‘There are many people who are not happy with the idea of African origin,’ says Eleanor Scerri, an archaeologist based at the University of Oxford who researches human origins. ‘They have co-opted multiregionalism to make a claim that this is a simplistic idea, that races are real, and that people who have come from a particular area have always been there.’ She tells me this appears to be prevalent not only in China, but also in Russia. ‘There is no acceptance that they were ever African.’
While for some an unwillingness to accept African origins may be motivated by racism or nationalism, it isn’t for all. There are those for whom it’s simply a way of squaring old origin stories with modern science. In Australia, for instance, Billy Griffiths tells me, many indigenous people favour the multiregional hypothesis because it sits closer to their own belief that they have been here from the very beginning. Indeed, this is an origin myth shared by cultures in many parts of the world. Until further evidence comes along (and maybe even after it does), the choice of theory may be driven as much by personal motivations as by data. The past can never be completely known, so the classic multiregional hypothesis persists despite its lack of support among experts. It has political power.
While classic multiregionalism seems unlikely to be the story of our past, the fact that we now know our ancestors bred with other kinds of archaic humans does have implications. It gives nourishment to those who would like to resurrect the multiregional hypothesis in full. It’s a factual nugget that feeds fresh speculation about the roots of racial difference. Some dogged supporters of the multiregional hypothesis can rightly claim that at least one prediction made by Wolpoff and Thorne has turned out to be correct. The pair suggested that other now extinct humans such as Neanderthals either evolved into modern humans or interbred with them. And on interbreeding, we now know from genetic evidence, the pair got it right. Some of our ancestors did mate with Neanderthals, although their contribution to people’s DNA today runs to just a few per cent, which means it couldn’t have been particularly widespread. But it did happen.
When I ask Wolpoff if he feels vindicated by this, he laughs. ‘You said vindicated. We said relief!’
Genetics has done the unthinkable, says rock art expert Benjamin Smith. ‘The thing that has worried me is the way that genetics research has moved … We thought that we were basically all the same, whether you’re a bushman in southern Africa, an Aboriginal Australian living in rural Western Australia, or someone like myself who is of European extraction. Everyone was telling us that we were all identical, all the modern science.’ The latest discoveries appear to move the story back a little closer to the nineteenth-century account. ‘This idea that some of us are more interbred with Neanderthals, some of us are more interbred with Denisovans … and Aboriginal Australians had quite a high proportion of Denisovan genetics, for example. That could lead us back to the nasty conclusion that we are all different,’ he warns. ‘I can see how it might be racialised.’
Indeed, when geneticists revealed the Neanderthal connection, personal ancestry testing companies were quick to sell services offering members of the public the opportunity to find out how much Neanderthal ancestry they might have, using data on genetic variants shared by both humans and Neanderthals – presumably in the expectation that this might mean something to everyday people. Maybe those having the test imagined they would have qualities in common with their extinct cousins.
The finding also had a peculiar effect on scientific research. Fairly soon after it was found to be modern-day Europeans who have the closer association to Neanderthals – not, as it turned out, Aboriginal Australians – the image of the Neanderthal underwent a dramatic makeover. When their remains were first discovered in 1856, the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel had suggested naming them ‘Homo stupidus’. But in the twenty-first century, these same Neanderthals, the dictionary definition of simple-minded, loutish, uncivilised thugs, have become oddly rehabilitated.
Svante Pääbo, the director of the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, who spearheaded some of the research that led to the discoveries of ancient interbreeding in the first place, was among those to marshal efforts to compare the genomes of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, in the search for what differs as well as what there is in common. This was accompanied by plenty of speculation from others. In 2018 a set of researchers in Switzerland and Germany suggested that Neanderthals actually had quite ‘sophisticated cultural 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.