Much of humanity’s primitive past remains shrouded in mystery, but a game-changing discovery is helping researchers piece together how our ancestors and another group of archaic humans once interacted: New archaeological evidence has revealed that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens had sort of a Mario and Luigi thing going on.
Wow! It seems Nintendo has been telling a much older story than anyone ever realized.
Anthropologists have known for some time that early modern humans existed alongside Neanderthals until the latter’s extinction some 40,000 years ago, but excavation of a shared settlement located in what is modern-day Bavaria has led experts to believe that the pair of ancient hominids had a dynamic quite like that of the Mushroom Kingdom’s iconic plumber duo. The shorter, stouter Neanderthals seem to have primarily worn reddish animal pelts and exhibited a plucky willingness to battle the fearsome megafauna of the age, while the taller, thinner Homo sapiens wore identically shaped garments adorned with green leaves and came off as bashful, timid goofballs. Intriguingly, this color scheme seems to have been a key point of differentiation between the species, with the discovery of various artifacts in reds and greens—including caps bearing either a big ‘N’ or ‘H.S.’ insignia, respectively—strongly suggesting that the overall Middle Paleolithic situation was about as Mario and Luigi as it gets.
It’s astonishing how much this one excavation site can tell us about the whole Mario and Luigi-style deal our ancestors had. Micro-fractures in leg and foot bones found there paint a vivid picture of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals running and jumping all over the hills, shouting “Yippee!” as they stomped on turtles and forcefully bounced off their shells to reach higher ground. The charismatic species apparently took on all sorts of Marioesque challenges together: returning lost baby penguins to their mothers, using Homo sapiens’ floatier jumps to cross large chasms in subterranean grottos, and smashing big blocks of flint into rudimentary stone tools, though it remains a contentious point of debate whether those blocks were smashed by punching or by headbutting. And while it appears that the hominids were generally cooperative, sharing foraged mushrooms and unleashing powerful tag-team attacks against mammoths, nearby cave paintings suggest that they nevertheless engaged in fierce competition during times of party games or tennis.
We kind of wish Homo sapiens were the Marios of the pair, but this is still incredibly cool.
“Though we still don’t know exactly what it was that made Neanderthals go extinct, these findings raise the possibility that the last 40,000 years are essentially a Luigi’s Mansion-type deal where the cowardly Homo sapiens get to break out of the sidekick role and take the spotlight in their own adventure,” said anthropologist Jason Weindling, adding that the glaciation of the Late Pleistocene was basically just an ice level like Snowman’s Land or Freezy Flake Galaxy when you think about it. “These discoveries also challenge previous beliefs that Neanderthals were more of a Wario figure to Homo sapiens’ Mario, which were rooted in misguided Victorian-era assumptions that Neanderthals were evil and went “WAHHH” all the time. And while Australopithecines predated the Mario and Luigi dynamic seen here by millions of years, this information supports current theories that those kooky little guys were pretty much Toad.”
Just amazing. It’s nice to know that our ancestors had a vaguely Mario Bros kind of situation going on with Neanderthals. Kudos to these researchers for giving us such a fascinating window into humanity’s past!
