We had doubts about how they coped with the cold, and the answer is that they did not evolve. For decades, paleoanthropologists have been faced with a biological paradox. Neanderthals, a species supposedly adapted to the glacial cold of Europe, had huge, wide noses. This feature, in theory, is totally ineffective at warming cold air before it reaches the lungs. But due to the scarcity of fossils, experts were still unable to explain exactly what happened to this species.
Reconstruction. To understand what happened here, experts managed to digitally reconstruct the inside of the nose of the “Altamura Man”, the world’s best-preserved Neanderthal, without even touching it. And what they discovered refutes much of what we thought about the faces of our evolutionary ancestors. The ultimate goal of this investigation was very clear: to find another reason why they disappeared from our planet. And all because, to date, the disappearance of this species remains a mystery, although the latest investigations show that they are more closely related to us than we thought.
Prisoner of calcite. To understand the magnitude of this discovery, one must first understand the object itself. The ‘Altamura Man’ was discovered in 1993 by a group of speleologists in the Lamalunga karst system in southern Italy. And this is no ordinary fossil. The skeleton is completely preserved, but it fell into a natural cave and became trapped in a chamber, where, over millennia, water and limestone did their work. Today, the Neanderthal is literally encrusted in the cave walls, covered by popcorn-like limestone formations that have protected it but also make it impossible to remove without destroying it. This mineral “prison” had an unexpected advantage: it preserved bone structures so thin and fragile that they normally disappear in fossil remains, such as the nasal shells and lamellae of the ethmoid bone. This is the first case in history where we have the complete nasal cavity of a Neanderthal.
Virtual dissection. As it was not possible to remove the skull to place it in the laboratory scanner, they had to take the laboratory into the cave. At first glance, this seems like a totally impossible task. The solution was endoscopic technology, as they used high-resolution medical probes (like those inserted into the bronchi for examination) to pass through the fossil’s eye and nasal cavities. The magic happened when these images were combined with photogrammetry methods, creating an accurate 3D model of the inside of the skull.
Central heating. After obtaining a sufficiently good photograph of the inside of this Neanderthal’s nose, it was time for interpretation. For many years, there was a hypothesis that, to compensate for their large noses in cold environments, Neanderthals must have had unique internal structures. These were vertical protuberances and medial thickenings that would function as radiators to warm and humidify the air. Two fundamental points necessary for proper breathing. But the results of the analysis showed something else. First, the internal structure of the nose is surprisingly similar to the structure of the modern human nose, only in a larger ‘frame’ of the face. This means that the supposed unique adaptations were not present in this fossil, and the airways did not have an “alien” architecture, as one might expect.
New extinction. Thus, Neanderthals apparently could not adapt to such a cold environment to breathe normally. We humans have many mechanisms to warm the air before it enters our lungs to ensure gas exchange. But this did not exist in our ancestors. Thus, if cold air enters the lungs, respiratory problems can arise which, at high temperatures, can actually lead to the extinction of the species, if we put ourselves in the context of extremely cold conditions.
Why their faces. If the giant nose was not a highly specialised “air heating machine”, what did they need it for? The study suggests that we should stop looking only at the climate. The characteristic face of this species seems to be the result of two specific factors:
- Ancestral genetics.
- Very high energy requirements, which demanded a large amount of oxygen and, consequently, a huge air flow.
The Altamura Man lived during the MIS 6 period (about 130,000-170,000 years ago), a cold time, but in southern Italy the climate was more moderate. His nose, “normal” on the inside but huge on the outside, suggests that the facial evolution of this species was not a straight line, determined solely by the thermometer.
