[dijit]

They were pretty great though.

I mean, racism and people using anthropology to try and act superior to each other aside (which, I will grant, is a pretty big fucking aside): neanderthals were crazy strong and had bodies which had much more "explosive" muscle fibres than that of modern humans (or H. Sapiens of the era).

They, of course, had significant misgivings which likely led to their extinction- but I wonder how a stocky, heavy-browed, big-toothed, barrel-chested bloke with no chin but a jaw like a breeze block Neanderthal would get along in todays world. They're built for Rugby.

Would be cool to experience.

[giardini]

Finally, an explanation for rugby!

https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=nea...

[dijit]

After doing a bit more digging, the reality is more interesting than the video implies. Neanderthals didn't get a rebrand because white people found out they shared DNA; the bad reputation was always built on dodgy science that was already being dismantled.

The whole "brutish caveman" thing traces back to 1908, when a French palaeontologist called Marcellin Boule got his hands on a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton and reconstructed it as a stooped, bent-kneed, gorilla-like creature[0]. Problem is, he got it completely wrong; the skeleton had severe arthritis, which he either missed or ignored, and he projected Victorian-era ideas about racial hierarchy onto the bones. It took until the 1950s for anyone to seriously challenge it[1], by which point the image was baked into popular culture.

The thing is though that the prejudice didn't even start with Boule. From the very first specimen found in 1856[2], scientists were already calling Neanderthals primitive because 19th-century science was obsessed with ranking humans into racial categories. Neanderthals were useful as a "below us" rung on a ladder that was already bullshit. So yeah, the video's not wrong that racial ideology played a role, but framing it as "white people discovered shared DNA and then rebranded Neanderthals" is a bit too neat. The rehabilitation started decades before the DNA findings, because the racial hierarchy framework that created the caricature fell apart first.

What we actually know now[3] is that they used pigments and art, made tools, cared for their sick, buried their dead, and survived wildly different climates for hundreds of thousands of years. They weren't H. Sapiens' thick cousins; they were a genuinely capable parallel branch of humanity that we happened to absorb (and probably helped push out, though the exact mechanism is still debated[4]).

The DNA thing is interesting but it's more of a "well, this is awkward" footnote to a correction that was already happening, it doesn't seem to be the cause of it.

[0] https://fossilhistory.wordpress.com/2015/01/01/marcellin-bou...

[1] https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/anatomy-and-physiolo...

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34350666/

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S295047592...

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6541251/

[tcp_handshaker]

>> After doing a bit more digging, the reality is more interesting than the video implies.

You are approaching this from the scientific angle. The reality is even worst that the video implies.

As soon as Neanderthals became genetic relatives of many living non-Africans ,-) Western portrayals became more willing to imagine them as human like, and even ...white.

"How Neanderthals Became White: The Introgression of Race into Contemporary Human Evolutionary Genetics" - https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/720130

"‘Race’ and the Changing Representations of Neanderthals" - https://scholar.xjtlu.edu.cn/en/publications/race-and-the-ch...

"Making the Neanderthals White: Historicizing Ancestry, Race, and Hominin Heritage" - https://philpapers.org/rec/KERMTN

[IAmBroom]

The reality is that it's far more complicated than you make it seem.

Archaeology has not been taken over by WYT racist plotting. Neanderthalis did get an undeserved reputation for being thick and dumb. We're correcting that.

And, some people are grabbing onto bits and pieces, and trying to reconstruct that into some racist BS. Similarly, certain things from Norse history are being coopted, but that doesn't mean every new discovery or article about viking exploits is inherently part of a racist conspiracy.

[dijit]

Fair point, and those papers are interesting (particularly the first one, which directly talks about this..).

I think we might be talking about two different things though. The scientific evidence for Neanderthal sophistication was there from the late 1950s; Straus and Cave reexamined the La Chapelle skeleton I spoke about earlier and basically said "this fella could ride the subway in new york and nobody would look twice", the Shanidar burials showed care for the sick, and there were decades of tool and burial evidence piling up after that. So the science was there, it just wasn't penetrating into popular culture.

And I think that's where your sources make a good point, the DNA discovery in 2010 probably did act as the catalyst for the popular rehabilitation. It gave journalists and TV producers a reason to care about something archaeologists had been saying for decades. Whether that reason worked because of racial identification specifically or because "you have caveman DNA" is just a more compelling headline is probably where we'd disagree; I suspect it's both, honestly.

Where I'd still push back a little is on the framing that this was purely a "white people found out they're related, so rebrand" phenomenon. The racial hierarchy framework that created the original caricature was already academically dead well before 2010, the correction was happening regardless, it maybe just wasn't getting airtime.