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.
Race and Sameness
Given the troubled history of genetics in the slipstream of the Human Genome Project and the key role that genetics and genomics have since come to play in science and society, a flourishing scholarship has emerged on race and genomics.24 For good reasons, this ever-growing scholarship has focused on questions of difference, how differences are produced in scientific practice, and how genetics might contribute to the production or essentialization of differences. Yet, although differences combined with biology should make us nervous and alert, this focus has also contributed to the assumption that while differences are produced, sameness is a given baseline. Indeed, the emphasis on difference suggests that in the context of race, differences are inherently political. As a consequence, this has led to the curious impression that similarities are apolitical. Due to our nervousness about difference (in relation to race and genomics), the production of sameness, resemblance and equivalence has received little attention in critical analyses. Inspired by the Neanderthal, I want to switch focus from difference to sameness and explore the versions of racialization this helps us to see.
The taken-for-granted nature of sameness in scholarship on race might in fact have deeper, more structural roots. In his seminal book The Invention of Humanity from 2017, historian and political scientist Siep Stuurman shows how modernity and the modern states of justice are based on the sameness of humans as the norm and their equality before the law as its consequence. Stuurman argues that there have historically been three crucial “modalities” that have helped to invent the thing called humanity. The first modality is the acknowledgement of a common humanness, that is, that humans belong to the same species. The second modality is related to the “anthropological turn,” through which cultural differences came to be understood as variation on a common theme, assuming a shared human culture. The third modality is a temporal regime that helped render human civilization as an evolutionary development, in the way that even if some peoples are not there yet—not yet modern—they are assumed to undergo similar development and eventually arrive in modern times.25
Although the three modalities that have helped to establish the paradigm of humanity have been widely shared by different civilizations across the globe, so Stuurman argues, the coupling of equality and sameness became pivotal in the racial order of Europe during the Enlightenment. According to that dictum, to become equal is to become like those who are already equal, that is, the European whites. Enlightenment thus became the obligatory point of passage for becoming equal.
The crux of Stuurman’s point is that sameness has become a normative baseline in the modern equality paradigm. His argument makes clear that becoming equal requires work and entails an ideological take on human relations. But as sameness has become the norm, the process through which this sameness is created has moved to the background and become largely obscured. By contrast, the ways in which difference and deviance are produced has typically attracted attention, alarm, or dismay.
Rather than taking sameness for granted, I focus on how sameness comes about, what it is made to be, and how it effects specific racializations. I demonstrate how different versions of sameness bring about different versions of race.
Time and Temporality
As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, race is entwined with notions of time and temporality. Time and temporality are sources of conflict and have been identified as modes of imperial governance.26 Given the pivotal role granted to the dating of, let’s say, stones, bones, and genes, the Neanderthal provides us with a good case for studying race in relation to time. But rather than taking time as a given natural phenomenon, I want to attend to how time is made and how this affects the ways similarities and differences are enacted.
In her 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing uses the case of the matsutake mushroom to unravel the devastating relation between the capitalist trope of “development” and ecological degradation and the production of precarity.27 She urges us to move beyond progressive narratives toward multiple temporalities. By way of the matsutake, the mushroom that thrives on forests disturbed by human chemicals, she invites us to attend to modes of unintentional life and to develop the art of living on a damaged planet. Rather than looking ahead and imagining a future of progress or looking back in time toward moments supposed to be less advanced, Lowenhaupt Tsing suggests that we “look around.”28 Moreover, she suggests that we develop an art of noticing and a taste for curiosity. In this way Lowenhaupt Tsing offers an interesting suggestion to reconfigure our relations with other species, a way, perhaps, of moving us beyond a single story—a phenomenon that is unfortunately so prevalent in science.
To illuminate the question of race, time, and the Neandertal, I further draw on the work of the French philosopher and mathematician Michel Serres. Serres contrasts his approach of time to what he calls classical, or linear, time. Linear time is typically connected with modernity and progress, something that is central to scientific practice. Serres calls this the time of the line: a time that can be cumulative, continuous, or interrupted, yet always remains linear. In Serres’s universe, however, time is topological. It assumes different shapes, lines, folds, circularities, and is therefore heterogeneous. Serres states that time does not flow, but percolates, as through a sieve. As he puts it, “it passes and it doesn’t pass.”29 It flows in turbulent and more chaotic ways. This is because time is not a natural given. It is an effect of relations between entities.
To make this more tangible, consider the German artist Gunter Demnig’s art project Stolpersteine, “stumbling stones.” Made of brass and bearing the name, date of birth, date of deportation, and death date of individual victims of Nazi Germany, these memorials are to be found in many European cities. They are typically placed on the sidewalk, in front of the last residence of the named victim.
Clearly, these stones are made to commemorate the victims. They do so, however, by producing time. Imagine you are going about your everyday business, going to buy your groceries, but stumble over such a stone. You might look down, read the information, and immediately, the street, the house adjacent to the stone changes. At such a moment, time gets made. From an event more than eighty years ago, it becomes a “now.” From being a line, time gets crumpled and an event from the past gets “folded” in the here and now.30 Here, in front of your eyes, things happened, and your imagination enfolds. This is an example of the art of noticing, in Lowenhaupt Tsing’s words, and simultaneously an example of the multiplicity of time that Serres alerts us to. Time passes (linearity) and does not pass (crumpling and folding). Just like the history of the Holocaust is not left behind but materialized in postwar European cities, the history of race science in general has also sedimented in varieties of practice in science and society. For example, in laboratory practice, data and samples collected in colonial times (like biometric measurements and skulls) are still relevant, and not just in the field of physical anthropology.31 Although it would be wrong to state that current laboratory practice is racist, these collections, data, and methods might in specific situations (e.g., in combination with specific questions) help mobilize former practices and reintroduce and produce “race.”
Let us now return to the time of the Neanderthals in order to analyze time, race, and sameness.
Time and Race
In recent years, it seems that research on the Neanderthal has developed a certain art of noticing, to evoke Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Rather than reducing the Neanderthals in place and time, it seems that both the kind of questions that are being asked and the technologies available to examine the artifacts are producing a more complex picture than the popular one, in which the Neanderthal is cast as the simple and brutish other “us.”32 We are now learning that Neanderthals not only had large brains but were also capable of complex cognition, such as copying of technology; they had a language that allowed them to perform complex tasks; they produced art, music, jewelry, and personal ornamentation, indicating a symbolic life and taste for aesthetics; they produced interesting artistic configurations that raise questions about possibilities of rituals and in any case index the ability for complex social organization.33 Increasingly, the perspective in research and social representations emphasizes not so much the differences between modern humans and Neanderthals as the similarities. They are like us. “They were very similar in many respects,” as paleontologist Katerina Harvati explains in the documentary First Peoples.34
I am both intrigued and troubled by the emphasis on sameness. It makes me wonder about the normativity of sameness and how sameness comes about.35 In what follows, I attend to one specific example—a postcard—and analyze how proximities and distances are made. As I will show, this postcard is instructive of the ways knowledge about the Neanderthals is homed in, comfortably placed within dominant imaginations, to become part of a racial politics.36
Werde Teil der Menschenfamilie
“Werde Teil der Menschenfamilie” (Become part of the human family) is a nicely inclusive invitation to this postcard on the website of the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany (figure 5.4).
Figure 5.4
“Werde Teil der Menschenfamilie.” Image/postcard on the website of the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany.
What we are looking at is a picture representing modern and not-so-modern humans at the Neanderthal Museum. The postcard is in my view a “folded object.”37 It is a time machine, where a heterogeneity of time is ordered in counterintuitive ways, producing proximities and distances. But let us first appreciate the impression and have a closer look at the figures represented. The card displays a familiar scene, evocative of a bourgeois moment. People are gathered in what looks like a casual library. In comfortable Chesterfields one can ponder nature and enjoy its wonders, read a book, or sip from a glass. Importantly, we have a gathering of a diversity of people, a family—the human family, we are made to think. The atmosphere is relaxed. A child is playing chess with a young woman. An interestingly diverse man, not too dark and not too light-skinned, is put centerstage, staring at us in a more or less self-contained way, as if he is in the know about what our common future is. Various other figures are nicely displayed. The scene seems to capture a spare moment in the day, a moment of casually being together before moving on to the dining room to enjoy a nice meal.
This postcard, which I received from friends who visited the museum, has been hanging in my office for three years. I have been stared at by these figures and I have been staring back at them. My eyes have been drawn between the center and the flanking regions, between the idealized diversity man-of-the-future in the center, Mr. 4% to the left, and the Turkana boy from Kenya and a stone-age man from Jebal Irhoud in Morocco on the right.38 Moving my eyes from left to right and back again, I have not been able to overlook a racial-typological impression, as if we see evolution in action from the right to the left, arriving at the CEO-like Mr. 4%.
Let us consider the different figures. We see a collection of modern humans, consisting of four women, two men, and a young boy. We have three representatives of Neanderthals: there is Mr. 4%, a young Neanderthal girl called Kina, and a Neanderthal man in the center (who could easily pass for a traditional shepherd) called Mr. N. But we also have a version of Lucy (Australopithecus) down left, as well as the figures mentioned above to the upper right: the Homo erectus Turkana boy, and the oldest Homo sapiens sapiens, the Stone Age man from Jebal Irhoud. The image thus condenses a time span from 3.2 million years ago (Lucy) to our own time. Yet all figures seem to be present in the now. The folding of evolutionary time is here produced by the very realistic rendering of these ancient hominids. To be sure, if they would have been represented as skeletons, this radical folding of time would not have been as effective, and a distance would have been produced between us and them.
But the picture does more, if we would consider that “things could have been otherwise.”39 Let us first consider Lucy and the Turkana boy by comparing and contrasting the reconstruction of them here with the ones at the Musée National de Préhistoire in Les Eyzies.
Figure 5.5
Lucy as depicted at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann (left) and at the Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies (right).
There is visibly something going on here. Although the reconstructions of Lucy and the Turkana boy are based on the same bones/artifacts, they differ in an obvious way. To be sure, the forensic artists who produce such reconstructions have to work with the material that they have. And such reconstructions are artistic expressions of sorts. But they are still based on the same models of the bones/artifacts found and the same state of knowledge about early hominids. The reconstructions at both the Neanderthal Museum and the Musée National de Préhistoire in Les Eyzies depict Lucy and the Turkana boy as more or less naked, yet the differences between the reconstructions are stark. Whereas the Neanderthal Museum seems to emphasize their wildness and difference, the Museum of Prehistory seems to invite the viewer to consider both the similarities and differences between modern humans and the depicted figures. At the Neanderthal Museum, Lucy is rendered an apelike figure and the otherness of the Turkana boy, a very dark-skinned bundle of muscles, cannot be overlooked. Moreover, both are placed outside in the “wilderness,” as if to underline their wildness. Juxtaposed with the coarse and vulgar depictions of the Neanderthal Museum, the matter-of-fact-ness of the representations in Les Eyzies is striking. In addition, both Lucy and Turkana Boy are depicted as if posing for a camera. A representation familiar, everyday, and modern in its gestures, yet it presents the “wrong” subjects. It thus mocks and dramatizes, just like a reversed minstrel figure, and so racializes the differences. Lucy and the Turkana Boy are not just wild, but also humanity’s other. Finally, and contributing to their racialization, is the sexualization of these depictions at the Neanderthal Museum. Lucy is displaying her body to the viewer. Similarly, the Turkana Boy is sexualized by his very pose, as if presenting his nakedness. By contrast, the Lucy at the Museum of Prehistory seems totally indifferent to the viewer; she is self-contained and not in need of our appreciation, whereas the Turkana Boy, whose private parts are covered, is standing in a highly commonplace way.
