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Even then, the duo noted that their findings were based on small and possibly unrepresentative samples. And after 17 years, Trinkaus doubled back on his idea completely, noting that later studies of the Pleistocene humans who lived alongside Neanderthals. The rodeo rider hypothesis, he said, should be "further qualified if not simply retracted." (Trinkaus declined to be interviewed for this story.)
But the hypothesis, and the broad notion of highly traumatized Neanderthals, clung to the popular consciousness as an imagined Neanderthal to a mammoth's back. Neanderthals from the point of view of other people. Others have argued that they could only survive their common wounds through medical savvy.
But in a new study-the largest of its kind-Katerina Harvati and her colleagues at the University of Tübingen have shown that head injuries are not so common in Neanderthals, and certainly no longer Homo sapiens. "This implies that Neanderthal trauma does not require its own special explanations, and that risk and danger are as much of the life of Neanderthals as they are of our own evolutionary past," writes Marta Mirazon Lahr from the University of Cambridge, in an accompanying editorial.
"Tea [high frequency of] head trauma has been used to argue that they are more violent, or hunted in a more particular way, "says Harvati. "We've taken away one piece of evidence for that. It's important to re-examine our assumptions about their behaviors. "
Other studies have come to similar conclusions, says Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an archeologist from the University of Bordeaux who studies Neanderthals. "It really [helps] to push back against the stubborn image of Neanderthals as having massively battered bodies, "she says. That image persisted partly because "it seemed to be a believable reason why we were supposedly more successful. Having clear data to disprove that, based on a really good sample size, [adds to] the growing view that there are many similarities in behavior between the two species. "
This study adds to the continuing image makeover of Neanderthals, which has long been pictured as brutish and unsophisticated. It's now clear that they made tools, used fire, made art, buried their dead, and perhaps even had language.
Harvati's colleague Judith Beier compared the skulls of 114 Neanderthals and 90 modern humans, all of whom lived in Europe and Asia between 20,000 and 80,000 years ago. (The term "modern human" here refers to Homo sapiens, rather than present-day people.) She is estimated to be between 4 and 33 percent of Neanderthals, compared to 2 to 34 percent of contemporary modern humans.
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