Dave Frayer: Who’re You Calling a Neanderthal?

Palaeoanthropologist Dave Frayer has written a nice piece in—yes, I know I said would not post from here but I have to, just this once—The New York Times, on the Neandertal in modern society. Interestingly, he uses the "th" spelling, which is uncommon among palaeoanthropologists who deal with this area.  He writes:

The “Neanderthals are inferior” attitude traces back to their earliest descriptions in the mid-1800s when the first Neanderthal was labeled as “freak” or an “idiot” or “incapable of moral and religious conception.” For many, the discoveries after 1865 confirmed these labels. Even the majority of human paleontologists supported this view.

As many palaeoanthropologists have pointed out, the principle reason for this is that they did not want to consider the fact that the Neandertals might be ancestral to modern humans.  Aside from mentioning the recent genetic studies that find Neandertal gene markers in modern humans, Frayer mentions something not explicated in recent news stories about Neandertals: language:

Another key to the language question is brain lateralization. Language is mostly on the left side, in the ear region. Someone who has suffered a stroke in this region often has impaired language ability, as well as paralysis on the right side of the body, because the left side of the brain controls that, too.

This lateralization is a hallmark of modern humans and is reflected in handedness. All humans have a right-hand-to-left-hand ratio of 9 to 1. Our nearest ape relatives lack this hand laterality, along with the modern FOXP2 sequence, but Neanderthals had both. Their 9-to-1 ratio was identical to all modern humans. The implication for all this is that Neanderthals could speak.

This is critically important to the idea of Neandertals being like us.  We often think of the hallmark of humanity is a fully-formed complex language that we do not share with other primates or prehistoric hominin species.  This is, it seems, in error.  As Frayer notes, there is no way to know what they talked about but it is clear that they did.  He finishes with an admonishment for all of us:

Neanderthals lived much richer lives than ever presumed. They were not exactly like us, but they bred with us and their genes and behavior are part of our heritage. So, be careful when you call someone a Neanderthal. You’re speaking about part of yourself.