Neanderthals in popular culture

Popular culture has served up portrayals of Neanderthals since the early 20th century. Early depictions conveyed and perpetuated notions of proverbially crude, low-browed cavemen; since the latter part of the 20th century, some depictions have modeled more sympathetic reconstructions of the genus ''Homo'' in the Middle Paleolithic era.
In popular idiom, people sometimes use the word "Neanderthal" as an insult - to suggest that a person so designated combines a deficiency in intelligence and a tendency to use brute force. The term may also imply that a person is old-fashioned or attached to outdated ideas, much in the same way as the terms "dinosaur" or "Yahoo".

A number of sympathetic literary portrayals of Neanderthals exist, as in the 1955 novel ''The Inheritors'' by William Golding, Isaac Asimov's 1958 short story "The Ugly Little Boy", or the more serious treatment by Finnish paleontologist Björn Kurtén (in several works including ''Dance of the Tiger'' (1978)) - compare British psychologist Stan Gooch's non-fiction works on the hybrid-origin theory of humans.

Origins

The contemporary perception of Neanderthals and their stereotypical portrayal has its origins in 19th century Europe. Naturalists and anthropologists were confronted with an increasing number of fossilized bones that did not match any known taxon. Carl Linnaeus' Systema Naturae of 1758 in which he had ''Homo sapiens'' introduced as a species without diagnosis and description, was the authoritative encyclopedia of the time. The notion of extinct species was unheard of and if so, would have contradicted the paradigm of the immutability of species and the physical world, which was the infallible product of a single and deliberate act of a creator god.
Most scholars simply declared the early Neanderthal fossils to be representatives of early "races" of modern man. Thomas Henry Huxley, a future supporter of Darwin's theory of evolution, saw in the Engis 2 fossil a "man of low degree of civilization". The discovery in the Neandertal he interpreted as to be within the range of variation of modern humans.

In mid 19th century Germany biological sciences were dominated by Rudolf Virchow, who described the bones as a "remarkable individual phenomenon" and as "plausible individual deformation". This statement is the reason why the characteristics of the Neanderthals were perceived as a form of pathological skeleton change of modern man in German-speaking countries for many years to come.

August Franz Josef Karl Mayer, an associate of Virchow emphasizes disease, prolonged pain and struggle on comparison with modern human features. "He confirmed the Neanderthal's rachitic changes in bone development .. Mayer argued among other things, that the thigh - and pelvic bones of Neanderthal man were shaped like those of someone who had spent all his life on horseback. The broken right arm of the individual had only healed very badly and the resulting permanent worry lines about the pain were the reason for the distinguished brow ridges. The skeleton was, he speculated, that of a mounted Russian Cossack, who had roamed the region in 1813/14 during the turmoils of the wars of liberation from Napoleon." Friedemann Schrenk, Stephanie Müller: ''Die Neandertaler'', S. 16

Arthur Keith of Britain and Marcellin Boule of France, were both senior members of their respective national paleontological institutes and among the most eminent paleoanthropologists of the early 20th century. Both men argued that this "primitive" Neanderthal could not be a direct ancestor of modern man. As a result, the museum's copy of the almost complete Neanderthal fossil of La Chapelle-aux-Saints was inaccurately mounted in an exaggerated crooked pose with a deformed and heavily curved spine and legs buckled. Boule commissioned the first illustrations of Neanderthal where he was characterized as a hairy gorilla-like figure with opposable toes, based on a skeleton that was already distorted with arthritis.Hammond M (1982). The Expulsion of Neanderthals from Human Ancestry: Marcellin Boule and the Social Context of Scientific Research. Social Studies of Science, 12 (1): 1-36.

Portrayals in text

Novels (fiction)

* Edison Marshall's 1935 novel ''Dian of the Lost Land'' features Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons as traditional enemies surviving in a warm valley of Antarctica.
* Philip K. Dick's novel '' The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike'' uses as a plot device the discovery of a Neanderthal skull in the United States. Neanderthals were also shown as living in primitive towns in the rural areas of the former United States in his book '' The Simulacra''. At the later part of this book, the re-emerging Neanderthals (or "chuppers") are happy at the outbreak of nuclear war, hoping that self-destruction of Homo sapiens might give them another opportunity to dominate Earth.
* In Mary Renault's ''The Bull from the Sea'', the Kentaurs are portrayed as Neanderthals.
* Clifford D. Simak's 1968 novel '' The Goblin Reservation'' features a Neanderthal named Alley Oop (after the eponymous comic strip) brought into the future for study purposes. The novel features him approximately twenty years later. By then, he is educated enough to be working on a doctoral thesis, but still has trouble with certain social aspects, possessing, for example, a habit of breaking into closed stores when hungry and paying compensation later.
* Michael Crichton's 1976 novel ''Eaters of the Dead'' places a small Neanderthal population in Northern Europe as the source of the battles recorded in Beowulf. This story was also the basis for a motion picture ''The 13th Warrior'' (1999), though the word "Neanderthals" was never mentioned in the movie.
*''Dance of the Tiger'' by professional paleontologist Björn Kurtén, follows interactions between European ''Homo sapiens'' and Neanderthals, possible worldviews and origins for troll mythology.
* The novel '' Glory Lane'' by Alan Dean Foster involves spacefaring Neanderthals who were removed from Earth by powerful aliens to save them from extinction.
* Colin Wilson discusses evidence and theories of Neanderthal survival into the modern age, including the possibility of their recent breeding with humans, in his book ''Unsolved Mysteries''.
* The clash between the last of the Neanderthals and the emerging race of ''Homo sapiens'' is portrayed in A.A. Attanasio's 1991 novel ''Hunting the Ghost Dancer''.
* Harry Turtledove's novella '' Down in the Bottomlands'' is set in an alternate timeline where the Mediterranean Sea has stayed dry since the Miocene, and Europe is still inhabited by ''Homo neanderthalensis'', referred to in the story as "Strongbrows" and described as "shorter, stockier, fairer", than the "Highhead" people (presumably analogous to ''Homo sapiens'').
* In John Darnton's 1996 novel ''Neanderthal'', a group of surviving Neanderthals is discovered in the mountains of Afghanistan. In the novel, Neanderthals are said to possess the ability to read minds due to their larger cranial capacity, but unlike Cro-Magnons, lacked the capability of deception on more than two levels at a time. The author blamed the near-extinction of the Neanderthals on this shortcoming.
* Joan Dahr Lambert's novel ''Circles of Stone'' tells the story of a band of early ''Homo sapiens'' teaming up with a remnant band of Neanderthals to defeat a hostile band of ''H.sapiens'' who are trying to take over their territory. Set in the Pyrenees, Neanderthals are dying out because they cannot give birth to enough children; their infant heads are often too big.
* In '' The Silk Code'' by Paul Levinson (winner of 1999 Locus Award for Best First Novel), Neanderthals are still living in Basque country in 750 AD, and a few survive in the present world.
* In the novel ''Raising Abel'', W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear tell of Neanderthals cloned back into existence in modern times, who are the targets of assassination attempts by a Christian fundamentalist creationist sect.
* In ''Darwin's Radio'' by Greg Bear (winner of 2003 Nebula Award), a phenomenon which caused the Neanderthals to die off now threatens modern humans.
* Stephen Baxter's '' Manifold: Origin'' prominently features Neanderthals from an alternate timeline. This is a sequel to '' Manifold: Space'' where Neanderthal characters also appear, in a narrower context, as genetically engineered slave laborers.
* The novel '' Heaven'' by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen features spacefaring Neanderthals who were removed from Earth by powerful aliens for unspecified reasons.
* In S. M. Stirling's novel '' The Sky People'', Neanderthals inhabit an alternate-history Venus.
* In ''N-words'' by Ted Kosmatka, Neanderthals are resurrected by South Korean scientists ''en masse'' and intermarry with human.
* Stephen Baxter wrote ''The Lingering Joy'', a sequel to Poul Anderson's "The Long Remembering" (see above). In a world on the brink of destruction in nuclear war, the daughter of the earlier story's protagonist embarks on the same kind of "mental time travel" as her father did many years before. Her main motivation is religious: to find out whether the Incarnation of Jesus was a single and unique event, or if God had before incarnated among the Neanderthals, to bring salvation to them, too.
* In ''Savage Eden'' by Nathan Martinez, the last living Neanderthal girl and a runaway autistic boy bond and learn to survive together as their hidden wilderness in the Caucasus Mountains is invaded by human death squads and armies on the eve of global nuclear war.
*In his Sigma Force novel ''The Bone Labyrinth'', James Rollins describes the Watchers, a superior hybrid species of early humans and Neanderthals who disseminated knowledge and possibly interbred with people throughout the world. They also created the protected, hidden city of Atlantis, located in Ecuador.
* In 2017, ''The Last Neanderthal'' by Claire Cameron was published.
* In 2018, Jacques Gaubil published ''L'homme de Grand Soleil'', a novel about the discovery of a Neanderthal living in the frigid northern Quebec and the chain of events that ensues, effectively a portrait of modern humans.

Short stories

* Neanderthals appear in H. G. Wells