by Lydia Pyne
In his written descriptions, Bouyssonie included photos of the cave’s entrance and the village of La Chapelle itself. In addition to the material cultural remains—the stone tools and mammal bones—that he describes as part of the excavation, he also validates the cave’s geologic and stratigraphic integrity, confirming the value of the in situ artifact and pointing toward French geologist Pierre Martel’s involvement with the project. Martel examined the sedimentary sequences and the different strata of the site immediately after excavation. He argued that the shape and origination of the pit could not have been formed from runoff or any kind of scouring action. The pit was angled southeast by northwest and was roughly rectangular in shape. It sat in the middle of the cave approximately one meter from the cave’s back wall and was buried little over a meter below the surface. The cross sections of the pit’s excavation showed repeated rock-fall from the roof of the cave, where large pieces were mixed in with other sediments. The pit itself, about half a meter deep, had clearly been cut into the underlying bedrock or cave surface—the body and the pit did represent a burial.17
Amédée Bouyssonie, Jean Bouyssonie, and Louis Bardon began excavations at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in 1908. The map of their excavations shows where the Neanderthal skeleton was discovered. Printed in Marcellin Boule’s L’Homme Fossile de La Chapelle-aux-Saints, 1911.
The idea of a nonhuman species burying its dead challenged notions of behavior and definitions of humanity. If, as the rhetoric went, “human” culture gave us some sort of evolutionary edge, it was awfully uncomfortable to think about a “failed” species—like Neanderthals—as having culture as well. This tension between humans and Neanderthals—almost a moral judgment against Neanderthals—has underscored our perceptions of Neanderthals for well over one hundred years.
By the 1950s, anthropologists began to rework Boule’s conclusions about the Old Man’s anatomy and culture—perhaps, anthropologists argued, he wasn’t as hapless as one thought. This reevaluation focused in two directions: first, reanalyzing the morphology of the La Chapelle skeleton, and, second, reassessing the cultural implications of deliberate burial within Neanderthal culture.
In Paris, on July 25, 1955, anthropologists William Straus and A. J. E. Cave began a major reevaluation of the La Chapelle skeleton, thanks to an impromptu trip to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris while attending the Sixth International Anatomical Congress. Originally interested in examining a particularly controversial specimen, the Fontéchevade skull, they found that they would have access only to casts of the materials, which they weren’t allowed to take measurements on.18 Unable to properly examine the Fontéchevade material, Straus and Cave turned their attention and curiosity to the La Chapelle skeleton housed in the museum, which had been made available to them by the museum curator, Mademoiselle L’Estrange.
What Straus and Cave saw shocked them. “We were not prepared for the severity of the osteoarthritis deformities affecting the vertebral column. It soon became clear why, in his reconstruction of the La Chapelle individual, Boule had found it necessary to turn to the Spy, La Ferrassie, and other Neanderthal skeletons for aid.”19 In other words, the patchy, tattered nature of the La Chapelle fossils, combined with the severe pathologies on the bones, made reconstructing that particular specimen difficult. A Neanderthal individual like the Old Man was better understood as a conglomeration of other skeletons—skeletons that “filled in” La Chapelle’s missing parts.
Straus and Cave proposed to reexamine, remeasure, and reinterpret the Old Man’s skeleton. This would help evaluate the legitimacy and accuracy of Boule’s reconstructions of Neanderthal poise, posture, and pathology. In addition to questions of Neanderthal biology and culture, their study also spoke to the burgeoning skeletal population of Neanderthals that had entered the research record. Where La Chapelle was the first mostly complete Neanderthal skeleton recovered (followed quickly by the La Ferrassie remains in 1909), by 1955 many mostly complete Neanderthals were available for study—Skhul and Tabun (discovered between 1929 and 1935 and today described as found in Israel but noted as Palestine in the midcentury literature), Shanidar Valley in Iraq, and Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan (noted as Russia). And, of course, British archaeologist Dorothy Garrod’s discovery of the Neanderthal child “Abel” in 1939 in Gibraltar.20
One of the first of Boule’s conclusions Straus and Cave reexamined was how the Old Man stood and how he would have walked. Boule described him as having a slouching, stooping posture. Straus and Cave argued that the Old Man suffered from “deforming osteoarthritis”—a condition of that individual’s health rather than a species characteristic.21 Straus and Cave’s own studies suggested that the Old Man, despite his osteoarthritis, would have stood much taller, his shoulders squared back, his head in line with the vertebral column. In short, La Chapelle would have had a much different poise and posture than the Boule model allowed.
But a different pose implied a different culture as well. How would La Chapelle—and other “classic Neanderthals”—have behaved? Would we recognize their culture and its practices? Such questions opened a range of new studies about vocalization, cultural exchange, and altruism within Neanderthal culture. Paleoanthropologists and archaeologists began to reexplore whether Neanderthals had any of those characteristics; if so, how would they be expressed in Neanderthal skeletal morphology or in the archaeological record? These new studies indicated that many of the features scientists saw as “uniquely Neanderthal” characteristics actually fell within the range of modern human variation—Neanderthals weren’t so different from humans after all.
When questions of Neanderthal altruism—how much a Neanderthal group would have helped its members—emerged, studies routinely pointed back to the La Chapelle specimen. In the 1980s, studies like N. C. Tappen’s study of the Old Man’s dentition raised serious concerns about the legitimacy of interpreting La Chapelle as the recipient of help from his social group, claiming that the skeleton’s dentition was “not reliable evidence of altruistic behavior by his [La Chappelle’s] cohort.”22
An even more recent evaluation of the entire skeleton by scientist Dr. Erik Trinkaus has shown that while the Old Man of La Chapelle did suffer from a degenerative joint disease, the deformation caused by this should not have affected Boule’s original reconstruction of the individual’s posture. It appears that Boule’s own preconceptions about early humans, and his rejection of the hypothesis that Neanderthals were part of Homo sapiens’ evolutionary cohort, led him to reconstruct a stooped, brutish creature, effectively placing Neanderthals on a side branch of the human evolutionary tree.
“The La Chapelle remains are often held up as a ‘type’ specimen of Würm glaciation European populations that have come to be known as ‘Classic Neanderthals.’ One might well inquire into the nature of the ‘type’ specimen,” paleoanthropologists Ronald Carlisle and Michael Siegel noted. “It is almost certainly for reasons of skeletal completeness that La Chapelle has been designated a type, yet it is distinctly an archetype and says nothing by itself of the range of variation that existed within the population of which it was a member.”23 In other words, we have made La Chapelle into an archetype.
By 2014, paleoanthropologist Dr. William Rendu summarized the state of La Chapelle research: “He [the Old Man] was quite old by the time he died, as bone had re-grown along the gums where he had lost several teeth, perhaps decades before. He lacked so many teeth in fact that it’s possible he needed his food ground down before he was able to eat it. Other Neanderthals in his social group may have supported him in his final years. Finally, the discovery of skeletal elements belonging to the original La Chapelle aux Saints 1 individual, two additional young individuals, and a second adult in the bouffia Bonneval highlights a more complex site-formation history than previously proposed.”24 Why do we keep coming back, then, to the La Chapelle specimen as the archetype for Neanderthal? The fossil’s scientific and cultural cachet transcended its existence as simply a comparative specimen in a
museum’s collection into a fossil with a story, a history, and an identity.
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As more and more Neanderthal fossils were discovered and published throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, questions about who they were, how they lived, and what the implications were of such a human-but-not-quite-human species began to percolate through a variety of media, from books to museums. Just as the science of Neanderthals continued to evolve and change, so did representations of Neanderthals in museums, literature, and popular culture in the early twentieth century.
Early museum dioramas of the Stone Age traded in the many cultural memes that surrounded Neanderthals. Dioramas and reconstructions became a way to put a body on a fossil; a reconstruction of a fossil provides a visual dimensionality of muscle, skin, hair, and movement that imbues a sense of “realness” to a fossil that a mere skeletal description, however detailed, simply cannot match. For fossils that are unable to freeze life as is (as would, say, an animal preserved by taxidermy), a reconstruction makes extinct species like Neanderthals accessible and understandable. We can immediately imagine the hominin in question—its tangible face and body are right in front of us and the body begs for a story to go with its science.
When we see reconstructed bodies of human ancestors, we summon certain narratives and interpose these underlying motifs onto the figures that we’re seeing. More than a plate or a placard, dioramas tell the viewer about a context, a setting, for a story.
Historically, museum dioramas have helped enforce the narrative of Boule’s Neanderthal, long popularized by The Quest for Fire. Again, this was particularly true at the turn of the twentieth century, when Frantisek Kupka popularized a primitive, hairy Neanderthal with his sketches in the Illustrated London News. Museum dioramas of Neanderthals conveyed particular prejudices and biases as well as information. Most of all, they told of particular assumptions, carefully tucked away below the surface of the exhibit.
Chicago Field Museum’s diorama of “Mousterian Man” (Neanderthals) as part of its Prehistoric Man series, 1930s. This image was taken from the museum’s visitors guide (H. Field and B. Laufer, Prehistoric Man, Hall of the Stone Age of the Old World, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, 1933).
In July 1933, the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History installed eight dioramas that depicted scenes from “early” hominin life from a variety of then current archaeological sites across Europe. These dioramas, by sculptor Frederick Blaschke, typify many early-twentieth-century assumptions about Neanderthal prehistory and the guesswork that was involved in reconstructing a spotty archeopaleontological record. The portrayal of technology in Blaschke’s dioramas, in particular, creates a powerful, indirect argument about success and direction in human evolution.
In Blaschke’s imagined scenes, Neanderthal hands clutch at a tool but lack any kind of dexterity—the tools and their use look clumsy. More than just fossils come to life, the slouching, hunched reconstructed Neanderthals reflected an interesting, subtle thesis about material culture and how hominins “ought” to have interacted with it. The reconstruction assumed a disconnect between tools and toolmakers; Neanderthals simply did not have anything material that was evolutionarily compelling. No complex tools, no dexterity, no ingenuity to invent “good” technology. Neanderthals, as portrayed in dioramas like Blaschke’s, solidified a story that champions technological ingenuity for humans’ “success.” The more people met these visual hominins in the museums, the more the Neanderthal stereotypes became locked in our cultural imagination.
Restoration of a Neanderthal man in profile, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, 1930s. This Neanderthal reflects the 1930s interpretations of the species: a hunched back and thick neck, very much in keeping with Marcellin Boule’s conclusions. (Wellcome Library, London; CC-BY-4.0)
Modern museum exhibits are working to change our cultural assumptions and to give museumgoers a better taste of current archaeological research. Because exhibits and dioramas have such incredible visual staying power, they offer a way to introduce a more nuanced Neanderthal to museumgoers. The Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian Institution, for example, offers a glimpse of our changing cultural assumptions about Neanderthals. When the Hall of Human Origins opened in 2010, it combined a display of the actual remains of a Neanderthal from Shanidar, Iraq, with an exhibit where visitors can download an app to “transform themselves into an early human.” (Called MEanderthal, the app creates a composite of your own face and an early hominin reconstruction.) Paleoartist John Gurche described the Neanderthal reconstruction that he created for the exhibit as “a behaviorally sophisticated kind of human… . I wanted to portray a being with a complex inner life. A distinct hairstyle … and a deerskin hair band with a lined design, hint that this complex being has symbolic levels to his thinking.”25 This is a long way from Boule’s 1957 description in his popular textbook Fossil Men: “There is hardly a more rudimentary or degraded form of industry than our Mousterian [Neanderthal] Man… . [T]he brutish appearance of this energetic and clumsy body, of the heavy-jawed skull … declares the predominance of functions of a purely vegetative or bestial kind over the functions of mind.”26 The changes to Neanderthal exhibits—“humanizing” them—mean that it is much easier to see the fossil species as someone like you and less like an evolutionary oddity.
Reconstruction of a Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) based on the La Chapelle-aux-Saints fossils. Reconstruction by Elisabeth Daynes of the Daynes Studio, Paris, France. (Sebastien Plailly/Science Source)
Museums aren’t the only means through which Neanderthals’ popular image is undergoing rehabilitation here in the twenty-first century. Almost one hundred years after the publication of The Quest for Fire, Canadian science fiction author Robert Sawyer imagines an alternative evolutionary timeline where Neanderthals—not humans—were the evolutionary “successes” of the Pleistocene. In his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, published in 2002–2003 (Hominids, Humans, Hybrids), Sawyer proposes: What if Homo sapiens hadn’t been the only member of the genus Homo to survive to the present day? What if that evolutionary history went to some other species, Neanderthals? What if Neanderthals had spent the last thirty thousand years achieving a culture like ours, which we believe to be uniquely “human”? And, most provocatively, what if Neanderthals did “human” better than us?
In the trilogy, Sawyer lays out two different Earths—an Earth as we traditionally consider it, and an Earth where Neanderthals became the dominant hominin 250,000 years prior. In this parallel world it was the humans (or gliksin), not Neanderthals, who went extinct. The Neanderthal Earth crosses with ours when Neanderthal physicist Ponter Boddit manages to travel between the two, through a portal that opens up at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory’s particle physics lab.
Back in the real worlds of archaeology and paleoanthropology, scientific consensus puts the extinction of the Neanderthals around thirty thousand years ago. Purported causes have ranged from changing climates and inferior technologies to the advent of revolutionary cognition in Homo sapiens—all hypotheses Sawyer works in to his speculative anthropology. Most explanations for Neanderthal extinction hinge on some spark of ingenuity that humans possess and Neanderthals don’t. Yet recent studies of Neanderthals offer serious challenges to these long-held views. From Italy, Gibraltar, Portugal, and Spain, such studies show Neanderthals as complex hominins, capable of sophisticated behavior—capable, indeed, of behavior generally thought to be exclusive to Homo sapiens.
The winner of the World Science Fiction Society’s prestigious Hugo Award, Hominids examines the interactions and moral implications of Neanderthals and humans through interspecies relationships. Sawyer’s attention to detail and his paleoanthropological research provide the same gestures toward scientific legitimacy as Rosny’s survey of La Chapelle. Sawyer’s details—just like Rosny’s—are well researched and ring just true enough to lend anthropological legitimacy to the stories. (In a fantastic literary twist, even the na
mes of the human protagonists—Louise and Mary—are gestures toward paleoanthropology’s history, acknowledging paleoanthropologists Louise and Mary Leakey.)
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It’s hard—if not impossible—to crack open a book about human evolution and not read about the history and significance of Neanderthals. They remain the first discovered fossil hominin species, and over the last 150 years they have given us a framework to think about them as a character, a species, and a concept.
Neanderthals have been written into the evolutionary narrative as an “Other”—a foil, a double, an easy contrast to our culture that discovered and interpreted them. As any student of literature will tell you, a foil takes a particular character and heightens that character by comparing him with another one; the foil is usually created to project the protagonist. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The most effective foils are generally created by contrasting the two through some set of essential characteristics.
In order for a foil to be truly successful, the character must have something in common with the story’s protagonist. Twentieth-century writer Vladimir Nabokov imagined Shakespeare’s Caliban and Ariel as classic foils that illustrated the opposite directions of the human condition. Caliban, the savage: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language!” Ariel, the ethereal spirit: “Pardon, master; I will be correspondent to command And do my spiriting gently.”27 Ariel entreats and Caliban practically growls—civilization and barbarity are neatly juxtaposed. Four hundred years after Shakespeare penned The Tempest, Caliban’s savage caricature still serves, for better or worse, as the central trope in our understanding of Neanderthals; we can think of them only when we first cast ourselves as protagonists in the narrative of human evolution. (Sawyer’s science fiction trilogy asks its audience to consider which—Neanderthals or humans—is the real Caliban character. In other words, which character is “more human”? In the trilogy, Caliban switches places with Ariel—the wise fool who teaches humanity how to be human.)
