Neanderthals weren’t ghosts. They were flesh and blood, walking the earth right alongside our ancestors. For thousands of years. They even mixed in bed with us, which explains why most of us still carry bits of their DNA today.
But that genetic handshake leaves the real questions untouched. What did they talk about? What did they do when the hunting stopped?
A new study in PNAS thinks they might have had a lot in common culturally. Specifically.
The Cave Evidence
The site is Üçağızlı II, a cave in modern-day Türkiye. The timeline is fuzzy but telling. Neanderthals held the lease from roughly 77,00 to 59.000 years ago. Modern humans moved in later, sticking around until about 47.000 years ago the authors of the study, led by İsmail Baykara from Gaziantep University, aren’t claiming these groups met face-to-face in the dust. They don’t have to.
The layers in the cave are separate. The bones belong to different eras. But the tools? The hunting tactics? The lifestyle?
Startlingly similar.
More Than Just Survival
Baykara calls it one of the “biggest surprises” in the data. It’s not about the flint knives or the spear points. It’s about shells.
Tiny, spiral things. Columbella rustica, a Mediterranean mollusk. Both groups—Neanderthal and Homo sapiens—went out of their way to collect these specific shells. Why?
There were plenty of other shell species nearby. Easier to catch? More abundant? Doesn’t matter. They chose the small ones.
Forces us to reconsider the nature of cultural barriers, maybe even intelligence limits, across different human groups in the Levant.
Previously, this kind of shell-hunting was tagged as a “modern human only” trait. A marker of symbolic thinking. A sign of something extra.
Maybe.
The study suggests these behaviors aren’t exclusive anymore. Maybe under the pressure to just stay alive, both groups still felt the urge to decorate. To make meaning from the mud and the coast.
Does it mean we copied them? Did they copy us? Or was it just… what people do when they have spare hands?
We might never know for sure. But the silence of the caves doesn’t scream emptiness anymore. It hums with shared habits.
Which raises a question we haven’t fully answered. What else have we been missing all this time? 🐚
