Abstract
Early modern humans (EMH) are often touted as behaviorally advanced to Neandertals, with more sophisticated technologies, expanded resource exploitation, and more complex clothing production. However, recent analyses have indicated that Neandertals were more nuanced in their behavioral adaptations, with the production of the Châtelperronian technocomplex, the processing and cooking of plant foods, and differences in behavioral adaptations according to habitat. This study adds to this debate by addressing the behavioral strategies of EMH (n = 30) within the context of non-dietary anterior tooth-use behaviors to glean possible differences between them and their Neandertal (n = 45) counterparts. High-resolution casts of permanent anterior teeth were used to collect microwear textures of fossil and comparative bioarchaeological samples using a Sensofar white-light confocal profiler with a 100x objective lens. Labial surfaces were scanned, totaling a work envelope of 204 x 276 μm for each individual. The microwear textures were examined for post-mortem damage and uploaded to SSFA software packages for surface characterization. Statistical analyses were performed to examine differences in central tendencies and distributions of anisotropy and textural fill volume variables among the EMH sample itself by habitat, location, and time interval, and between the EMH and Neandertal samples by habitat and location. Descriptive statistics for the EMH sample were compared to seven bioarchaeological samples (n = 156) that utilized different tooth-use behaviors to better elucidate specific activities that may have been performed by EMH. Results show no significant differences between the means within the EMH sample by habitat, location, or time interval. Furthermore, there are no significant differences found here between EMH and Neandertals. Comparisons to the bioarchaeological samples suggest both fossil groups participated in clamping and grasping activities. These results indicate that EMH and Neandertals were similar in their non-dietary anterior tooth-use behaviors and provide additional evidence for overlapping behavioral strategies employed by these two hominins.
Highlights
The concept of “behavioral ingenuity” has long been linked to narratives explaining both the evolutionary success of early modern humans and the eventual demise of the Neandertals [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
Dietary comparisons between early modern humans and Neandertals, including those from molar microwear [11], stable isotopes [12,13], paleoethnobotanical studies [14,15,16,17], faunal analyses [3, 18, 19], and food processing [20] frequently indicate that the former had greater dietary flexibility or accessed a broader subsistence base that included aquatic resources, fast and elusive small game, a greater variety of plant foods, and improved food storage and processing capabilities
Further studies suggest that early modern human clothing was more complex, fitted, and specialized, resulting in superior thermal protection during the cold oscillations of Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 3 and beyond [21,22,23]
Summary
The concept of “behavioral ingenuity” has long been linked to narratives explaining both the evolutionary success of early modern humans and the eventual demise of the Neandertals [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. This concept is often measured using some suite of archaeological or paleobiological criteria posited as markers of socioeconomic flexibility or complexity. These analyses buttress common notions of early modern human ingenuity, recent studies suggest that Neandertal adaptation was more developed and nuanced than previously thought
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