Why did we think Neanderthals weren’t smart?

H.G. Wells is probably best known for his story about an alien invasion, “The War of the Worlds,” and some of his other fantastical science fiction. But he also dabbled in some less well known prehistorical fiction. In 1921, he published a story about early modern humans and Neanderthals called “The Grisly Folk.”

In it, a group of early modern humans is wandering around. Wells makes it clear that he does not think they are especially refined. They engage in scintillating dialog like:

“Ugh!” said one abruptly and pointed.

“Ugh!” cried his brother.

But though these “true men,” as Wells calls them, were “still savages, very prone to violence and convulsive in their lusts and desires,” they were, he claims, recognizably human.

“We can understand something of what was going on in their minds, those of us who can remember the fears, desires, fancies and superstitions of our childhood,” he says.

By contrast, the antagonists of this particular story, the “grisly men,” are not recognizably human at all. These are Neanderthals, and, Wells imagines, they were less intelligent than “true men”; they “had no speech” and “did not understand.” They were less social than true men, and senselessly violent. In the story, they make a hobby of making off with the children of “true men.”

And, in Wells’ version of events, they treated their own children no better. He writes descriptions like:

“A male may have gone with a female or so; perhaps they parted in the winter and came together in the summer; when his sons grew big enough to annoy him, the grisly man killed them or drove them off. If he killed them he may have eaten them. If they escaped him they may have returned to kill him. The grisly folk may have had long unreasoning memories and very set purposes.”

In short: Wells assumed Neanderthals were unintelligent brutes. And he was absolutely not alone. For around a century, this was the prevailing narrative about Neanderthals. It was present, not just in Wells’s imagination, but in scientific papers.

In more recent decades, we’ve realized that this narrative is almost certainly incorrect. Researchers have revisited old Neanderthal bones and tools, and realized that our prior understanding of these early human peoples was misguided.

Still, the myth of the ignorant Neanderthal is so pervasive that headlines often lead with it. “Neanderthals were not less intelligent than modern humans, scientists find” reads a Guardian headline. Or, from HowStuffWorks: “More Proof Neanderthals Weren’t Stupid: They Made Their Own String.”

The question is: Where did this idea even come from? Why did researchers think Neanderthals were so unintelligent to begin with?

“It turns out there’s a really deep past to that,” says Paige Madison, a science writer who wrote a journal article on this topic, and is writing an upcoming book on human origins. “There’s a reason why we tend to think of Neanderthals as these kind of brutish, dumb, lesser Homo sapiens.”

We spoke to Madison as part of the latest episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s science podcast, which looks at how difficult it is to really know anything about Neanderthals at all.

What follows is my conversation with Madison, edited for clarity and length.

Don’t leave me in suspense. What is the deep, dark reason that we thought of Neanderthals as dumb?

So the first Neanderthal fossils [recognized as such] came out of the ground in the 1850s. And you have this confluence of factors that shaped how people were thinking about Neanderthals and even how they were thinking about themselves.

This was [a time] of colonialism, and you had all of these assumptions about what variation meant amongst humans and what it meant for potentially taking over other cultures and extracting resources from them. There were a lot of assumptions about certain groups of living humans being superior to other groups. Those assumptions made their way into the science of Neanderthals. [They] were just sort of taking [their] worldview on humans and applying it to these fossils in the past.

Is there a specific example that helps explain how the culture of the late 19th century wound up informing how people looked at bones?

At the time you had this new science that was really trying to put living humans into categories and characterize them and understand differences. The form that it really took was the measurement of skulls. There were scientists collecting skulls from all over the world and trying to measure these variations. One was the presence of a brow ridge, which is something that varies a little bit with living humans, and there was this idea that [a brow ridge] was more primitive.

And then the presence of a steep forehead. They thought that this had to do with a region of the brain that was more developed. And so they would generally categorize most Europeans, for example, as having this steep forehead, and they would use this as evidence that these groups were superior.

Those differences are minuscule and they are certainly not meaningful in terms of intellect and cognition, but at the time they were seen as incredibly meaningful and a way that you could differentiate these groups.

So Neanderthals then come out of the ground and just get slotted into that worldview. They fit in exactly the spot that these European scientists were categorizing as the lower end of human intellect. The more “primitive” end. And it automatically then carried with it the implication that these were creatures that were primitive.

Where did the perception of the hunched Neanderthal come from? Beyond just them being foolish, I feel like I also have this impression of them knuckle-dragging around. Slumping.

Yeah! So there’s this story that you will find in textbooks, where basically this one French scientist, Marcellin Boule, misinterpreted a Neanderthal skeleton. And as the story goes, he got a hold of one of the first really complete specimens and he took a look at it and decided that these were these hunched-over brutes that were so dumb that they couldn’t even really stand up straight.

But I think he kind of applied this brutish conception that had already existed and applied it to their posture. And so of course that is significant. It did partially shape how we think about them. But he certainly did not invent it by any means.

Got it. So a variety of European scientists developed this narrative about Neanderthals as dummies, people who were somehow inferior to other early modern humans. How did we start pushing back on that story?

It definitely wasn’t just one thing. Very rarely in the history of science do we ever see big conceptions shifting because of one thing. So just as Boule didn’t create this image [of the brutish Neanderthal] alone, it wasn’t destroyed by one scientist alone, but instead was more of a confluence of factors that happened all around the same time.

One of those was World War II coming to a close and the consequences of the involvement of race science in World War II being really clear. So, for a historian, it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that you see people starting to push back on this dumb, brutish, primitive conception [of Neanderthals] right around the time that people are also pushing back on the racial conceptions of living humans.

Another thing was, scientists actually got back into the museum in Paris, where the skeleton that Marcellin Boule looked at was housed … and they took a second look. They noticed that this was an elderly individual, and it was very clear that there were signs of arthritis on the bones.

So basically it was like if people 10,000 years in the future took like one super arthritic old man and were like, “Yep, every person in the 2000s was just like this 72-year-old.”

Exactly. And it’s worth mentioning, too, that the signs of arthritis on the skeleton are well recognized and Boule probably should have been able to recognize them. So it kind of goes to show how our expectations can lead us towards a certain conclusion and kind of push us in that direction even when the evidence isn’t quite there.

That’s why you see these interpretations change over time — because there’s so much else that’s going into the interpretation. It’s not as simple as looking at the bones and immediately knowing exactly what they mean. That is being filtered through tons of other information, both scientific and cultural. You know, we just can’t turn off that lens at any given moment.

So… it’s kind of like Boule’s ideas in his time were easily accepted because they made sense in the cultural context that they were a part of, but later, they were rejected, in part because of evidence and also in part maybe because the narrative had shifted. People were questioning race science anyway. They were starting to question race science applied to Neanderthals. And so suddenly it’s almost like it opened up space to also question this image that Boule had [of Neanderthals]?

Exactly. Suddenly the earlier ideas about Neanderthals just didn’t make as much sense.

It sounds like what you’re saying is that our perception of Neanderthals has always been less about Neanderthals and more about ourselves, or our current cultural moment? Like, if you read what people historically have written about Neanderthals, you learn less about Neanderthals and you just learn more about the scientists and the society that they live in?

That’s exactly what I would argue. Some scholars have said that it’s a little bit like holding a mirror up to ourselves, because Neanderthals were so closely related to humans living today.

I think what’s interesting about it — and you’ll hear this from a lot of historians of science — is that it’s much easier to see that in the past, to accuse them of making mistakes given their biases or their cultural or political leanings, but in fact, what most historians and philosophers of science would argue is that that is still going on. It’s just harder to see it in the present.

How do modern scientists guard against this in their attempts to better understand Neanderthals?

I think the best thing that most scientists can do at this point is to be very explicit about what their biases could be, what the limitations might be, and really just put all of that out on the table so that we can examine it the best that we can.

One really strong way that I see this playing out in the science is [scientists] recognizing that their worldviews are shaping the kinds of questions that they’re asking and the ways they’re asking those questions.

So, for example, if you find artwork in a cave, and you assume that artwork is something that only Homo sapiens have done and that Neanderthals were not capable of it … then you never even ask the question [“could Neanderthals have made this?”]. You just ask “Which Homo sapiens did this and when?”

But if you come into a cave and you see that there’s art in there, you can ask, “Who did this?” in a more open way.

That’s something I work with scientists [on] a lot — just thinking about the ways that their starting points, their questions, have already either opened or closed certain possibilities.