The Neanderthal in Your Closet

NOTICE: If you are, (or wish to identify as,) an intellectual, please pronounce the word “Neanderthal” Nee-ander-TALL. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Thirty years ago, Neanderthals were but branch on the slow path to the modern human. Which was good and proper, because the theory of evolution expects to find branches everywhere, and so far, archaeology had done a poor job supplying anything along that line except hoaxes.

Neanderthals were the perfect branch. Hunched, dirty, and hairy, they dressed, with a saucy disregard for the ongoing Ice Age, in loose wraps of untanned animal skins, (when they bothered to wear anything at all). It was a lovely story, and as some have noted, it made archaeology nice and simple. If a cave contained art, stone or wooden tools, necklaces or pottery, we automatically knew those artifacts were left by later “real” humans. Neanderthals contributed nothing but their crooked bones. It’s good when people know their place.

Then scientists made an embarrassing discovery. 

We are, in part, Neanderthals. All of us. Native Americans, Asians, Europeans, Pacific Islanders, Middle Easterners, and (the news has just come in) even Africans—we all share a… stocky skeleton with a brow ridge in our closet.

And about the time we realized that we are part Neanderthal, we began to make some shocking discoveries.

Which was a total coincidence.

It had nothing, nothing, to do with thinking so well of ourselves that we were willing to crack open the possibility that our ol’ uncle ‘Ander had a brain. But once that possibility did exist, the archeologists began to notice things. An alarming array of artifacts that had somehow slipped their notice before.

They found evidence that Neanderthals had family recipes. That they cooked meals well-seasoned with choice spices over intentionally started fires. Neanderthals enjoyed seafood, poultry, mushrooms, tubers and dates. And (this is truly rude,) far from following the “paleo diet,” which as “Paleolithic” men, they really should have had the courtesy to stick to, they also ate grains and legumes. Some even appear to have been vegetarians.

This varied diet wasn’t without its drawbacks, however. We have evidence of a Neanderthal with a cavity, who was then given a successful root canal by (we assume) another Neanderthal. And while we have already decided that the man receiving the root canal did so without anesthesia, we do know they used naturally occurring aspirin, and we even found one fellow with penicillium (from which we got penicillin) in his stomach. How and why it came to be there is a complete mystery. It could not have been on purpose.

Neanderthals also cooked up super glue, which they used to make tools. This glue, made from sap, had to be heated to a temperature between 350°C and 400°C (662–752°F) in a low-oxygen environment for a precise period of time. Any hotter or cooler and the glue failed. And with this glue they made some incredible weapons, which they used to hunt animals and one another (these are our ancestors, after all). Luckily for them, they also cared for their sick, wounded, and old, which is more than can be said for Canada.

Neanderthals built wooden structures, sometimes used Mammoth bones to construct windbreaks, and generally liked to be comfortable. They wore clothes. They created paint, using complex mixtures to achieve just the right color, and they used some of that paint to decorate their jewelry. They also played the flute.[1]

By now, the most inhuman behavior we can accuse the Neanderthals of is living in caves. Who would do that? Except…we don’t actually know that they did. What we do know is they buried their dead in caves, as did Abraham, Issac and Jacob, who probably lived at the same time, or a little afterwards.

Neanderthals were the same height as “Homo sapiens” living at that time. We have zero evidence that they had an unusual amount of body hair.[2] They did have slightly bigger brains and more powerful bodies, and they had a brow ridge. A capital crime, that last one.[3] In the end, the only reason Neanderthals must never be just plain “humans” is that calling them such would destroy a prized evolutionary timeline.

So who were the Neanderthals? 

Since they are human, they must be descended from Noah and his sons, and since we all have a bit of Neanderthal in us, I would assume they were romping about before or during the dispersion at Babel. They certainly managed to get their DNA in the mix before humanity spread too far. Which would indicate that one of those respectable names in Genesis’ Table of Nations might well have been someone who would later be labeled as a Neanderthal. Recent research has shown that the very oldest Neanderthals skeletons don’t look as distinctively Neanderthal as the newer ones, which makes sense if they came from one of Noah’s sons or grandsons.

It begins to look very much like we (modern) humans, for purposes of our own, took a group of humans and decided that, since they didn’t look strictly like us, they must not be actual people. We’ve certainly never done that before.

The next best hope for an archaic human to hang our theories of human evolution on, is the Denisovans. Brutish, culture-less, hairy, half-naked, even older than the Neanderthals—except, oops, what were they doing with sewing needles? Certainly not sewing.

And Aboriginal Australians, Oceanians, Papuans, and some Asians are descended from the Denisovans.

Well…that’s just awkward.

[1] Some scientists believe the flute was made by a bear, not a Neanderthal. Of the two possible craftsmen, my money is on the one with opposable thumbs.

[2] Although in all fairness, Esau had to have gotten his genes for extreme body hair from somewhere.

[3] There is a pun hidden here, but it’s so tangled in Latin roots that I couldn’t quite dig it out. Let me know if you have better luck.

[4] If I did not include a source for a claim, feel free to email me or google it.