there was a sameness to them over the whole vast expanse of time 
and space these people inhabited. This stands in stark contrast to 
the spirit of innovation and inventiveness that suffused the produc- 
tions of the modern humans who entered Europe around 40 kyr ago, 
displacing the Neanderthals in the process (see below). 
Interestingly, some Japanese investigators (Ohnuma et al., 1997) 
have recently carried out an elegant experiment in which two groups 
of college students were taught to make “‘Levallois points,” a tool 
type favored by many Neanderthal groups. One group was taught 
by direct nonverbal demonstration, while the other was also given 
verbal explanations. Significantly, there was no difference in per- 
formance between the two groups, either in quality of product or in 
speed of learning! 
The Neanderthals lived in a period of oscillating climates, some- 
times extremely severe, and occupied a huge area as a rather ho- 
mogeneous group. Exactly how sophisticated they were as hunters 
is not entirely clear, although many believe that in most places, at 
least, they probably only hunted smallish mammals, scavenging the 
remains of larger ones. In most cases their living places seem to 
have been rather haphazardly organized, unlike those of modern 
people. It’s been suggested that, like their predecessors, Neander- 
thals were “‘foragers,”’ opportunistically availing themselves of food 
sources they encountered while roaming around the landscape (see 
Binford, 1981). This contrasts with modern hunters and gatherers, 
who are (or were) “‘collectors,”’ carefully monitoring the resources 
around them and planning their exploitation. 
One Neanderthal propensity that may bespeak a profound aspect 
of humanity is the burial of the dead—something that these homi- 
nids practiced at least occasionally, and simply. Burial might, of 
course, have been no more than a convenient way of disposing of 
a particularly unpleasant form of clutter, and the Neanderthal pref- 
erence for placing the corpse in a flexed posture might have resulted 
simply from the desire to dig the smallest pit possible. But it’s hard 
to avoid the impression that the act of burial conveys some form of 
empathy with the deceased. Whether it implies more than that is 
less certain. Spiritual awareness in all early modern human societies 
is marked by the inclusion of grave goods with the deceased: objects 
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