Project Title: “Changing ideas of the Neanderthal and the human”
Mentor: Becky Mansfield – Geography
Abstract:
Homo sapiens neanderthalensis provides a mirror for how we define humanity. In different times and contexts, different authors depict Neanderthals as sharing or lacking many traits conferring humanity. These traits include intelligence, use of tools, geography expansion, art, material culture, language, and domination of nature. This project examines the changing portrayals of Neanderthals in popular writing and underlying cultural and genetic definitions of the human. A variety of popular and scientific writings about Neanderthals from the past 150 years were surveyed with particular attention to the 1921 H.G. Wells short story “The Grisly Folk” and the 2011 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Ideas about Neanderthals vary from author to author, but similar questions arise of what it means to be human. Wells and Harari in particular both contrast the Neanderthal with the early modern Homo sapiens, with the two human groups representing different levels of “Otherness”. Wells helped solidify the public image of Neanderthals as brutish and subhuman. Later, archeological discoveries such as the “flower burial” at Shanidar Cave and shifting dialogue about race helped humanize the Neanderthals. However, genetic studies have had mixed effects: Early genetic studies of mitochondrial DNA showed no admixture, separating modern humans and Neanderthals in the scientific and popular imagination. Newer studies of nuclear DNA, however, reveal small amounts of admixture. This evidence of interbreeding definitively places Neanderthals within our species under the most species definitions, but Neanderthals remain depicted in a liminal space between the human and the natural.