"When Orcs Were Real"--A Look At Danny Vendramini's Theory of Neanderthal Predation

 

Vendramini's imagining of a
Neanderthal (Source)

    This post was motived by the article, "When Orcs were Real" published in the blog, Contemplations On The Tree of Woe.  The article was a review and summary of the ideas presented in Danny Vendramini's book, Them and Us: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans. The genesis of Vendramini's book was trying to figure out why humans so suddenly surpassed all other hominids over a very short period of time (a couple tens of thousands of years at most) in intelligence, tools and art, speech  and so on, to leave us literally the last man standing among the higher primates. For such rapid evaluation, Vendramini theorizes, the only possible explanation was predation: something was hunting humans in such numbers that it drove a rapid evolution of humans in order to survive. And given the location of where this was occurring, the Levant, he believes that the super-predator in question was the Neanderthal. 

    Vendramini agrees with the mainstream that Neanderthals were driven to eventual extinction by war with Homo Sapiens. Where he parts ways with the mainstream is in his assessment of what Neanderthals were like.

    Vendramini shows that:

Neanderthals were apex predators. Analysis of isotopes of bone collage has shown that Neanderthal diet was 97% meat. They are estimated to have eaten 4.1 lbs of fresh meat per day. Ample evidence exists to show they used stone-tipped wooden spears to hunt. From the bones littering their caves, we know Neanderthals hunted woolly mammoths, giant cave bears, woolly rhinos, bison, wolves, and even cave lions - the most dangerous and lethal animals on earth.

Neanderthals were cannibals. A number of Neanderthal sites reveal bones that have been cut and cracked open to extract the marrow. While this hypothesis was initially rejected a recent find at El Sidron in Spain revealed numerous Neanderthal skeletons with the unmistakable marks of butchery by cannibals wielding hand axes, knives, and scrapers.

Neanderthals had more robust bones and heavier musculature than Homo Sapiens. They weighed 25% more. They were so heavily muscled that their skeletons had to develop extra thick bones. “One of the most characteristic features of the Neanderthals is the exaggerated massiveness of their trunk and limb bones. All of the preserved bones suggest a strength seldom attained by modern humans…” (quoting paleoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus). “A healthy Neanderthal male could lift an average NFL linebacker over his head and throw him through the goalposts.” Neanderthals also evolved extremely thick skulls - “postcranial hyper-robusticity” — that protected them in close-quarter confrontation with prey. They all had kyphosis, with hunched backs, that gave them a distinct profile and gait.

Neanderthal teeth were twice as large as human teeth. According to 2008 anthropologist research, their mouths could open much wider than human mouths, enabling them to take extremely large bites. Judging by the size of the jaw, they had tremendous bite force.

Neanderthals evolved in Ice Age Europe and had specific adaptations to that climate. They had short limbs, large noses, and compact torsos. Most importantly, they were covered with thick fur!

    Since no Neanderthal cadaver survives, this point cannot be proven. But Vendramini points out that every primate except Homo Sapiens is covered with fur, and that every cold-adapted mammal during the Ice Ages had thick fur, including mammals that were hairless in Africa, such as the elephant and rhinoceros. There is no reason to believe Neanderthals were hairless except for our desire for them to look like us. The only way Neanderthals could have survived in the Ice Age without fur was if they made thick, protective clothes. Archeologist Mark White points out “Neanderthal clothing would have needed to be more than the ragged loincloth… of popular depiction. Some form of tailoring would have been required…” But Neanderthal sites have yielded “no evidence of needlecraft technology.” They weren’t making clothes — because they had fur.

    Neanderthal skulls had extremely large eye sockets, suggesting very large eyes. That, in turn, suggests that Neanderthals were nocturnal. However the large eyes pose a problem, as Ice Age Europe would have presented Neanderthals with blinding sunlight reflected off the snow. Vendramini suggests that the Neanderthals had vertically-aligned slit pupils, which enabled them to use the full diameter of the lens in low light, while shutting out bright light by day. Nocturnal primates such as the rhesus monkey and owl monkey all have large eyes with vertically-aligned slit pupils. Vendramini suggests Neanderthals also had a tapetum lucidum (like a cat) that made their eyes shine in the dark, and had dark sclera like all other primates.

    Neanderthals had distinct facial prognathism that featured large, broad noses. Vendramini argues that this suggests a “Neanderthal snout” with a dog-like nose designed for scent hunting. This was useful during nocturnal raids.

    Neanderthals did not speak human languages. He quotes a September 2008 talk presented to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists: “Their large nasal cavity would have decreased the intelligibility of vowel-like sounds, and the combination of a long face, short neck, unequally-proportioned vocal tract, and large nose made it highly unlikely that Neanderthals would have been unable to produce quantal speech.” Neanderthal tongues were also not shaped to speak clearly. Overall, the evidence suggests a creature that spoke with a deep timbre with lots of guttural sounds.

    The Neanderthal that Vendramini describes is thus a terrifying creature: A hunched cannibalistic predator with large, shining eyes and an animalistic snout, covered by thick fur and massive muscles, built for close combat, hunting by night, with a brutish and guttural voice, and a huge mouth with huge teeth and powerful jaws.

Read the whole thing. And while the article suggests a connection between Neanderthal and past legends such as orcs, goblins, trolls, ghouls, vampires, etc., I would note that what is described is not so different from the various "hairy man" legends around the world, including Sasquatch. 

    Of course such dramatic suggestions need to come with its share of caveats. First, Vendramini is not a trained anthropologist or even a scientist: he is self-taught and his background is in film and media. Just something to consider when weighing his evidence and conjectures. On the other hand, he has 800 citations backing up various points raised in his book. 

    Second, his theories have come under attack from other sources, the most cogent being "'killer neandertals' – does this one really stack up?" from Alison Campbell at the University of Waikato. Another critique is "Them and us: predatory Neanderthals hunted humans?" by Adam Benton at his Filthy Monkey Men blog. But even if we accept their criticisms, that does not mean that the hypothesis is not without merit. Research does show that Neanderthals were primarily meat eaters ("Exceptionally high δ15N values in collagen single amino acids confirm Neandertals as high-trophic level carnivores").  A 2003 article on Neanderthals from Smithsonian Magazine also suggests that they were apex predators:

    Though the fossil evidence is not definitive, Neanderthals appear to have descended from an earlier human species, Homo erectus, between 500,000 to 300,000 years ago. Neanderthals shared many features with their ancestors—a prominent brow, weak chin, sloping skull and large nose—but were as big-brained as the anatomically modern humans that later colonized Europe, Homo sapiens. At the same time, Neanderthals were stocky, a build that would have conserved heat efficiently. From musculature marks on Neanderthal fossils and the heft of arm and leg bones, researchers conclude they were also incredibly strong. Yet their hands were remarkably like those of modern humans; a study published this past March in Nature shows that Neanderthals, contrary to previous thinking, could touch index finger and thumb, which would have given them considerable dexterity.

    Neanderthal fossils suggest that they must have endured a lot of pain. “When you look at adult Neanderthal fossils, particularly the bones of the arms and skull, you see [evidence of] fractures,” says Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at WashingtonUniversity in St. Louis. “I’ve yet to see an adult Neanderthal skeleton that doesn’t have at least one fracture, and in adults in their 30s, it’s common to see multiple healed fractures.” (That they suffered so many broken bones suggests they hunted large animals up close, probably stabbing prey with heavy spears—a risky tactic.) In addition, fossil evidence indicates that Neanderthals suffered from a wide range of ailments, including pneumonia and malnourishment. Still, they persevered, in some cases living to the ripe old age of 45 or so.

 It also confirms that they may have been cannibals:

Clues to some Neanderthal ways of life come from chemical analyses of fossilized bones, which confirm that Neanderthals were meat eaters. Microscopic studies hint at cannibalism; fossilized deer and Neanderthal bones found at the same site bear identical scrape marks, as though the same tool removed the muscle from both animals.

Although his critics insist that Neanderthal made and used clothes similar to humans, that issue is disputed (see also here) with some researchers arguing that Neanderthals did not wear any clothes or, at most, capes of animal skins. Certainly there is no physical evidence of Neanderthal clothing or tools (such as needles) suggestive that they made clothing. And there is no denying that they had much larger ocular cavities than humans. 

Heuvelmans' reconstruction of the La Chapelle aux Saints Neanderthal with a postulated outline (left) and reconstruction of the Minnesota Iceman. (Source)

 Drawing of the Minnesota Iceman (Source)

     Also suggestive is "A Review of Neanderthal: the Strange Saga of the Minnesota Iceman" (Part 1) (Part 2) by Darren Naish in Scientific American. Naish doesn't address Vendramini. Rather, his interest was in the fact that although the Minnesota Iceman is now regarded as a fraud (which is his own personal belief as well), "the key factor that transformed the iceman story into an international incident is that several knowledgeable people either became convinced that it was real, or at least became interested in the possibility that it might be." (Citation omitted). 

Among those convinced by its reality was the late ‘father of cryptozoology’ Bernard Heuvelmans (1916-2001) who, together with colleague Ivan T. Sanderson – also a formative character as goes writings on alleged mystery animals – examined the iceman in person in 1968. In 1969, Heuvelmans published a brief technical paper on the creature (it’s telling that the paper is sole-authored and not co-written with Sanderson; more on that in a moment) (Heuvelmans 1969), and in 1974 co-authored an entire book – L’Homme Néanderthal est Toujours Vivant (Neanderthal Man is Still Alive) – on the whole story. 

What is interesting about this is that Heuvelmans was convinced that the Iceman was a Neanderthal, or at least closely related to it. Naish also relates that:

Heuvelmans (2016) also describes spending an entire year working on the generation of an enormously detailed illustration of the iceman. He does acknowledge that such effort might transpire to be a waste of time, but this is because he hoped that the body would one day fall into the hands of a zoological institution, not because he considered it probable that it might be a hoax.

Presumably these illustrations are in an unpublished multi-hundred page monograph that Heuvelmans authored. Of interest here:

Neanderthals, so he explains, were likely covered by a hairy pelt (p. 173), possessed a remarkable ‘ultra-human’, upturned nose in which the nostrils pointed directly forwards (p. 179) (something like that of snub-nosed monkeys), “had no lips at all and a widely stretched mouth” (p. 180), had hands in which the thumb was both more elongate and “less readily opposable” than that of H. sapiens (pp. 182-185), had extraordinarily broad feet with curled toes that functioned in rock-climbing (p. 186), were probably capable of accruing fat stores and of indulging in a semi-hibernation (p. 211) and had “bigger eyes” that gave them “the option of vanishing into the night” (p. 211).

 Not too different from Vendramini's description.

    I am about 2/3 through Vendramini's book. I believe he has valid criticism of how Neanderthal features have been influenced by anthropomorphic bias. It isn't much different from the long time bias of the Romantics in anthropology that held that uncivilized tribes of humans were "noble savages" when the physical evidence indicated that primitive tribes, without the policing influence of an advanced civilization, were much more warlike and violent than their civilized brethren. 

    Certainly he is correct that using forensic reconstruction techniques developed for humans should not be applied unquestionably to Neanderthal skulls. For instance, per the Smithsonian, "humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos are more closely related to one another than either is to gorillas or any other primate." Yet we do not see similar facial features, especially the nose, between chimpanzees and humans. 

    Humans' and Neanderthals' common ancestor is believed to have been Homo heidelbergensis with the line leading to each species diverging approximately 400,000 years ago. Per the Smithsonian, when describing H. heidelbergensis:

This early human species had a very large browridge, and a larger braincase and flatter face than older early human species. It was the first early human species to live in colder climates; their ­­­short, wide bodies were likely an adaptation to conserving heat. It lived at the time of the oldest definite control of fire and use of wooden spears, and it was the first early human species to routinely hunt large animals. This early human also broke new ground; it was the first species to build shelters, creating simple dwellings out of wood and rock.

However, as the Australian Museum describes them, "[t]he sloping forehead resembled those found in earlier species rather than the vertical foreheads of modern humans," "as with earlier species, the lower jaw did not have a protruding, pointed chin," and "nasal opening was relatively wide". Again, nothing to indicate a human-like face notwithstanding the Smithsonian's artistic rendition.

    Vendramini is probably correct that the larger eyes were to allow the Neanderthal to see better at night, possibly indicating that they had some combination of larger pupils, greater number of cones versus rods in the eyes, and, perhaps, even some form of tapetum (the reflective layer in the eyes of animals like dogs and cats that cause their eyes to "glow" when reflecting light). (Of course, as anyone that came of age before the late 1980's, Caucasians have a weak form of tapetum that shows up with flash photography and the phenomena of "red eye"--I learned on my mission to Japan that native Japanese did not have "red eye" in photographs and they thought it eerie that the American and Canadian missionaries did). Whether Neanderthal had vertical irises is completely speculative, but I personally doubt it. Canines inhabited the same geographical regions and climate, see very well in the dark, and don't have vertical irises to protect against bright light.

    The consensus of anthropologists is that Neanderthals and humans interbred, thus the reason why Caucasians and Asians have some Neanderthal DNA--"Roughly two percent of the genomes of Europeans and Asians are Neanderthal." Vendramini seems to agree, suggesting that the Neanderthals may have raided human groups not just to kill off resource competitors but to mate with human females, producing hybrid offspring. It seems to me that it is unlikely that viable offspring would have occurred since humans only have 46 chromosomes (versus 48 for apes, for instance); at a minimum, male hybrids would not have been possible. 

    But there is another possible explanation: Telegony, the theory of heredity holding that offspring can inherit the characteristics of a previous sexual partner of the female parent. Although animal breeders had long held telegony to be correct, and it obviously informed human beliefs for most of history (thus the preference for brides that are virgins), it has only recently been the subject of research which seems to show that it is correct (see, e.g., here and here). 

    But back to Vendramini's original question: why did the humans of the Levant so rapidly evolve? The studies he cites in his book indicate that humans and Neanderthal had co-existed in the Levant for a period of time, over time the humans pretty much disappeared, but when humans reappeared, they were much more advanced than they had been previously, and more advanced than humans in other parts of the world. Almost like a population of advanced humans had been dropped into the Levant from somewhere else.