Study: Neanderthals Didn't Always Act Like Cavemen

(Oct. 6) -- Neanderthals weren't Neanderthals at all -- at least not in terms of being brutish cave dwellers dragging women around by the hair.

In a study published this week by researchers at England's University of York, the human ancestors are depicted as caring, empathetic people who tended the weak and infirm, including a child with brain damage and a man with a withered arm, mangled feet and a bashed-in skull that left him blind in one eye.

"Compassion is perhaps the most fundamental human emotion,'' archaeologist Penny Spikins, who led the research team, told Britain's Daily Mail. "It binds us together and can inspire us, but it is also fragile and illusive."

Using modern innovations, including neuro-imaging, researchers found that groups of the extinct species living in Europe as long as 500,000 years ago routinely cared for the least capable in their midst.

The archaeologists examined the remains of child with congenital brain abnormalities and determined it had not been abandoned but lived to about age 6. A deformed, half-blind Neanderthal appeared to have been looked after for as long as 30 years, according to The Press newspaper in York.

Hunting and eating together may have helped develop a sense of compassion, researchers said. Their findings were published in the journal Time & Mind.

Noting that empathy has also been documented in chimpanzees, Spikins told Wired.com, "We can be pretty sure that Neanderthals could also feel the distress of someone else and want to make it better in the moment.

"But beyond that," she said, "we have examples of Neanderthals looking after each other. That means they could not only feel someone's distress but think through how they wanted to help."

For years, scientists have argued whether Neanderthals, named for a valley in Germany, were a separate species from homo sapiens, whose skeletons match those of modern humans. Neanderthals, who disappeared about 30,000 years ago, had bigger rib cages and longer, stronger arms.

They were long believed to be intellectually and developmentally inferior, but recent findings have determined Neanderthals had roughly the same brain size as homo sapiens and used tools. Their extinction has been alternately blamed on climate change, interbreeding and genocide at the hands of homo sapiens.