Irina Bălan's Key Ideas from Kindred
by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Neander "thal" (valley) was named for a 17th century poet and composer, Joachim Neander. It was consumed by massive quarrying and the new valley became known as Neander Thal.

The weird bit is that Joachim's family's name was originally Neumann, later converted by his grandfather to Neander. Both names literally mean "new man".

What better name for the place where we discovered a new human?

That any bones at all survive over such immense timescales is astonishing. Every skeletal part is immensely important. They offer a treasure of data on individual lives, simultaneously acting as windows onto entire populations.

Specialists apply a vast range of techniques from biochemistry to high-tech visualisation, examining whole bodies or zooming down to the near daily layer inside teeth. Through the DNA they contain, Neanderthal remains are also our direct connection to these vanished people. 

Both we and they inherited some ancient features in common, but their lineage kept other we lost, while the reverse is also true.

Neanderthals & Homo Sapiens reflect two diverging pathways of being human.

Our inquisitive minds love to discover reasons for everything, but in fact evolution via natural selection is simply about reproductive success, not forging uber-adaptation. Building bodies is an interconnected process and altering one part can cause transformation elsewhere. While a genetic blueprint is important, how hominins live also profoundly impacts bodies, from bones to cellular level.

Shanidar 1, a skeleton found in Iraqi Kurdistan, was well into middle age when he died and has overcome an astonishing number of physical difficulties:

• his right upper arm suffered multiple fracture and shrivelled after healing, its lower part being amputated;
• his right shoulder blade was malformed;
• he had bony growth conditions that lead to poor hearing;
• he survived multiple head injuries (one leaving him with a crushed face and blind in one eye).

In spite of living with chronic pain and his many challenges, he adapted to daily life in the group.

It seems unlikely that individual Neanderthals developed their sophisticated technologies without social learning contexts and reasonably elaborate communication.

The range of skills and great accomplishment across diverse materials implies some sort of teaching, matching the fact that directed instruction is common to all living humans. Combined teaching by showing as well as telling is most effective, and young Neanderthals likely learned by cultural and bodily immersion.

Proof for this are the obvious techno-lithic complexes, the shell-knapping or birch tar technology. 

Composite tools that imply the inherent process of joining together must have reinforced collaboration, crucial for hunting and social networks.

Birch tar suggests interesting ideas: to comprehend that bark would transform to sticky, pungent black liquid means grasping that matter could transmute. Rather than being destroyed by fire, it would be remade.

As tar was cooked, cooled and solidified, then was reheated and softened once again, so cycles of change were witnessed and understood.

They combined convention with adaptability. They invented ways to take things apart and join them together. 

Moving heavily muscled and shorter legs is hard work, but so is beating a bigger heart. Neanderthals would have needed a whopping 3500 - 5000 kcal every day, going up to 7000 in harsh environments when lacking insulating clothes.

That's the equivalent of a blow-out Christmas day binge: a fry-up at breakfast, roast dinner and champagne, cheese platter, plus left overs and trifle for dinner. Each and every day.

Three reindeers every 7 days would hit that target.

To get enough vital micronutrients you need fat, brain, tongue, eyes and marrow.

Neanderthals had a wider array of bitter and sour taste perception, larger tolerance for sampling unfamiliar plants of fermented meats.

They kept some food underwater. They stored meat by drying it or by mashing up with fat and marrow.

Storing plant based foods would require similar processes, by drying or put in water, which could only happen at living places rather than while out and about gathering.

A whole range of options exist with fermentation. Storing in low oxigen conditions allows meat to on the path of putrefaction while still being edible.

Scrutinising the shifting of stone by Neanderthals has other implications beyond their capacity for planning or managing time and resources. Since the distances their artefacts moved were the only direct measure of mobility, they ended up being used as proxy for range size.

Range size isn't just about land, but about people. If Neanderthals lived in small areas, then they's rarely meet other groups. Moreover, without large territories and extended social relations, it was theorised that Neanderthals wouldn't need material expressions of shared cultural values, which can help maintain networks.

Did Neanderthals have a thing for shine and glitter?

Examples are known across the Neanderthal world: a quartz crystal, a fossil shell, pumice stones. Can we infer symbolic meaning? A special treatment of them would be needed.

At Cioarei-Boroșteni cave in the southern Carpathians excavations uncovered a hard ball-like object, enough to fill your hand, yet remarkably dense. Possibly opal.

Residues of black and red pigment were found. What the pigment was used for can only be imagined, but it's significance lies in showing that Neanderthals were interested in applying color to unusual things.

Multiple episodes of interbreeding between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal, even between Neanderthal and Denisovan.

A man died at Peștera cu Oase, Romania, between 42 and 37 ka. His genetic ancestry was mind blowing because 11% was Neanderthal. This means he had a Neanderthal ancester within just four to six generations. This man's heritage also shows multiple interbreeding phases with another around 2 millennia before his death.

Until incredibly recently, the world was sparkling with hominins: Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo Floresiensis (hobbits) and other tentatively named Asian populations like Homo Luzonensis, or Naledi in Africa.

The great challenge going forward is combining the ever growing but very different kind of evidence: how genetics connects to physical diversity and making sense of both of them in relation to the culture they produced.

21st century advances in genetics allows us to recover Neanderthal DNA from dust. Biological experimentation splicing neanderthal genes into mice has already begun. There are now multiple projects building Neander-oids: small clumps of gene-edited human brain cells. They're not true brains, but develop electrical connections. In 2019 they'd been connected to robots controllable through signalling. These machines can walk and possibly track neural development. All these raise profound concerns. This is all science happening in the dark.

There's no agreed ethics, code of practice or transparency.