NEANDERTHALS THE SAME SPECIES?
In the 1930s, however, scientific thinking about Neanderthals began to shift again; Neanderthal graveyards discovered in Italy and France showed evidence of complex burial rituals, such as tools and animal bones carefully placed with the bodies and a “crown of stones” surrounding a man’s skull. That suggested that Neanderthals, instead of being animalistic brutes, were intelligent creatures with spiritual beliefs. In the late 1940s, French paleontologist Camille Arambourg, after seeing an x-ray of his own neck vertebrae, noted striking similarities to those of Neanderthals, and showed that Boule’s analysis of Neanderthal anatomy had been wrong.
By the 1950s, scientists were emphasizing the similarities between Neanderthals and modern humans, rather than their differences, and some even argued that they actually belonged to the same species, just as different racial and ethnic groups do. As William Straus, Jr. and A.J.E. Cave wrote in a 1957 scientific article, if a Neanderthal “could be reincarnated and placed in a New York subway — provided that he were bathed, shaved and dressed in modern clothing — it is doubtful whether he would attract any more attention than some of its other denizens.”
Eventually, some even came to see Neanderthals not just as probable ancestors, but as the prehistoric equivalent of the 1960s counterculture. In his 1971 book Shanidar; The First Flower People, anthropologist Ralph S. Solecki argued that the Neanderthals were a gentle, peaceful society that took care of the elderly and infirm--with the obvious implication that they morally superior to the modern Americans waging a bloody war in Vietnam.
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