Neanderthals

This week in physical anthropology we are covering Neanderthal people, and much has been learned about them in just the last decade.

While it is true that there has been practically no evidence found of anything we might consider 'art' in Neanderthal contexts, nevetheless their tool and weapon technology suggests that these were not stupid people. Evidence also suggests that they organized large hunts, and killed their prey with sophisticated stone tools and hafted spears. They lived in rock shelters where they sometimes made partition walls, pebble flooring, and garbage pits. Endocasts of their skulls show that they had the mental capability to speak, as do the openings allowing nerves to the tongue, and hyoid bones in their throats. In total, it is likely that these people could speak. And so, in direct contrast to pop culture's view of Neanderthal as a bumbling, stupid, hairy, backward, oaf, a more accurate assessment is of a people who had a thriving, arctic culture with a spoken language.

For the past decade or so labs around the world have been 'cloning' viable Neanderthal tissue, so that we now know the general parameters of the Neanderthal genome. It turns out that genetically Neanderthal is not close enough to us to be our direct ancestor, and is rather an off-shoot of Homo erectus localized in Europe and Western Asia that died out about 30,000 years ago. Probably temperature changes in the Late Pleistocene eliminated the herds of herbivores central to Neanderthals' survival, and together with mammals like the wooly rhino, Neanderthals became extinct. What we do know for certain is that we are not descended from Neanderthals.

Such cloning technology may one day allow us to clone an entire Neanderthal from its DNA. Such a possibility poses for us the question as to whether or not this would be a good thing. Mary Shelley was in no two minds about it when she had Dr. Frankenstein track down his 'monster' all the way to the arctic wastes in order to dispatch it once and for all. Michael Creighton also posed a similar situation when the dinosaurs brought to life from their DNA took the upper hand and killed or chased away the humans from Jurassic Park.

At the same time, we have been domesticating and manipulating nature at least since the beginning of food production, 10,000 years ago. Might this simply be the next step? Is it more ethical to clone new strains of wheat and tomatoes for our consumption than it is to raise a Neanderthal baby to adulthood? If so, why? Perhaps a line in the sand might be that if something has the potential for a neo-cortex, and all that comes with it, such as feelings and conscious thoughts, we ought not to tamper with it. Generally, our culture is passive to the steady advances in genetically modified food, but is pro-active and angry when something like a dolphin is killed for food. Would our culture feel the same if, let's say, a chimpanzee was cloned for study? Even though we now know that Neanderthal is not in our direct line, is it still just a bit too close to clone?