The Naked Neanderthal

 

Homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthals, were a species of hominin that existed from approximately 400,000 to 40,000 BCE, coexisting with Homo sapiens for up to 10,000 years. From the time of the discovery of their existence in 1856, they were assumed to be brutish, ignorant and animal-like. The stereotypical caveman. But new discoveries and evidence during the last decade have given us a different picture of what Neanderthals were like and what they were capable of.* These assumptions were that they were not so different from us. They were intelligent, excellent hunters and stone carvers, they created art and buried their dead, and they lived in small family groups, caring for each other.

Now Ludovic Slimak, in The Naked Neanderthal, 2022 (English translation 2023), questions this more recent image. His perspective is that Neanderthals were not like us, but rather a completely different type of humanity, and that we cannot know what they were really like.

He states that they “were never other versions of us – not brothers, not cousins – when it comes to mental structures, but an utterly different humanity. To approach them is to encounter a fundamentally divergent consciousness.”

And, “The truth is, we have not yet been able to define the inner nature of this other humanity. And such is the full extent of our uncertainty that we come face to face with the undefinable nature of humankind and the other human beings with whom, for a while, we shared our planet.”

However, in this book, he does relate many of his assumptions about the Neanderthals based on his excavations at Neanderthal sites for the last 30 years. He describes these excavations, artifacts found, and his conclusions as to what this information tells us about the lives of Neanderthals. For example, he accepts evidence that Neanderthals took care of their most vulnerable members and that they buried their dead, but he cautions against the conclusion that this indicates they were like Homo sapiens.

He writes, “The care that the Neanderthals bestowed on their dead arises from an ethology shared by all hominins and does not in any way link the Neanderthals to the conscious or unconscious conceptions that characterize our own humanity. And this evidence tells us that the archaeological facts are not under-exploited or over-exploited but more often than not misunderstood. An inaccessible sphere of prehistoric thought.”

So, even though much of his archeological work indicates that many aspects of Neanderthal behavior were like ours, he insists that they were a completely different kind of humanity, and we cannot know them by comparing them to ourselves. Everything that has been learned about Neanderthals is in this inaccessible sphere of prehistoric thought.

What wasn’t clear to me about this point of view is how he supports his conclusion. If another hominin engaged in behaviors similar to ours, why conclude that they were nothing like us? And he claims that by studying Neanderthals, we can learn more about our own humanity. It isn’t clear to me how this is possible if we can never know what Neanderthals were like or how they thought.

In regard to evidence that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred, he seems to contradict himself. In the chapter Understanding the Human Creature, he writes:

“Question also the encounter between our ancestors and these distant populations. But there is no proof that any encounter between two distinct humanities on the same territory ever took place, and there is no archaeological trace of it. We can only deduce it from genetic information that shows that intermixing took place between populations, but no archaeological site documents these strange meetings between two humanities.”

Wouldn’t the “genetic information” be enough proof of an encounter? And couldn’t this also be proof that the two hominins weren’t such “distinct humanities” after all? And further on in the same chapter he writes, “So there was one year at the most separating our final Neanderthal populations and our first Sapiens. Here, but no doubt elsewhere too, an encounter must have take place.”

So he states both ‘no proof of any encounter’ and ‘an encounter must have taken place.’

Despite his various contradictions and some assumptions that confused me, it was very interesting to read about his archeological work and his long-time interest in Neanderthals. I also find it useful to read conflicting assumptions about the same evidence, since much of what archaeologists conclude is based on interpretation. This is definitely a book to make you think about the evidence.

 

* See also my posts for books detailing these discoveries: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art; The Smart Neanderthal: Bird catching, cave art & the cognitive revolution; How to Think Like a Neandertal; and The Neanderthals Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story.