Neanderthals Fact, Fiction, and Wishful Thinking

In the early 20th century, paleoanthropologists interpreted the oft-profound differences between specimens of an expanding human fossil record as reflecting taxonomic and evolutionary diversity. Why, then, in the 1940s, did geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky reconfigure human evolution into one, profoundly morphologically variable lineage which changed slowly through time? Neanderthals: Fact, Fiction, and Wishful Thinking exposes, for the first time, the history of how conceptions of race have configured interpretations of the first-found human fossils; how assumptions underlying human fossils were and still are interpreted as to species and their evolutionary relationships. No matter how "different" Nazis thought living humans were, differences between Neanderthals and bigger-browed, chunkier-faced specimens and living humans trivialized the differences between living humans. In 1950, without basis, taxonomist Ernst Mayr lumped all fossil and extant humans into three transforming species of genus Homo: transvaalensis>erectus>sapiens; sapiens subsumed humans, Neanderthals, and even less morphologically sapiens-like specimens. In 1962, at a Wenner-Gren Foundation meeting, participants-mostly geneticists and behaviorists, unfamiliar with the human fossil record-voted to keep these specimens, Neanderthals, and humans in Homo sapiens. Even when Neanderthals were returned to species neanderthalensis, the assumption remained: humans and Neanderthals interbred. When a Neanderthal nuclear DNA sequence was cobbled together and compared to human nDNA, molecular anthropologists could claim humans received "genes" identified in Neanderthal DNA via interbreeding. In its press release, the Committee that awarded Svante Pääbo the Nobel Prize for "demonstrating" human inheritance of Neanderthal "genes" made clear that his claims were predicated on assuming Neanderthal-human interbreeding. It's remarkable how received wisdom continues to influence evolutionarily naïve paleoanthropologists and molecular anthropologists who then present as fact, to a naïve public, assumptions that are biologically and evolutionarily wrong.

Jeffrey H. Schwartz is Professor Emeritus of the Departments of Anthropology and History & Philosophy of Science, and at Resident Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a Research Associate at the Division of Anthropology, The American Museum of Natural History, New York. His research interests include method and theory in evolutionary and developmental biology and genetics, palaeontology, and comparative anatomy.