The traditional image of Neanderthals as gritty people who spent most of their time out hunting might not be entirely accurate, according to a new study revealing that they may have had to devote hours to daily subsistence tasks instead. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
The traditional image of Neanderthals as gritty people who spent most of their time out hunting might not be entirely accurate, according to a new study revealing that they may have had to devote hours to daily subsistence tasks instead. —Colin Shaw - Our extinct prehistoric cousins, the Neanderthals, may have spent less of their time living the rugged life of the hunter and more of it carrying out tedious domestic chores, a new study suggests. Researchers investigated the causes of distinctive skeletal features that occur in Neanderthal remains. Compared with modern and most prehistoric Homo sapiens , Neanderthal skeletons have significantly overdeveloped right arms. In some cases, their upper arm bones are as much as 50% stronger on their right side than their left. By comparison, living humans display much lower levels of upper arm bone strength asymmetry at about 5-15%. Biological anthropologists have previously argued that this was the result of right-handed Neanderthals using spears to hunt big game, which would have certainly been an activity critical to ensuring their survival in the variable climate of the Pleistocene epoch, from about 450,000 to 30,000 years ago.
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