Characterized by Darkness: Reconsidering the Origins of the Brutish Neanderthal
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Characterized by Darkness: Reconsidering the Origins of the Brutish Neanderthal Paige Madison1 Accepted: 27 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The extinct human relatives known as Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) have long been described as brutish and dumb. This conception is often traced to paleontologist Marcellin Boule (1861–1942), who published a detailed analysis on a Neanderthal skeleton in the early twentieth century. The conventional historical narrative claims that Boule made an error in his analysis, causing the Neanderthals to be considered brutish. This essay challenges the narrative of “Boule’s error,” arguing instead that the brutish Neanderthal concept originated much earlier in the history of Neanderthal research and was, in fact, an invention of the earliest analyses of the first specimen recognized as a Neanderthal in the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that temporally relocating this conception of Neanderthals allows for a better understanding of the interconnected nature of the study of fossil humans and the science of living human races during the nineteenth century. This new view of the brutish Neanderthal sheds light on the earliest phases of the science that became paleoanthropology, while examining the racial, cultural, and political attitudes about race and extinction that accompanied the science at that time. By inspecting the ways in which the Neanderthals’ image was a product of a particular time and place, we gain a perspective that provides a new basis for thinking about the conceptions of hominin fossil species. Keywords Fossils · Neanderthals · Paleoanthropology · Race
An Uncouth and Repellant Creature Neanderthals are often characterized as brutish, uncouth, and unintelligent. These extinct human relatives are portrayed as shuffling, clumsy, “hideous” savages who are the “complete picture of unattractiveness” (Smith 1924, p. 70). In recent decades, scholars have begun to argue that this negative caricature is unfounded, raising * Paige Madison [email protected] 1
Arizona State University, Tempe, USA
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the question of how such a dramatic and pervasive caricature arose in the first place (Papagianni and Morse 2015; Hayden 1993; Finlayson 2019; Frayer 2019). The origin of the Neanderthal’s image is commonly traced to paleontologist Marcellin Boule, who is said to have committed an “error” in the early twentieth century when he examined a skeleton known as the Old Man from La Chappelle (Boule 1911, 1912, 1913). Boule interpreted the elderly, arthritic skeleton as an idiotic hunchedover brute—conflating pathological deformity with species-wide idiocy. This mistake, scholars have argued, resulted in a “merciless characterization” of the species that “almost single-handedly” revolutionized the ways scientists think about Neanderthals (Shreeve 1995, p. 36; Lewin 1997, p. 62). The legend of “Boule’s error” has been propagated in textbooks, popular histories of paleoanthropology, and histories of science (Lewin 1997; Reader 2011;
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