Readers reply: why do neanderthals have such a bad reputation? | Life and style

Why do neanderthals have such a bad reputation? Carlo Moretti, Verona

Send new questions to [email protected].

Readers reply

Almost certainly the haircut … woodworm20

Neanderthals have a bad reputation largely due to historical misconceptions and outdated stereotypes. Early depictions painted them as brutish, unintelligent and uncivilised, based on the incomplete and misinterpreted fossil evidence available at the time. This view was reinforced by the need to distinguish modern humans as superior and more advanced.

However, recent research has shown that Neanderthals were much more sophisticated than previously thought. They created tools, had a form of language, engaged in symbolic behaviours and even buried their dead. The negative image persists partly because of lingering myths and the human tendency to view anything different or extinct as inferior. graungroans

Homo sapiens have far better publicists? Sagarmatha1953

I once had a date with a Basque girl and decided I’d impress her by learning a bit about her culture. Unfortunately, I told her that the Euskara language was neanderthal instead of neolithic (come on, it starts with N and has a TH and a L in it). She wasn’t impressed. alexito

Paige Madison has convincingly argued in recent years that the dismissal of Neanderthals as brutes goes back to the discovery at Feldhofer in the Neander valley in Germany in 1856. Based on the size and shape of the skull, leading geologists, naturalists and anatomists concluded that the individual must have been a dim-witted brute. Thomas Henry Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”), for example, said that the skull could have held only “the thoughtless brains of a savage”. Prehistorian

Possibly related to the once-dominant school of “Whig history” that sees history as a continuous march of progress and enlightenment imposing its worldview on prehistory. Seen through that lens, Homo sapiens replacing Homo neanderthalensis represents a superior strain of humanity taking its rightful place and a necessary step on the road to human perfection. Seeing Neanderthals as equal to us, but just different, and their replacement as the result of arbitrary factors that made us better suited to the environment than them, is incompatible with the Whig history worldview. So it became convenient to portray them as backwards and primitive, just as it became convenient to portray other human cultures in a similar light through racist stereotyping. ProjectXRay

Because Homo sapiens have an attitude of arrogance towards the rest of the natural world. This is displayed particularly in our wars, in which only the human cost is commented on and the rest of nature ignored. I’m sure that the same arrogance applied to our Neanderthal cousins. Anthony Reed

Because we allegedly conquered them – or so goes the story that I was taught in the 1950s. We “othered” them. And, of course, together with the spoils, the victors get to write history. Pamela Hall

The answer to the question is simple and complex – it’s due to human nature. People tend to like conformity in the group they are a part of, yet they also like variety in those they marry, because nature pushes for genetic diversity. In short, people tend to be self-contradictory. “My group is better than your group” has been a steady theme throughout human history.

Next, consider beliefs and attitudes back in the 1500s, when the sociological concept of races first started to emerge. People were trying to define the differences between various ethnic groups while also trying to explain the perceived superiority of certain ethnic groups over others. Being dark-skinned at the time (and too often even today) was considered more primitive and therefore less evolved.

Fast-forward to Gibraltar in 1848, when the first adult Neanderthal skull was found, but wasn’t recognised as a different species of what we now call archaic humans. (The skull of a Neanderthal child had been found in 1829 in Belgium, but it also wasn’t recognised as a related species.) It was after the discovery of a male – in the Neander valley of Germany in 1856 – that scientists figured out the remains weren’t those of anatomically modern humans. The early Neanderthal discoveries were considered bestial sub-humans with just enough cognitive ability to scratch fleas while eating carrion and their own dead.

Evolution as we know it today was first proposed, more or less, in the early 1800s (Lamarckism), with Darwin and Wallace’s version being published in 1859. By 1950, evolution was accepted by most biologists.

How does all this relate to the bad reputation Neanderthals were subjected to? In simple terms, people often consider “older” and “different” as more primitive and essentially less evolved or capable. It doesn’t matter if you could drop a person of today into the conditions of 10,000, 50,000, 500,000 or more years ago: most would consider themselves more evolved and better capable of survival than the people who knew what they were doing. Essentially, hubris makes too many people think they are the epitome of life even though we’re all still evolving (hopefully) into the next step of what it means to be human. Cameron

I don’t think they do have a particularly bad reputation! They’re not bankers or estate agents … Brutha