In 1856 quarrymen digging in a cave in the Neander Valley in west Germany came upon the bones of what they assumed to be an old cave bear. Realising it was, in fact, a strange human with a shallow, sloping forehead, huge brow ridge, and massive limbs, Johann Carl Fuhlrott, a local schoolteacher, collected the bones and took them to the University of Bonn, where they were judged to be of great antiquity, and, possibly, the remnants of Europe’s earliest population. Neanderthal 1 (the German suffix thal means ‘valley’) would become the first ancient hominin recognised as being from another species, Homo neanderthalensis.
Since their discovery 170 years ago Neanderthals have been the most studied category of early human. Fossil-bearing archaeological sites in Europe and West Asia have yielded more than 350 Neanderthal individuals, and there are hundreds more sites bearing Mousterian stone tools (named for the rock shelters of Le Moustier, where a complete Neanderthal skeleton was recovered in 1908), which were predominantly made by Neanderthals. Neanderthals Among Us is the first book to tell the story of Neanderthals in science and popular culture. It summarises the history of scientific Neanderthal research, from the early racial science of craniology to up-to-the-minute findings from the analysis of ancient DNA, alongside a vast, multilingual corpus of Neanderthal imagery comprising novels, poetry, and films, to cartoons, advertisements, and computer games. Sahlins establishes a dialogue between science and popular culture, showing ‘Neanderthal Man’ as an ever-shifting chimera.
Sahlins’ scientific history begins centuries before the discovery of Neanderthal 1. From antiquity, the Western imagination was populated by an intermediate class of satyrs and Wild Men, lesser doubles who lacked speech, reason, beauty, and chastity. The classical satyr and medieval Wild Man retained signs of animality, including hairy bodies, a low bearing, and untrammelled sexual appetites. They were, in other words, Neanderthals avant la lettre.
Colonial explorers relocated the folkloric Wild Man into their reports about indigenous peoples and great apes, creating the cultural conditions from which, in the 18th century, the first racial sciences arose. From 1856 skulls such as Neanderthal 1 were organised into a racialised hierarchy, with European crania at the top, indigenous peoples of colour below, and Neanderthals at the bottom. Neanderthals, understood as Europeans, were generally portrayed as white-skinned but ‘dark’ and hirsute. Even though Neanderthal skulls were on average larger than those of modern humans, they were treated as the ‘missing link’ between apes and humans that proved Darwinian theories of evolution.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries Neanderthals on the page, in museums, and on the screen were portrayed as brutes and rapists. The fantasy novel Quest for Fire, written in 1911 by the pseudonymous ‘Joseph-Henri Rosny’, conjured a world of ‘100,000 years ago’ peopled by ‘tribes’ at different evolutionary stages. When a cannibal tribe of ‘coarse brutes’ with ‘raw, heavy flesh, hairy bodies and low foreheads’ steal his clan’s fire, the Homo sapiens hero must fight to retrieve it (with the aid of woolly mammoths). In 1981 the novel became an Oscar-winning film, its screenplay written by Anthony Burgess. In the 1990s hair-dragging rape scenes in the Clan of the Cave Bear novels (20 million copies sold by 1990) caused the books to be banned from American public libraries. Neanderthal was applied to any character, ideology, or practice that was accused of being violent, dull-witted, and backward-looking. Progressive movements in North America applied Neanderthal rhetoric to reactionaries, anti-feminists, and conservatives. Using the international News on the Web corpus, Sahlins reveals a worldwide spike in English-language usage of Neanderthal coinciding with Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns.
After the Second World War scientists reacted against the popular caricature of the Neanderthal. In 1953 a Neanderthal who had lived for years with debilitating injuries and who must have been cared for by others was unearthed at Shanidar Cave in Iraq. A few years later another Neanderthal skeleton was found surrounded by flowers as part of an elaborate burial ceremony. These Neanderthals were clearly very different from popular culture’s apish louts.
The mapping of the Neanderthal genome in 2010 showed that Neanderthals are not just among us, but within us. Between 52,000 and 39,000 years ago, humans and Neanderthals interbred repeatedly over a period lasting around 7,000 years, leaving nearly a third of the Neanderthal genome as fragments scattered across the DNA of the global population. Neanderthals were not a fundamentally different species but a closely related group of human peoples. Sahlins samples the ‘Neanderthal Ancestry Reports’, which the biotech company 23andMe offered to more
than half of its 14 million customers before going bankrupt in 2025 (his own Neanderthal inheritance turns out to be a disappointingly average 2.1 per cent). Sahlins’ more immediate genetic (and intellectual) inheritance derives from his late father, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, a social theorist who criticised biological determinism. Sahlins junior is similarly alert to the danger of explaining human behaviour as if it were exclusively based on genetics. The Neanderthal genome, he warns, remains ‘something of a Rorschach test onto which people project ideas and assumptions about ancestry and what it means to be human – or differently human’.
He is also an erudite and entertaining guide, offering novel perspectives on the latest science, for example the 2026 discovery that interbreeding was predominantly between Neanderthal males and human females, and not between Neanderthal females and human males. Neanderthals Among Us should be read by anyone interested in how humans are made.
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Neanderthals Among Us: The Making of a Prehistoric Human
Peter Sahlins
OneWorld, 448pp, £25
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
Helen Wickstead is Senior Lecturer in Museum and Gallery Studies at Kingston University.