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How our view of Neanderthals has evolved By William Lee
Back in 1856, quarry laborers dug into two limestone caves in the Neander Valley, near Dusseldorf, Germany, and uncovered a startling find: a strange-looking skull, longer and lower than that of a modern human, with thick, bestial-looking browbridges. Hermann Schaaffhausen, the first credentialed scientist to examine the remains, noted that its shape was “a natural conformation hitherto not known to exist, even in the most barbarous races,” and speculated that it was a relic of an ancient indigenous people who preceded the Germans. Other scientists haughtily dismissed his theory, arguing that the bones found in the cave belonged to some ordinary, unfortunate human deformed by pathology.
Since then, the Neanderthals have been the subject of controversy, right down to their name (some prefer Neandertal, in keeping with the modern German spelling). Were these ancient creatures, who lived in Europe and parts of Asia roughly between 200,000 and 28,000 years ago, a part of our family tree? Or were they a totally separate species of evolutionary dead-enders, doomed to fail in competition with our smarter, more linguistically and technologically advanced ancestors? Over the past 152 years, the popular conception of Neanderthals — who they really were, how they lived, and why they ultimately disappeared — has veered from one extreme to another. Some have portrayed them as bestial brutes with a shuffling gait who lacked the ability to speak but had an apparent penchant for cannibalism, while others have lauded them as gentle, compassionate, spiritual beings who placed flowers on the graves of their dead.
As Erik Trinkaus and Pat Shipman note in their 1994 book, “The Neandertals: Of Skeletons, Scientists and Scandal,” our view of Neanderthals has often been shaped by our own Zeitgeist as much as by the scientific facts. “Through the years, the shifting paradigms have drawn as much on the scientists and scholars themselves, and the times and social climates in which they lived, as they have on the ancient bones,” they write.
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