Neanderthal face reconstructed by Vendramini, Copyright themandus.org

He has written a book called “Them and Us”, in which he propounds the hypothesis that Neanderthals were:

• Very different looking from most modern representations – much uglier, hairier, and far less human-like.
• That they were brutal, intelligent, tool-using predators, who preyed upon modern man in the areas where they came in contact, specifically, the Levant.
• That being the prey of Neanderthals was the most important factor in human evolution, and that it was responsible for the flowering of art and sculpture, the technological innovations in the tool making industry, perhaps even the flowering of language – all of which happened around 40,000 to 50,000 years ago.
• And not only that, it was responsible for the evolution of the human body type, including features that distinguish us from other apes, such as decreased hairiness, the development of a prominent and protruding nose, different body posture and gait, etc.
• Finally, he lists a whole range of human behavioral traits, such as preference for symmetrical faces, fear of the dark, abominable snowman myths across various cultures, etc. as some sort of racial memory of Neanderthals, whom we fear and despise, because they preyed upon us.

Now at first read, this appears to be the work of a misguided though enthusiastic kook. He seems to have no formal qualifications in biology or paleo-anthropology, and is self-taught. He makes the first few chapters of his book available online, and from a quick read, he seems very dismissive of arguments that run counter to his thesis, for example, the loss of body hair in Homo sapiens. He mentions other theories, such as the thermoregulation during the transition from forest living to life on the savannah, but he dismisses them so hastily that it looks like he doesn’t really understand them all too well. Some of the examples he gives (such as big cats are predators, and some of them live in hot climates, why didn’t they lose their hair?) have reasonable answers in the literature, but he makes no mention of them. Instead, he pushes his theory, that we lost body hair because of sexual selection – we didn’t want to look like those ugly, murderous Neanderthals – it became a taboo to look like them.

Profile reconstruction of Neanderthal face, Copyright themandus.org.

Superficially, some of this may make sense. We certainly can’t rule out the role of sexual selection in the loss of body hair. But making the jump from “might be possible in a mundane way” to “it was a response to Neanderthal predation” is a very long stretch. He does this in many, many different areas, not just body hair.

Now I understand that he offers this as a hypothesis. He is not saying this is how it happened, just that this is how it might have happened. Which is fine, but the supporting evidence is very thin. Further, in his enthusiasm to bring in every possible argument to bear, he adds so much speculative and flimsy stuff that it makes it seem like he can’t distinguish between science and fantasy. To name a few, he finds some supposedly “universal” human traits such as xenophobia, preference for bathing and cleanliness, loyalty to the group, self-sacrifice, patriarchy, aggression, and many more, and ties them all into some imagined “prey psychology”, which developed as a result of humans being the victims of Neanderthals.

To be fair, he is not alone in this. Many so called “evolutionary psychologists”, or evolutionary biologists in general, make sweeping generalizations and assumptions, based on the flimsiest evidence. To me, this is an example of science turning into social narrative, the trivialization of science. You don’t need rigor and reasoning based on solid evidence, you don’t need to be cautious, to make no claim beyond the evidence – all you need to do is to tell a good story, preferably sensational enough to get picked up by the popular press, and give you your 15 minutes of fame.

Neanderthal with spear, Copyright themandus.org.

Part of it is the problem of generalists versus specialists. Evolutionary biologists or evolutionary psychologists (*shudder*) are generalists, tying together a lot of details from anthropology, genetics, sociology, psychology, etc. to make some broad claim. But in doing so, they often lack the specialized knowledge of each individual field – they lack sufficient knowledge to not over-generalize, and sometimes end up making silly blunders. They tend to trivialize and gloss over problems that are ambiguous and not resolved, picking the interpretation that favors their own theory, often not realizing that the foundation is very shaky.

And then there are those who disconnect with reality altogether, like Vendramini, when he goes off about connecting “fear of the dark” to nocturnal predation by Neanderthals or similar arguments. The pity is that he doesn’t seem to realize what he’s doing. In trying to add weight to his arguments, he is throwing in every last thing he can think of. And so he’s mixing in things that have some weight and credibility (like, we don’t really know exactly what Neanderthals looked like, perhaps they were more ape like than modern representations; or we don’t know exactly what human-Neanderthal interactions were like, there may well have been violence), with things that are utter nonsense, such as fear of the dark. So the good stuff gets mixed with the bad, and taints everything as trash. Further, it creates a bad impression of the writer, in that he doesn’t seem to be able to distinguish science from fantasy.

To top it all, he really appears serious about this airy-fairy stuff. He has another theory (and another whole website devoted to it), which propounds something he calls “teem theory”. In simple terms, the theory is that nasty stuff that happens to us and creates powerful negative impressions gets imprinted on non-coding regions of our DNA, and thus becomes heritable to future generations. This is what he uses to explain things like fear of the dark, xenophobia, etc. – that these bad experiences with homicidal Neanderthals became imprinted on our DNA, and continues to manifest in modern behavior.

That would be a whole other discussion and a whole other blurb on this blog, so I don’t want to get into it at this time. Briefly, he looks at instinctive behavior of a certain kind, such as certain animals instinctively recognizing their predators and avoiding them, concludes that such behavior must be coded into the DNA, since it’s untaught and not learned, therefore DNA must provide a mechanism for coding our fears. Such ideas ignore a whole realm of evidence, that a huge range of predator-avoidance behaviors are in fact learned, and that interpreting specific instances where they don’t appear to be learned is over-generalizing. Yes, there are instincts that are heritable, but the actual mechanism of how they work, what exactly is coded in the DNA, are very much unknown. Making it out to be something as specific as xenophobia is very imaginative, but poor science.

Neanderthal, hunting. Copyright themandus.org.

I see evolutionary biologists make similarly specific claims, that generosity and altruism are hard coded in our genes – all sorts of stuff like that. I consider it all very unlikely, an over-specification of something much broader. Perhaps what we are inclined for is social cohesiveness, being social animals, and specific instances of it are just a manifestation, they are not individually hard coded. It’s possible to take a population of rats, breed for either aggressiveness or docility, and in a very few generations end up with two distinct populations that are behaviorally very different in that respect. It’s been done. It doesn’t show anything very specific, other than that “fight” responses and aggression are more marked in one population than another, perhaps through some simple hormonal trigger. Going from that to very specific theories about brain centers dealing with aggression, or “cooperation” or something similar is not warranted by the evidence.

While I find his theory not convincing, it did make me wonder about a few things. What exactly do we know about how Neanderthals looked like? Forensic recreations based on bones have to be somewhat an exercise in guesswork, on prior knowledge. I agree with his point that they are not at all comparable to forensic recreations of humans. After all, we have a huge body of knowledge of what humans are supposed to look like, so our guesses are founded in a great deal of prior information. We don’t have a similar body of knowledge of what Neanderthals looked like, so our reconstructions may err on side of making them look too human (or conversely, less human) than they really were.

We have no casts of their soft tissues. We don’t know how hairy they were. We don’t know how much their noses protruded. We don’t know how big their eyes were, how erect their spines, how prominent their musculature. For all of these things, we make educated guesses, but some guesses are more educated than others. For example, the musculature is hinted at by the shape of the bones, the sites of attachment of various muscles to the bones. So this kind of guess can be trusted to a greater extent than say, the guess about how hairy they were, or what their skin was like, or how symmetrical their faces were.

So our picture can’t be very precise, there is some range of possibilities, within the constraints set by the bones. Just how wide that range is, I don’t know, and I wonder if they could have looked like the pictures on his web site. I don’t personally know of any physical evidence that goes against his reconstruction. Perhaps some more knowledgeable people can add to this. But it occurs to me that if Neanderthals looked sufficiently ape-ish, sufficiently non-human, it would explain why we find no evidence of human-Neanderthal interbreeding in the genomes. It would discourage (though not necessarily prevent) the two species from interbreeding.

I look forward to more information which should become available as the Neanderthal genome is fully sequenced and annotated.