BROOKE GLADSTONE This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ and I'm Annalee Newitz. As we've heard earlier this hour, pop culture depictions of Neanderthals are just full of foolishness.

 

[CLIP]

 

GEICO COMMERCIAL It's so easy to use Geico dot com a caveman could do it. [END CLIP]

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ which were followed by a whole cycle of Geico ads where the Neanderthals protested their negative portrayals, which led to a whole new round of jokes about how funny it was when Caveman tried to sound smart.  Like this one featuring the so-called stupid caveman from Adult Swim:.

 

[CLIP]

 

PRESIDENT BIDEN There, me was, beating boulder into powder because me couldn't eat it, and magic ball land in lap. Naturally me think 'All right, free egg!' Because me stupid and me caveman. So... [END CLIP]

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ But something else lurks beneath the surface of these stories. To see it, let's go back to 1953, when the civil rights movement was heating up and some states were striking down laws that banned marriage between people of different races. That year, audiences at the drive-in watched a monster movie called Neanderthal Man, in which a mad scientist uses an experimental drug to turn himself into a Neanderthal for...reasons. He becomes a swarthy, violent brute who, of course, conks his girlfriend on the head and brings her back to his cave. That's when a mob of white guys with guns tracked them down and...

 

[CLIP]

 

SHERIFF Figure on trying to smoke him out, and trust the luck that she'll get away.

 

DR HARKNESS It's too dangerous.

 

SHERIFF Well, the only other solution is to get the state police down with tear gas.

 

DR HARKNESS That's just as bad. [END CLIP]

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ So is this mob of randos with guns gets ready to storm the cave. Miss Marshall and her Neanderthal boyfriend emerge.

 

[CLIP]

 

SHERIFF Get him.

 

MISS MARSHALL No! Don't shoot!

 

SHERIFF Flatten out quick. We'll fire over your head!

 

MISS MARSHALL No don't! [END CLIP]

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ Yeah, sure. It's just a monster movie. But to anyone familiar with the history of lynching in the United States up to that point, this scene probably felt a little too on the nose. Then in 1968, we got another story about our hominid cousins that was a thinly veiled allegory for racial politics. In Planet of the Apes, a group of astronauts led by Charlton Heston have gone way off course and found themselves landing on Earth in the distant future. Talking apes have replaced Homosapiens and relegated the planet's former rulers to the status of animals. They assume Charlton Heston is an animal, too. But when they lasso him like a stray cow, he shouts the movie's most famous line,.

 

[CLIP]

 

GEORGE TAYLOR Take you're stinking paws off me you  damn dirty ape. [END CLIP]

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ Today, this memorable line isn't just a nerdy reference, it's a racist dog whistle. In 2014, New York politician Jim Coughlin brought this usage into the mainstream when he called, then-MSNBC anchor, and now host of The Takeaway, Melissa Harris-Perry, a damn dirty ape. And in 2018, ABC fired Roseanne Barr from her own show after a nasty tweet linking former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to Planet of the Apes. And it's this aspect of the Neanderthal myth that fascinates science journalist Angela Saini, who writes about the ways that science can perpetuate racism.

 

ANGELA SAINI Very quickly, after Neanderthal bones were discovered, they were recruited into existing ideas about how people thought about race in the 19th century. The bones were discovered in Germany, but one of the first things scientists did was to compare those bones to the bones of living Aboriginal Australians in the 19th century. There was this very widespread belief in the scientific community and this idea of a racial hierarchy. That white Europeans were at the top,  and other races were slotted below. And also that those at the bottom of this hierarchy were like Neanderthals doomed to die out.

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ I wonder if we can blame all of this on Linnaeus, because I'm thinking about how back in the 18th century, this botanist, Carl Linnaeus. he created a bunch of the taxonomic categories of animals and plants that we use today. He also developed a hierarchy of humans, though, based on racial categories, and he always put Homo Africanness at the bottom right alongside Homo monstrous and homo ferriz what he considered to be feral and monstrous people. So do you think it goes back to Linnaeus?

 

ANGELA SAINI Because there were these existing racialized ideas about the world because of colonialism and slavery that became woven into this taxonomic project. So when Linnaeus was creating these quite arbitrary categories in his head because as we know, the human species is one human species, there were no natural subdivisions between us. He was working within what was already a wider project.

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ So you've written about how scientists and journalists began to talk about Neanderthals in a different way when genetic analysis revealed that they were probably fair skinned with red hair?

 

ANGELA SAINI Of course, we all all know that the word Neanderthal is not something we purely associate with another species of human. We also use it to describe kind of oafish, stupid man. So there was this widespread assumption that Neanderthals went extinct because they were too stupid. They were like thugs, almost. Even those comparisons that were made between Aboriginal Australians and Neanderthal remains in the 19th century. I think point to this idea that European scientists, North American scientists at that time thought about races in that deeply offensive, destructive way. In the 19th century, one of the very first laws that was passed in Australia was a white Australia policy, and this was about essentially breeding the color out of Australia. Brutally tearing children away from their parents, putting them in care homes where they were often abused or horrible, disgusting things happen to them. This was all justified under this racialized policy that said that this is a group of people that don't have a right to be here, that they're going extinct anyway, and science became part of that project. Now it's become quite clear over the last couple of decades that modern humans mated with Neanderthals, Europeans in particular. When you look at the way in which Neanderthals are now being described in the media. So over the last 10 years or so, suddenly we hear them being rehabilitated. You know, Neanderthals were actually much smarter than we thought they were. They didn't go extinct because they weren't clever enough. It was some other reason. Look how similar to us they are. And that's what I find particularly galling. Is that only, you know, a hundred or so years ago, the supposed similarity between Neanderthals and Aboriginal Australians was used as a justification to draw living modern humans out of the circle of humanity. And now, because we see that Neanderthals have some relationship to modern day Europeans, Neanderthals themselves an extinct species has been thrown into that circle of humanity.

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ I wonder if you could talk more about the implications of this discovery that in a sense, a lot of us are a hybrid of humans and Neanderthals who were once viewed as as not human.

 

ANGELA SAINI So there was this quite popular theory, 30-40 years ago, and it's very much discredited, called the multiregional hypothesis, which posited that different races evolved separately on the continents on which they're found. It sounds very 19th century, and it is, and as we know quite categorically, you know, we are all products of the out of Africa expansion. We all evolved into modernity in Africa. But that multi regional hypothesis has to some extent or some degree, I think, been revived with this idea that once we arrived in these various places around the world, that we interbred with other human species that were already there. And maybe that's what gives rise to our racial differences, which I think is nonsensical. But you do see in the literature and in the media, people trying to make those kind of distinctions, which to me smacks sometimes of 19th century pseudoscientific racism.

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ It really does. And I mean, you've talked about how a lot of the scientific theories ascribed to Neanderthals are basically just reckless speculation. Why do we keep doing this? Why does this keep happening? Why do we keep going back to these 19th century models?

 

ANGELA SAINI So many of the power structures around us were built from slavery and colonialism, and these beliefs have become so internalized and embedded in the way that we think about each other that we believe them to be biological. We mistake it for nature. We keep coming back to it because we just cannot convince ourselves that it isn't real.

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ So you've talked about the multi regional hypothesis, and I wonder if there are any other examples of the scientific speculation about Neanderthals that you consider to be equally absurd.

 

ANGELA SAINI You know, one thing I did find really interesting was during the COVID-19 pandemic, which for me was just chock full of very weird racial speculation. You know, as soon as we saw ethnic minority disparities in health – people, even experts, you know, people who should know better began immediately entering into racialized speculation about what they were seeing. We saw a number of scientists looking into the possibility that Neanderthal genes, and I put that in quotation marks. You can't see me doing that because I can is somehow responsible for why some people were more kind of protected to the virus than others. And it was suspect even at the time, because there were so many complex reasons why people are exposed to a virus and why they catch it. Within families, you see such differences in how people respond. And yet that did look to me again as an attempt to reinforce this theory that there are some fundamental genetic differences between big population groups. Now, since then, what further study has shown that these so-called Neanderthal genes, which people talked about conferring special protection on certain people, they're not necessarily Neanderthal genes and that galaxy of protection that people have is actually quite well distributed everywhere. It's not as though some continents have been spared, everyone's been hit.

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ So where do you see Neanderthals showing up in contemporary debates and conflicts over race? It seems like an odd figure to be showing up. And yet we see it happening.

 

ANGELA SAINI I've spent quite a few years now doing what I do not recommend anyone else does, which is spending a lot of time online looking at what scientific racists say and do. And reading their publications. They are always on the hunt for whatever within the sciences will support their racialised theories. And what they're essentially trying to do is prove that race is biologically real, that there are fundamental psychological, behavioral intellectual differences between racial groups that can explain racial inequality in a society like the United States.

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ Fringey groups are arguing that Neanderthals are kind of the great white ancestor.

 

ANGELA SAINI Not, no, not in those terms, but they're always on the lookout for scientific proof of white superiority and difference. There's very little genetic evidence to support this idea. That race is biologically real. We are one of the most homogeneous species on the planet. I mean, we are more homogeneous than chimpanzees. There's more genetic diversity among chimpanzees than there is among humans. More than 90 percent of the differences between people are not between population groups that between one person to the next. So what they're trying to do is find something that will support this idea that Europeans are somehow genetically exceptional. You know, the genes associated with lactose intolerance are distributed unevenly around the world. Europeans in some regions and again, this goes up and down because there are many Europeans are intolerant to milk. But far right wingers have leapt upon this idea that tolerance to milk is one of their special racial qualities that they have. They're really reaching. I mean, you have to work very hard these days to be a scientific racist, but they will look for absolutely anything.

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ I wonder if you could leave us with some guidelines. How would you like scientists to be talking about Neanderthals so that they don't feed into these racial myths?

 

ANGELA SAINI What I would really love is for scientists to be educated about the history of the sciences, more so that they understand the mistakes that were made in the past around race science, eugenics, the ways in which scientists entered into speculation that was completely illegitimate and pseudoscientific, and the risks of doing that again now. One of the things that I think is a tragedy really is that when you're trained in the sciences or engineering and I studied engineering myself, we get very little exposure to the politics that is embedded within scientific history. Less mistakes would be made if scientists had a much broader understanding of their own fields.

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ What does that sound like as someone who is listening to a scientist or say, reading something that a scientist has written? How would you want them to explain it so that I, as the naive reader, don't come away from what they've said, thinking, Oh, so it turns out there's different subspecies of humanity.

 

ANGELA SAINI But when we explain things and put them in context, I think that's much better. And also hold their hands up to the racist assumptions of past. I don't think there's any doubt that the way scientists talk about Neanderthals now is sometimes also tinged with race and racism. Is there enough introspection about that? I would say no, because it's only in hindsight in my experience that researchers of the hold up their hands and say, Yes, we were biased.

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ Thank you so much for joining us today, Angela.

 

ANGELA SAINI It's been my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ Angela Saini is the science journalist and author. Her latest book Is Superior: The Return of Race Science.

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ The most pernicious myth about Neanderthals is actually something you hear all the time about humans. The idea that some groups of us are destined to die out because we're inferior.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE It comes back to that question of why the Neanderthals disappeared. There's lots of theories. First, of course, is that we just killed them all. Or maybe the rapidly changing climate killed them. Or maybe their social groups were so small they couldn't get enough genetic variety, which weakened them? Or maybe we simply absorbed them.

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ If you look at how long they lived, and how they lived, it's impossible to say that they failed. In fact, they live on in our DNA, in your DNA.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE My two and a half percent!

 

ANNALEE NEWITZ Yes. Long live the Neanderthals and all our hominin sisters.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Micah Loewinger, Eloise Blondiau, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang and Suzanne Gaber. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our technical mdirector is Jennifer Munson. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.