Neanderthal

The Neander Valley (Neandertal in modern German spelling) is a small limestone gorge near Düsseldorf, Germany. It was named after Joachim Neander, a seventeenth-century pastor and hymn writer who liked to walk there. His original surname was Neumann (German for 'new man'), which his grandfather had Hellenized to Neander (Greek for 'new man'). In 1856, quarry workers in the valley found bones — a skullcap, thigh bones, arm bones, ribs — that would be identified as belonging to a previously unknown species of human.

The anatomist Hermann Schaaffhausen and the naturalist William King studied the bones. King proposed the species name Homo neanderthalensis in 1864. The discovery came three years before Darwin's The Descent of Man and challenged prevailing assumptions about human uniqueness. Were these bones human? Something else? Something in between? The Neander Valley became the type site for an entire species.

For over a century, Neanderthals were depicted as brutish, hunched, and stupid — the 'caveman' of popular imagination. This image was based on a reconstruction of a skeleton (the 'Old Man of La Chapelle') that turned out to have severe arthritis. Modern research has overturned the caricature: Neanderthals made tools, used fire, buried their dead, created art, and interbred with Homo sapiens. Most people of European and Asian descent carry 1-4 percent Neanderthal DNA.

The word 'Neanderthal' (or 'neanderthal' with a lowercase 'n') has become an insult meaning stupid, brutish, or uncivilized. 'He's a complete Neanderthal.' The insult is based on the nineteenth-century caricature, not on modern science. The people we call Neanderthals when we mean 'stupid' were sophisticated enough that we mated with them and carry their genes. The insult is aimed at our own ancestors.