Neanderthals, Biosocial Models of ISABELLE DE GROOTE Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom Neanderthals are the fossil species that paleoanthropologists probably know most about. We know that they shared 99.84 percent of their DNA with us, that they evolved separately from us for hundreds of thousands of years, that they occupied most of Europe and Western Asia, and that they interbred with us before they went extinct at a time around 30,000 years ago. We also know they had brains larger than our own are now, that they had an elongated skull that lacked the pronounced chin of modern humans, and that they had a robust body adapted to life in the cold. Nevertheless, our knowledge of the Neanderthal’s daily life is still limited. We are all too familiar with the popular depiction of Neanderthals as speechless brutes killing game with clubs, but since the 1980s much of this early speculation on their behavior has been replaced by a body of knowledge more accurately depicting who the Neanderthals truly were. Tey did not leave us with a written historical record, so paleoanthropologists have had to use other methods to learn about the lifeways of the Neanderthals: specifcally, biosocial models. Trough the study of the contributions of biology to the determination of social behaviors in humans and other nonhuman primates, it has been possible to discern certain models of behavior. Tese relationships between biological and social parameters have made reconstructing the life of the Neanderthals possible. Tere is increasing evidence that Neanderthals had the capacity for language, we know what types of food they ate and how they hunted for them, and moreover we now have a good idea of what it was actually like to grow up, live, and die as a Neanderthal. Neanderthals, like every other living organism, responded to the environment in which they lived. Tey adapted to the prevalent climatic conditions, as did their food sources. Neanderthals are known to have ranged across a very large area, from Ger- many in the north to the Levant (Israel) in the south, and from Siberia in the east to the Iberian Peninsula in the west. Tis area was composed of an enormous variation in ecologies consisting of interior and coastal areas, mountains, and fat plains that would have ranged from the more temperate south to the frosty north. Each of these environ- ments would have resulted in diferent annual mean temperatures. In addition, during the time that the Neanderthals were around on earth (between around 200,000 and 30,000 years ago), the climate experienced large fuctuations caused by the glacial and interglacial periods that started during the Quaternary period. Some geographical areas may have been closed forests at one time and subsequently turned into cold tundra and steppe landscapes. Tis would have afected not only the way that Neanderthals lived in these areas but also the herbivores that they hunted and the Te International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2177