Picture a skull with a brain cavity bigger than yours, mine, or almost anyone’s alive today. Now place that skull inside a Neanderthal, a species most of us still associate with brute strength rather than brainpower. That is exactly the puzzle Amud 1 hands to anthropologists. Found in a cave in northern Israel, this fossil forces us to rethink what “big brained” really means and who gets to claim the title.
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Where Amud 1 was found
Amud 1 comes from Amud Cave, a site set into a limestone gorge in the Upper Galilee, close to the Sea of Galilee. A Japanese expedition led by Hisashi Suzuki uncovered the skeleton in July 1961. It turned out to be a nearly complete, though poorly preserved, adult skeleton that the excavation team identified as male. Researchers estimate his height at roughly 172 to 177 centimetres, which is unusually tall for a Neanderthal, a species typically remembered for a shorter, stockier build.
The remains date to the Late Pleistocene, somewhere in the range of 50,000 to 55,000 years ago, placing Amud 1 within the Middle Paleolithic period. This was a time when the Levant, the corridor of land connecting Africa, Asia, and Europe, hosted a rotating cast of hominin groups moving through in response to shifting climates.
Just how big was that brain?
Here is the headline fact: Amud 1’s cranial capacity has been measured at approximately 1,740 cubic centimetres, one of the largest ever recorded for any hominid, living or extinct. A 2015 virtual reconstruction using computer modelling refined this figure slightly to around 1,736 cubic centimetres, confirming that the original estimate was close to accurate even after accounting for damage to the skull.
To put that in perspective, the average brain volume for a modern human hovers around 1,350 cubic centimetres, while the average for Neanderthals as a species sits closer to 1,410 cubic centimetres. Amud 1 comfortably exceeds both. In fact, according to Guinness World Records, Amud 1’s brain volume ranks among the largest ever measured in the human fossil record, rivalled only by a roughly 100,000-year-old skull from Xuchang, China.
Bigger brain, bigger body
Before this number gets oversold, it needs a dose of context. Brain size tends to scale with body size across mammals, and Neanderthals generally had heavier, more muscular frames than modern humans. Once body mass is factored in, the gap between Neanderthal and modern human brain size narrows considerably. Amud 1 himself was unusually tall, so part of his large cranial capacity likely reflects his overall build rather than some isolated leap in cognitive capacity. Even so, the raw number matters. It dismantles the old assumption that Neanderthals were cognitively inferior simply because they looked different from us.
Does a big brain mean a bigger brain, cognitively speaking?
Cranial capacity is a physical measurement, not a direct readout of intelligence. Brain organisation, neuron density, and the wiring between regions matter just as much as overall volume. What Amud 1 does show is that Neanderthal brains were, at minimum, structurally capable of supporting complex behaviour. The skull itself carries a mix of features, a long, broad braincase, prominent brow ridges, and a receding forehead alongside a moderately projecting midface, that anthropologists describe as a mosaic. Some researchers have even proposed that this mix of traits hints at gene flow between Neanderthal and modern human populations in the Levant, since the region was a meeting ground for both groups over tens of thousands of years.
Was Amud 1 deliberately buried?
Amud Cave has produced far more than one skeleton. Excavations there eventually recovered remains from at least sixteen individuals, including infants and young children, a pattern that points toward the site being used repeatedly for depositing the dead rather than accumulating bones by pure accident. The clearest single piece of evidence comes from a different individual at the same site, Amud 7, an eight to ten month old infant whose remains were found with the jawbone of a red deer placed on the pelvis, a detail interpreted as a deliberate funerary gesture.
Amud 1’s own burial context is less clear cut than Amud 7’s, since his skull was recovered from a complicated stratigraphic layer that also contained material from much later periods. Still, taken together with the rest of the cave’s mortuary evidence, Amud 1 sits within a broader pattern that increasingly convinces researchers that Levantine Neanderthals treated their dead with intention rather than indifference.
How this compares across the Levant
Amud is not an isolated case. A comparative study covering seventeen Neanderthal and fifteen Homo sapiens burials across multiple Levantine sites found that both species buried their dead across all ages and sexes, sometimes including grave goods such as animal horns, antlers, and jawbones. Interestingly, Neanderthal infant burials appeared more frequently than infant burials among Homo sapiens at these sites, suggesting subtle differences in mortuary customs between the two populations even as both practised some form of intentional burial.
Why the Levant keeps rewriting the story
The wider region around Amud Cave has become one of the most important areas for understanding how Neanderthals and Homo sapiens related to one another. Excavations at nearby Tinshemet Cave, dating even earlier than Amud, revealed that the two groups did not just live nearby but appear to have shared tools, lifestyles, and burial customs, including the symbolic use of ochre, suggesting genuine cultural exchange rather than parallel, isolated existences.
Not every researcher agrees on how close that exchange was. Some argue that the burials at Tinshemet, Skhul, and Qafzeh caves belong specifically to Homo sapiens, while the behaviours seen at Kebara, Amud, and Dederiyeh caves are tied to Neanderthals, pointing to distinct traditions existing side by side rather than one shared culture. Either way, the debate itself shows how central this small stretch of land has become to the human origins story. It was a crossroads, a place where different hominin populations overlapped for tens of thousands of years, adapting to the same landscape and, in some cases, to each other.
Regional diversity within Neanderthals
Amud 1 also complicates the picture of Neanderthals as a single, uniform species. His unusual height and his skull’s long, broad shape place him closer to other Levantine specimens like Tabun and Shanidar than to the shorter, more heavily built Neanderthals of Ice Age Europe. This regional variation matters because it shows Neanderthals were not a fixed template stamped across every environment. They adapted physically to different climates and terrains, much as modern human populations vary across geography today.
The bigger takeaway
Amud 1’s real contribution to anthropology is not the number 1,740 by itself. It is what that number forces us to unlearn. For decades, popular imagination treated Neanderthals as a lesser, more primitive branch of the human family tree, defined mostly by brute strength. A skull with one of the largest brain volumes ever recorded, found alongside evidence of intentional burial, pushes back hard against that image. It suggests a species capable of symbolic thought, social bonds strong enough to motivate funerary care, and enough biological sophistication to rival, and in one measurable way exceed, our own species.
What do you think? If brain size alone does not prove superior intelligence, what other kinds of evidence would help anthropologists judge Neanderthal cognitive ability more fairly? And if Neanderthals and Homo sapiens really did share burial customs and tools in the Levant, does that change how we should think about the boundary between the two species?
References
- https://www.britannica.com/place/Amud-anthropological-and-archaeological-site-Israel
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.22777
- https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/634481-largest-human-brain
- https://phys.org/news/2024-10-ancient-graves-reveal-distinct-burial.html
- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260412071005.htm
- https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/neanderthals-modern-humans-and-a-mysterious-human-lineage-mingled-in-caves-in-ancient-israel-study-finds
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