Figure 5.6
Turkana boy as depicted at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann (left) and at the Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies (right).
Comparing and contrasting the reconstructions at the Neanderthal Museum and the Museum of Prehistory help articulate their normativity, not only in terms of racial representation, where skin color is a strong signifier, but also in terms of gender. The sexualization of Lucy and the Turkana Boy at the Neanderthal Museum contributes to their further racialization and othering. This familiar mode of racialization through othering helps us see the politics of such reconstructions. As Paul Gilroy reminds us, however, this mode of seeing and recognizing difference is historically situated. “Seeing race,” Gilroy argues, takes a specifically trained human “sensorium” attuned to the recognition of racial types and kinds.40
In what follows, I analyze racialization not as an effect of difference through “otherness” but of sameness through “us-ness.” Returning to the family picture postcard at the Neanderthal Museum and considering time in relation to sameness, we can observe an interesting configuration that underscores the racial character of this depiction. In this scene, Lucy becomes almost a pet. Even as a pet, however she is drawn into the human family, domesticated and made part of the family. The same happens in the postcard to the Neanderthals, whose similarities with modern humans are underlined by their clothing and gestures, such as the human hand touching the Neanderthal man who has a stick.
However, this proximity stands in a stark contrast to the Turkana Boy and the Stone Age man of Mount Irhoun. They both seem to be set apart from the human family. Their nakedness does not fit the bourgeois ambiance. Their representations give way to typical visualizations of the black male body.41 In addition, the juxtaposition between their splendid nakedness and the erotic pose of the Turkana Boy spills over and sexualizes the body of the Stone Age man and makes him more naked than he actually is. So even though this man is in fact our closest ancestor, he oscillates between Homo erectus and our stereotypes about blackness, thus ending up outside the “human family” of the postcard. While Lucy and the Neanderthals are homed in to successfully become part of this family, our closest ancestor is pushed outside it and made part of a different collective.42
Through these relations of proximity and distance, time is reconfigured in novel ways, here crumbled, there stretched out, contributing to what is considered same or different. Both collectives—the family of “us-ness” as well as of “other-ness”—become racialized in this depiction. However, the specificities of the collectives matter, since their sameness differs radically, and so does the associated configuration of race. First, the version of sameness that is related to the other is fairly unspecific. It is a category in which people are lumped together, and one in which the phenotype and the body play crucial roles. These markers turn them into “phenotypic others,” a category that, based on bodily markers of difference, can assume anything that is not-us or can be radically reduced.43 By contrast, sameness as a version of us-ness is an open and generous category which makes space for individuality—as was the case with Mr. 4%—but also for family, as well as for belonging to a specific cultural place. Each member belongs to the family and the place but cannot be reduced to any of these. Thus, although this version of sameness is racialized, the members of this collective retain their individuality and with it the possibility of being “in time” instead of “out of time.”
Conclusion
Philosopher of science Joyce Havstad has coined the term “sensational science” to describe ancient DNA research. Sensational science is a “science which empirically speculates, to the public’s delight and entertainment, about scintillating topics such as when humans evolved, where we came from, and who else we were having sex with during our early hominin history.”44 Ancient DNA research is consequently, and as I have shown in this chapter, an affective field, one that invites a wide audience to project different kinds of aspirations, feelings, and vested ideas.45
In this text, I have attended to ancient DNA in the lab, but also outside of it, to analyze how it affects representations of the Neanderthal. A lot can be said—and has been said—about what Anna Källén and colleagues have addressed as the “aDNA revolution.” In their analysis, the story of this revolution comes with “a sense of direction and inevitability of the way forward.”46 It is this propensity that tends to contribute to the modernist single story in which diverse histories and experience are subsumed. On the pages above, I have examined how “the danger of a single story” of evolution, a story that comes with a specific rendering of time and temporality, feeds into knowledge produced in the field of aDNA. I have argued that the fact that Neanderthals have contributed parts of their DNA to modern humans through interbreeding has led to a novel racialization of the Neanderthal.
By now, we know that Neanderthal genes are shared not only in Europe and Asia, but also among African populations.47 Yet, the powerful and single story about European-Neanderthal lineage has remained dominant. Its effect is a whitewashing of the Neanderthal. This is a politics in which the Neanderthal genes become the ultimate markers of European-ness.48 In the analysis of the postcard (which is more than a postcard), “Become part of the human family,” we have zoomed in on who is made part of this human family and how. I have shown that it is helpful in this case not to analyze race through the common register of difference, but rather to zoom in on sameness.
Attending to the material details of racial politics and focusing on the way time gets made and how it produces proximities and distances, and thereby different collectives, I have shown how a racialized collective of “us-ness” gets produced. Crucially, sameness in relation to “us-ness” leaves ample space for differences within, space for individuality, while sameness based on “other-ness” reduces the collective of the other to one or a limited set of markers. Whereas modernist narratives, including those of science and of science museums, are firmly committed to a linear rendering of time, the case analyzed here shows a comingling of time. It demonstrates the importance of focusing on time and its politics in relation to race. And it underscores the significance of the whitewashing of the Neanderthal in current racial politics in Europe.
Notes
1. I would like to thank the organizers of the symposium “Code Narrative History: Critical Perspectives on Ancient DNA” in Stockholm, where a version of this chapter was delivered as a keynote address. I also thank the participants of this symposium for their comments and suggestions. I am grateful to the organizers, especially Daniel Strand, in their capacity as editors of this volume, for their feedback on various drafts of this chapter. The chapter has also benefitted from the feedback and suggestions by two anonymous reviewers. The analyses presented here are the result of collaborations with members of the RaceFaceID team, whom I thank for thinking together hard about this wild object called race. Finally, I thank the European Research Council for supporting my research through an ERC Consolidator Grant (FP7–617451-RaceFaceID-Race Matter: On the Absent Presence of Race in Forensic Identification).
2. Mr. 4% has, of course, received his name from the discovery that some contemporary human individuals have up to 4% Neanderthal DNA.
3. For a beautiful and important analysis of the racialization of the Neanderthal, the production of a racial type and a racial portrait, as depicted in the reconstructions of Egon von Eickstedt in Vienna, and of how these reconstructions in the 1920s shaped the popular imagination of race and its origins in prehistory, see Paul H. Lambers, Margit Berne, and Katrin Kremmler, “From Anatomy to Palaeo-Raciology: Two Neanderthal Reconstructions at the NHMW 1924/25,” Annalen des Naturhistorischen Museums in Wien: Serie A für Mineralogie und Petrographie, Geologie und Paläontologie, Anthropologie und Prähistorie 123 (April 2022): 33–64. For a discussion of the portrayal of the Neanderthal by Boule and Kupta, see Marianne Sommer, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Neanderthal as Image and ‘Distortion’ in Early 20th-Century French Science and Press,” Social Studies of Science 36, no. 2 (200: 207–2406).
4. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” Ted Talk, July 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story#t-1796.
5. Here I am particularly referring to evolutionary theory and the ordering of species (and different kind of people) along the line of evolution.
6. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 244.
7. Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
8. I spent half a year at Pääbo’s lab as an anthropologist of science, where I conducted a laboratory ethnography focusing on human genetic diversity. See Amade M’charek, The Human Genome Diversity Project: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
9. The ALF sequencer is a sequencing machine that detects target DNA fragments, because they carry a fluorescent label with them. In the case discussed here, these labels were added for the processing and copying of DNA in the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) machine.
10. Matthias Krings et al., “Neandertal DNA Sequences and the Origins of Modern Humans,” Cell 90, no. 1 (1997): 19–30.
11. See Amade M’charek, “Race, Time and Folded Objects: The HeLa Error,” Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 6 (2014): 29–56. In this paper, I show how race is folded into the sequence and obscures its multiple origins. The original sequence was based on DNA from an unknown UK placenta, HeLa cells, as well as bovine DNA. The resequencing of the reference in 1991, however, has led to the exclusion of HeLa DNA, which originally stemmed from the African American woman Henrietta Lacks.
12. Rebecca L. Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allan C. Wilson, “Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution,” Nature 325, no. 6099 (1987): 31–36.
13. It should be noted that the authors of the study did not have access to the DNA of African populations, and that samples were actually taken from African American individuals, who thus represented African populations.
14. Irony in the sense of Donna Haraway: “Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play.” See Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late 20th Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, ed. Haraway (London: Free Association, 1991), 149–183. On the intricacies of Mitochondrial Eve, see Venla Oikkonen, “Mitochondrial Eve and the Affective Politics of Human Ancestry,” Signs 40, no. 3 (2015): 747–772.
15. See Jane Gitschier, “All about Mitochondrial Eve: An Interview with Rebecca Cann,” PloS Genetics 6, no. 5 (2010): 1–4.
16. For a helpful review, see Saioa López, Lucy van Dorp, and Garrett Hellenthal, “Human Dispersal Out of Africa: A Lasting Debate,” Evolutionary Bioinformatics 11 (2015): 57–68. On the conversation among geneticists and paleontologists, see Svante Pääbo, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
17. According to Pääbo, this is a paraphrase of a famous statement of the anthropologist Vincent Sarich, who worked in Allan Wilson’s lab in Berkeley in the 1980s. It seems that Mark Stoneking might have borrowed it and used it in the interview with me in 1996. See Pääbo, Neanderthal Man, 95.
18. Krings et al., “Neandertal DNA Sequences,” 27.
19. Richard Ed Green et al., “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,” Science 328, no. 5979 (2010): 710–722.
20. It is slowly becoming clear that the genetic material that modern humans received from the Neanderthals has played a crucial role in building resistance to viruses and bacteria. Perhaps this made human survival possible in Europe at the time. The presence of Neanderthal genes has also helped explain why some Covid patients have a very tough disease process, and why genes in turn protect people better against this virus. See Hugo Zeberg and Svante Pääbo, “The Major Genetic Risk Factor for Severe COVID-19 is Inherited from Neanderthals,” Nature 587, no. 7835 (2020): 610–612.
21. Green et al., “Draft Sequence,” 29.
22. John Hawks, “Accurate Depiction of Uncertainty in Ancient DNA Research: The Case of Neanderthal Ancestry in Africa,” Journal of Social Archaeology 21, no. 2 (2021): 179–196.
23. David Reich quoted in Hawks, “Accurate Depiction of Uncertainty,” 179.
24. For a discussion about the troubled history of genetics, see Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). For the recent scholarship on race and genomics, see, for instance, Nadia Abu El-Haj, “The Genetic Reinscription of Race,” Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (2007): 283–300; Duana Fullwiley, “The Molecularization of Race: Institutionalizing Racial Difference in Pharmacogenetics Practice,” Science as Culture 16, no. 1 (2007): 1–30; Ian Whitmarsh and David S. Jones, eds., What’s the Use of Race? Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Alan H. Goodman, Yolanda T. Moses, and Joseph L. Jones, Race: Are We So Different? (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in the Genomic Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Troy Duster, “A Post-Genomic Surprise: The Molecular Re-Inscription of Race in Science, Law, and Medicine,” British Journal of Sociology 66, no. 1 (2015): 1–27; Daniel Strand, “0.01%: Genetics, Race and the Methodology of Differentiation,” Eurozine, January 4, 2021, https://www.eurozine.com/0-01.
25. Siep Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
26. See Bhabha, Location of Culture; Charles W. Mills, “The Chronopolitics of Racial Time,” Time & Society 29, no. 2 (2020): 297–317; Katharina Hunfeld, “The Coloniality of Time in the Global Justice Debate: De-centring Western Linear Temporality,” Journal of Global Ethics 18, no.1 (2022): 100–117.
27. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
28. Lowenhaupt Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 22.
