The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How Modern Science is Rewriting Their Story

by Papagianni, Dimitra

  GEICO’s satirical view of these popular images of Neanderthals and cavemen is also reflected in print cartoons. Like the man stranded on a desert island or the patient on a couch receiving psychoanalysis, the caveman family is a staple of cartoon humour. Most of these cartoons boil down to just two joke archetypes: in one, the caveman family does things quite primitively and, in the other, the caveman family is surprisingly sophisticated despite living in a cave. In both cases the joke plays on our preconceived image of cavemen and Neanderthals representing the opposite of civilization and, ultimately, on our deep discomfort that our advanced society arose from humble and embarrassing beginnings. We laugh not because cavemen and Neanderthals are beneath us but because they are us.

  Generic cavemen, often with Neanderthal features, have long been a stock subject of jokes and cartoons, mostly uncomplimentary, but they are typically based on outdated ideas.

  This cartoon humour is a parody of the illustrated reconstructions of the everyday lives of cavemen that one finds in books like this one. In a review of iconic caveman illustrations, the anthropologist Stephanie Moser argued that many of the standard images – hunting, making tools, sitting around a fire, confronting animals, sharing a meal – are part of an established artistic tradition that actually pre-dates the archaeological discoveries and theories they claim to depict.

  These illustrations often contribute to the persistence of out-dated ideas. For example, virile males, often wielding clubs, are in the foreground, while women are either absent or sitting calmly in the background. Extending into the realm of the moving image, such reconstructions also perpetuate bizarre ideas about the past, such as the fact that cavemen always seem so serious and anti-social when eating or having sex.

  The mistaken notion that Neanderthals walked hunched over dates to a poorly reconstructed skeleton that was excavated in 1908 at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France (see p. 141). After this skeleton was found, the French palaeontologist Marcellin Boule at the Museum of Natural History in Paris became both the first researcher to study a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton and the first researcher to nearly completely misread a Neanderthal skeleton. Boule gave the ‘Old Man’ of La Chapelle-aux-Saints a decidedly ape-like, stooped posture. Now considered to have died at the age of thirty, this ‘Old Man’, it turns out, had bad arthritis and premature bone degeneration, and but for these infirmities would have stood as upright as anyone today. No amount of new research, tracing full bipedalism and erect posture back millions of years, seems to be sufficient to dislodge the image of the stooped caveman from our iconic vocabulary.

  Although Neanderthals tend to be subsumed under the generalized and mythical idea of cavemen, they do also have a particular image in popular culture. The term ‘Neanderthal’ is recognizably derogatory in ways no other archaic human species is. One would hardly complain of behaviour that was ‘australopithecine’ or ‘heidelbergensian’. The meaning of accusing someone of being a Neanderthal is widely understood, even by people with no knowledge of human evolution. And here we cannot resist mentioning that the American politician Sarah Palin once responded to criticism by calling one of her political rivals a ‘knuckle-dragging Neanderthal’. Neanderthals, of course, did not drag their knuckles.

  A key source of popular misconceptions of the Neanderthals comes from early reconstruction drawings such as this one from 1909 of the ‘Old Man’ (he was only 30!) of La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France (see also pp. 140–41).

  At times the image of a form of human ruled by animal instincts has had great popular resonance. In 1970 the band that became the legendary 10cc laid down an experimental drum track and without much thought added the words, ‘I’m a Neanderthal man / You’re a Neanderthal girl / Let’s make Neanderthal love / In this Neanderthal world’, which they sang repeatedly. The single sold 2 million copies and shot up to No. 2 in the UK charts.

  Perhaps on account of their unfair treatment, Neanderthals have attracted a sort of cult following by people who want to celebrate them as a noble savage, a misunderstood, thoughtful species deserving of our admiration. They are so close to being like us, yet they are the butt of our jokes. It seems that there is a widespread longing to be able to communicate with them, allowing us to atone for our sin of derision and, perhaps, for the extermination of our closest cousins.

  One way we could communicate with Neanderthals would be if there were still some around today. The fantasy that living Neanderthals have somehow survived unnoticed for the past 40,000 years is part of the lore of Big Foot, also known as the Yeti, Sasquatch or Alma, depending on the part of the world where it is found. The formula is that a rural community passes down a legend of large, hairy, primitive, man-like creatures inhabiting the woods or high mountains near by. An explorer arrives to hear first-hand accounts of these sightings, but somehow the beasts are always just out of reach.

  These tales are usually fodder for novels, tabloid newspapers and TV documentaries in the tradition of spontaneous human combustion, the Loch Ness monster and haunted houses. In the 1980s an archaeologist from the University of Leicester was brave enough to attempt a relatively serious scholarly survey of the Big Foot myth, evaluating the likelihood that various sightings around the world were actually of living Neanderthals. In her book, Still Living? (1986), Myra Shackley dismissed these one by one, but held out hope that on a trip to Mongolia she came close to finding Neanderthals in the Altai Mountains.

  Despite making such a tantalizing claim, Shackley soon left archaeology to take a post in cultural resource management, in order to study the tourism of sacred sites. With Shackley’s Mongolian research unfinished, perhaps another intrepid explorer will one day continue the search and rekindle the romantic notion that our closest human cousins are simply biding their time and will rise again.

  Neanderthals in fiction

  In the opening scene of John Darnton’s 1996 sexually charged archaeological adventure, Neanderthal: Their Time Has Come, a Mujahideen guerrilla takes refuge high in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan and is thumped on the head by a Neanderthal hungry for human brains. The notion that a surviving pocket of Neanderthals has discovered better hiding places than al-Qaeda is typical of the improbable plot devices that authors use to bring Neanderthals and modern humans together in dramatic situations.

  Fictional Neanderthals have been known to hole up for centuries in mountains and caves from the Basque region of Spain to Scandinavia, Armenia and northern California. Fictional cloned Neanderthals set up their own community in Swindon, UK. And fictional Neanderthals both from our own past and from parallel universes have fallen through all manner of time machines and malfunctioning quantum computers. Only a handful of plots take place in the Palaeolithic world where modern humans and Neanderthals actually met, and while these tend to be more illuminating of how real-life Neanderthals might have lived, in our opinion there is almost nothing in fiction that approaches plausibility.

  Neanderthals have appeared in the fictional works of an impressive array of writers including Darnton (a Pulitzer Prize winner), science fiction giants H. G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, Michael Crichton, Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, Nobel laureate William Golding and, inevitably, William Shatner. The bestselling Neanderthal novel is Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear, which follows the exploits of a modern human girl raised by a tribe of Neanderthals. According to the back cover of a recent edition, it has sold tens of millions of copies since its publication in 1980. In 1986 it was adapted as a movie with Daryl Hannah in the lead role (see p. 144, above). Auel penned five popular sequels, collectively called the ‘Earth’s Children’ series. In addition to the air of credibility she gives her knowledge by attending conferences and basing characters on actual Neanderthal skeletons, much of Auel’s success must be attributed to her deft employment of a plot turn that has been experimented with by many ‘Neanderthal’ authors: interspecies sex.

  A still from the 1981 film Quest for Fire, one of many visualizations of Neanderthals in the m
ovies that have proved popular, but which reinforce erroneous stereotypes.

  When Neanderthals first started appearing in fiction in the early 20th century, they were basically primitive. The seminal title of this genre is J. H. Rosny-Aîné’s La Guerre du feu (1911), which became the hit movie Quest for Fire (1981). The story is based on the improbable premise that Neanderthals who could make clothes, knap stone tools and kill large predators could not rub two sticks together to make fire. When a more archaic form of human attacks a Neanderthal settlement (the Oulhamrs) and extinguishes their hearths, three members of the group set out to steal fire from a rival tribe (the Kzams, or modern humans). Speaking only in the third person and relying on their acute sense of smell, the three heroes defeat and kill a large number of scary animals and human rivals. In the film they also have sexual encounters.

  More recently, fictional Neanderthals have been transformed into a gentle, gifted, morally superior people with extraordinary tracking abilities, all reminiscent of Native Americans in 19th-century literature. Jasper Fforde created a brilliant parody of this trend in the form of Neanderthal detective Bartholomew Stiggins in his ‘Thursday Next’ series. Fictional Neanderthals seem to be taking on a life of their own, becoming remarkably consistent in literature yet increasingly divergent from the archaeological view of them. On his website Fforde described the dilemma of depicting fictional Neanderthals: ‘I started out by making them complete thickos, unable, in first draft, to conceive how you couldn’t hijack an elevator in Swindon and order it to go to a department store in Augsberg…. Since it seems likely that neanderthals were ousted from the planet by modern man, I chose to make them unaggressive yet highly intelligent. But a different form of intelligence. They had no word for ‘I’ and live in perfect social order, needing no government.’

  A reader who has been exposed to Neanderthals only in fiction might believe that all Neanderthals worshipped cave bears, had rigidly divided gender roles and elaborate rituals (especially surrounding burials), could track game and unfriendly modern humans with a canine-like sense of smell and possessed some sort of telepathic ability – the only question being whether they could ‘see’ through one another’s eyes or ‘share’ memories. It goes without saying that none of these ideas has widespread support in the non-fiction universe. Even the plausible stereotypes are not based on any archaeological evidence.

  Of all the Neanderthal paperbacks, there are two tales in particular that are thought-provoking in their depictions of possible meetings with our prehistoric kin. Dance of the Tiger: A Novel of the Ice Age by Björn Kurtén (1980) is a fictionalization of a theory about a possible cause of Neanderthal extinction. In the novel a modern human boy called Tiger falls in with a Neanderthal clan, marries a Neanderthal woman and seeks to avenge his father’s murder. Kurtén’s idea is that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred but had sterile offspring. He imagines that this could have led to the Neanderthals’ extinction if the sterile hybrids became alpha males within the Neanderthal tribes but were shunned by modern humans. Kurtén was a palaeontologist, and his descriptions of Ice Age flora and fauna are rich and evocative.

  The other memorable story is Isaac Asimov’s ‘The Ugly Little Boy’ (1958) (accessible in Robert Silverberg’s 1991 expansion and adaptation, Child of Time, and in the 1987 compilation Neanderthals: Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction No. 6), which explores the challenges a child-care worker would face if a Neanderthal boy were brought into the present by a time machine. After a difficult start the boy adapts well to the modern world but is frustrated by his confinement in the time-machine lab, where the laws of physics somehow prevent him from leaving the room. In the end the scientists elect to send him back to his own time to an almost certain death, and his carer must figure out how she can save him. The poignant ending is a reminder of the Neanderthals’ enduring humanity, contrasted with the at-times soulless march of scientific progress.

  Neanderthal names

  There are three basic approaches to naming Neanderthals in fiction: the primitive name (Ha), the nickname (Leviticus) and the foreigner (Stefan Antonescu).

  In the primitive, grunt-sounding variety, it is common for several tribe members to have rhyming or alliterative names. For example, William Golding’s last surviving Neanderthals in The Inheritors (1955) include Fa and Ha, Nil and Mal, Lok and Liku. Auel’s clan of Neanderthals in The Clan of the Cave Bear is made up of females Aga, Oga, Ona, Aba, Uka, Ika, Iza, Ebra and Ovra, alongside males Dorv, Droog, Goov, Grod, Vorn, Borg, Broud, Brun, Crug, Creb and Zoug. Readers are advised to keep a crib sheet to avoid confusion. In Quest for Fire, Rosny-Aîné’s Neanderthal names rely more heavily on vowels: Faouhm, Naoh, Ouag, Aoum.

  Robert J. Sawyer, author of the ‘Neanderthal Parallax’ trilogy of novels, which feature an alternative world where Neanderthals, rather than modern humans, emerged as the dominant human species. Sawyer is better known for writing Flash Forward, which was adapted as a high-budget yet short-lived science fiction TV show.

  The nicknames imply a higher degree of metaphorical thinking than the grunt names. In some cases modern humans bestow the nicknames. John Darnton’s tribe in Neanderthal includes Lancelot, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus (but not Deuteronomy or Numbers for some reason), Blue-Eyes, Dark-Eyes and Longface. Asimov’s title character is called Timmie in ‘The Ugly Little Boy’. Michael Stewart’s version in Birthright (1990) is Adam. And then there are nicknames the Neanderthals give each other. When Robert Silverberg stretched Asimov’s tale into the novel-length Child of Time, he gave us Silver Cloud, Mammoth Rider, Fights Like A Lion, Stinking Musk Ox and She Who Knows. Kurtén imagined Neanderthals named after trees and flowers in Dance of the Tiger: Woad, Angelica, Parnassia, Torchflower, Silverbirch, Baywillow.

  Foreign names imply Neanderthals who are more, or less, like us. Robert J. Sawyer’s ‘Neanderthal Parallax’ trilogy of Hominids (2002), Humans (2003) and Hybrids (2003) introduces the geographically unspecific foreign-sounding names of Ponter Boddit, Adikor Huld, Delag Bowst, Jasmel Ket and Megameg Bek. Jasper Fforde’s Bartholomew Stiggins is not strictly foreign, at least from our point of view (he lives in Swindon, which is not far from where we started writing this book), but his name is certainly not one you are likely to encounter in the real Anglo-Saxon world. In The Silk Code (1999) Paul Levinson brings us Stefan Antonescu and Max Soros, who use some genetic engineering trick in order to travel unnoticed around New York and London.

  When two ethnic groups meet they tend to develop collective and often abusive names for each other, and two species would probably act in the same way. Thus the humans of Philip K. Dick’s excellent The Simulacra (1964) refer to an ominous and backward-living population of Neanderthals as ‘chuppers’. The ‘wendol’ are medieval cannibal Neanderthals, intentionally reminiscent of Beowulf’s foe Grendel, in Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead (1976). Meanwhile Sawyer’s Neanderthals call us ‘Gliksins’. Kurtén’s Neanderthals are ‘Whites’ or, less kindly, ‘Trolls’ to the modern human ‘Blacks’ of Palaeolithic Europe. Rosny-Aîné’s Neanderthals call the moderns ‘Thin Men’. Probably the most demeaning example is Stephen Baxter’s modern humans who treat their downtrodden Neanderthal neighbours as an oppressed minority of nameless ‘boneheads’, a reference to their prominent brow ridges, in Evolution: A Novel (2002). Auel’s Neanderthals are the ‘Clan’ who oppose the ‘Others’ (us), in terms echoed by Silverberg’s ‘People’ (Neanderthals) and ‘Other Ones’ (us). According to Fforde, ‘Arguments of racism regarding the Neanderthals are entirely unfounded – the Neanderthal is a different species.’

  Aside from the nameless beast-like Neanderthals of Baxter, these fictional names all carry the same message: that Neanderthals are just like us in that they have names for individuals and groups, and in that they have a sense of self. At the same time, the names are reminders that they are fundamentally different. The exceptions are Silverberg’s Neanderthal names, which tell us that they are fundamentally like American Indi
ans, and Levinson’s, which tell us that they are fundamentally like eastern Europeans.

  Bears, flutes and flowers

  Fiction writers seem to have seized upon minority or out-dated interpretations of three cave sites in particular: Drachenloch in Switzerland is the source of the cave bear cult idea, which Auel has now etched into the public consciousness; Shanidar in the Kurdish province of Iraq has given us the idea that Neanderthals were sensitive beings who decorated graves with large quantities of flowers; and Divje Babe I is a cave in Slovenia where an alleged Neanderthal flute was discovered, on a cave bear femur, forming the basis for Levinson’s The Silk Code, a detective story featuring musical Neanderthals and Amish genetic engineers.

  In the movie adaptation of The Clan of the Cave Bear, the human heroine is cast out of her adopted Neanderthal tribe when the tribal leader dramatically inserts a cave bear femur into a skull to mark her expulsion. This image comes directly from the excavations in the early 20th century at Drachenloch, where the excavator, Emil Bächler, interpreted this arrangement of cave bear bones, found near some Mousterian stone tools, as being evidence of Neanderthal religion. The current thinking among archaeologists is that this was just a chance configuration and there is no solid evidence that the Neanderthals arranged cave bear skulls in ritualistic ways. Even if a Neanderthal placed the femur into the skull on purpose, it is an isolated find, and there is no reason to think that it was part of a ritual, let alone a cult.