There would have been good reason for Neanderthals and other early humans to don skins and eschew frolicking about their natural paradise in the buff. For ninety per cent of the time Neanderthals were on Earth, the planet was colder than it is today. Thus, the Neanderthals were physically well adapted to a climate in which most days resembled Montreal in February. "They had a powerful metabolic furnace: a big heart and lungs," Bisson says. "They also had short bodies, small forelimbs, and big noses which served as heat conservation and humidification devices. They did lots of vigorous activity in cold weather, so their noses were probably runny all the time. They weren't very attractive."

Capturing ice-age food -- characteristically of the large and hostile variety, given that low temperatures made a vegan diet difficult to maintain -- must have required all of the Neanderthal's substantial strength and endurance. A fossil site of carefully stacked mammoth bones has been discovered, along with primitive tools, prompting archeologists to hypothesize that Neanderthals had driven a herd over a cliff and then harvested the remains.

PHOTO: Courtesy BBC

But woolly mammoth was not typically on the menu, Bisson notes. Neanderthals usually went for slightly smaller prey: giant bison, horse, some reindeer, and the European wild ox. "The wild ox was forty per cent larger than domestic cattle and had a real attitude," he explains. "It was the Arnold Schwarzenegger of cows." Neanderthals would kill them, or any big, dangerous ungulate, routinely -- but there was a cost. Much of the killing was done at close quarters. The large wooden spears would wound and enrage the prey, and the hunters would then have to close in for the kill. As a result, Neanderthal skeletons display a range of traumatic injuries comparable today only to those of rodeo riders, the one remaining profession where people get stomped and kicked regularly by angry, hooved animals.

The BBC can credit its good fortune in finding Bisson to a former student of his, Kris Kovarovic, BA'97, currently pursuing her doctorate at the University College of London. Kovarovic's office mate occasionally contracts academics for the BBC, and mentioned to her that the director wanted new faces, including an interesting, engaging Neanderthal specialist. "I thought, 'Oh boy, do I have somebody for you,'" recalls Kovarovic. The director auditioned Bisson, along with a number of other North American archeologists, in a long transatlantic phone call, and the rest is history -- much of it more fully recorded in two companion BBC documentaries, Triumph of the Beast and The Beast Within, which focus on the making of Walking with Prehistoric Beasts.

While he speaks authoritatively on a number of stone-age subjects, Bisson's real love lies in paleolithic technology: the tools created by Neanderthals and other early humans. Neanderthals were very capable craftsfolk. "You need to strike at the right angle to prepare flint as a tool," he stresses. Everyone -- young and old, male and female -- would have tool-making skills, especially as tools were not saved or transported, but rather fashioned and used when they were needed, and then discarded. Brandishing a perfect spear point, Bisson says, "I could not do this, and very few hobbyists today could."

	Michael Bisson with a handmade cutting tool PHOTO: Owen Egan

The spear heads and scrapers that Bisson uses to demonstrate his point (and theirs) come from the Redpath Museum's extensive collections. Henry Ami, a paleolithic artifact connoisseur, left a healthy portion of his collection to McGill, and British archeologist Dorothy Garrod, who first excavated the Tabun Cave and Skhul in Israel in the 1920s, also directed many items to the Museum.

"Both collections are excellent potential sources of research, and I also use them in my courses," says Bisson, who complements his research with a deep commitment to teaching. In 1998, he was the Arts Faculty winner of the H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching. "The great thing about teaching is that you are forced to explain things to students, who want to know why we do things, not just what we do." The standard classification system for mid-paleolithic stone tools was formulated in the 1950s by FranÁois Bordes, but is full of ambiguities. "Students would call me on them," he says, "and I would just parrot the rules. But it got me thinking..."

Classification systems may seem as dry as the dust on old bones, but they express our understanding of how Neanderthals thought about their world, or at least about their tools -- the only part of their world we have left. Bordes and other European archeologists believed that Neanderthals had culturally conditioned cognitive categories that influenced how they designed tools.

"Imagine a member of one group of Neanderthals saying something like 'I'm a Ferrassie Neanderthal, so I'm going to make the retouched edge, the working edge of the tool, parallel to the axis of flaking.' They then take the piece and produce a side scraper," says Bisson. "However, if I were a Quina Neanderthal, I would look at these side scrapers and say 'bleah.' Then I'd make a transverse scraper." Bisson, a flint-knapper of many years, felt that this idea was bunk. Instead, there is growing conviction that scraper types tend to correlate with environmental areas, the qualities of local flint, and the availability of flint.