been added into the mix, jumping from us to them.’

The third theory is that we didn’t fight them or outcompete them but interbred with them: that we are not archaic H. sapiens but a hybrid of sapiens and neanderthalensis. To general amazement, in 2010 it turned out that this theory is at least partly correct. Neanderthal DNA was sequenced and compared with H. sapiens DNA, and it was found that all surviving humans outside Africa have between 1.8 and 2.6 per cent Neanderthal DNA; sub-Saharan Africans have less, thought to be the result of later reintroduction after the initial exodus from Africa. Western Europeans have less Neanderthal DNA than Asians, Oceanians and Indigenous Americans. Although no individual has more than 2.6 per cent Neanderthal DNA, a large part of the Neanderthal genome still exists: most sources give a figure of 20 per cent, but Wragg Sykes says ‘perhaps as much as a half’. (She doesn’t give a source for that, which is a pity, because it is a very striking number; this is a rare instance where her reader-friendly policy of not footnoting everything to death is regrettable.) In other words, the Neanderthals are still here; we are at least partly them, in the very synapses that fire as I write these words and you read them. It is an amazing thought.

As the DNA evidence has continued to come in, the story of our relationship with our relatives has got more and more complicated, as stories about relatives tend to do. In 2018, the Denisova Cave remains that were first DNA-sequenced for mitochondrial female-line DNA were retested with new technology that allowed the examination of nuclear DNA. To widespread astonishment, it was found that D11 (known as ‘Denny’) had a Denisovan father and a Neanderthal mother: she was a first-generation hybrid human. This strongly suggests that interbreeding between human species was common. As the DNA evidence continues to come in, it is becoming apparent that H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis had multiple patches of interbreeding across multiple thousands of years. The idea of inter-species sex was once seen as one of Jean M. Auel’s wilder and pervier fantasies about early man. We now know that she was completely right.

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

And the "sado" part of sado-masochism is named after the famous soul singer, Sade. Her song "No Ordinary Love" was embraced by the counterculture kink movement in San Francisco during the early 1990's.

Larssen wrote:

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