JOHN HAWKS You wouldn't usually say that stupid congressman is a Neander-TAL, you'd probably say Neander-THAL.
BROOKE GLADSTONE That's the right way to pronounce everybody's favorite paleozoic insult. From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, we spelunk into the real story of our cave dwelling cousins,
CLIVE FINLAYSON The animals that lived across Europe and Asia from 2- 300,000 years, very successfully. We have another 200,000 years to go before we catch up with the Neanderthals.
BROOKE GLADSTONE And expose the worldview behind the scientific racism that seems to know no limits of time or place.
ANGELA SAINI So there was this belief that white Europeans were at the top of this hierarchy and other races were slotted below. And also that those at the bottom of this hierarchy were like Neanderthals doomed to die out.
BROOKE GLADSTONE Join us as we reckon with our family history,,,after this.
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BROOKE GLADSTONE From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone...
ANNALEE NEWITZ ...and I'm Annalee Newitz.
BROOKE GLADSTONE That's – THE Annalee Newitz, joining me this hour are science journalist and science fiction writer. Their most recent book is Four Lost Cities A Secret History of the Urban Age and co-host of the podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct.
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ANNALEE NEWITZ We're going to be talking about a speech from last March where President Joe Biden made a disturbing comment…
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[CLIP]
PRESIDENT BIDEN The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything's fine. Take off your mask. Forget it. [END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE We both heard it. Of course, we were both appalled.
ANNALEE NEWITZ I mean, it's just not true. There's no evidence that Neanderthals couldn't understand existential risks.
BROOKE GLADSTONE Yeah, right!
ANNALEE NEWITZ Why are Homo sapiens always insulting Neanderthals?
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BROOKE GLADSTONE Turns out we're both obsessed with Neanderthals
ANNALEE NEWITZ and how they've been maligning Neanderthals for over 100 years. You may be wondering why that matters.
BROOKE GLADSTONE Well, when Annalee and I met, we found that we both shared the view that to understand who you are and where you're going, you cannot go too far back. In fact, there is no back too far.
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ANNALEE NEWITZ So we're going to explore the prism through which we have long viewed Neanderthals and what that says about us and how our view of them is changing and what that says about us, too.
BROOKE GLADSTONE We're going back to the Paleolithic and it's going to blow your mind because it wasn't like this...
[COMMUNICATIVE, VISCERAL GRUNTING; GROWLING ]
ANNALEE NEWITZ Or this...
[FRED FLINSTONE, YABBA-DABBA-DOOING]
BROOKE GLADSTONE Or this.
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UNFROZEN CAVEMAN LAWYER I really don't understand your Congress or your system of checks and balances because I'm just a caveman. I fell in some ice and later got thawed out by scientists. But there is one thing I do know. We must do everything in our power to lower the capital gains tax. Thank you! [END CLIP]
ANNALEE NEWITZ It was more like... this:
JOHN HAWKS The Neanderthals conquered challenges with cooperation. They collected pigments, red ocher and manganese dioxide, and they colored things.
ANNALEE NEWITZ That's John Hawks, anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison – who knows his Neanderthals.
JOHN HAWKS To me, studying Neanderthals is like trying to study an alien intelligence. I don't understand the language that they might have spoken, but I can tell from the patterns that there was sophisticated behavior there.
ANNALEE NEWITZ We got started on this whole thing by talking about the word that Joe Biden used to describe people who refuse to wear masks. I say Neander-TAL,
BROOKE GLADSTONE I say Neander-THAL.
ANNALEE NEWITZ The difference is academic, but it also has to do with pop culture.
JOHN HAWKS You wouldn't usually say that stupid congressman is a Neander-TAL. You'd probably say Neander-THAL, and that kind of is the popular culture versus really scientific point of view is encapsulated in that,
ANNALEE NEWITZ Hawks says, there are really two versions of the Neanderthal, the one from pop culture who exists on The Flintstones and in the mind of Joe Biden, and the one who scientists understand as an early human who has gone extinct. They're kind of our sisters and kind of our mothers. What I mean is that they share a common ancestor with Homosapiens and...how to put this delicately? They also exchanged genetic material with our fathers. Hawks says that Africa was once teeming with different types of early humans, and all of them were interacting with each other. They were also migrating out of Africa into Europe and Asia. Homosapiens were not the first humans to leave Africa and colonize Europe.
JOHN HAWKS Neanderthals emerged as a different population from our African ancestors. Around 700,000 years ago, and when they first split off from those African populations, they were a population that joined together with another group that we today know is the Denisovans. The Neanderthals ultimately lived in the western half of Eurasia, the Denisovans, we think in the east and southeast part
ANNALEE NEWITZ and elsewhere in the world. There was a diminutive human called Homo floresiensis, nicknamed The Hobbit people. All of them were human with complicated social lives and art and culture. But there were also early humans that Hawks says probably weren't like us
JOHN HAWKS Homo naledi, a species that I have been working on for the last decade. In South Africa, in the Middle Pleistocene as Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans in Africa were diversifying. There's this other species in South Africa, Homo floresiensis that you mentioned. Many of these groups represent deeper branches that connect earlier in our evolutionary history and are very different from us. Some of them, like Homo naledi, I would really hesitate to call human. They had brains, a third the size of ours.
ANNALEE NEWITZ Our scientific. Understanding of who counts as human and who our closest ancestors are has changed a lot over the past half century. And this brings us back to terminology. In 1950, you'd call a human like me, a hominid.
JOHN HAWKS And the reason is that "-id" is this suffix in taxonomy that means family. The great apes living today, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas are close relatives and chimps and bonobos are our closest living relatives. So the tree of relationships doesn't separate the living great apes from us. It puts us within them. For taxonomists, what that means is that our family is a family that includes the other great apes. They're the hominids.
ANNALEE NEWITZ But in the past few decades, taxonomists have started using a new category – hominin – that is just for humans and our direct ancestors. And thus, with a change in suffix, we have a new way of separating ourselves from the apes and firmly putting us in the same tribe as Denisovans. The Hobbits, small brained Homo naledi, and, yes, the Neanderthals. And given that we were all in the same tribe, it's not a surprise that a lot of you know, love was flowing between all these groups. Or, as the scientists say, there was a lot of genetic ad mixing.
JOHN HAWKS It's certainly true that we all belong to populations that have mixed with each other, that have mixed repeatedly, and that mixture is fundamental to our nature as a species. It's accelerating, if anything, with long distance movement between different populations. But it was true prehistorically. One perspective that ancient DNA has given us all of these skeletons from different times in the past is that we can see that, hey, the people that lived in this place 3,000 years ago weren't the same as the people that lived there earlier because there was immigration, there was mixture. And that's true at every time stage that we can observe.
ANNALEE NEWITZ So that means that most of us are a little bit Neanderthal. In fact, Brooke did a genetic test, and she was a little disappointed that she was only two and a half percent Neanderthal at most.
BROOKE GLADSTONE Hey, rub it in.
ANNALEE NEWITZ The path from hominid to hominin was pretty recent, and it's also pretty significant. Science has now acknowledged that Neanderthals, among other early hominins, were human like us. Of course, we're still having arguments about the relative humanity of Republicans and Democrats, so...you know?
BROOKE GLADSTONE Up next, how after more than 100 years, we came to understand what we didn't understand about Neanderthals, like how they lived, what they ate, what they wore and how they died.
ANNALEE NEWITZ This is On the Media.
