Big Neandertal noses weren’t made for cold

Proof that Neandertals hadn’t adapted to cold was right under their noses.

Unique video from the naval cavity of a bizarrely well-preserved Neandertal skull confirms the hominid’s enormous noses were not an adaptation to cold climates, as was proposed in the early 20th century. Neandertal nasal cavities were much the same as those of our own Homo sapiens species, researchers report November 17 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research finally refutes an old idea that Neandertals’ protruding faces were necessary to accommodate large noses that had supposedly evolved to warm and moisten cold and dry air before it reached their lungs.

“What we found is that, yes, Neandertals had bigger noses, but that the inner structure of their noses was not so different from our own,” says paleoanthropologist Constantino Buzi of the University of Perugia in Italy. “They were simply larger, and worked more efficiently.”

The new study is based on the skull of “Altamura Man,” a Neandertal who lived between 172,000 and 130,000 years ago and whose skeleton was discovered in a cave in southern Italy in 1993. The skeleton seems intact, but it is covered by a thick layer of calcite, also known as “cave popcorn.” Neandertal remains are rarely so well-preserved, and in other specimens the very fine bones at the rear of the nasal cavity have always been damaged or missing, Buzi says. But the fine nasal bones of Altamura Man are intact. Rather than damaging the skeleton, researchers have studied it within the cave.

In the latest study, Buzi and colleagues used specialized tiny camera attached to thin tubes — the type of “endoscopic” cameras used in medicine — to create 3-D digital reconstruction of the skull and nasal cavity, as well as video and photographs — the first ever for the species.

Buzi says that groups of modern H. sapiens who live in cold regions, such as the Arctic Inuit people, have evolved nasal adaptations to better breathe cold air: “In cold climates, the nasal cavity gets taller and narrower,” he says. But the researchers did not see any such signs inside the nasal cavity of Altamura Man — the first firm evidence that Neandertal noses did not feature a similar adaptation.

Paleoanthropologist Bruce Hardy of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, who did not participate in the study, notes that stocky Neandertal bodies seem to have been better for cold climates than those of H. sapiens. But the idea that Neandertal noses evolved for the cold has been debated for decades, perhaps in an effort to differentiate our species from the Neandertals we displaced or bred with. “We finally have a fossil that preserves the internal nasal bony structures of a Neandertal,” Hardy says. “The authors can actually observe the structure rather than speculate about it,” and hopefully put the debate to rest.