Superior: The Fatal Return of Race Science. Angela Saini

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СКАЧАТЬ behaviour’, prompting one British archaeologist to wonder out loud whether ‘they were a lot more refined than previously thought’. An archaeologist in Spain claimed that modern humans and Neanderthals must have been ‘cognitively indistinguishable’. A few even raised the possibility that Neanderthals could have been capable of symbolic thought, pointing to freshly discovered cave markings in Spain that appear to predate the arrival of modern humans (the finding has failed to convince rock art expert Benjamin Smith).

      ‘Neanderthals are romanticised,’ I’m told by John Shea. They’re no longer around, and we don’t have a great deal of evidence about what they were like or how they lived, which means they can be whatever we want them to be. ‘We’re free to project good qualities, things we admire, and the ideal on them.’ In reality, whatever they were like, he says, ‘the interbreeding thing is more like a symbolic thing for us than it is of evolutionary consequence.’

      Yet researchers haven’t been able to help themselves looking for evolutionary consequences. One team of scientists claimed that the tiny peppering of Neanderthal DNA may have given Europeans different immune systems from Africans. Another published paper linked Neanderthal DNA to a whole host of human differences, including ‘skin tone and hair color, height, sleeping patterns, mood, and smoking status’. An American research group went so far as to try to link the amount of Neanderthal DNA people have with the shapes of their brains, implying that non-Africans may have some mental differences from Africans as a result of their interbreeding ancestors.

      For more than a century the word ‘Neanderthal’ had been synonymous with low intelligence. In the space of a decade, once the genetic link to modern Europeans was suspected and then confirmed, that all changed. In the popular press, there was a flurry of excitement about our hitherto undervalued relatives. Headlines proclaimed that ‘we haven’t been giving Neanderthals enough credit’ (Popular Science), that ‘they were too smart for their own good’ (Telegraph), that ‘humans didn’t outsmart the Neanderthals’ (Washington Post). Meanwhile a piece in the New Yorker whimsically reflected on their apparent everyday similarity to humans, including the finding that they may have suffered from psoriasis. Poor things, they even itched like us. ‘With each new discovery, the distance between them and us seems to narrow,’ wrote the author. In the popular imagination, the family tree had gained a new member.

      In January 2017, the New York Times asked: ‘Neanderthals were people, too … Why did science get them so wrong?’ This was indeed the big question. If the definition of ‘people’ had always included archaic humans, then why should Neanderthals so suddenly be accepted as ‘people’ now? And not just accepted, but elevated to the celebrity status of sadly deceased genius cousin? It wasn’t so long ago that scientists had been reluctant to accept the full humanity even of Aboriginal Australians. Gail Beck’s family had been denied their culture, treated in their own nation as unworthy of survival, their children ripped from them to be abused by strangers. In the nineteenth century, they had been lumped together with Neanderthals as evolutionary dead-ends, both destined for extinction. But now that kinship had been established between Europeans and Neanderthals, now we were all people? Now we had found our common ground?

      If it had turned out that Aboriginal Australians were the ones to possess that tiny bit of Neanderthal ancestry instead of Europeans, would our Neanderthal cousins have found themselves quite so remarkably reformed? Would they have been welcomed warmly with such tight hugs? It’s hard not to see, in the public and scientific acceptance of Neanderthals as ‘people like us’, another manifestation of the Enlightenment habit of casting humanity in the European image. In this case, Neanderthals have been drawn into the circle of humankind by virtue of being just a little related to Europeans – forgetting that a century ago, it was their supposed resemblance to indigenous Australians that helped cast actual living human beings out of the circle.

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      Milford Wolpoff is clear with me that he doesn’t think there is any biological basis to race, that there are no separate races, except as social categories. He comes across as honest and well meaning, and I believe him. But one obvious implication of his multiregional hypothesis is that if different populations became modern in their own way on their own territories, then maybe some became what we today recognise as human sooner than others. ‘A modern human from China looks different than a modern human in Europe, not in the important ways, but in other ways,’ he tells me. ‘So did one become modern earlier than the other one?’ Such a line of thinking opens a door for the politics of today to be projected onto the past, giving rise to racial speculation even if that’s not what he intends.

      There is still not enough evidence that any humans became modern outside Africa in the way that classic multiregional theory suggests. Even Wolpoff concedes that Africa must remain at the heart of the story. ‘I will never say that all of modernity is African, but you’ve gotta think that most of it is’ – even if only because in our deep past that’s where most people lived. It is impossible to airbrush Africa out of the lineage of every living person. The genetic evidence we have to date confirms that some version of an ‘Out of Africa’ scenario must have happened.

      But over time, the picture inside Africa has changed to incorporate the growing scientific realisation that our origins might have been a little fuzzier than we imagine. In the summer of 2018 Eleanor Scerri at the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford, together with a large international team of geneticists and anthropologists, published a scientific paper suggesting that rather than humans evolving from a single lineage that can be traced to a single small sub-Saharan African population, perhaps our ancestors were the product of many populations across a far wider area within Africa. These pan-African populations might have been isolated by distance or ecological barriers, and could therefore have been very different from one another. It is multiregionalism, if you like, but within one continent.

      ‘Gradually we started to emerge from the occasional mixing of the populations that were spread around,’ Scerri tells me. ‘The characteristics that define us as a species don’t appear in any single individual until much later. Before that, the characteristics of our species were distributed across the continent in different places at different times.’ Modern humans, Homo sapiens, emerged from this ‘mosaic’. ‘We need to look at all of Africa to get a good picture of origins.’ This version of our past still puts Africa at its centre, as the first home of our ancestors, but it also concedes that modern humans didn’t appear suddenly in one place looking and sounding sophisticated, thinking symbolically and producing art. There was no sudden moment at which the first modern human emerged. The characteristics of us existed in various others before us.

      ‘Humans evolved in Africa first,’ agrees anthropologist John Shea. ‘Not in just one garden of Eden, but among a broadly distributed population more or less like stops across a subway system. People were moving around along the rivers and coastlines.’ In short, we are a product of longer periods of time and space, a mixture of qualities that incubated in Africa.

      According to archaeologist Martin Porr in Australia, this version of the past is more plausible given the way that fossil evidence is scattered across the African continent. For him personally, it also resonates with indigenous Australian ways of defining what it means to be human. Up north in the Kimberley where he has done most of his work, he says, rock art is not thought of as just images upon rock. ‘The rock is actually not a rock but it’s a formation out of the dreamtime that is alive, that is in the living world, that people inhabit. And people themselves are part of that.’ Human and object, object and environment, are not separated by hard divisions the way they are in Western philosophies.

      ‘You can oscillate in and out of humanity just as objects and animals can oscillate between being human.’ An inanimate object can take on human qualities, the way a doll does to a child. In that sense, too, Porr suggests that what made a being human in the past also oscillated.

      ‘I think there’s nothing essential СКАЧАТЬ