[vtsnowedin]

On review, I have to agree with vt and dis that the core finding of the original study that the lead article refers to is rather self evident. .........

.......

vt wrote: "The modern humans may well have introduced diseases that were plagues to the neanderthals making one contact with a modern human fatal for a whole Neanderthal family group or tribe.
At any rate some thing or things happened to make their death rate exceed their birth rate and in a few generations they were gone."

That's an interesting proposal that I hadn't thought about. It would seem quite logical, since a similar dynamic was important in wiping out so much of the Native American population (Guns, Germs, and Steel and all that).

The problem with it that I see, though, is that one then (and to some extent the problem with any theory that ascribes the demise of the Neanderthal solely to the influence of homo sapiens) is that the two populations seem to have co-existed in Europe for about 5000 years.

Surely, an introduced disease would do most of its grim work in the first and second generation after contact. I can't quite figure out a scenario where it would take hundreds of generations to do so.

Also, if homo sapiens were so much more effective at hunting because of their domestication of dogs, their throwing weapons and their communicative abilities, one would think that those advantages also would have out-competed Neanderthals much more quickly and wiped them out in much faster than 5000 years.

Consider that peoples mobility was much less then it is today. There were no bridges or roads and all travel would have been by foot. As late as 1850 most modern humans lived and died within fifty miles of their place of birth with sailors and world travelers being much less then one percent of the modern population. During the ice age tribes would spend the winter sheltering in a cave with no communication with anyone, friend or foe, for months. Only in summer while following migrating herds of game animals would tribes encounter other people and have the opportunity to pass germs from one person to another. So the rate of progress of anything good or bad might have been very slow with fits and starts.
Looking at the timeline I consider that the last most southern advance of the ice sheets would have pushed the game and the Neanderthals south and pushed them into the land already being occupied and hunted by modern humans about 30,000 ybp and that concentration of their population created both conflict with the modern humans and the opportunity for plagues to spread east west along the ice sheet margin.

[Synapsid]

vtsnowedin,

The Neanderthals were gone long before 30 000 ybp. Recent re-dating shows that they likely didn't make it past 40 000 ybp. Moderns were already in Europe by then, and in Asia a couple of millennia earlier, so transmission was possible though, as you point out, epidemic spread would have been difficult.

Neanderthal DNA is found in an Asian Modern who dates about 45 000 ybp, so, um, we had contact.

[dohboi]

Sy asked: "What was your once-upon-a-time academic field?"

Linguistics, but such questions of ultimate origins have long been considered peripheral to the field, at best. That has change some in the more recent decades.

[dohboi]

Vt wrote: "...As late as 1850 most modern humans lived and died within fifty miles of their place of birth..."

Exactly.

And yet, long before that time, the germ and technological advantages of Europeans still allowed them to dominate and largely wipe out the native populations of the Americas and a number of other places.

I expect that better dating and DNA techniques, and perhaps some things we haven't even dreamed of yet, will continue to overturn our notions of who these folks were and of how they interacted with moderns.

[vtsnowedin]

vtsnowedin,

The Neanderthals were gone long before 30 000 ybp. Recent re-dating shows that they likely didn't make it past 40 000 ybp. Moderns were already in Europe by then, and in Asia a couple of millennia earlier, so transmission was possible though, as you point out, epidemic spread would have been difficult.

Neanderthal DNA is found in an Asian Modern who dates about 45 000 ybp, so, um, we had contact.

The exact dates of ice sheet advances and retreats are a bit fuzzy as each advance tended to wipe out the evidence of the prior one and the events of the interim between them. It doesn't matter to my supposition if it was 30,000 or 45,000ybp or any time in between. Whenever it was the advancing ice reduced hunting grounds and pushed the Neanderthals south and into contact and conflict with modern humans. The proverbial caught between a rock and a hard place dilemma.

[Synapsid]

vtsnowedin,

I'd substitute "severe climate" for "ice sheet" but I agree with your point.

During times of severe climate in northern Eurasia Neanderthals were living as far south as Israel and NW Iran. When things warmed up Neanderthal remains are found less far to the south. The record from Israel is illustrative: the caves of Skhul and Qafzeh contain horizons with Moderns in the lowest, dated to the last interglacial, Neanderthals farther up, and Moderns in the upper layers. This would fit with Moderns moving up from Africa during the interglacial but Neanderthals staying farther north, then Moderns moving south as the last glacial got underway and Neanderthals showing up in their place, and finally Moderns moving in for good, well after Neanderthal times. The story is doubtless more interesting than this, though.

As for determining the times of ice-sheet advance, at the local scale, as you say, later advances tend to obscure evidence for earlier ones unless the earlier advanced farther than the later ones, which is the case, for example, for the evidence in the Midwest of the glacial previous to the most recent one. For ice sheet growth and decline on the larger scale we have an excellent record contained in sea-floor sediments, detailed and well-dated. Foraminifera, one-celled critters that make shells of calcium carbonate, incorporate oxygen from seawater into their shells, and the ratio of 16oxygen to 18oxygen records ice volume on land: seawater evaporates, falls as snow which, if there's enough of it, compacts to ice and when conditions are right you're on your way to an ice sheet. Water molecules containing 16O are lighter than ones containing 18O so the evaporated water is slightly enriched in 16O and 18O is preferentially left behind, to be built into foram shells. Higher ratios of 18O to 16O record glacials, lower ratios record interglacials, and the shells can be dated by U/Pb.

[vtsnowedin]

vtsnowedin,

I'd substitute "severe climate" for "ice sheet" but I agree with your point.

During times of severe climate in northern Eurasia Neanderthals were living as far south as Israel and NW Iran. When things warmed up Neanderthal remains are found less far to the south. The record from Israel is illustrative: the caves of Skhul and Qafzeh contain horizons with Moderns in the lowest, dated to the last interglacial, Neanderthals farther up, and Moderns in the upper layers. This would fit with Moderns moving up from Africa during the interglacial but Neanderthals staying farther north, then Moderns moving south as the last glacial got underway and Neanderthals showing up in their place, and finally Moderns moving in for good, well after Neanderthal times. The story is doubtless more interesting than this, though.

As for determining the times of ice-sheet advance, at the local scale, as you say, later advances tend to obscure evidence for earlier ones unless the earlier advanced farther than the later ones, which is the case, for example, for the evidence in the Midwest of the glacial previous to the most recent one. For ice sheet growth and decline on the larger scale we have an excellent record contained in sea-floor sediments, detailed and well-dated. Foraminifera, one-celled critters that make shells of calcium carbonate, incorporate oxygen from seawater into their shells, and the ratio of 16oxygen to 18oxygen records ice volume on land: seawater evaporates, falls as snow which, if there's enough of it, compacts to ice and when conditions are right you're on your way to an ice sheet. Water molecules containing 16O are lighter than ones containing 18O so the evaporated water is slightly enriched in 16O and 18O is preferentially left behind, to be built into foram shells. Higher ratios of 18O to 16O record glacials, lower ratios record interglacials, and the shells can be dated by U/Pb.

Well having an ice sheet a half mile thick on your hunting grounds is pretty severe climate in my book.
I was aware of the marine sediment data base but don't know how accurate it is. It might be very good at saying a ten thousand year period was ice age or inter glacial but not be able to show you the year to year or decade to decade variations. It would only take a couple of years without summer like conditions in an area to drive the grazing animals south and the hunters would have to follow.
It is an interesting puzzle that is always looking for better data. The things they know for sure have changed four or five times sense I was in school back in the 1970's.

[rockdoc123]

and the shells can be dated by U/Pb.

not to be negative here but many, many years ago when I took a graduate course in geochronology the error bar on U/Pb was around 250,000 years ? can't remember the exact number, likely asked it in my comprehensives but that was back when Jerry Garcia didn't have grey hair!

[dohboi]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L6KGuTr9TI

[Synapsid]

vtsnowedin, rockdoc,

vt: The 18O/16O curve has a resolution of about a millennium overall but this can be improved greatly by using it in conjunction with ice cores, and we have those from Antarctica that reach back some 840 000 years.

I suggested severe climate in place of ice sheet because it applies far away from the ice sheet itself; not all Neanderthals lived near an ice sheet.

rockdoc: Thanks for the nudge. I should have written U/Th dating, especially useful for carbonates such as corals and speleothems, as well as U/Pb dating. That said, U/Pb dating has been refined to give accuracy in dating to well under 1%, I believe, and so has U/Th. Both are combined with mass spectrometry and that really boosts resolution.

[vtsnowedin]

vtsnowedin, rockdoc,

vt: The 18O/16O curve has a resolution of about a millennium overall but this can be improved greatly by using it in conjunction with ice cores, and we have those from Antarctica that reach back some 840 000 years.

I suggested severe climate in place of ice sheet because it applies far away from the ice sheet itself; not all Neanderthals lived near an ice sheet.

Yes the advance of an ice sheet most certainly affects climate all the way to the equator. The water bound up as ice drops sea level and its absence from the atmosphere probably expands and moves deserts etc. I would think that the Neanderthals probably followed the migrations of reindeer and would have a range that covered their range as well as extending south through country populated with horses, bison and aurochs.

[Tanada]

Neanderthal went "extinct" for several reasons:

* Climate change and ice age.. it took a lot of species out, including the sabre tooth cats and wooly mammoth. And, neanderthal.

* Neanderthal was actually better suited for the north, in some ways, compared to homo sapiens. Greater lung capacity, stouter and much stronger, etc. BUT.. homo sapiens was *much smarter*, and had full language, which was a great advantage over neanderthal's simpler vocalizations.

Neanderthal was stronger physically and sturdier, but intelligence and communication and technology is the greatest of all advantages.

* More recent studies indicate that homo sapiens out-competed neanderthal, fought them and drove them out of lands, but also interbred with them.

Neanderthal didn't really go extinct -- rather, they were bred out and blended in with us, and we carry some of their genes to this day.

Neanderthal was actually very intelligent and we actually have quite a bit of proof about that in the stone tools they left behind.

Homo Sapiens stone tools are generally speaking symmetrical in design. The way our brain works we want to see everything 'balanced'. Look at any paintings from cave art up through the 1900 period and they always feel right when the objects of the painting are either grouped in a large mass, or they lead your eye to a certain point. It doesn't matter if it is a cave painting of a hunter going after a herd animal, or a religions painting from 1650, there is either a group shot, or a focused attention shot. Our stone tools were the same way, our arrows and spear tips and knives are all flaked to make a symmetrical shape, and if we break that symmetry the tool is discarded even if it is still fully functional in many cases.

Neanderthal brains were not symmetry obsessed the way we were. When Neanderthal stone tools were first discovered and classified the people doing the work looked at them and instinctively reacted that they 'looked wrong' so they classified them as primitive and less advanced than Homo Sapiens symmetrical stone tools. However modern engineering principals when applied to stone tools revealed that the Neanderthal stone tool collection are ergonomic in design. Instead of being symmetrical and 'pretty' they are deliberately flaked to be sturdy and comfortable for long use without inducing repetitive motion injuries. IOW Neanderthal were so much smarter than us that they designed tools using principals that modern Homo Sapiens did not rediscover until the 1990's.

http://phys.org/news/2012-01-neandertha ... tools.html

Levallois artifacts are flaked stone tools described by archaeologists as ‘prepared cores’ i.e. the stone core is shaped in a deliberate manner such that only after such specialised preparation could a prehistoric flintknapper remove a distinctive ‘Levallois flake’. Levallois flakes have long been suspected by researchers to be intentionally sought by prehistoric hominins for supposedly unique, standardised size and shape properties. However, such propositions were regarded as controversial by some, and in recent decades some researchers questioned whether Levallois tool production involved conscious, structured planning that resulted in predetermined, engineered products.

Now, an experimental study – in which a modern-day flintknapper replicated hundreds of Levallois artifacts – supports the notion that Levallois flakes were indeed engineered by prehistoric hominins. By combining experimental archaeology with morphometrics (the study of form) and multivariate statistical analysis, the Kent researchers have proved for the first time that Levallois flakes removed from these types of prepared cores are significantly more standardised than the flakes produced incidentally during Levallois core shaping (called ‘debitage flakes’). Importantly, they also identified the specific properties of Levallois flakes that would have made them preferable to past mobile hunter-gathering peoples.

Dr Metin Eren, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University’s School of Anthropology and Conservation and the flintknapper who crafted the tools, said: ‘The more we learn about the stone tool-making of the Neanderthals and their contemporaries, the more elegant it becomes. The sophistication evident in their tool-making suggests cognitive abilities more similar to our own than not.’

[Synapsid]

vtsnowedin, Tanada,

vt: It's the other way round: climate governs ice sheet behavior. In proximity to an ice sheet its presence is what people would respond to, yes, but recall that not all Neanderthals lived near ice sheets. Most of the range of the Neanderthals was nowhere near an ice sheet; NW Eurasia was mostly covered in ice down to about the latitude of London or central Germany and no farther east than the longitude of the western Laptev Sea, and that's a lot of area, but much of the Neanderthal range still lay to the south, particularly at times of severe climate.

Neanderthals were hunters, all right, and large mammals were certainly sought after and eaten. Over the past few decades more detailed examination of sites shows that Neanderthal diets were not as based on megamammal meat as has been thought, though, and they were more like Moderns in their dietary opportunism than they'd been given credit for. A lot would have depended on what was available locally, or course, just as with the modern Inuit--who eat all the vegetable goodies they can find during Spring and Summer growth seasons as well as partly digested stuff from caribou and maybe moose intestines.

Neanderthals did hunt mammoth, horse, bison, reindeer--anything they could bring down and they could bring down most anything. Bjorn Kurten, who was one of the main researchers on Neanderthal way of life, once said that a male Neanderthal could have killed a horse with his fist. Kurten wasn't kidding, either. It's true that those horses weren't as large as ours today, but still.

On Jersey, in the English Channel, there's a mammoth jump dated to around 125 000 years, if memory serves. Ran the beasts over the edge of a cliff, they did.

Tanada: The earliest Moderns out of Africa, at the Israeli sites that date to the last interglacial, show that Moderns were using the very same stone-tool technology the Neanderthals were using, what the article you cited calls Levallois. You can't tell whether a site is Modern or Neanderthal from the stone tools back then. Moderns in Africa were using the same. What the prepared core does is allow a much greater length of cutting edge to be obtained from a given piece of rock than just making a tool out of it (like the hand axes we've all seen pictures of) would, because you can keep making flakes from deeper and deeper in the core as you continue to remove flakes. Later, Moderns made small, uniform flakes (a centimeter or less long,) to be used in composite tools, from cores not much larger than a walnut. The longer a worker does this the better at it that worker gets so it's no surprise that the tools show ergonomic workmanship.

As to Moderns making stone tools showing symmetry not characteristic of Neanderthal tools, yes and no. There's no question of such symmetries being common and widespread--the beautiful Clovis points of the lower 48 states that we've all seen pictures of are sometimes deliberately more beautifully made than they needed to be--and our awareness of them is partly due to those being the ones that get the attention. There are good functional reasons for their manufacture the way they are. But if we look at tools that date to the Late Palaeolithic, from a huge area in eastern Asia, we see largely unifacial industries, just as the Levallois was. The same is true of the tools of the early settlers in NE South America, and of many of the tools from Clovis sites, for that matter. It was characteristic of all stone tool industries created by Moderns. This needs to be kept in mind.

By the way, that tendency to concentrate on symmetry shows up in studies of the marvelous cave paintings of SW Europe. What we see published is a small part of what's there in those caves, and a good deal of that could be called graffiti and crude sketches.

[Synapsid]

dohboi, vtsnowedin, Tanada,

I just noted a goof in my first post: Homo antecessor is the name some archaeologist have applied to hominin remains in Spain that range in age from around 1.2 million (stone tools only, no skeletal material) to 800 000 years, not to the remains at the Sima de los Huesos. The latter have been dated to about 430 000 years.

We don't know if the former are ancestral to the latter or not; neither has been found in Africa, as far as I know.

[vtsnowedin]

vtsnowedin, Tanada,

vt: It's the other way round: climate governs ice sheet behavior. In proximity to an ice sheet its presence is what people would respond to, yes, but recall that not all Neanderthals lived near ice sheets. Most of the range of the Neanderthals was nowhere near an ice sheet; NW Eurasia was mostly covered in ice down to about the latitude of London or central Germany and no farther east than the longitude of the western Laptev Sea, and that's a lot of area, but much of the Neanderthal range still lay to the south, particularly at times of severe climate.

Neanderthals were hunters, all right, and large mammals were certainly sought after and eaten. Over the past few decades more detailed examination of sites shows that Neanderthal diets were not as based on megamammal meat as has been thought, though, and they were more like Moderns in their dietary opportunism than they'd been given credit for. A lot would have depended on what was available locally, or course, just as with the modern Inuit--who eat all the vegetable goodies they can find during Spring and Summer growth seasons as well as partly digested stuff from caribou and maybe moose intestines.

Neanderthals did hunt mammoth, horse, bison, reindeer--anything they could bring down and they could bring down most anything. Bjorn Kurten, who was one of the main researchers on Neanderthal way of life, once said that a male Neanderthal could have killed a horse with his fist. Kurten wasn't kidding, either. It's true that those horses weren't as large as ours today, but still.

On Jersey, in the English Channel, there's a mammoth jump dated to around 125 000 years, if memory serves. Ran the beasts over the edge of a cliff, they did.

Tanada: The earliest Moderns out of Africa, at the Israeli sites that date to the last interglacial, show that Moderns were using the very same stone-tool technology the Neanderthals were using, what the article you cited calls Levallois. You can't tell whether a site is Modern or Neanderthal from the stone tools back then. Moderns in Africa were using the same. What the prepared core does is allow a much greater length of cutting edge to be obtained from a given piece of rock than just making a tool out of it (like the hand axes we've all seen pictures of) would, because you can keep making flakes from deeper and deeper in the core as you continue to remove flakes. Later, Moderns made small, uniform flakes (a centimeter or less long,) to be used in composite tools, from cores not much larger than a walnut. The longer a worker does this the better at it that worker gets so it's no surprise that the tools show ergonomic workmanship.

As to Moderns making stone tools showing symmetry not characteristic of Neanderthal tools, yes and no. There's no question of such symmetries being common and widespread--the beautiful Clovis points of the lower 48 states that we've all seen pictures of are sometimes deliberately more beautifully made than they needed to be--and our awareness of them is partly due to those being the ones that get the attention. There are good functional reasons for their manufacture the way they are. But if we look at tools that date to the Late Palaeolithic, from a huge area in eastern Asia, we see largely unifacial industries, just as the Levallois was. The same is true of the tools of the early settlers in NE South America, and of many of the tools from Clovis sites, for that matter. It was characteristic of all stone tool industries created by Moderns. This needs to be kept in mind.

By the way, that tendency to concentrate on symmetry shows up in studies of the marvelous cave paintings of SW Europe. What we see published is a small part of what's there in those caves, and a good deal of that could be called graffiti and crude sketches.

Part of the difficulty in determining what they did and did not do lies in the durability of there discarded waste. If they gathered a cabbage and ate it there would be no remains of it a week later. The bones of a horse or a mammoth if thrown into a midden pit in a desert area might survive twenty thousand years. A stone tool being stone will still be a stone a couple of million years later and unless it spent that time in a flowing river will still have the tool marks left on it by it's last owner. That throws a considerable bias into the investigations of a researcher looking at all the available evidence that they have to be conscious of and attempt to factor in or out. I know of only one cache of paleolithic wooden spears that has been found. We know not if they were the average for the art at the time or some youths first attempts. Almost all the things they may have made from wood or bone or animal hides have long sense been burned up or rotted to dust. So a researcher looking at a stone point has to imagine what it was hafted to and how it was used and all the perishable kit the owner also had. Sometimes like the Clovis points there are obvious features deliberately worked into the stone that show how they were intended to be hafted but there is not enough of that evidence to go around.
It is a tough science with precious little evidence to work with and much of it could well support two or more plausible explanations for it's existence.

[dohboi]

Interesting discussion on all sides, folks. Thanks.

And here's something to further stir the pot, and to kind of tie together this with another of our favorite threads:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next ... 180959066/

Did Neanderthals Die Out Because of the Paleo Diet?
A new theory links their fate to a meat-heavy regimen

While humans have barrel-shaped chests and narrow pelvises, Neanderthals had bell-shaped torsos with wide pelvises. The prevailing explanation has been that Neanderthals, often living in colder and drier environments than their human contemporaries, needed more energy and therefore more oxygen, so their torsos swelled to hold a bigger respiratory system.

But Ben-Dor had a gut feeling this was wrong. What if the difference was what they ate? Living in Eurasia 300,000 to 30,000 years ago, Neanderthals settled in places like the Polar Urals and southern Siberia—not bountiful in the best of times, and certainly not during ice ages. In the heart of a tundra winter, with no fruits and veggies to be found, animal meat—made of fat and protein—was likely the only energy source.

Alas, though fat is easier to digest, it’s scarce in cold conditions, as prey animals themselves burn up their fat stores and grow lean. So Neanderthals must have eaten a great deal of protein, which is tough to metabolize and puts heavy demands on the liver and kidneys to remove toxic byproducts. In fact, we humans have a “protein ceiling” of between 35 and 50 percent of our diet; eating too much more can be dangerous.

[vtsnowedin]

Interesting discussion on all sides, folks. Thanks.

And here's something to further stir the pot, and to kind of tie together this with another of our favorite threads:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next ... 180959066/

Did Neanderthals Die Out Because of the Paleo Diet?
A new theory links their fate to a meat-heavy regimen

While humans have barrel-shaped chests and narrow pelvises, Neanderthals had bell-shaped torsos with wide pelvises. The prevailing explanation has been that Neanderthals, often living in colder and drier environments than their human contemporaries, needed more energy and therefore more oxygen, so their torsos swelled to hold a bigger respiratory system.

But Ben-Dor had a gut feeling this was wrong. What if the difference was what they ate? Living in Eurasia 300,000 to 30,000 years ago, Neanderthals settled in places like the Polar Urals and southern Siberia—not bountiful in the best of times, and certainly not during ice ages. In the heart of a tundra winter, with no fruits and veggies to be found, animal meat—made of fat and protein—was likely the only energy source.

Alas, though fat is easier to digest, it’s scarce in cold conditions, as prey animals themselves burn up their fat stores and grow lean. So Neanderthals must have eaten a great deal of protein, which is tough to metabolize and puts heavy demands on the liver and kidneys to remove toxic byproducts. In fact, we humans have a “protein ceiling” of between 35 and 50 percent of our diet; eating too much more can be dangerous.

Again plausible but not exclusive to all other possibilities.
The wide pelvis and large rib cage could just be an adaptation to carrying heavy weights long distances. Think of a reindeer hind quarter weighing 75 pounds or so killed three miles from the shelter.
And would there be any evidence of the females gathering and stockpiling nuts , fruit, and edible roots for winter? By spring that pile of turnip ancestors that grandma sat on in the fall would be all gone.

[Synapsid]

vtsnowedin,

All true.

Preservation bias is one of the heavier crosses archaeologists have to bear, especially so, as you say, with regard to perishable organic materials. There are ways to learn something about Neanderthal diets, though. Stable-isotope analysis is a useful approach: the ratio of 15N to 14N in the growth zones of teeth and bones records the ratio of marine to non-marine food sources in the diet, of obvious use in sites near coasts but also sometimes in inland remains too, telling us something about mobility over the lifetime of the individuals. The 13C/12C ratio tells us about relative consumption of various kinds of plants, again over the person's lifetime.

Close examination of teeth, primarily molars I believe, has revealed microscopic amounts of foodstuffs packed into the low points of tooth surfaces and also preserved in dental calculus. Some examples are starch grains, which can be identified to type of plant, and silica phytoliths that tell us which grass seeds were eaten. In the old days careful cleaning of skeletal material in the lab removed such evidence but now it's looked for. More detailed examination of site sediments can reveal the presence of plant material too. We can't compile menus but we do know more than nothing.

Neanderthals were indeed built differently from us. One suggestion was that the larger chest cavity of Moderns contained lungs of greater capacity than those of Neanderthals, allowing us to move fast over long distances, and we certainly do see hunting done that way by the San of the Kalahari in southern Africa. They can wound a large animal and then run it until it drops. One of the differences we see between Neanderthal and Modern sites is a greater variety of tool materials, obtained over larger distances, in the latter, suggesting that Moderns covered more ground in their yearly movements than Neanderthals did.

[Tanada]

Try this on for size, new Neanderthal science.

By Colin Barras



They worked by torchlight, following the same procedure hour after hour: wrench a stalagmite off the cave floor, remove the tip and base, and carefully lay it with the others.

Today we can only guess as to why a group of Neanderthals built a series of large stalagmite structures in a French cave – but the fact they did provides a rare glimpse into our extinct cousin’s potential for social organisation in a challenging environment.

Gone are the days when we thought of Neanderthals as crude and unintelligent.
..

Archaeological evidence now suggests they were capable of symbolic thought, had a basic knowledge of chemistry, medicine and cooking, and perhaps some capacity for speech. They may even have taught modern humans new artisanal skills when the two species met and interbred.

Read it here How to speak Neanderthal: Perhaps we do already

A reassessment of evidence from Bruniquel cave, near Toulouse in south-west France, suggests even more Neanderthal sophistication. In one chamber, 336 metres from the cave entrance, are enigmatic structures – including a ring 7 metres across – built from stalagmites snapped from the cave floor.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/20 ... years-ago/

[vtsnowedin]

Looks pretty wet and drippy today but perhaps during ice age winters it was dry.
It looks like a campground Bullring to me where you sit around a central camp fire and swaps lies and stories. Throw a bear skin over the laid up stalagmites and you have a more comfortable seat for the elders that is just the right distance from the fire.
And again they are weaving quite a story from very scant evidence.