The most serious argument against Huxley’s hypothesis was put forth in 1911. Marcellin Pierre Boule, a French anthropologist and scientific heavyweight, had been called upon to study and reconstruct a Neanderthal specimen that had been uncovered in France several years earlier. Once Boule was finished, anyone viewing the reconstruction would come away with some strong ideas about what Neanderthals looked like. Significantly, he gave the skeleton a curved rather than upright spine, indicative of a stooped, slouching stance. With bent knees, flexed hips, and a head that jutted forward, Boule’s Neanderthal resembled an ape. The anthropologist also claimed that the creature possessed the intelligence (or lack of intelligence) to match its apelike body.
Boule commissioned an artist to produce an illustration of his reconstruction, and the result depicted a hairy, gorillalike figure with a club in one hand and a boulder in the other. The creature stood in front of a nest of vegetation, another obvious reference to gorillas. Boule’s vision of Neanderthals, with their knuckle-dragging posture and apelike behavior, also left an indelible mark on a public eager to hear about its ancient ancestors. For decades to come, Neanderthals would become poster boys for stupidity and bad behavior. The epitome of a shambling, dimwitted brute, “Neanderthal” became synonymous with “bestial,” “brutal,” savage,” and “animal.”12 In “The Grisly Folk,” an influential story written by H. G. Wells in 1921, the author stuck to the Boule party line, depicting “Neandertalers” as cannibalistic ogres: “when his sons grew big enough to annoy him, the grisly man killed them or drove them off. If he killed them he may have eaten them.” According to Wells, the grisly men also developed a taste for the modern humans who had moved into the neighborhood, finding “the little children of men fair game and pleasant eating.” Because of this type of rude behavior (“lurking” was also a popular activity), Wells felt that the ultimate extermination of the Neanderthals was completely justified, allowing modern humans to rightfully inherit the Earth.
The only problem with Wells’s character, according to paleontologist Niles Eldridge, was that it was based on Boule’s misconceptions. “Every feature that Boule stressed in his analysis can be shown to have no basis in fact.”
Since the early 20th century, Neanderthals have undergone a further series of transformations and today there are two main hypotheses.
That they were our direct ancestors (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) became part of what is known as the Regional Continuity hypothesis. It is a view currently supported by paleoanthropologist Milford Wolpoff, who believes that Neanderthals living in Europe and the Middle East interbred with other archaic humans, eventually evolving into Homo sapiens. According to Wolpoff, similar regional episodes took place elsewhere around the globe as other archaic populations intermingled, hybridizing into regional varieties and even subspecies of humans. Importantly, though, there would be enough intermittent contact between these groups (Asians and Europeans, for example) so that only a single species of humans existed at any given time.
Alternatively, the Out of Africa hypothesis holds that modern humans evolved once, in Africa, before spreading to the rest of the world where they displaced, rather than interbred with, the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and others who had been there previously. The groups driven to extinction by Homo sapiens had themselves evolved from an as-yet-undiscovered species of Homo (perhaps H. erectus) that had originated in Africa and migrated out earlier.
I interviewed Ian Tattersall in his impressively cluttered office at the American Museum of Natural History, where he is curator emeritus in the Division of Anthropology. Tattersall is one of the world’s eminent paleoanthropologists and has authored (or coauthored) more than a hundred articles on ancient hominids, as well as popular books on the topic. He is a major proponent of the Out of Africa hypothesis.
As we sat surrounded by fossilized bones, ancient artifacts, and a small population of lifelike hominid replicas, I asked Tattersall if he thought that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had interbred and hybridized, the central tenet of the Multiregional (or Regional Continuity) hypothesis.
“Not to any biologically significant extent, no,” he replied. “Neanderthals were incredibly different, and I think they viewed the world very differently, too. Now there may have been a bit of Pleistocene hanky-panky that went on, but I don’t think it was anything that would have affected the future trajectory of either population.”
“So you don’t subscribe to the ‘Neanderthals-R-Us’ hypothesis?”