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Humanity of the Neanderthals

History is written by the winners – that's us, Homo sapiens sapiens. We have long deemed Neanderthals a more primitive, sub-human species distinct from ourselves. We gave them different names; Homo neanderthalis and Homo sapiens. We were thought to have displaced them outright as we advanced through their old stamping grounds in Europe. But that picture has changed drastically in recent years and is continuing to change.

We now know that some advanced artefacts previously ascribed to us were made by Neanderthals. They buried their dead with flowers. Their hyoid bones, brains and facial musculature were consistent with a capability for speech. We coexisted for thousands of years and shared cultures. They copied our bear-tooth necklaces. We probably learned a few tricks from them and not the other way round, as previously assumed.

But the family closeness runs much deeper than that. Our communities interbred, at the very least during several periods along the way. Genetically we all have some Neanderthal in us today; they help control our hair and skin colours and sleep pattern, and contributed vital features of out immune system. And that is only what we have discovered in the last few years. The reconstruction of a Neanderthal man from his skeleton has demonstrated graphically that were he walking the streets today in modern dress he would look short, stocky and powerfully built, but nobody would question his membership of our own human race for a moment.

Then, a third "species" was discovered, Homo denisova (or Homo altaiensis). The Denisovans lived further east, in Asia, and made advanced artefacts. They left a few bone fragments and, again, the stamp of their genes in our blood.

Most recently, we have been identifying a whole web of early human populations scattered about Africa. Although no trace is known to field palaeontology, they interbred widely with us and contributed to our genetic makeup so significantly that they are being identified from the presence of these genes alone.

The picture is growing of a great web of small, semi-isolated communities scattered across Africa and Eurasia, interbreeding when occasion arose and sometimes merging when the pure strains died out leaving no physical trace behind save their genes. As we learn more about the Neanderthals and Denisovans, we will find more of their genes in us and surely begin to unearth more such strains and webs behind their ancestry.

The idea that all these interbreeding strains, many little more than large and long-lived tribes, were distinct species is absurd. There is not the slightest scientific basis for treating the Neanderthals and Denisovans any differently. Classifying them as as separate species from ourselves and downplaying their cognitive achievements is wholly untenable, it is as antiquated as Creationism. None of them ever went extinct, or their genes would not be in our living bodies to be found. They merged with other strains to make us what we are today. We are their living descendants as much as we are of many another population of the day, and they live on in us.

They may not have been quite as nimble-fingered or as intelligent as their sapiens contemporaries or as the average human today, but there is a spread in any population and I know many people today whose craft skills and intellectual capacity are no better. Compare the intellectual capacities of a bulldog and a border collie and you will soon see what I mean. We do not deny our mentally challenged friends their humanity; to deny the Neanderthals and Denisovans theirs is nothing short of chauvinist racism, a nasty feature of Western civilisation which still lingers and is equally unpleasant to see in the minds of modern palaeontologists.

It is high time we rewrote our family tree to include H. sapiens neanderthalis and H. sapiens denisova alongside ourselves, H. sapiens sapiens. That we ultimately survived suggests only that the H. sapiens sapiens of the day was a rather different breed from ourselves, lacking as it did the various benefits brought to us by our Neanderthal and Denisovan heritage. Perhaps we need to recognise an H sapiens transientis who was their contemporary and shared with them our common ancestry, but in the end died out because they lacked the survival traits which the Neanderthals and Denisovans also passed on to us.

One might even go further and suggest that a better taxonomic model for this network of interbreeding humans is the nodern dog, Canis canis. These creatures come in an even wider range of morphologies and survival traits (or lack of them). Yet we debate only whther they are all a single species, Canis familiaris, or even a single sub-species of the wolf, Canis lupus familiaris. It does not seem to occur to our taxonomists that if a Chow-chow can interbreed with a Chihuahua and a Neanderthal can interbreed with a modern human, then perhaps the same classification distinctions should be applied to both. Where we talk of dog "breeds", we talk of human "races". To play Devil's advocate, one might suggest that treating the Neanderthals as some kind of primitive untermensch is nothing more than overt racism. The burden is on the taxonomists to disprove the accusation.

Updated 1 May 2022