It’s amazing what the Neanderthals have learned in the fifty years yer news writer has heard anything about them:
In 1863, the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley claimed a striking similarity between Neanderthal brow ridges and the ‘lowering, threatening expression’ he perceived in the skulls of Aboriginal peoples – ignoring the clear difference in anatomical shape. The European intellectual elite were mostly blind to the possibility that Neanderthals were evidence of a common heritage for living people. Instead, they saw ‘scientific’ proof of the racist hierarchies that positioned non-Europeans as less evolved – although remaining puzzled that ‘savages’ nevertheless appeared to possess brains as big as those filling their own top hats. Up until the 1960s, scientists were still publishing theories of human evolution proposing that different races had budded off the human family tree sooner than others, with Caucasians the most recent arrivals, and therefore the least ‘primitive’…
These ideas have cast a long shadow over the study of Neanderthals.
Rebecca Wragg Sykes, “The Neanderthal renaissance” at Aeon (March 13, 2019 but recycled)
As noted earlier, in any Darwinian scheme, someone must be the subhuman. Otherwise, there is no beginning to human history. Who will get to play the subhuman next?
Sykes is the author of the forthcoming Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art (June 2020)
See also: Neanderthal Man: The long-lost relative turns up again, this time with documents