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.
