Pod Insights Unexplainable Who are you calling a Neanderthal? About this episode Rumors of Neanderthal brutishness have been greatly exaggerated.
Guest: Paige Madison, science writer
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:01 Speaker 00 All right.
2:02 Noam Hassenfeld? Hello, Bird.
2:04 Speaker 00 Hello, Noam.
2:05 Noam Hassenfeld? What are we, uh, what are we talking about?
2:07 Speaker 00 Okay, so as you know, we recently did a whole episode on Neanderthals.
2:14 Noam Hassenfeld? Neanderthals.
2:15 Speaker 00 Neanderthals. But what you might not know is how to pronounce Neanderthals. Uh, what you might not know is that I also went on kind of a, I guess like a side quest is the best way to describe it for that episode. Um, so I was talking to like a bunch of different people sort of about how we'd perceived Neanderthals over time, essentially.
2:41 Noam Hassenfeld? Okay.
2:42 Speaker 00 So if I were to ask you sort of what the classic view of Neanderthals was, what would you say?
2:50 Noam Hassenfeld? Oh, um, my brain immediately goes to the GEICO commercial, I think.
2:55 Speaker 00 It's so easy to use GEICO.com. A caveman could do it. Yeah, I think that's a good example, actually, because the whole, the whole joke of those commercials is that, you know, you have so easy, a caveman can do it. And then you have a guy who looks a lot like our classic image of a Neanderthal, right? Being like, What? What do you mean? Like, I'm super competent.
3:18 Speaker 05 Walking upright, discovering fire.
3:21 Speaker 00 But it turns out that these commercials like kind of have a point. Like, there are headlines about how Neanderthals weren't less intelligent than early modern humans, or, you know, just Neanderthals weren't stupid, essentially.
3:35 Noam Hassenfeld? Were these articles written by the caveman from GEICO?
3:37 Speaker 00 No, it's just a coincidence that the, the byline is H. Neanderthalensis. But so I was reading through these various articles about Neanderthal intelligence. And I started to wonder, essentially, why do we think they're stupid? Like, like, where did this idea even come from to begin with?
3:55 Speaker 06 And it turns out there's a really deep past to that. There's a, there's a very strong reason why we tend to think of Neanderthals as these kind of brutish, dumb, lesser Homo sapiens.
4:06 Speaker 00 So I reached out to Paige Madison, uh, who's a a science writer, but she also wrote her PhD thesis on, on our perception of Neanderthals. And she says that there's this kind of like, like a common story that a lot of people point to, to explain why we think Neanderthals are dumb. And it starts with this like anthropologist slash paleontologist slash geologist guy named Marceline Boule.
4:34 Speaker 06 And so as the story goes, this French scientist Marcel Boule misinterpreted a Neanderthal skeleton.
4:41 Speaker 00 So this was the early 20th century and people had been kind of digging up bits and pieces of Neanderthals for a while. But this time, some diggers had found a more complete skeleton in France. And they sent this Neanderthal skeleton to Boule, who was at the Natural History Museum in Paris.
5:02 Speaker 06 He got a hold of one of the first really complete specimens and he took a look at it and decided that these were these hunched over brutes that were so dumb that they couldn't even really stand up straight.
5:15 Speaker 00 And again, as the story goes, this is what people ran with, like newspapers spread Boule's version of Neanderthals and that's how it became sort of the dominant perception.
5:25 Noam Hassenfeld? Hmm.
5:26 Speaker 00 And then decades later, in the late 1950s, people reexamine the skeletons and were essentially like, so this is the skeleton of an old man with arthritis.
5:39 Noam Hassenfeld? Okay.
5:40 Speaker 06 So like, this is kind of the equivalent of basically like if someone were trying to figure out like, what were people like in the 21st century? And they only looked at like the skeleton of one old man.
5:51 Noam Hassenfeld? Or like if someone found like Shaq's skeleton, you'd be like, oh yeah, humans, they're all like seven feet tall.
5:56 Speaker 00 Exactly. So this Boule story is, it's compelling, right? And it is true that Boule did publish this paper in the early 1900s, that his vision of the arthritic Neanderthal was republished by newspapers, right? It did contribute to the narrative that Neanderthals were stupid.
6:16 Noam Hassenfeld? Hmm.
6:17 Speaker 00 But Page says that his image of the sort of brutish Neanderthal Is actually just one part of a much larger story here.
6:26 Speaker 06 Fool didn't create this image alone. It was more of a confluence of factors that happened all around the same time.
6:33 Speaker 00 She says, instead of looking at sort of one scientist, it's actually more interesting to kind of look at the scientific waters that he was swimming in. And her contention is that those scientific waters were actually already assuming essentially that Neanderthals were brutish and boorish and stupid at the time.
6:50 Noam Hassenfeld? Interesting.
6:51 Speaker 00 So essentially, like, when Europeans first got interested in Neanderthal skulls, like, the middle of the 1800s, people were also getting into sort of craniometry. You know what craniometry is, right?
7:04 Noam Hassenfeld? That's like the skull measuring thing that, I guess, the Nazis, I tend to associate with the Nazis, which I guess is later. But the idea is they would measure skull sizes of various ethnic groups. And they would say that, oh, we can determine your ethnic group based on the shape and size of your skull, and that correlates with how smart you are, or how good of a person you are, or how much you deserve to live.
7:30 Speaker 00 Right. And I guess, to be sort of abundantly clear here, right? Like, we do now know that skull measuring is not a useful way of understanding people's mental capacity, or their other traits, right? But if we go back to the 19th century, this logic was really popular, right? Like, a lot of scientists had bought into this. And so they would look at, for example, brow ridges. And so the idea was that, like, if you had a prominent brow ridge, you were somehow more primitive. And then if you had, like, a steep forehead, say, they thought your brain was more developed. And so scientists would argue that, like, Europeans were superior because their foreheads were steeper.
8:14 Speaker 06 And again, these are features that we know, first of all, those differences are miniscule, and they are certainly not meaningful in terms of intellect and cognition. But at the time, they were seen as incredibly meaningful and a way that you could differentiate these different groups.
8:29 Speaker 00 And Neanderthal skulls, as they were digging them up, they kind of fit perfectly into this narrative.
8:35 Speaker 06 They fit in exactly the spot that these European scientists were categorizing as the lower end of human intellect and sort of the more primitive end.
8:47 Speaker 00 So basically, like, when the scientist, Boole, like, looks at this Neanderthal skeleton, he's kind of seeing like what he expects to see in the context of like, the science leading up to this is essentially saying like, hey, Neanderthals seem to be kind of stupid. And he's like, yeah, and they hunched too.
9:03 Noam Hassenfeld? Yeah.
9:03 Speaker 06 I think what he did was, he took it one step further. So he kind of applied this brutish conception that had already existed and applied it to their posture. And so, of course, yes, that is significant. It did partially shape how we think about them. But he certainly did not invent it by any means. And it's worth mentioning, too, that the signs of arthritis on the skeleton are well recognized. And Boole probably should have been able to recognize them. I mean, there's no reason, given his training, that he wouldn't. So it kind of goes to show how our expectations can lead us towards a certain conclusion and kind of like push us in that direction,
9:43 Speaker 06 even when, you know, the evidence isn't quite there. And that's why you see these interpretations change over time, right? Is because there's so much else that's going into the interpretation. It's not as simple as looking at the bones and immediately knowing exactly what they meant. But that is being filtered through, you know, tons of other information, both scientific and cultural. You know, we just can't turn off that lens at any given moment.
10:11 Noam Hassenfeld? So this is like, this is just saying it's not this one scientist's fault. It's sort of like, why was everyone else around so ready to believe this? It's because everyone kind of was in the same context.
10:22 Speaker 00 Right. And, and this idea, it's reinforced if you look at the, the reexamination of the skeleton that happened later on. So different historians will suggest different times for when people sort of started changing their perspective on Neanderthals and Neanderthal intelligence. But for Page, she starts to see people rethinking things after World War II. And again, like, the Nazis were involved in this project, right, of skull measuring and using those measurements to justify horrific things, horrific race categorization.
10:57 Speaker 00 And so it's not that surprising to Paige as a historian that as you start to have people after the war reevaluating skull measurement science, that's also when you start to see people maybe changing their perspectives or starting to change their perspectives on Neanderthals as well.
11:15 Speaker 06 So you just had all of these factors kind of lining up that suddenly the earlier ideas about Neanderthals just didn't make as much sense.
11:25 Noam Hassenfeld? That's fascinating. I guess the place that leaves me is just, I guess I want to, how do you, how do you change the social context? I assume you can't. And then how do you know when you're in a social context?
11:40 Speaker 00 Are you asking basically like, what do we do about current?
11:44 Noam Hassenfeld? Yeah, like how do we know if, how do we, how do we know if what we think of Neanderthals right now is right, or anything is right? If we're not sure about the water we're swimming in?
11:53 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, great question. Stay tuned.
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13:35 Noam Hassenfeld? Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.
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15:42 Speaker 00 So before the break, you basically asked, like, how do we know we're not being misled by our own cultural context, right? And when I asked Paige this question, she was essentially like, yeah, we live in a society, you know, like inevitably we're going to have some degree of our cultural moment acting as the lens that we see through. And she even said that, you know, some scholars say that our ideas about Neanderthals have often said more about us than they have about Neanderthals.
16:13 Speaker 06 It's a little bit like holding a mirror up to ourselves.
16:16 Speaker 00 But she also says that there are ways to try and kind of avoid this trap. Okay. So one way that she describes is just keeping your questions really broad.
16:28 Speaker 06 So for example, if you find artwork in a cave and you assume that artwork is something that only Homo sapiens have done and that Neanderthals were not capable of it, then you never even ask that question. You just ask which Homo sapiens did this and when. But if the worldview has changed and you come into a cave and you see that there's art in there, you can then ask who did this in a more open way. And that's something I work with scientists a lot, is just thinking about the ways that they're just their starting points, their questions. Have already either opened or closed certain possibilities.
17:07 Speaker 00 And then I also talked to a paleoanthropologist named Ellen Rouget. So she is actively studying early modern humans and Neanderthals. And I asked her, basically, like, how do you avoid having your cultural assumptions color your science, right? And she said that one of the main things that scientists can do is to look for evidence that doesn't fit what they'll assume they'll find and kind of zero in on that.
17:35 Noam Hassenfeld? Like specifically look for things that contradict your expectations.
17:39 Speaker 00 Or like, if you see them, don't dismiss them. So she gave me this really basic example from her work, kind of where she was she was looking through a cave and she found some bones. And she sent them out to be carbon dated. And when they came back, they were they were younger than she expected them to be. And she said that she could have just dismissed it. She could have said, that's not possible. There must have been contamination at the lab or something like, forget about these bones. But instead, she kind of zeroed in on these surprising dates and ended up realizing that her initial assumptions about who had lived in this cave and when they'd lived there just hadn't been right. And so like, this is a really small example,
18:24 Speaker 00 but it's part of that overall thesis she has that like, one of the few ways that you can kind of check your biases is to look for pieces of evidence that don't fit with your biases and then take those pieces of evidence seriously.
18:39 Noam Hassenfeld? Interesting. I mean, that does feel I gotta say, that feels like easier said than done.
18:45 Speaker 00 I mean, if I were going to make a GEICO commercial for science, it would be
18:50 Speaker 00 science, so difficult, perhaps even a Neanderthal, despite all of its, you know, potential sophistication and intelligence, might have difficulty doing it.
19:02 Noam Hassenfeld? Oh, my God.
19:03 Speaker 00 And that's why I don't work in advertising.
19:13 Speaker 00 Paige Madison is a science writer who wrote a journal article on this topic, and she's writing an upcoming book on human origins. This episode was produced by me, Bird Pinkerton. It was edited by Meredith Hodnot with help from Jorge Just. Mara also runs the show. Noam Hasenfeld writes the music. Christian Ayala does our mixing and our sound design. Melissa Hirsch checked the facts. Julia Longoria is the fact that glass frogs can have transparent skin. And as always, we are grateful to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show. This was our first ever Monday episode. Do you have thoughts about how it went? Do you have ideas for future Monday episodes? Write in to [email protected] .
19:57 Speaker 00 If you want to support our show and help us keep making it, please join our membership program. That's at vox.com/members. vox.com/members. You can also support us by leaving us a nice review, or a rating, or just by telling people in your life to listen. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back on Wednesday.
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