Neanderthals are most commonly thought of as bloody brutes with little intelligence, emotionless and having no interest in anything other than hunting. In fact, the word “neanderthal” has been thrown around thousands of times, being used as an insult to describe “someone who is rude and not very smart. If your brother interrupts your garden party by spraying your guests with a hose, you can call him a neanderthal.” (Vocabulary.com). However, recent research has revealed that we’ve been stereotyping neanderthals, our extinct relatives, as mindless savages for dozens of years. But surprise; we’re actually much closer to them than we think.

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    The oldest Neanderthal fossils in the world are 430,000 years old, and they would live as a species for another 390,000 years until their extinction. When they were alive, they lived in numerous locations and living conditions. They were based widely in Eurasia, jumping from the warm woods of Spain and Italy to the frigid lands of England and Siberia. Their time on Earth, however, would unfortunately be cut short for unknown reasons. To this day, scientists still debate on what caused them to die out about 40,000 years ago with numerous theories being formulated. Some involve natural selection and competition; maybe our ancestors outcompeted them for food and shelter since they lived in such small groups. Some involve climate change; scientists discovered a thousand-year long spell of cold weather that aligned with the period of the Neanderthal extinction. There was also another gruesome theory involving weapons, with it simply stating that we had more advanced weapons back then and outfought them.

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    Despite Neanderthals being looked down as inferior and unintelligent, we have inherited around 2% of their DNA as our ancestors used to mate with them. Further research shows that Neanderthal genomes are incredibly alike to ours, “containing about 20,000 genes bundled into 23 chromosomes. Like us, they had two copies of 22 of those chromosomes (one from each parent), and also a pair of sex chromosomes. Females had two X chromosomes, while males had one X and one Y.” (The Conversation, 2024).  This relatively newfound similarity to Neandethrals has also passed down some of their traits, like red hair, arthritis, and resistance to some diseases. Their intelligence has also been seen in their creations. They were the first recorded species to make tools from bone, they built shelters, and were described by the National History Museum as “skilled tool makers, as evidenced by excavated objects such as spears and flint handaxes.” They invented the Levallois technique, a technique for crafting tools that prioritized efficiency and portability: and it is still being studied in universities around the world today. Neanderthals also gained the ability to make fire 200,000 years ago in order to survive in their challenging, harsh environments, proven in the form of “discrete hearths of charcoal, ash, and fire-altered sediments, charred and calcined bone, and heated stone.” (Neanderthal Cooking and the Costs of Fire, 2016).

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Giving Neanderthals the recognition they deserve not as brutes, but a highly intelligent species similar to ours is incredibly important as it gives insights to human evolution, culture, survival, history, communities and biology, helping us understand them better. So the next time someone wants to use the word "Neanderthal" as an insult, they should think again.

 

 

Works Cited

Graves, Jenny. “Modern human DNA contains bits from all over the Neanderthal genome – except the Y chromosome. What happened?” The Conversation, 16 June 2024, https://theconversation.com/modern-human-dna-contains-bits-from-all-over-the-neanderthal-genome-except-the-y-chromosome-what-happened-230984. Accessed 2 July 2024.
Hendry, Lisa. “Who were the Neanderthals?” Natural History Museum, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/who-were-the-neanderthals.html. Accessed 2 July 2024.
Henry, Amanda G. “Neanderthal Cooking and the Costs of Fire.” The University of Chicago Press Journals, The University of Chicago Press Journals, 25 July 2016, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/692095#:~:text=in%20human%20evolution.-,Evidence%20for%20and%20against%20Neanderthal%20Use%20of%20Fire,calcined%20bone%2C%20and%20heated%20stone. Accessed 2 July 2024.
“Neanderthal - Definition, Meaning & Synonyms.” Vocabulary.com, https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/neanderthal. Accessed 2 July 2024.