Over the past week or so the perpetual argument about whether we were “superior” to Neandertals or not has cropped up again, thanks to a new paper in PLoS ONE, Neandertal Demise: An Archaeological Analysis of the Modern Human Superiority Complex. In it the authors utilize material remains to infer that no, in fact Neandertals were not “inferior”, and their demise was more a matter of demographic assimilation than competitive exclusion and extinction. To get the “other perspective” in a measured fashion I recommend this interview of Chris Stringer in National Geographic.
As I suggest above this debate has gone back and forth for a long time, and seems subject to fashion as much as empirical results. Ten years ago the Stanford paleoanthropologist Richard Klein published The Dawn of Human Culture, which laid out very cogently the dominant perspective of the time that Neandertals were not humans as we understand humans, and were superseded by a neo-African lineage which was gifted with the bio-behavioral capacity for exceedingly flexible and protean cultural adaptability. Klein’s central conjecture is that ~50,000 years ago a subset of ancient humans in Africa developed the biological capacity for cultural creation on a scale unprecedented before in the hominin lineage. He appealed in a rather hand-wavy fashion to punctuated equilibrium to serve as the basis for what was basically a model of modern human origins out of a single saltation event. Though not perhaps in every exact detail, the broad outlines of Klein’s thesis were accepted as part of the “Out of Africa” canon which had crystallized over the previous 20 years. Modern humans came, they saw, they conquered.
All this changed in 2010 when A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome was published. Over the past four years the general inference established in this paper, that a few percent of non-African human ancestry derives from Neandertals, seems to have been supported by further publications. At the time I observed, and have continued to see, a trend to humanize Neandertals. After all, they were in part our ancestors, so the previous dehumanization now seems rather uncharitable. Klein and his fellow travelers even hypothesized that Neandertals did not have language, that complex speech may have been the bio-behavioral shift which allowed for the rapid expansion of neo-Africans. Though those who study science and claim that it is strongly shaped by cultural priors tend to become overly enthusiastic about this dynamic, there is some truth in it, and how we view Neandertals does seem subject in part to what we want them to be.
But it’s hard to shake the intuition that there was something special about neo-Africans 50,000 years ago. Stringer lays out the archaeological perspective, what I might term the “Great Leap Forward-lite” model. Complex, elaborate, and protean cultural expression with symbolic connotations seem to have exploded exponentially after the expansion of neo-Africans. That’s hard to deny. It’s easy then to make the leap to assuming that this cultural change was due to a biological change.
My own primary reason to be swayed by the view that neo-Africans were different in some fundamental and biological way is not much informed by archaeology, since I have only a superficial grasp of this field. Rather, it is the fact that it is neo-Africans who crossed the Wallace Line, and ventured into the New World. Hominins, humans of some kind, were present across Eurasia for over one million years, but it took neo-Africans to expand the frontiers of the Homo range almost immediately after they appear on the scene outside of the original contintent. That’s not in dispute at all, and requires no deep and specialized knowledge.
And yet this point does make me think somewhat about what to make of the Polynesians. The ancestors of the Melanesians arrived in “Near Oceania” ~30,000 years ago, and there they stopped. It took 25,000 years for humans to push past the eastern fringes of Melanesia into the vast Pacific, with the arrival of the Austronesian Lapita culture. As you can see on the map above the Austronesian maritime range was incredible, from Madagascar all the way to Easter Island off the coast of Chile. In fact it seems likely that Austronesians were the first settlers of Madagascar, as opposed to Africans from the relatively nearby coast. Using the same logic that informs my perception of Neandertals vs. neo-Africans one might ask if the Austronesians of Taiwan were somehow biologically different from the Melanesians. Perhaps there was a mutation which compelled the Austronesians on their long journey out of Taiwan?
The point here is not to underplay biological differences between Neandertals and neo-Africans. The fact that there seems to be a paucity of Neandertal ancestry on the X chromosome is suggestive of hybrid incompabilities. But, the conclusions one draws from the facts seem to be strongly colored by the model which one already presupposes. As a matter of fact there may be bio-behavioral differences between modern human lineages which explain differences in cultural expression. But obviously these are not so clear in a genetic sense. When we think of differences between Neandertals and neo-Africans it is often as if the traits were disjoint between the two groups. But perhaps it is a much more subtle and nuanced biological difference, which was ratcheted upward and amplified by the flexible nature of human culture. The rise and fall of neo-African cultures themselves exhibits an almost inexplicable waxing and waning. There is no reason it had to be any different in the past.
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