11. Wesley Bernardini, “North, South, Center: An Outline of Hopi Ethnogenesis,” in Religious Transformation in the Late Pre-Hispanic Pueblo World, ed. Donna M. Glowacki and Scott Van Keuren (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011), 196–220; Thomas E. Sheridan et al., eds., Moquis and Kastiilam: Hopis, Spaniards, and the Trauma of History, vol. 2 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020).
12. Wesley Bernardini et al., Becoming Hopi: A History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021).
13. Wesley Bernardini, Hopi Oral Tradition and the Archaeology of Identity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005); Paulette F. C. Steeves, The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021); Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
14. David Hurst Thomas, “A Shoshonean Prayerstone Hypothesis: Ritual Cartographies of Great Basin Incised Stones,” American Antiquity 84, no. 1 (2019): 1–25; Peter M. Whiteley, “Archaeology and Oral Tradition: The Scientific Importance of Dialogue,” American Antiquity 67, no. 3 (2002): 405–415.
15. Jesse Walter Fewkes, “Property-Right in Eagles among the Hopi,” American Anthropologist 2, no. 4 (1900): 690–707.
16. Mischa Titiev, “Old Oraibi: A Study of the Hopi Indians of Third Mesa,” Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 22, no. 1 (1944).
17. T. J. Ferguson, ed., Yep Hisat Hoopoq’yaqam Yeesiwa (Hopi Ancestors Were Once Here): Hopi-Hohokam Cultural Affiliation Study (Kykotsmovi: Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, 2003).
18. T. J. Ferguson and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, History Is in the Land: Multivocal Tribal Traditions in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).
19. Wesley Bernardini, “Identity as History: Hopi Clans and the Curation of Oral Tradition,” Journal of Anthropological Research 64, no. 4 (2008): 483–509.
20. Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, “The Past Is Now: Hopi Connections to Ancient Times and Places,” in Movement, Connectivity, and Landscape Change in the Ancient Southwest: Proceedings of the Southwest Symposium, ed. Margaret C. Nelson and Colleen Strawhacker (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2011), 443–455.
21. The Hopi people and other Pueblo tribes see sites such as Chaco Canyon as ancestral to them, while the Navajo Nation—the largest tribe in the United States, with a reservation that entirely surrounds the Hopi Reservation—also claims affiliation to it.
22. Nanibaa’ A. Garrison, “Genomic Justice for Native Americans: Impact of the Havasupai Case on Genetic Research,” Science, Technology and Human Values 38, no. 2 (2013): 201–223.
23. Chip Colwell, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
24. Armand Minthorn, “Bringing the Ancient One Home: Genetic Data and the Case for Repatriation Kennewick Man,” in DNA and Indigeneity: The Changing Role of Genetics in Indigenous Rights, Tribal Belonging, and Repatriation, ed. Alexa Walker, Brian Egan, and George Nicholas (Burnaby, BC: Simon Fraser University, 2015), 10–12.
25. For some of these cases, see Joanne L. Wright et al., “Ancient Nuclear Genomes Enable Repatriation of Indigenous Human Remains,” Science Advances 12, no. 4 (2018): 1–12; Alissa L. Severson et al., “Ancient and Modern Genomics of the Ohlone Indigenous Population of California,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 13 (2022): 1–10.
26. Douglas J. Kennett et al., “Archaeogenomic Evidence Reveals Prehistoric Matrilineal Dynasty,” Nature Communications 8, no. 14115 (2017): 1–9; Amanda Daniela Cortez et al., “An Ethical Crisis in Ancient DNA Research: Insights from the Chaco Canyon Controversy as a Case Study,” Journal of Social Archaeology 21, no. 2 (2021): 157–178.
5 Whitewashing the Neanderthal: Doing Time with Ancient DNA
Amade M’charek
In the summer of 2016, I was with my family in France, where we visited the National Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies.1 At the entrance, I was struck by a reconstruction of an adult Neanderthal man and a child (figure 5.1). Both were sitting on the floor in scenery that gave the impression of a father and a son talking to each other about the things of life. As I was studying this scene, I started to realize how it evoked a sense of proximity rather than distance, and familiarity instead of strangeness. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the reconstructions cast the Neanderthal as scarcely haired and as almost transparently white.
Figure 5.1
Author studying the Neanderthal reconstructions in the Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies, France.
Slowly, it dawned on me that ancient DNA research had started to do its job. With the discovery of our genetic relationship with this hominid group, the Neanderthal, traditionally depicted as brutal, dumb, darkish, heavily furred, and often ape-like, has become portrayed as a human, even European. At the Neanderthal Museum in the German town of Mettmann, we can even admire the Neanderthal in a suit in a display called “Meet Mr. 4%” (figure 5.2).2 Seeing him in this CEO-like outfit, one is tempted to think his Tesla is parked just outside the museum.
Figure 5.2
Mr. 4% at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany.
It seems that as an effect of aDNA, the Neanderthal and its relation to humans has radically changed, from the apelike appearance described by French paleontologist Marcellin Boule and depicted by Czech artist Frank Kupta (figure 5.3) at the beginning of the twentieth century to a contemporary white man, a relative.3 These depictions make visible to the naked eye how the Neanderthal has been drawn into a racial politics.
Figure 5.3
The Neanderthal as depicted (a) by German paleoanthropologist Hermann Schaaffhausen in 1876/1888, and (b) by Czech artist Frank Kupta in 1909.
To be sure, I see value in the way such reconstructions manage to generate attention from a broad audience. Evoking curiosity and familiarity is an interesting way of engaging a public with the past and the results of scientific inquiry. But these reconstructions are not neutral. The niceness of the Neanderthal, and the way this hominin group is embraced and drawn into our family, are troubling. By highlighting similarities, the Neanderthal is made part of an us-ness which stands in contrast to conventional depictions of the Neanderthal as alien. Through this change of appearance—the whitening and acculturalization of the Neanderthal, as well as the assumed genetic relatedness—a sameness is produced. Moreover, in this way, the Neanderthal is made part of one single story in which everything is subsumed into a European linear temporality where “we” are located at the end, as the crown of evolution.
The Danger of a Single Story
In her famous TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie unravels the politics of homogenizing narratives, in particular Eurocentric stories about certain people, and their lives and cultures, in places far off the Center. This is a politics that reduces Europe’s other to one single identity, a stereotype. “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete,” Adichie says. “They make one story become the only story.”4
Here, I would like to add that single stories tend to rely on a particular rendering of time—a linear modernist time axis on which events and especially people and their various kinds can be ordered.5 At the end of the line, “the now,” in the words of Homi Bhabha, there is us, the West, Europe.6 European man. The line means that complexities are subsumed in favor of progressive development, that is, all entities of humans and nonhumans develop and move according to one single tempo and can be located at different points on the line. So it naturalizes time as a given, rather than an effect.7 But it also naturalizes relations and our narratives of those relations. When I arrived in the Netherlands as a young girl—an immigrant daughter eleven years old—I was asked in school where I was from. “Tunisia,” I said. “Ah, Tunisia, you are fifty years behind, then,” my schoolteacher responded. Although I was there with my classmates, I was actually fifty years behind them.
This is the trouble that I address in this chapter. It is concerned with time and temporalities in relation to race, through the case of the Neanderthal. I will proceed in three steps. First, I take you to the lab where we will attend to laboratory practice and how the genetic study of the Neanderthal started to take shape. Second, I elaborate theoretically on my analysis of race in relation to time as well as to sameness and resemblance. Finally, I analyze a postcard featuring a reconstruction of the “the human family,” organized more or less around the Neanderthal. Here, I will use the postcard to elaborate on the cultural effect of genetic knowledge in relation to race.
Encountering the Neanderthal in the Lab
It is November 14, 1996, and we are at the laboratory for evolution and human genetics in Munich, the former lab of Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo. That morning I entered the lab, where I had my bench.8 I had already put my coat and bag in the locker down the hall, had a quick look at my lab journal to recall the experiments that I had planned for that day, and went to get myself a cup of coffee. As usual, I walked through the small writing room, situated between the lab and the so called “tea room.” I noticed champagne glasses, empty bottles, packs of cigarettes, and full ashtrays all scattered about the long writing desk. The cigarettes especially drew my attention. For people may have dinner in the lab, or sleep in the lab, but smoking in the lab? That just never happened. A colleague came in and asked me whether I had heard about Matthias Krings, one of the population geneticists working in the lab. There had been a party last night, she told me, because Krings had sequenced the Neanderthal for the second time and found the same mitochondrial DNA sequence.
I became aware of Matthias’s absence. Normally, he would be working day and night. My colleague went on telling me about the excitement of the event and described how Krings and Ralf Schmitz, the curator of the Landesmuseum in Bonn, who had made the Neanderthal bones available, were looking attentively at the computer screen while the gel was run on the so-called ALF (automated laser fluorescent) sequencer.9 As the data became visible, the sequence turned out to be the same as the previous one that Matthias had found. This indicated that they were looking at the first ever mitochondrial DNA sequence of a Neanderthal. They called Svante, who rushed back to the lab. After this, they decided to have a small party.
This was for many reasons a moment worth celebrating. First, obtaining hominin DNA from 40,000-year-old fossilized bones is already a challenge. To then go on and map the DNA is a true technical feat. The problem with ancient DNA is that it is often degraded, for example because it is cut into small pieces by bacteria that seize organisms from the moment of death. So, in practice, researchers usually find the DNA of these bacteria or, through contamination, the DNA of modern humans, like the researchers’, or anyone else who has been in contact with the material. The problem of contamination was a greater problem in 1996, since when techniques have emerged to identify contaminants and remove their sequence data.
For that reason, the success of Matthias and Svante was indeed a milestone in ancient DNA research. This achievement and what followed have contributed crucially to the emerging field of aDNA research.
The mitochondrial DNA sequence was eventually published in 1997 in the journal Cell.10 Based on comparisons between Neanderthal DNA and various contemporary European, Asian, and African populations, it was found that the Neanderthal differed from all modern humans, indicating that the two groups had not interbred.
In those days, when I was in Svante’s lab, I was interested in biases and normativities of the human mitochondrial DNA reference sequence that had been produced in Cambridge in 1981. I was asking questions such as: Whose DNA was used to produce the sequence? How and where was it done? And why it was seen as a European sequence?11 During one of the population group meetings, we discussed these biases. Svante indicated that it would not be possible to avoid a kind of optical bias, because the reference sequence would always be closer (and thus more similar) to one population than another (depending on whose material was used for sequencing the reference sequence). And he added jokingly: “It might be a good idea though to start using the Neanderthal sequence as the new reference. It is equally far away from all humans.”
Almost ten years earlier, in 1987, the field of genetics had produced another sensation. Nature published the startling paper “Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution,” which provided genetic evidence for the hypothesis of a single origin of all humans and demonstrated that this origin was in Africa. It thus confirmed the out-of-Africa theory of human origin.12 Based on the analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of 147 individuals—quite an achievement at the time—the paper showed that genetic diversity was higher among African populations than among populations living in other parts of the world.13 The tantalizing conclusion was thus that the mitochondrial DNA of modern humans can be traced back to one common ancestor who lived about 200,000 years ago. Paradoxically, notwithstanding the conflict between biblical and evolutionary time scales, in an accompanying editorial of the journal this ancestor was referred to as Mitochondrial Eve: an interesting double anachronism, or simply an “irony” in the sense that contradictory things necessarily go together.14 The researchers behind the study, Alan Wilson and his team at Berkeley, were taken by surprise when they found themselves in a media frenzy because their research immediately became part of a debate about the (non)existence of racial groups.15 The Mitochondrial Eve paper provided the genetic arguments as to why the idea of biological races is untenable and therefore provoked controversy with paleontologists.
The then prevailing theory in paleontology was that the origins of early humans went back much further in time. According to the so-called candelabra theory, it was one million years, whereas other multiregionalist scientists estimated the migration out of Africa to have happened two million years ago.16 According to these theories, the first humans migrated from Africa much earlier than, say, 100,000 to 50,000 years ago, and subsequently developed into different “races” in different places in the world. The Mitochondrial Eve paper, by contrast, contributed to the understanding that anatomically modern humans underwent the same development and genetically belonged to one human family.
One of the authors of the paper, geneticist Mark Stoneking, happened to be visiting Svante’s lab when I was there. I interviewed him about the Mitochondrial Eve paper and the controversy it provoked. He pointedly stated the difference between genetics and paleontology: “We geneticists know that our genes must have had ancestors, but paleontologists can only hope that their fossils had descendants.”17 The implication of Stoneking’s statement is that the relation between paleontological artifacts from the past and modern humans is not evident, whereas DNA self-evidently implies a connection between now and then: DNA comes from somewhere, and the task is to excavate that past.
The Neanderthal sequence extracted by Krings was one such fossil that was thought to have no descendants. In Krings’s 1997 paper in Cell, it was concluded that “the Neanderthal mtDNA sequence … supports a scenario in which modern humans arose recently in Africa as a distinct species and replaced Neanderthals with little or no interbreeding.”18 The paper thus confirmed the dominant notion that the Neanderthal was a dead end. While the Neanderthal lived in the Middle East and Europe for a very long time, this hominid was (violently?) replaced by modern humans who joined the scene later.
Going Nuclear
However, in 2006, Pääbo’s lab, now housed at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, took the challenging route of nuclear DNA and embarked on sequencing the forty-six chromosomes of the Neanderthal. By this time, it was hypothesized that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthal people might have shared more than just a time corridor in which they both walked around on Asian and European soil.
The challenge is due to the size of the genomes: whereas the mitochondrial genome consists of about 16,000 base pairs, the nuclear DNA genome consists of about 3 billion base pairs. After a journey of finding suitable bones that would yield enough DNA, securing the money and technology for the sequencing, collecting the brains that could help figure out how to analyze the data, and deciding which journal should be granted the scoop, the sequence was published in 2010 in Science.19 And indeed, while the mitochondrial DNA analyzed in Matthias Krings’s 1997 paper indicated genetic distance between humans and Neanderthals, nuclear DNA revealed astonishing proximity.20 Moreover, the Neanderthal seemed to have contributed between 1 and 4 percent of their genes to modern humans.21 The results cannot be understood as anything other than that they had sex with each other, and that a substantial number of children were born from it. The Neanderthal is not an evolutionary dead end, after all, but lives on in us. In addition, the results suggested that while Europeans and Asians were found to share DNA with the Neanderthals, African populations seemed not to do so. By now, we know that this was a problematic and not so accurate conclusion.22 At the time that the paper was published, however, geneticist David Reich, who was one of the coauthors, stated that “we do not find any evidence of Neanderthal gene flow in Africans.”23
This mesmerizing research and the surprising genetic relations it helped to uncover have also caused trouble in terms of race. As we will see below, the assumption that the Neanderthal had exchanged genetic material with European populations has contributed to a whitewashing of the Neanderthal, which has made it a figure in racial politics. Before going into that discussion, however, I will first provide some theoretical background for my analysis of race.
