Were Neanderthals built for the cold? A rare fossil offers new clues

Neanderthals have long been pictured with huge noses that set their faces apart from ours. A new look inside one exceptionally preserved skull now suggests that their nasal passages were not specialized cold weather equipment.

The key fossil, known as Altamura Man, is fused to a cave wall deep underground. This rare preservation provides scientists with the opportunity to test long-held ideas about the Neanderthal face.

Rethinking the Neanderthal nose

The research was led by Costantino Buzi, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Perugia in Italy (UNIPG). His research focuses on Neanderthal skull anatomy and how it relates to breathing and climate.

Earlier computer simulations of airflow through virtual Neanderthal noses suggested that their nasal passages could warm and moisten cold air very efficiently.

Many researchers treated this result as support for the idea that Neanderthal noses were adapted to cold climates.

Others proposed that Neanderthals had inner nasal autapomorphies, traits unique to one species, including extra bony ridges and missing bony roofs.

Those features were treated as hard proof that Neanderthal faces evolved mainly for breathing in frigid air.

There was one big problem with this picture of cold-adapted noses. Almost every Neanderthal skull had damaged or missing bones inside the nose, so nobody had ever seen a complete ancient nasal cavity.

A fossil trapped in stone

Altamura Man was discovered in the early 1990s, when cave explorers spotted human bones coated in pale mineral crusts.

Fossils from this individual date to roughly 130,000 to 172,000 years ago, placing him in the middle of the Neanderthal era.

“It’s probably the most complete human fossil ever discovered,” said Buzi. That completeness means his skull, spine, and chest all offer clues to how a full Neanderthal body worked in life.

Because the cave ceiling and walls are fragile, researchers cannot safely cut the skeleton free without risking serious damage.

Instead, the team carried delicate cameras and lights through tight passages to bring their laboratory tools down to the fossil.

Looking inside a frozen airway

The key tool was an endoscope, a flexible tube with a camera, that could slide through openings in the skull into the nasal cavity.

Researchers recorded video inside the nose and combined hundreds of images to build detailed three-dimensional models of every preserved bone surface.

“This surely is the first time we have clearly seen these structures in a human fossil,” said Buzi, noting their rarity. The resulting digital skull gives researchers a clean view of the nasal architecture without touching the fragile fossil itself.

When they examined this model, the team looked for a vertical bony ridge, a bulge, and a missing roof over the lacrimal groove. That lacrimal groove, narrow channel that drains tears into the nose, had been thought to lack bony cover in Neanderthals.

In Altamura Man, none of those unusual bony configurations were present. However, the scroll-like nasal turbinates, curled bones that help warm air, were notably large compared with the size of his face.

What the missing features mean

The absence of the supposed inner nasal signatures in Altamura Man means those traits cannot be used as defining markers of Neanderthals.

Instead, the large nasal opening and projecting upper jaw seem to track overall skull size and growth patterns, not a special nose cold adaptation.

“We can finally say that some traits that were considered diagnostic in the Neanderthal cranium do not exist,” said Buzi.

“The study challenges a long held idea about Neanderthal evolution,” said Ludovic Slimak of the University of Toulouse (UT).

That shift fits the view that midfacial prognathism, forward projection of the middle face, reflects how Neanderthal skulls grew with their large bodies.

A recent review of Neanderthal skull and neck anatomy argues that head and spine traits formed as an integrated system. The research links this system to glacial conditions and to population bottlenecks that reduced group size.

Cold climates, warm bodies

A broad survey of Neanderthal cold adaptation notes that these early humans occupied Eurasia for over 100,000 years, living through winters and ice age phases.

The work suggests that successful survival came from a mix of culture and biology rather than from any single dramatic anatomical trick.

Neanderthals used fire, processed hides into clothing, and likely wore simple footwear and layered garments to cut wind chill.

Shelters, close group cooperation, and careful control of food sources also reduced the time their bodies had to face extreme cold outdoors.

Seen together with the Altamura findings, this picture implies that the Neanderthal nose did not need special extra structures to keep cold air manageable.

A fairly ordinary internal nasal layout seems to have worked well inside a body and culture already tuned for harsh climates.

Why this changes the story

Improved radiocarbon dating shows that Neanderthals disappeared from Europe about 40,000 years ago after overlapping with early modern humans for several thousand years.

Their final disappearance therefore played out against shifting climates, changing landscapes, and the arrival of highly flexible Homo sapiens.

“Everything in Neanderthals has been shoehorned into the idea that they’re adapted to cold,” said Todd Rae of the University of Sussex (US). He noted that they were likely struggling with the cold by the time of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the coldest phase of the ice age.

The evolving story of Neanderthals

The new Altamura analysis pushes researchers to separate traits that truly helped Neanderthals handle cold from features shaped by growth, genetic drift, or chance.

The study also shows how a single well-preserved fossil can overturn neat adaptation stories and replace them with richer, messier pictures of ancient lives.

The inside of Altamura Man’s nose now matters as much as his heavy brow ridge or thick bones.

Together with other new finds, it suggests that Neanderthals were not ice age caricatures but complex people whose bodies recorded varied pressures over time.

The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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