Sep 30, 2023 05:45 PM
(This post was last modified: Sep 30, 2023 05:48 PM by C C.)
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023...s-about-us
EXCERPTS: ... The most recent defence of Neanderthal dignity to appear in English is The Naked Neanderthal by the French paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak. He reports encountering an anthropologist at Stanford who joked, while projecting a slide of a Neanderthal skull, that “if I got on a plane and saw that the pilot had a head like that, I’d get off again”. Blunter still was the Russian academic who kept insisting that the Neanderthals were, simply “different”. Different how? “Ludovic,” he said, “they have no soul.”
What exactly is that supposed to mean? Dragged out of the realm of idle metaphor, the Russian scientist must have been saying that there were psychological capacities that we, Homo sapiens, have – capacities distinctive of our humanity – that Homo neanderthalensis lacked. But what were they? That is a scientific question, to be answered by research, not simply a matter for philosophical speculation.
It is beyond doubt now that the knuckle-dragging stereotype of the Neanderthal was based on a crude mistake. Marcellin Boule, a French pioneer in the subject, has much to answer for: faced with a well-preserved specimen from a French cave in 1908, he chose to reconstruct, for no obvious scientific reason, its legs and spine as stooped. A widely circulated illustration of a reconstructed body depicting the Neanderthal as more ape-like than recognisably human set the tone for the popular misunderstanding of Neanderthals: inarticulate, slouching, slow; therefore other; therefore inferior.
Like other champions of the Neanderthals’ dignity, the evolutionary biologist Clive Finlayson, author of The Smart Neanderthal and The Humans Who Went Extinct, was exasperated by the cultural influence of Boule’s scientifically groundless reconstruction. Armed with better-preserved skulls and fewer assumptions about the inferiority of the Neanderthals, he was in a position to show why our anatomical differences from Neanderthals have been overstated.
[...] The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that the best image of the human soul was the human body. Acknowledging the soul – the dignity – of the Neanderthal might well have to start with acknowledging how alike their bodies were to ours.
[...] The Neanderthals, in other words, walked erect, hunted big game and knew how to control fire: hardly the knuckle-draggers of stereotype...
[...] The genome offered strong support to what had previously been only a hypothesis: that Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals had had a common ancestor who lived about 600,000 years ago. More significantly, it showed that when early Homo sapiens had walked from their original home in Africa into Eurasia, they had encountered Neanderthals there and interbred with them. The Neanderthals were among the genetic ancestors of modern Europeans and Asians (but not of modern Africans). Eurasians today have between 1.5 and 2.1% of Neanderthal DNA.
[...] Unusually for a piece of genetics research, Pääbo’s results became the stuff of salacious tabloid headlines. Playboy magazine interviewed Pääbo about his research, producing a four-page story titled “Neanderthal Love: Would You Sleep with This Woman?” The mucky Amazonian Neanderthal woman featured in their illustration was not designed to be a fantasy object.
Meanwhile, men wrote to Pääbo volunteering to be “examined for Neanderthal heritage” – perhaps seeking a scientific basis for their stereotypically Neanderthal traits, being “big, robust, muscular, somewhat crude, and perhaps a little simple”. It was mostly men who wrote in, though there was the occasional woman convinced her husband was a Neanderthal.
[...] The old knuckle-dragging conceptions of Neanderthals certainly don’t do justice to what the evidence tells us. But they at least did the Neanderthals the courtesy of allowing them to be different from us. The challenge, Slimak argues, is not to dignify the Neanderthal by making them, effectively, identical to us, a sort of “ersatz sapiens”. The challenge is to let them have their dignity while remaining themselves, a different kind of human, a different kind of humanity... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: ... The most recent defence of Neanderthal dignity to appear in English is The Naked Neanderthal by the French paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak. He reports encountering an anthropologist at Stanford who joked, while projecting a slide of a Neanderthal skull, that “if I got on a plane and saw that the pilot had a head like that, I’d get off again”. Blunter still was the Russian academic who kept insisting that the Neanderthals were, simply “different”. Different how? “Ludovic,” he said, “they have no soul.”
What exactly is that supposed to mean? Dragged out of the realm of idle metaphor, the Russian scientist must have been saying that there were psychological capacities that we, Homo sapiens, have – capacities distinctive of our humanity – that Homo neanderthalensis lacked. But what were they? That is a scientific question, to be answered by research, not simply a matter for philosophical speculation.
It is beyond doubt now that the knuckle-dragging stereotype of the Neanderthal was based on a crude mistake. Marcellin Boule, a French pioneer in the subject, has much to answer for: faced with a well-preserved specimen from a French cave in 1908, he chose to reconstruct, for no obvious scientific reason, its legs and spine as stooped. A widely circulated illustration of a reconstructed body depicting the Neanderthal as more ape-like than recognisably human set the tone for the popular misunderstanding of Neanderthals: inarticulate, slouching, slow; therefore other; therefore inferior.
Like other champions of the Neanderthals’ dignity, the evolutionary biologist Clive Finlayson, author of The Smart Neanderthal and The Humans Who Went Extinct, was exasperated by the cultural influence of Boule’s scientifically groundless reconstruction. Armed with better-preserved skulls and fewer assumptions about the inferiority of the Neanderthals, he was in a position to show why our anatomical differences from Neanderthals have been overstated.
[...] The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that the best image of the human soul was the human body. Acknowledging the soul – the dignity – of the Neanderthal might well have to start with acknowledging how alike their bodies were to ours.
[...] The Neanderthals, in other words, walked erect, hunted big game and knew how to control fire: hardly the knuckle-draggers of stereotype...
[...] The genome offered strong support to what had previously been only a hypothesis: that Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals had had a common ancestor who lived about 600,000 years ago. More significantly, it showed that when early Homo sapiens had walked from their original home in Africa into Eurasia, they had encountered Neanderthals there and interbred with them. The Neanderthals were among the genetic ancestors of modern Europeans and Asians (but not of modern Africans). Eurasians today have between 1.5 and 2.1% of Neanderthal DNA.
[...] Unusually for a piece of genetics research, Pääbo’s results became the stuff of salacious tabloid headlines. Playboy magazine interviewed Pääbo about his research, producing a four-page story titled “Neanderthal Love: Would You Sleep with This Woman?” The mucky Amazonian Neanderthal woman featured in their illustration was not designed to be a fantasy object.
Meanwhile, men wrote to Pääbo volunteering to be “examined for Neanderthal heritage” – perhaps seeking a scientific basis for their stereotypically Neanderthal traits, being “big, robust, muscular, somewhat crude, and perhaps a little simple”. It was mostly men who wrote in, though there was the occasional woman convinced her husband was a Neanderthal.
[...] The old knuckle-dragging conceptions of Neanderthals certainly don’t do justice to what the evidence tells us. But they at least did the Neanderthals the courtesy of allowing them to be different from us. The challenge, Slimak argues, is not to dignify the Neanderthal by making them, effectively, identical to us, a sort of “ersatz sapiens”. The challenge is to let them have their dignity while remaining themselves, a different kind of human, a different kind of humanity... (MORE - missing details)