Neanderthals were depicted as club-carrying

The stereotype of a typical Neanderthal life is that it was extraordinarily difficult, violent, and traumatic. But a comparative analysis of the remains left behind by Neanderthals and contemporaneous humans is finally overturning this unwarranted assumption.

Decades ago, Neanderthals were depicted as club-carrying, dim-witted brutes who spent their days clobbering each other with reckless abandon. The modern vision of Neanderthals, while vastly improved, continues to perpetuate the idea that these now-extinct hominids lead dangerous and violent lives—an assumption based on early descriptions of individual skeletons.

New research published today in Nature is finally setting the record straight, showing that Neanderthals and Upper Paleolithic modern humans experienced similar levels of head trauma. Yes, life was tough for Neanderthals—but the new research suggests life wasn’t any less tougher or violent for contemporaneous Homo sapiens.

This idea, that Neanderthals led brutal lives, was largely predicated on injuries observed in the bones and skulls left behind by Neanderthals. When comparing trauma in Neanderthals to those seen in anatomically modern humans, scientists observed higher levels of head and neck injuries in Neanderthals, which was attributed to their lifestyle.

Neanderthals, it was argued, engaged in violent social behavior; lived a mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyle in perilous Ice Age environments where opportunities for accidents were in steady supply; were prone to attacks by dangerous carnivores such as bears and cave hyenas; and, as hunters, relied on close-range weapons—such as stabbing implements and thrusting spears—to subdue their prey, which required them to come into close contact with large animals.

Katerina Harvati, the lead author of the new study and an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, said these earlier studies were based on a descriptive approach, focusing on just injured individuals and evaluating trauma patterns across skeletons rather than injury rates. Recent efforts have tried to be more systematic and quantitative in their approach, but Harvati said these studies were limited in scope and thus inconclusive.