THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

Such an empathetic representation may speak well of our times. According to archaeologist Clive Gamble, each age gets the Neanderthal that it either wants or deserves. Since they were first recognised as a distinct species in 1859, Neanderthals have tracked the prejudices, fears and hopes of succeeding generations. Charlie Chaplin's 1914 film His Prehistoric Past, featuring the little tramp as "Weak-chin" in a fur leotard and iconic bowler hat, mocked the caveman stereotype. In the Warner Brothers' 1963 cartoon Mad as a Mars Hare, space-travelling Bugs Bunny was changed into a brutish "Neanderthal Rabbit" by Marvin the Martian's ACME "time-space gun." In the peacenik days of the early 1970s, the discovery of pollen mixed among Neanderthal remains in northern Iraq led US archaeologist Ralph Solecki to propose they were the "first flower people." From the first discoveries at the height of European empire, right through to today's reappraisal as we stand on the cusp of a new age of extinction, when we have looked at our lost cousins, we have unwittingly revealed our own reflection.

The earliest discoveries tapped into bleak contemporary prejudices. Nana and Flint are based on skulls found in Gibraltar--Nana's in 1848 and Flint's in 1926. (Nana's was found before the breakthrough discovery in 1856 of a partial skull with pronounced brow-ridges, in Germany's Neander Thal--or "New man"--valley, although she wasn't recognised as belonging to a newly assigned distinct species until 1864.) Proponents of racial hierarchy seized on the striking difference in their skull shape as evidence of inferiority. Hermann Schaaffhausen, one of the discoverers of the Neander Thal fragment, said that it proved Neanderthals were a lower species of human, akin to "negroes" and "idiots." Thomas Huxley, who also examined the skull, declared that Neanderthals were a "primitive race" closer to Australian Aborigines than modern Europeans.  [...]

In Kindred, her fascinating 2020 study of Neanderthal biology and culture, Rebecca Wragg Sykes makes clear they were skilled stone workers and makers of composite tools. They wore clothes, possibly even shoes, and may have woven plants into three-ply thread. Neanderthal homes were furnished with plant-matter beds and animal-hide floor-coverings. They cooked meat; there's even evidence of wood fragments embedded in fossilised calculus that suggests they used toothpicks. They mixed pigments, favouring black, red, dark brown, and grey when decorating seashell ornaments and the walls of their dwellings. They adorned themselves with bird feathers, and cared for the sick and disabled. The oldest extant artworks we know of, cave paintings in Spain, were made by Neanderthals--as was the world's most ancient known structure, a ring of broken stalagmites assembled in Bruniquel, a cave in southern France, 174,000 years ago. Neanderthals may even have had a form of notation that recorded quantity.

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