Justice for Neanderthals!

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In February 1916, Theodore Roosevelt penned a particularly barbed commentary in the pages of National Geographic. His target wasn’t a political opponent like Woodrow Wilson or William Howard Taft. Instead, he aimed his sharp-tongued insults at someone who had not been a rival for more than 40,000 years—our extinct cousin, the Neanderthal. He wrote:

“These Neanderthal men were squat, burly, big-headed, thick-skulled savages, with brows projecting over cavernous eyes, knees permanently bent, and jaws almost chinless. Their brains were of good size, but the portions which represent the higher intellectual attainments were poorly developed.”

Roosevelt’s roast was accompanied by an illustration from famed paleoartist Charles R. Knight of a hunched Neanderthal clad in a fur loincloth and clutching a wooden club. Opposite it, an enlightened “Cro-Magnon Man” (i.e., modern human) is depicted standing upright and painting a bison on a cave wall by the light of an oil lamp.

Both Roosevelt and Knight were echoing the scientific sentiment at that time that Neanderthals were dumb and brutish, imagery that has plagued Homo neanderthalensis to various degrees since its discovery in 1856. But now, more than a century after America’s “Rough Rider” president maligned Neanderthals within our yellow borders, scientists are giving the archaic species some long-overdue justice.

Decades of research have reshaped our image of Neanderthals, showing they were likely a sophisticated, intelligent branch of humanity, possibly even capable of art, culture, and empathy. Archaeological clues from scattered sites suggest that some may have buried their dead, practiced rudimentary dentistry, hunted birds at night, managed hearths, manufactured red ocher, constructed structures from cave stalagmites, and more.

“Let’s forever bury—rest in peace—that sort of dim-witted, knuckle-dragging cousin of ours who never actually existed,” says National Geographic Explorer Genevieve von Petzinger, a paleoanthropologist who took Stones & Bones inside her search for Neanderthal cave art earlier this year.

Neanderthals have been misunderstood since researchers first identified the fossils found in a quarry in the Neander Valley in Germany 170 years ago. Initially, the bones were believed to belong to a cave bear. Or maybe a deformed soldier who died in the Napoleonic Wars. Others thought they came from a wild race of men that wandered the woods.

“It was discovered in a non-evolutionary world,” says Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus of human origins at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This was three years before Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species changed the way researchers thought about the origins of humans. “The idea of some barbarian form of human was a relatively easy notion to come up with.”

Then in 1864, a geologist named William King viewed the remains through the lens of human evolution. He formally named the fossils Homo neanderthalensis, marking the first time scientists had discovered evidence of an extinct human species.

In his scientific paper, he wrote:

“Considering that the Neanderthal skull is eminently simial, both in its general and particular characters, I feel myself constrained to believe that the thoughts and desires which once dwelt within it never soared beyond those of the brute.”

A couple years later, the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel proposed a blunter name: “Homo stupidus.” Then in 1908, the discovery of a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton further fueled the derogatory assumptions. In his analysis of the remains, French paleontologist Marcellin Boule showed bone by bone that the Neanderthal skeleton was more like an ape than a human. But unbeknownst to Boule, the individual he inspected had been old and suffered from severe osteoarthritis.

“When they rebuilt him, they’re like, ‘Look, he’s hunched over. He can barely walk. He’s practically a standing gorilla,’” von Petzinger tells me. “He was hunched, but not because he was a knuckle-dragging guy.”

In 1909, Boule commissioned František Kupka, a Czech artist, to draw the first representation of a Neanderthal based on the skeleton. It was full ape-man. “That was the received wisdom for several decades,” says Tattersall.

One figure who helped crystallize Neanderthals’ brutish image in popular media was H. G. Wells, says Peter Sahlins, a historian of science and author of the upcoming book Neanderthals Among Us: The Making of a Prehistoric Human. The British evolutionary theorist—sometimes referred to as the father of science fiction—portrayed Neanderthals as ugly, inarticulate, lumbering idiots to be vanquished by real humans in his early 1920s book The Outline of History and short story The Grisly Folk. That helped set the stage for future Neanderthal portrayals in films and novels throughout the 20th century.

“Neanderthals have played a role of our lesser doppelganger,” says Sahlins. “They’re always the sort of bigger, burlier, stupider, darker, kind of evil twin, if you will, of Homo sapiens.”

Today though, that view is changing.

“Every day, there’s some new discovery about Neanderthals showing how smart they were,” says Tattersall. “What I think they show us is that it is possible to be incredibly intelligent and not be Homo sapiens. And that we Homo sapiens are astonishingly egotistical in thinking that our way of being smart is the only way of being smart.”

One hint of Neanderthal intelligence in the archaeological record is evidence suggesting they were able to extract tar from birch bark to make an adhesive for their stone tools, says von Petzinger. It’s like a form of engineering with fire, she says. Too cold, it doesn’t work. Too hot, it turns to ash. It needs to be heated just right.

Many scientists also now believe that Neanderthals may have had compassion for each other based on evidence that Neanderthals cared for their elderly and disabled, including a child who likely had Down syndrome. “That kind of empathy and altruism was sort of thought to be a human-only characteristic,” she says.

Von Petzinger is also on a mission to investigate whether Neanderthals made cave art. She argues that they did, and if the evidence proves it out, it would challenge human prejudices that put symbolic thinking and creativity in Homo sapiens on a pedestal. “Art doesn’t have to be figurative to be complex, communicative, intentional, and purposeful,” she says.

And then there’s the Neanderthal DNA that’s still around in modern humans. In 2010, when Svante Pääbo sequenced the Neanderthal genome, we learned how similar their genetics were to ours—approximately 99.7 percent identical. For tens of thousands of years, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred.

That discovery “has made people emotionally connect with them totally differently than they used to,” says Rebecca Sykes, an archaeologist and author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. But she cautions against valuing Neanderthals solely for the DNA they left behind. Instead, she points to the 300,000-year legacy they held as an intelligent and remarkably successful other form of humanity.

“Justice for them,” Sykes tells me, “would be trying to understand them without constantly trying to refract it through a story of us.”

Lunging Sea Lizards

Remember that scene from Jurassic World where the giant Mosasaurus leaps from the water to snatch a great white shark? It’s not so far-fetched after all. A new study used physics and the fossil record to reconstruct the bodies of these sea lizards and determine how powerful leviathans like Mosasaurus and Tylosaurus were able to lunge forward underwater.

“It is so cool how far these animals can move with a single flick of the tail,” says Kiersten Formoso, a paleontologist at Rutgers University and the paper’s lead researcher. National Geographic writer Asher Elbein spoke with Formoso to find out exactly how fast these marine reptiles could accelerate with a single burst and which one was the fastest.

A Strange Roman Lightning Ritual

“To the Romans, there was little doubt that lightning strikes required action,” wrote University of Iowa historian Sarah Bond in a story published last week. You might remember Bond from our last issue of Stones & Bones, in which she helped my colleague Candida Moss puzzle out how ancient Romans could have transported polar bears to the Colosseum. Here, she describes how a discovery at Hadrian’s Villa, a second-century retreat outside Rome, is giving archaeologists new insight into how the ancient world responded to lightning strikes, which they interpreted as messages from the gods.

All Hail the Tyrant Lizard Queen

How social was T. rex? Scientists are learning more about how the giant flesh eaters interacted with each other from analyzing their scarred skulls and fossilized trackways. National Geographic writer Riley Black takes us into the latest research and shares her lifelong love affair with one of these killing machines, a specimen known as AMNH 5027 that stands in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Black is also releasing a new book on October 27 called Tyrant Lizard Queen: The Love, Life, and Terror of Earth’s Greatest Carnivore, about Earth’s most famous prehistoric predator.

Speaking of the queen of dinosaurs, last month we asked readers to send us their own attempts to draw a T. rex. Hunter Beau Hartman, 9, sent in this masterpiece. 

Have an idea for what paleontology or archaeology myth we should debunk next? Let me know—we might tackle in a future newsletter.