The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature

"Yes. The author is French, the English translation was published in 2023, and I reviewed it for the scientific journal Nature . Slimak is an archaeologist who’s been working for decades, a field archaeologist, excavating sites, publishing on them. He had written another book before, but I’m not sure that had an English translation. I enjoyed this because it’s very forthright. It’s elegantly written. It’s funny, but it’s also intentionally provocative. Yes, and I really don’t agree with a lot of it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful for me as a researcher and a writer to read it and think about it. One of the things that he talks about, towards the end, is what happened to Neanderthals. To come back to your question, his position would be that the evidence for the nature of contact being aggressive is the fact that Neanderthals disappeared, and that there never was a full assimilation. We have negative evidence, basically. It’s true we can say from the genetics that there was not a population assimilation. They didn’t merge into us. There was some interbreeding, but it wasn’t like the ‘total assimilation’ performed by the Borg from Star Trek; a lot of Neanderthals were disappearing without being integrated into the Homo sapiens populations. No. To surviving infants, and especially to fertile infants. Yes, that’s part of it. There is something going on there. Even with that, speaking as a non-geneticist, as I understand it you would still see a different signal if it had been a wholesale merging. Also, one of the places that Slimak excavates has now become a globally important site. It’s in the Rhône Valley in France, called Grotte Mandrin. I mention it a lot in Kindred , in the discussion of what is going on at the end of the world of the Neanderthals. This site has always stuck out because it had a particular, atypical layer in between Neanderthal layers below and above (and I’m talking culturally Neanderthal). This layer in between seemed odd because of the nature of the stone tool technology. It had elements of what Neanderthals do, but executed slightly differently, in particular over a thousand stone points, many tiny, much smaller than they ever made them. Recently, analysis of a tooth from that layer has suggested that this probably is a Homo sapiens presence. The reason why that’s significant is that it’s really old: 55 thousand years. It’s about 10,000 years older than any other evidence that we know of for Homo sapiens being in Western Europe. It’s this weird little blip. After that layer, you have more, classically Neanderthal material. What is going on in that site? It’s just one tiny little keyhole where you have this apparent sapiens presence and then they’re gone again. “Every new sample we get has the potential to rewrite the Neanderthal story” But even more amazing, and this is why I love Slimak’s archaeological work, his research group have used this fabulous pioneering technique where you look at soot microchronologies. Depending on the way your cave forms, you have calcite films accumulating over the inside walls. If you have a fire and it gets sooty, it’ll leave a dark layer on that. And then, if people go away, you just get more calcite, which is white. And then, people come back, and you get the soot. You can see this build-up of layers, like a barcode, and just as we do with tree-ring chronologies, by examining the calcite fragments, matching the patterns, and refitting them between the layers, you’re able to say that the gap of time between the lower Neanderthal layers and the appearance of this weird one is probably less than a decade, maybe less than a year. It is a super abrupt arrival. They’re there for a while, then nobody is in that region for centuries, maybe a bit longer, and then Neanderthals come back. There are other elements about the weirdness of this layer too: these people arrive, but the stone tool raw materials used and animals hunted suggest they were already ‘mapped onto’ the local resources, although they’re moving differently. There are all these anomalous things, and Slimak’s explanation is that this layer is effectively a signal for a local Neanderthal extinction event. Maybe there’s some interaction, maybe the sapiens community is even learning some of the knowledge about where rocks are for example, because they seem to pick it up straight away. But the cultural signal of the Neanderthals who had been there is gone, and then after the sapiens are gone, nobody else is there. We don’t know why they left. We don’t know if they also died out in that region. Did they just move through, onto somewhere else? It’s a complete mystery. From Slimak’s perspective, we’re looking at extirpation, perhaps with some initial co-existence, but it’s not a living-alongside-each-other, happy-ending story. I think this site, Mandrin, is the best case where you can maybe argue for a contact scenario without coexistence and continuance, because there’s clearly a rupture of some kind. God, yes. This is something that happens now since COVID, theories for what happened to Neanderthals always included novel pathogens, like ‘Oh, was there some random disease?’ Because we have horrible evidence from history, where you have immunologically naive populations encountering others, and we know what happens. People have always responded to that idea, ‘Yeah, but you can’t see it archaeologically,’ and that’s true. You would have to have had particular diseases that would leave a very clear mark on bones, and that’s just vanishingly unlikely. But, everybody now having seen first-hand what happens when you have a new disease and how quickly it can spread (of course we have aeroplanes now, but still), and it has shifted views. We still don’t have evidence for a widespread imported disease being part of the picture, but as one of the elements of what may have been going on, it’s more plausible; plus we’ve now got the ability to look for DNA too, even from sediments. Also, we have to remember that the scenario that Slimak is talking about in Southeast France, it’s just one of the Neanderthal ‘end of the worlds’. I was saying earlier how vast their geographic range is. It’s massive, and what is going on in different regions, in terms of endings, has to be plural. There’s not going to be one process or one mechanism that’s going to explain their disappearance across that whole range. It’s many, many different stories. Yes, and I think this book is not only about this. A large portion of the book, before he gets to the question of what we think about the ending of Neanderthals, is a hugely critical and very philosophical dissection of, in his view, how we try to pigeonhole Neanderthals and how we do not like the Otherness of them. It’s an interesting point because that Otherness of Neanderthals is always at the centre of how we talk about them in a literary sense, but our willingness to accept it has shifted in time. Historically it was their definitive character, that we wanted them to be different because it makes us wonderful. From the earliest days of their scientific discovery, that was the perspective. And then, it shifted into them becoming this dark mirror for ourselves. Slimak’s claim and his very strong critique is that over the past thirty years or so, as archaeology has become vastly more complex, and richer, we have gone too far the other way. Now, if we find an eagle talon in a site with a bit of polish on it, you’ll get people claiming it is evidence that it was a necklace. It isn’t; it’s evidence that you have a talon with some polish on it, that therefore it rubbed against something hard. I agree with him about a lot of his very particular critiques, and that’s exactly actually what I tried to do in Kindred . I don’t know if he agrees with everything I wrote, but I was trying to be cautious. I was trying to say: What is the totality of the scientific data? Can I give us a definitive account of where we are? What does it mean if you have an eagle talon that’s slightly polished, and with a bit of red pigment on it? What can we say about that? The problem, always, with Neanderthals is that we do find these strange little standout things, but they are quite isolated. When you compare it to contemporary early Homo sapiens populations, say, in southern Africa, the difference is clear: you find many sites where you’ve got lots of layers and they’ve all got lots of strange little things in them. In Neanderthal sites, you might have one unusual object in one layer, or at most a couple, and they are different between sites too. The material evidence is much more isolated, so you’re forced to do the thing I was talking about before. You have to tack between materials and sites and say, ‘Okay, where do we see that they’re interested in birds? Is it for more than food? What can you really say about talons and feather collection? What about the pigment?’ You try to put all that together to understand that one object. That’s always going to be a process and there’s no clear lines. That’s a personal, interpretive thing. Some scholars will go further and others less, and Slimak’s main argument is that collectively archaeologists have gone too far. That today’s Neanderthals have become, as he calls them, these ‘macabre puppets’: we dress them up, and they’re like ‘dandies’ with feathers in their hair, and he thinks that’s preposterous. Another thing is that through most of the book, it’s very interesting, going back to thinking about the positioning and the framing of them in The Inheritors , that Slimak talks about Neanderthals as ‘the creature’ or ‘the beast’. Yes, but he’s doing that on purpose. I bristled at it. Yes, and he’s intentionally doing it. It’s not that he thinks there’s nothing sophisticated or interesting in them; I think he’s warning us against wishing to create a being we might want to meet. That’s us, in some sense! I do think The Naked Neanderthal is a really great book, as a challenge. It has annoyed a lot of people, and I can see why. I think he goes a bit far in some instances and is a little bit unfair, especially in terms of describing how his fellow scholars work or think. We’re not the very black-or-white characters that we’re depicted as. I think there’s a lot more nuance there, and Slimak too has his fair share of bias, including a very masculine perspective. I think it’s still an important book because there is something true in his main point, which is that we are a little bit scared of uncovering a strange, negative other kind of human, because we know that the original monstrous vision of Neanderthals was rooted in inaccurate science and prejudice. We know that that’s not true, but that doesn’t mean that the archaeology says they’re exactly like us. It really doesn’t. There is a profound difference. I think you can acknowledge difference without removing the ability for Neanderthals to have any sort of human-ness or even softness to them, because I think that’s part of being a primate and a mammal, and there’s very little of that in the book. Yes, absolutely. I think the primate thing is a good way to understand his book because with chimps, I think most primatologists (maybe not the ones who work on chimps!) would say chimpanzees are the bastards, while bonobos however are lovely and friendly. But that’s also now a stereotype. Yes, and there’s so much amazing new work that’s come out of studying bonobos, because they were several decades behind in the amount of attention. And we now can see, not only the whole shagging thing, but that they are massively more open to relationships with groups that are unfamiliar. The groups will travel together. Individuals will move between groups. It’s much more chill. That is not the case with chimps. They will attack and kill unfamiliar groups. Slimak’s point would be that we don’t want Neanderthals to be like chimps; we want them to be like bonobos. Maybe it doesn’t quite go that far. My point would be that we spent decades drawing only on chimpanzees to imagine Neanderthals, and we need that bonobo element as well. That’s why I think it’s a good book. It really does ask us to critically reassess how we’re imagining them."