Unexplainable - Who are you calling a Neanderthal?

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

Rumors of Neanderthal brutishness have been greatly exaggerated. Guest: Paige Madison, science writer For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠vox.com/members Help us plan for the future of Unexplainable by filling out a brief survey: ⁠⁠⁠⁠voxmedia.com/survey⁠⁠⁠⁠. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, I'm Matt Bouchelle, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYP. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, don't swipe away. It's called, That Sounds Like a Lot. You know that feeling when you check your phone, read a few headlines and think, that sounds like a lot. I can't do this. Well, I can, and I'm going to get into it every Friday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world. And then I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or, honestly, anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to get the news.

but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it. That sounds like a lot coming May 1st, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today on Unexplainable, we've got a big announcement. In the vast audio wilderness, something peculiar is afoot. This is unexplainable. Nestled in the dense thickets of your podcast feed,

a science show is growing. Unexplainable. Expanding. This is Unexplainable. Listen closely, and you can even hear it. multiply. Unexplan. Suddenly, from one, there are two more.

Unexplainable. Twice a week. Many unexplainable. Follow for new episodes every Monday and Wednesday. All right. Hello, Bird. Hello, Noah. What are we talking about?

Okay, so as you know, we recently did a whole episode on Neanderthals. Neanderthals. Neanderthals. Yes. But what you might not know is how to pronounce Neanderthals. What you might not know is that I also went on kind of a, I guess like a side quest is the best way to describe it for that episode. So I was talking to like a bunch of different people sort of about how we'd perceived

Neanderthals over time, essentially. Okay. So if I were to ask you sort of what, classic view of Neanderthals was. What would you say? Oh, my brain immediately goes to the Geico commercial, I think. It's so easy to use geico.com, a caveman could do it. Yeah, I think that's a good example, actually, because the whole joke of those commercials

is that, you know, you have so easy a caveman can do it. And then you have a guy who looks a lot like our classic image of a Neanderthal, right, being like, what do you mean? Like, I'm super competent. Walking up, right, discovering fire. But it turns out that these commercials, like, kind of have a point. Like, there are headlines about how Neanderthals weren't less intelligent than early modern humans. Or, you know, just Neanderthals weren't stupid, essentially.

Were these articles written by the caveman from Geico? No, it's just a coincidence that the byline is H. Neanderthalensis. But so I was reading through these various articles about Neanderthal intelligence, and I started to wonder essentially, why do we think they're stupid? Like, where did this idea even come from to begin with? And it turns out there's a really deep path to that. There's a very strong reason why we tend to think of Neanderthals as these kind of brutish, dumb, lesser homo sapiens. So I reached out to Paige Madison, who's a science writer, but she also wrote. her PhD thesis on our perception of Neanderthals.

And she says that there's this kind of like a common story that a lot of people point to to explain why we think Neanderthals are dumb. And it starts with this like anthropologist slash paleontologist slash geologist guy named Marconin Boulle. And so as the story goes, this French scientist Marcellan Boulle misinterpreted a Neanderthal skeleton. So this was the early 20th century, and people had been kind of digging up bits and pieces of Neanderthals for a while. But this time, some diggers had found a more complete skeleton in Rance.

And they sent this Neanderthal skeleton to Boul, who was at the Natural History Museum in Paris. He got a hold of one of the first really complete specimens, and he took a look at it and decided that these were these hunched over brutes that were so dumb that they couldn't even really stand up straight. And again, as the story goes, this is what people ran with. Like, newspapers spread Bois version of Neanderthals, and that's how it became sort of the dominant perception. And then decades later, in the late 1950s, people re-examine the skeletons, and were essentially like, so this is the skeleton of an old man with arthritis.

So, like, this is kind of the equivalent of basically, like, if someone were trying to figure out, like, what were people like in the 21st century? And they only looked at, like, the skeleton of one old man. Or, like, if someone found, like, Shaq's skeleton, you'd be like, oh, yeah, humans. They're all, like, seven feet tall. Exactly. So this Bull story is, it's compelling, right? And it is true that Bull did publish this paper in the early 1900s that his vision of the. the arthritic Neanderthal was republished by newspapers, right?

It did contribute to the narrative that Neanderthals were stupid. But Page says that his image of the sort of brutish Neanderthal is actually just one part of a much larger story here. Fool didn't create this image alone. It was more of a confluence of factors that happened all around the same time. She says instead of looking at sort of one scientist, it's actually more interesting to kind of look at the, the scientific waters that he was swimming in.

And her contention is that those scientific waters were actually already assuming, essentially, that Neanderthals were brutish and boorish and stupid at the time. Interesting. So essentially, like, when Europeans first got interested in Neanderthal skulls, like the middle of the 1800s, people were also getting into sort of craniometry. You know what craniometry is, right?

That's like the skull measuring, thing that I guess the Nazis, I tend to associate with the Nazis, which I guess is later, but the idea is they would measure skull sizes of various ethnic groups, and they would say that, oh, we can determine your ethnic group based on the shape and size of your skull, and that correlates with how smart you are or how good of a person you are or how much you deserve to live. Right. And I guess to be sort of abundantly clear here, right, like we do now know that skull measuring is not a useful way of understanding people's mental capacity or their other traits, right? But if we go back to the 19th century, this logic was really popular, right?

Like a lot of scientists had bought into this. And so they would look at, for example, brow ridges. And so the idea was that, like, if you had a prominent brow ridge, you were somehow more primitive. And then if you had like a steep forehead, say, they thought your brain. was more developed. And so scientists would argue that, like, Europeans were superior because their foreheads were steeper. And again, these are features that we know, first of all, those differences are minuscule, and they are certainly not meaningful in terms of intellect and cognition. But at the time, they were seen as incredibly meaningful in a way that you could differentiate

these different groups. And Neanderthal skulls, as they were digging them up, they kind of fit perfectly into this narrative. They fit in existence. They fit in existence. the spot that these European scientists were categorizing as the lower end of human intellect and sort of the more primitive end. So basically, like, when this scientist, Boo, like, looks at this Neanderthal skeleton, he's kind of seeing, like, what he expects to see in the context of, like, the science leading up to this is essentially saying, like, hey, Neanderthals seem to be kind of stupid, and he's like, yeah, and they hunched, too.

Yeah. I think what he did was he took it one step further. So he kind of applied this brutish conception that had already existed and applied it to their posture. And so, of course, yes, that is significant. It did partially shape how we think about them. But he certainly did not invent it by any means. And it's worth mentioning, too, that the signs of arthritis on the skeleton are well recognized. And Boole probably should have been able to recognize them.

I mean, there's no reason given his training that he wouldn't. So it kind of goes to show how our. expectations can lead us towards a certain conclusion and kind of like push us in that direction, even when, you know, the evidence isn't quite there. And that's why you see these interpretations change over time, right? Is because there's so much else that's going into the interpretation. It's not as simple as looking at the bones and immediately knowing exactly what they meant, but that is being filtered through, you know, tons of other information, both scientific and cultural. You know, we just can't turn off that lens at any given moment. So this is like,

this is just saying it's not this one scientist's fault. It's sort of like, why was everyone else around so ready to believe this? It's because everyone kind of was in the same context. Right. And this idea, it's reinforced if you look at the reexamination of the skeleton that happened later on. So different historians will suggest different times for when people sort of started changing their perspective on Neanderthals and Neanderthal intelligence, but for Paige, she starts to see people rethinking things after World War II. And again, like the Nazis were involved in this project, right, of skull measuring and using those measurements to justify horrific things, horrific race categorization. And so it's not that surprising to Page as a historian

that as you start to have people after the war re-evaluating skull measurement science, that's also when you start to see people maybe changing their perspectives or starting to change their perspectives on Neanderthals as well. So you just had all of these factors kind of lining up that suddenly the earlier ideas about Neanderthals just didn't make as much sense. That's fascinating. I guess the place that leaves me is just, I guess I want to know.

How do you change the social context? I assume you can't. And then how do you know when you're in a social context? Are you asking basically like, what do we do about current? Yeah, like, how do we know if what we think of Neanderthals right now is right? Or anything is right. If we're not sure about the water, we're swimming in. Yeah, I mean, great question.

Stay tuned. It's all about you. and when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level. With a private wing to check in in your own security channel at London Heathrow, you can glide from your car to their clubhouse, a destination in its own right in 10 minutes or less.

On board, you can treat yourself to your own private suite to stretch out in, with lots of storage space, a lie flat bed, and delicious dining from beginning to end. Just be sure to leave room for dessert. They're mile high tea with all the little, cakes and sandwiches is a showstopper. Go to virginatlantic.com to learn more. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic,

and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Follow Pretty Tough wherever you get your podcasts. I'm a Sted Hearnden, and this is America actually. We're all talking to each other to see what did we do wrong? What did we not see? I'm in Washington, D.C. this week to interview Ruben Gallego.

He's a Democratic senator from Arizona, and he's been thinking openly about running for higher office. But he's recently run into some hot water because of his connection to Congressman Eric Swalwell. I have to learn from this, and I will learn from this. But, you know, for me, it's not a 2028. question. It's about what it means to be a better first boss in my office and also a better senator to my constituents.

This week on America, actually, we asked Gallego about predatory behavior in Washington. His plans for immigration reform and more. Before the break, you basically ask like, how do we know we're not being misled by our own cultural context, right?

And when I asked Paige this question, she was essentially like, yeah, we live in a society. You know, like, Inevitably, we're going to have some degree of our cultural moment acting as the lens that we see through. And she even said that, you know, some scholars say that our ideas about Neanderthals have often said more about us than they have about Neanderthals. It's a little bit like holding a mirror up to ourselves. But she also says that there are ways to try and kind of avoid this trap. Okay.

So one way that she describes is just keeping your questions really broad. So, for example, if you find artwork in a cave and you assume that artwork is something that only Homo sapiens have done and that Neanderthals were not capable of it, then you never even ask that question. You just ask which Homo sapiens did this and when. But if the worldview has changed and you come into a cave and you see that there's art in there, you can then ask who did this in a more open way. And that's something I work with with scientists a lot, is just thinking about the ways that they're just their starting points,

their questions, have already either opened or closed certain possibilities. And then I also talked to a paleoanthropologist named Elen Ruggier. So she is, like, actively studying early modern humans and Neanderthals. And I asked her basically, like, how do you avoid having your cultural assumptions color your science, right? Hmm. And she said that one of the main things that scientists can do is to look for evidence that doesn't fit what they'll assume they'll find and kind of zero in on that.

Like specifically look for things that contradicts your expectations. Or like, if you see them, don't dismiss them, right? So she gave me this really basic example from her work, kind of, where she was looking through a cave. and she found some bones, and she sent them out to be carbon-dated, and when they came back, they were younger than she expected them to be. And she said that she could have just dismissed it, right? She could have said, that's not possible. There must have been contamination at the lab or something, like, forget about these bones. But instead, she kind of zeroed in on these surprising dates and ended up realizing that her initial assumptions about who had lived in this cave and when they'd lived there,

just hadn't been right. And so, like, this is a really small example, but it's part of that overall thesis she has that, like, one of the few ways that you can kind of check your biases is to look for pieces of evidence that don't fit with your biases and then take those pieces of evidence seriously. Interesting. I mean, that does feel, I got to say,

it feels like easier said than done. I mean, if I were going to make a GEICO commercial for science, it would be science. So difficult, perhaps even a Neanderthal, despite all of its potential sophistication and intelligence, might have difficulty doing it. Oh, my God. And that's why I don't work in advertising.

Paige Madison is a science writer who wrote a journal article on this topic, and she's writing an upcoming book on human origins. This episode was produced by me, Bird Pinkerton. It was edited by Meredith Hodding, not with help from Jorge Just. Mera also runs the show. Noam Hassanfeld writes the music. Christian Ayala does our mixing in our sound design. Melissa Hirsch, check the facts. Julia Longoria is the fact that glass frogs can have transparent skin. And as always, we are grateful to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show. This was our first ever Monday episode.

Do you have thoughts about how it went? Do you have ideas for future Monday episodes? Write in to Unexplanable. at Vox.com. If you want to support our show and help us keep making it, please join our membership program. That's at Vox.com slash members. Vox.com slash members. You can also support us by leaving us a nice review or a rating or just by telling people in your life to listen. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and we will be back on Wednesday.