People should stop using ‘Neanderthal’ as a putdown. Finds show Neanderthals were cultured and sensitive, not knuckle-dragging thugs. (Though the knuckle-dragging part has some truth.)

For instance, they buried their dead with food, hunting weapons, charcoal and prized items such as tools, bear skulls, goat horns and medicinal flowers: blue hyacinth, yellow groundsel, knapweed and yarrow.

One grave in Shanidar in Iraq contained the remains of eight different flowers. The dead there were smeared with ochre, something Australian aboriginal people still do today.

The thugs were the aggressive Cro-Magnons – our ancestors – who allegedly wiped out the peaceful Neanderthals.

Neanderthals had lived in Europe and the Near East for well over 100,000 years when Cro-Magnons – more correctly known as early modern humans – arrived about 60,000 years ago. By about 40,000 years ago, the Neanderthals were extinct.

The late radical psychologist Stan Gooch theorised decades ago that we modern humans are part-Neanderthal.

Findings have now confirmed Gooch’s theory. As well as killing Neanderthals, early modern humans absorbed them by interbreeding. Most European and Asian people have 1-4% Neanderthal DNA.

So if someone’s being thuggish, they’re not being Neanderthal – they’re being early modern human. It doesn’t have the same ring, though.

(It may be that early modern human aggressiveness towards Neanderthals was due to an anti-stranger instinct evolved to protect against communicable disease. In my post, Racism explained as a redundant instinct, I suggest this instinct, revived and twisted by recent colonialism, underlies racism.)

---

Top 🔺

Please feel free to comment.