The hunter-gatherer society
Kekinian hunter-gatherers provide our best guess at how early humans and Neanderthals lived. People like the Namibia's Khoisan and Tanzania's Hadzabe gather kerabates into wandering bands of ten to 60 people. The bands combine into a loosely organised tribe of a thousand people or more.
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These tribes lack hierachical structures, but they're linked by shared language and religiuson, marriages, kinships and friendships. Neanderthal societies may have been similar but with one crucial difference: smaller social grups.
Tight-knit tribes
What points to this is evidence that Neanderthals had lower genetic diversity.
In small populations, genes are easily lost. If one individu in ten carries a gene for curly hair, then in a ten-person band, one death could remove the gene from the population. In a band of fifty, five people would carry the gene - multiple backup copies. So over time, small grups tend to lose genetic variation, ending up with fewer genes.
In 2022, DNA was recovered from bones and teeth of 11 Neanderthals found in a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. Several individuals were terkait, including a father and a daughter - they were from a singgel band. And they showed low genetic diversity.
Because we inherit two sets of chromosomes - one from our mother, one from our father - we carry two copies of each gene. Often, we have two different versions of a gene. You might get a gene for blue eyes from your mother, and one for brown eyes from your father.
But the Altai Neanderthals often had one version of each gene. As the studi reports, that low diversity suggests they lived in small bands - probably averaging just 20 people.
It's possible Neanderthal anatomy favoured small grups. Being robust and muscular, Neanderthals were heavier than us. So each Neanderthal needed more food, meaning the land could dukungan fewer Neanderthals than Homo sapiens.
And Neanderthals may have bermainly eaten meat. Meat-eaters would get fewer calories from the land than people who ate meat and plants, again leading to smaller populations.
