The dialectic Neanderthal: Re-configuring the human question in times of planetary crisis

Introduction

Daniel Martin Feige (2022) has recently revitalized the self-conceiving human – the idea that humans are those living beings who constantly make and re-make themselves according to their own self-image(s) and thereby work through issues currently difficult to grasp and resolve conceptually. This understanding of what it means to be human has a systematic and a historical implication. Systematically, the human lifeform is said to be characterized by a recursive condition in which human behaviour is mediated by more-or-less conscious self-understanding – what Plessner (1975) has cast as ‘excentric positionality’ and what Scheler (2018) has described as the human predicament to grapple with a proper ‘place’ in the world. Historically, human self-conception must be understood as a deeply situated and as such context-dependent material and discursive construct, so that its realizations and recursive relationships with human behaviour may vary widely in time and space. Beyond the obvious difficulties of ‘applying’ this qualification of the Anthropos to past human contexts from which hardly any self-referential testimony has survived, it is informative to consider how the Neanderthal debate may play into the human self-devising project.

First of all, the scholastic preoccupation with differentia specifica is itself a reflex of the need to make sense of the particularities of human life in the face of other-than-human lifeforms. The classic Neanderthal debate which has raged in archaeology and palaeoanthropology for the last thirty years or so (Mellars and Stringer 1989; Mellars 2015 [1996]; Barker et al. 2007; d’Errico and Stringer 2011) neatly inscribes into this logic as Neanderthals were traditionally framed as the proximate ‘others’ (Corbey 2005; Peeters and Zwart 2020) and together with other primate model species (chimpanzees, bonobos) fundamentally shaped how scholars envisioned the evolution of our own species – Homo sapiens. Neanderthals have since sparked the creative imagination of the public and the scholarly community alike and essentially acted as a ‘foil’ or ‘mirror’ of human self-definitions (Shreeve 1995; Madison 2021), becoming a potent conduit of re-negotiating nearly all of the central registers of human self-assertion in late Western modernity – from nature vs. culture to body vs. mind. And even though there is a growing consensus as to the originality and hitherto often-underestimated complexity of Neanderthal life among archaeologists (e. g., Roebroeks and Soressi 2016; Romagnoli, Rivals, and Benazzi 2022; Nowell 2023), the assessment of the Neanderthal evidence continues to polarize.

Slimak (2023a) speaks of a ‘hidden […] fierce war’: ‘On [the] one side, those who think the Neanderthal is another us. On the other, those who think it is an archaic form of humanity, with vastly inferior intellectual capabilities […] It is not so much a war of ideas as a war of ideologies […].’ In The Naked Neanderthal, Slimak (2023a) goes on to argue that these agonistic proclivities should not be taken overly seriously, and often do not hinge on the available data at all, as the goal must be to qualify Neanderthals on their own terms, escaping the strains of Sapiens-Neanderthal dialectics. In this, I would contend, there is emerging conceptual convergence among those who care about Neanderthals and the pasts we picture by reference to them: Wragg Sykes’ Kindred (2020) presents a celebration of Neanderthal creativity and the richness of their cultures in Pleistocene Europe, Finlayson’s The Smart Neanderthal (2019) argues for the cognitive depth and flexibility of their projects, and Hussain and colleagues (2022) have taken fundamental issue with the ‘Sapiens benchmark’ too often deployed in order to straight-jacked them.

Against this background, I suggest it is of key importance to distinguish between two equally informative interpretive projects: 1) to understand Neanderthal life from within, with as little distorting Sapiens baggage as possible; and 2) to strategically deploy a ‘Neanderthal lens’ in order to challenge, and perhaps even destabilize, our self-perception as well as the prevailing Whig narratives as to the evolutionary success of our species. The second project bears some similarities with the inversed methodologies of animal studies (Specht 2016; De Vos 2023) and often relies less on empirical evidence than on a careful dissection of assumptions and conceptual frameworks. From a metaarchaeological perspective, what is perhaps most striking about the Neanderthal debate is its ambiguity – the ongoing scholarly encounter with Neanderthals does not so much resolve old questions but rather exposes the many misconceptions on which they are based, and thereby frames a liminal space of cross-species investigations of anthropological import. Peeters and Zwart (2020) symptomatically refer to Neanderthals as ‘familiar strangers’, pointing precisely to the fact that they can be said to be similar to what we think makes us ‘human’ in some ways, while being clearly different in other regards; such interrogations thus often merely reveal the limits of the categories we use for such boundary negotiations. That Neanderthals frequently eclipse the neat divisions introduced by such packaging of reality – think for example of the human-animal boundary (Corbey 2005) – may thus ultimately tell us something important about ourselves and how we have come to imagine ourselves in evolutionary and planetary contexts.

With regard to the question of the human, Neanderthals may so be said to join the ranks of those who have begun to progressively unsettle the many supposed certainties of the Anthropos (e. g., Haraway 2016; Bajohr 2020) – not coincidentally as the burgeoning planetary polycrisis (Morin and Kern 1999) proficiently dismantles the dysfunctionalities and pathologies of our long-standing conceptual imports. The Neanderthal debate therefore frames an important meta-conversation about useful assumptions and concepts to think about ourselves in the context of life and evolution more generally, and so perhaps yields impetus to revise our self-image as we work through such issues. Although I recognize the perspectives and insights to be gained by a ‘post-critical’ attendance to Neanderthals in order to imagine less biased and perhaps radically alternative futures (see e. g. Terry et al. 2024 for the need to decolonize the past in order to open-up the future), I argue that it is imperative to first critically disassemble the foundations of how we have come to frame and investigate Neanderthals in archaeology and beyond. I attempt to do this in the reminder of this paper by working through a number of vignettes characterizing such research.

‘Moderns’ vs. ‘Ancients’: The ambivalence of relating past and present

In James Shreeve’s The Neanderthal Enigma (1995) – a masterful and perceptive synthesis of the first decade of Neanderthal research after the proclamation of the ‘Human revolution’ (Mellars and Stringer 1989; Mellars 1989) – Neanderthals are not simply juxtaposed to Homo sapiens but to so-called ‘moderns’ as an equivocation of the latter. This semantic is no coincidence and speaks to the larger context of the original Neanderthal debate still permeating the expert literature today (Shea 2011; Ames, Riel-Salvatore, and Collins 2013; Porr and Matthews 2017). The equalization of Sapiens and ‘moderns’ or ‘modern humans’ was famously recalibrated by the ‘Sapiens paradox’ (Renfrew 2008) – the realization of a major time-lag between the emergence of the biological features characteristic of Homo sapiens and the accretion of behaviour dubbed ‘typically human’, by which most scholars simply meant behaviours sufficiently similar to those documented in contemporary or historical human forager societies (e. g., d’Errico et al. 2012). While some scholars sought to explain this perceived nature-culture divergence by a sudden cognitive mutation in some Sapiens populations (Klein 1992; 2008), most archaeologists rallied around the idea that the proclaimed ‘moderns’ must have acquired a distinct capacity for culture in the earlier part of their evolutionary history (Sterelny 2011; 2014), thereby setting them apart from other hominins. Ironically, this nature-culture framing was only reinforced by the landmark paper The revolution that wasn’t (Mcbrearty and Brooks 2000), which influentially criticized the Eurocentric focus of the debate and marshalled archaeological data from Africa to demonstrate the much earlier origin of many of the supposed key traits of Sapiens modernity built up long before entering Europe over the last 200,000 years or so.

This discursive context of debating Neanderthals is a complex construal interweaving various unreflected assumptions and default modes of thinking. As shown by post-colonial critiques, Neanderthals are more-or-less radically ‘othered’ vis-à-vis ideas about rationality, human nature, and a supposed telos in the evolution of the Anthropos that were developed in the course of Western intellectual history, and so frequently reflect our historically derived self-image more than anything else (Porr 2011; 2014; Porr and Matthews 2017; Hussain in press). Importantly, these conceptual lenses are not simply descriptive but inescapably normative in the sense that they construe Neanderthals in relation to what humans ought to be, as what it means to be human can never be translated to a question of mere facts alone (we would otherwise commit circular reasoning: we must already know what the qualification ‘human’ broadly refers to before we lay out the facts in order to demonstrate it, otherwise we beg the question). Parallelizations of the idea of the ‘human’ and the genus Homo can also not evade this problem because they misconstrue the issue as a mere taxonomic problem.

In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising but worth reiterating that debates about Sapiens-Neanderthal relations often perpetuate undertones of race and racism (Graves 1991) and in most cases maintain a species-level and thus ultimately essentialist perspective, by which one is forced to compare stereotypes, even if these are constructed as heuristic devices based on the currently available archaeological evidence. This tacit essentialism indeed continues to be fundamental to how Neanderthals are negotiated today as only such a perspective allows for meaningful talk about quasi-stable Neanderthal capacities – be they behavioural, cognitive, cultural, or otherwise (see e. g. Haidle et al. 2015). Although capacities may generally vary, the species-level grounding of the debate makes it almost impossible to pay attention to capacity divergences that do not sit comfortably with proposed taxonomic boundaries and so elucidate intra- and cross-taxonomic diversity. As an additional complication, capacities cannot be observed directly, and much archaeological capacity analysis therefore comes close to a metaphysical undertaking. Not all capacities are ‘expressed’ or ‘used’ at all times and they are thus often regarded as generalized resources to act in certain ways without binding those possessing the respective capacities to necessarily do so. What kinds of capacities can then be said to exist, how many capacities one must postulate in order to explain observed behavioural variation and evolutionary change, and what the relevant unit of such capacity analysis would be (population, species, lineages) therefore greatly depends on our assumptions, and so feeds back into the question of how we a priori construct humanness if the latter is defined with reference to certain capacities and not others.

Ames and colleagues (2013) fittingly deprecate the ‘unrealistic dichotomy […] between a modern and a non-modern archaeological record’ – one of the many consequences of this dominant framing and internal logic of the debate (see also Corbey 1998; 2005). It is notable that not even the recognition of a direct contribution of some Neanderthal populations to the make-up of Sapiens DNA (e. g., Krause 2019) has altered the parallelization ‘modern (humans)’ and Sapiens vs. ‘archaic (humans)’ and non-Sapiens Homo representatives. I argue that this is fundamentally because the Neanderthal debate has become a key arena for our present-day self-affirmation as ‘Moderns’. This echos a well-known historicist trope pertaining to the difficult relationship between past and present. Lowenthal (1985; 2015) has shown how various periods of human history have mobilized and related to the past in different ways – why we thus have to speak of ‘politics of the past’ respectively, in which archaeology has traditionally a crucial role to play (Gathercole and Lowenthal 2001). Lowenthal’s (1985) original insight – foundational to heritage studies inter alia – was that the past does not simply exist independently of a present in which it is conjured up and brought to bear, and in the same way as the past can be constitutive for a given present, the latter deploys various strategies and techniques to render the past functional and useful for its projects. The Past is a Foreign Country (Lowenthal 1985, p. 74 ff.) skilfully illustrates how the ‘Ancients vs. Moderns’ trope often fulfils this key function and so illuminates situated past-present interactions.

Seen from this perspective, it may be less puzzling why notions such as ‘modern humans’, ‘modern human origins’ and ‘behavioural’, ‘cultural’ or ‘cognitive modernity’ stubbornly persist in the expert literature despite accumulating critique. These terms are conceptual registers of modernity as a period and are as such instrumental to the modernist project. The Neanderthal debate thus reflects not just biases and preconceptions inherited from earlier researchers and commentators, but actively contributes to and so reinforces the broader ensemble of specific socio-cultural norms, attitudes, and ways of doing and thinking that arose in the ‘Age of Reason’ and the subsequent Enlightenment period in Europe. This also further underlines that debating Sapiens-Neanderthal relationships is never a neutral or innocent undertaking but forcefully shaped by prevailing imperatives of human self-observation and self-understanding – albeit of very specific humans in time and space, and certainly not of humanity as a whole (neither past nor present).

Widening fractures of the modernist gaze

In The Gap, Thomas Suddendorf (2013) probes a whole range of long-standing candidate qualities of human exceptionalism such as language, intelligence, morality, culture, theory of mind as well as mental time travel in an attempt to salvage what is left of the division between the Anthropos and other species. Suddendorf’s impressive synthesis demonstrates that difference is still an important feature of life in general and not all is fluid, but his exploration is also symptomatic of how humanness is negotiated and construed in the humanist tradition of Western modernity (Corbey 2005) – echoing predominant strategies of human-animal boundary policing in other fields such as history (Howell 2018). This tradition not only tables particular imaginaries of what makes us human but also perpetuates certain ideas as to how history unfolds and what it is for. Returning to Neanderthals, these ideas feature prominently in questions of their extinction as these are deeply entangled with the conditions of Homo sapiens dispersal and its emergence as a dominant global species. Firstly, I want to note that the questions we ask and foreground are an integral part of this conceptual framework. For instance, it is instructive that archaeologists continue to be fascinated by the idea that only Sapiens made it into the final stretches of the Pleistocene and, relatedly, that there was a spike reduction of biological diversity in the hominin line supposedly corresponding to a pronounced increase in cultural capacity and diversity (see esp. Bon 2009). From this construal of the broader problem context alone – scholars want to know why – follows that there was likely a species-level difference between Sapiens and other Late Pleistocene hominins including the Neanderthals and Denisovans, laying the foundations for the evolutionary success of the former and the demise of the latter. The problem of the eventual demise of all non-Sapiens hominins, in other words, so becomes essentially a differentia specifica question – notably because this process is said to be co-extensive with the ecological and cultural expansion of Sapiens on a planetary scale.

What sets us apart from other hominins can so be understood by studying the reasons for our survival and their extinction. This is a classic form of historicism in which the ‘winner’ retrospectively dictates how historical processes are reconstructed and what matters; the demise-survival polarity so becomes readily attached to the ancients-moderns foil of past-making, often mediated by the concept of progress which is so central to Western understandings of history. It is in this way of mobilizing the past in order to explain (and legitimate) a purported present that value-driven judgements of superiority inhere. Klein (2003, p. 1526) for example asserts: ‘[a]lmost certainly, the Neanderthals succumbed because they wielded culture less effectively’. Villa and Roebroeks (2014) have referred to this kind of reasoning as the ‘modern human superiority complex’ and showed that such judgements are rarely consistent with the patterns observed in the archaeological record – they spring from the construal of the larger problem context more than anything else. Importantly, we can in principle ask other questions and the answers we are able to develop may be less tautological.^[1] I will return to this point again later in this paper.

Regarding sedimented ideas of how history precedes, it is critical to realize that Sapiens-Neanderthal interaction – fuelled by direct evidence for interbreeding (Villanea and Schraiber 2019) and possibly extended chrono-geographic overlap (Higham et al. 2014) – continues to be modelled, explicitly or not, as a colonial encounter in which Neanderthals are considered the quasi-colonized. This is done in an almost literal sense as Sapiens dispersal into Europe and elsewhere is framed as ‘colonization’ (Graves 1991; Hussain in press). In this way, ecological language and modernist historical imaginaries are mixed. Two observations are important here. First, there is almost zero engagement with the question whether the colonial encounter analogy is justified in the context of deep-time hominin-hominin interaction, suggesting that this figure of thought has been both normalized and internalized (see esp. Slimak et al. 2022; Slimak 2023b for recent examples). Second, the presumption seems to be that such asymmetric encounters with unbalanced power dynamics – symptomatically assumed rather than examined – result in the inevitable domination of the supressed by the powerful, with quasi no counter-agency granted to the former. This engrained conceptualization clearly reflects the self-assertion of the supposedly powerful – the deep-time colonizers – especially given that the global displacement of other hominins by expanding Sapiens populations has often been celebrated as evidence for human ingenuity, exceptionality and unique adaptability (Klein 2003; Mellars 2015 [1996]; Marean 2015). Like in the historical context of European colonialism, the agency of the colonized is marginalized and even denied, albeit research increasingly shows that the colonized always acts back and frequently develops novel and creative behaviours as well as subversive coping strategies alongside patterns of resistance (e. g., Harrison 2002; Hofman and Keehnen 2019). How Neanderthal-Sapiens interactions have long been portrayed in the archaeological literature therefore reproduces some of the colonial imaginaries constitutive of European modernity, including the perception that such encounters across difference were strictly one-sided affairs and that colonization ultimately served the greater good of humanity.

Historically, the confident self-assertion of European powers was often linked to strategies of ‘de-humanization’ vis-à-vis the constructed ‘other’ in order to justify and legitimate the associated social, economic, political and intellectual ventures (see e. g. Kronfeldner 2021 and contributions therein). From this perspective, it seems to be no mere coincidence that Neanderthals are often still treated as ecological rather than as cultural agents and in the past were explicitly cast as ‘mere animals’ (cf. Corbey 2005) – irrespectively of the rapidly growing recognition of culture as a widespread phenomenon among many nonhuman animals (Rendell and Whitehead 2001; Safina 2020; Whiten 2021). Policing of the human-animal boundary in this context, in other words, is a direct consequence of imagining Neanderthal-Sapiens interactions as a one-sided quasi-colonial encounter, and so testifies to the potency of mixing the enlisted conceptual framings within a horizon of sense-making that echoes the long-standing historicist trope of ‘Ancients’ vs. ‘Moderns’. These ideas are in the literature often fused – due to the disciplinary constitution of deep-time archaeologies – with blunt Darwinian precepts of fierce and brutal competition (‘nature as red in tooth and claw’) as well as the infamous ‘survival of the fittest’ trope popularized by Spencer and Tennyson rather than Darwin himself. Taken together, all of this strongly suggests that Neanderthal research is subject to a specific self-actualizing agenda in the wake of a historically grown apprehension of what it means to be human.

This argument can be further illustrated by engaging with a recent recalibration of the problem of Neanderthal extinction (and that of other Late Pleistocene non-Sapiens hominins), which, albeit subtle, may count as a point in case. Over the last five to ten years or so, the image of a good ‘Age of the Moderns’, as a historical explanation for how humans are today for the better, has suffered some serious cracks and scholars have begun to link the dawning of the same age to human eco-destructive potentials. Situated within the larger context of increasing attention to the deep-time roots of the so-called Anthropocene (Foley et al. 2013) and millennial-scale processes of defaunation and biodiversity attrition (Dirzo et al. 2014; Lemoine, Buitenwerf, and Svenning 2023; Bergman et al. 2023), the eventual demise of Neanderthals and other hominins has been argued to be the result of unprecedented ecosystem impacts of expanding Sapiens populations – now notably cast as the ‘ultimate invasive species’ (Marean 2015; Shipman 2015; 2017). This not only provides a new reading of Stewart’s (2007) classic proposal of Neanderthal extinction as part of a larger faunal exchange at the end of the last Ice Age, it not merely blames climate change but increasingly so Sapiens interference with ecosystem processes and faunal evolution.

The invasive species frame does not necessarily break with previous modernist tropes, however, as it offers a new lens to engage with the failures of the asserted Indigenous Neanderthal project in Eurasia, but this time with a dark flavour and not accidentally reminiscent of the so-called ‘Columbrian exchange’ as a possible starting point of the Anthropocene – the ‘human age’ (Lewis and Maslin 2018). Notably, this construal threatens to cast Neanderthals as curators and stewards of nature, while humanness is increasingly framed as the capacity to geoengineer novel biosphere conditions with an overriding tendency to destroy and unmake – re-surfacing yet another set of problematic polarities centered on ideas of primitivism, natural conservationism, and notably the ‘noble savage’ vis-à-vis Neanderthal otherness (cf. Anderson 2005, p. 6). It is important to emphasize that the invasive species concept so powerfully re-tables the problem of nature, as invasive species are those who do ‘not belong’ to where they go and thus stand ‘out of nature’, disrupting the natural order. The concept is linked to ideas of the fixity of nature and often criticized because of this import (e. g., Vogelaar 2021). I suggest that it is precisely because of this contestedness that the concept is drawn into the debate – it presents a crystallization point to think through the ambivalence of human nature in the face of planetary disaster and catastrophe of our own making. The danger is of course that archaeology helps framing eco-destructivity as an inevitable part of human nature and so plays into the hands of those who see little sense or hope in systemic transformations. This being said, the ongoing ecological recalibration of the problem of Neanderthal extinction in the archaeological literature showcases that such interrogation is still in the service of the historicist project of human self-understanding and is thus arguably complicit in the construction of some of the foundational myths of our time.

Alien worlds? Neanderthal technology and technicity

Paul Mellars allegedly once said ‘[a] typical Mousterian [Neanderthal] might make a tool and think, ‘As long as this does the job, I don’t care what it looks like’’ (cited in Shreeve 1995, p. 303). The idea of stable, potentially information-yielding stone tool shapes was indeed a part of the original ‘Human Revolution’ model (Mellars and Stringer 1989; Bar-Yosef 2002; Mellars 2005; Barker et al. 2007) and a key entry on its associated Eurocentric list of Sapiens-specific behavioural features (Mellars 1989; Mellars 2015 [1996]). Mellars (1989, p. 365) explicitly emphasized that these new form regimes in stool tools are probably more important than production modalities, that they showcase unparalleled ‘innovation’ capacity, possibly inter-regional variation, ‘standardization’ and a concern with ‘imposed form’, possibly linked to corresponding ‘mental templates’ (but see Dibble et al. 2017 for a global critique of such simple mind-matter correspondences). For Mellars (1989, p. 365) and others, this concern and care for shaping objects in a specific and broadly conventionalized way unites diverse domains of Sapiens material culture in Europe, such as stone and organic tool technologies but also objects of personal ornamentation, and was argued not to be shared to the same degree with Neanderthals. Even though much of this construal is seen with a good dose of scepticism today – especially elevated morphological standardization turns out to be difficult to demonstrate – Valentin (2011), echoing some of these broader ideas, has recently argued that it is only in the European Upper Palaeolithic that a distinct concept of a coherent lithic type truly crystallizes (see also Weißmüller 2003, pp. 180 – 182). Bon (2009: 263 – 268; 2015) has similarly proposed that shaped and polished organic tools, considered a hallmark of the European Upper Palaeolithic, incurred considerably technological demands of curation, so spurring behavioural complexity in early Sapiens populations (and not Neanderthals).

What is interesting about these conversations is their commitment to particular assumptions as to the relevance of certain technological properties at the expense of others, and the related, inescapable normativity of such assessments. To begin with, we note a general commitment to the idea that output matters more than ways of doing things, presumably because only artefactual output can be assessed with regard to its causal interactions with the external world – leading to much emphasis on ‘efficiency’, ‘efficacity’, and other currencies to establish what has been called ‘adaptive value’. Not only does this reproduce an output-oriented paradigm of production as it has become the baseline for Capitalist market economies predicated on growth and optimization, it is also tied to a progressivist notion of evolution according to which evolutionary success – grounded in a putative ‘economy of nature’ – is directly tied to the capacity to innovate and develop more effective means to extract energy from the environment (for an explicit archaeological account, see especially Binford 1962 and White 2007 [1959]). Leroi-Gourhan’s (2009 [1987]) seminal formula that technological development among hominins is driven by the gradual maximization of total cutting-edge per volume unit is a classic expression of this way of thinking and has motivated a range of sophisticated statistical analyses of the evolution of ‘cutting edge efficiency’ (Režek et al. 2018; Muller and Clarkson 2016). The point here is not so much that these ideas cannot be useful, but rather that they can easily lead us astray in terms of what matters about the record, and about Neanderthals by extension.

As a matter of fact, it may be argued that this now normalized way of thinking with and through technology has proven relatively unproductive vis-à-vis the archaeology of Neanderthals, and this may in part be because of a disconnect between received ideas and what may be termed Neanderthal techno-economic rationality. To start with, Muller and Clarkson’s (2016) assessment of cutting-edge fecundity of different stone knapping technologies in early human evolution ‘dispel[s] the notion that the transition to the Upper Palaeolithic was accompanied by an increase in efficiency’, pointing to less pronounced net differences in productive efficiency than often assumed, and suggesting that much earlier technological transitions such as bifacial tool-making and the dawn of prepared core technology – both a hallmark of Neanderthal technological worlds – were more significant developments. In addition, it has been quantitatively shown that Levallois technology ranks among the most complex ways of working stone in terms of its degree of hierarchical organization (Muller, Clarkson, and Shipton 2017), confirming earlier qualitative interpretations of this recurrent feature of the Neanderthal record (Boëda 1993; 1994; Boëda, Geneste, and Meignen 1990; Geneste 2010). In general, there is a clear ‘double standard’ (Corbey and Roebroeks 2001) at work regarding complexity ascriptions, as Neanderthal technological worlds appear to be ‘complex’ in different ways than their later Sapiens counterparts, notably in Europe (Hussain 2018; Hussain and Will 2021).

Importantly, recent research taking stock of the techno-functional design of Neanderthal stone tools has powerfully demonstrated that relationships between form and function can be extremely fluid and are frequently predicated on dynamic co-optation and adjustment rather than stable outcome or functional recurrence (Boëda 1997; 2013; Soriano 2000; Geneste 2010). Tools exhibit high degrees of recycling and structural reworking – the emphasis often being placed on potential use rather than specific use targets. Thus, the relationship between stone blanks (unworked matrices for functional tool-modifications) and tools (retouched elements) may be quite different in many Neanderthal contexts, and the relationship between tool use and tool life-history seems often more multifarious than in Upper Palaeolithic contexts. Ultimately, then, the concept of a tool (Forestier and Boëda 2021) may indeed have been radically different when ideal-typical Neanderthal-associated Middle Palaeolithic and later Sapiens-associated Upper Palaeolithic settings in Europe are confronted. This is linked to structural differences in how tools are supplied by blanks within the context of the often marked diversity in Neanderthal-mustered production technologies, including variants of Quina, Discoid and Levallois and other systems (Jaubert 1999; Delagnes 2010; Brenet et al. 2014; Delagnes and Rendu 2011). These production technologies yield differentiated sets of blanks with varying transformation affordances and thus frame different regimes of tool-output and land-use, while introducing various options of inter-technology cooperation and synergy (Hussain 2024). This intricate landscape of co-existing stone working technologies is thus by itself often more complex (in the sense of diversification and structural depth) than in many Upper Palaeolithic contexts.

What can be added is a high degree of fractality and recursivity characterizing many Neanderthal-associated technological contexts – in the literature often referred to as ‘ramification’ (Bourguignon et al. 2004). Mathias and Bourguignon (2020) have shown that in southwestern France levels of ramification and structured nestedness in Neanderthal stone working tend to increase over time, while Pastoors and colleagues (2010) have argued that the overall efficiency of volumetric exploitation in the Late Middle Palaeolithic layers of Balver cave in western Germany appears to equally ratchet up from the lower to the upper levels. All of this suggests – as argued by others before (Boëda 1991; Delagnes 1995) – that, clouded by the output-oriented gaze, conceptual complexity in stone technologies is considerable in many Neanderthal contexts and there is also substantial directional change and innovativeness in long-term technological developments (Boëda 2005; Jaubert 2009).

Recent research has similarly started to indicate that tools made from the remains of animals, especially their bones, are probably much more common in the Neanderthal archaeological record than long believed (see esp. Baumann et al. 2020; 2022; 2023). Generally speaking, this body of work seems to suggest that shape-stabilization and formalization were often less important for Neanderthal tooling behaviour and that this has also contributed to the somewhat reduced visibility of such objects for archaeologists. This is not to deny that Neanderthals sometimes invested in and curated quasi-stable forms – Late Middle Palaeolithic Keilmesser and handaxes offer paragon examples that they did (Uthmeier 2016; Frick and Herkert 2020; Jöris et al. 2022). Yet what is problematic is to suggest that standards of form and not the structure of technological worlds occupied by Neanderthals should be taken as indicative of their cognitive capacities and behavioural complexity. Indeed, the inherent flexibility of technological approaches increasingly evident in Neanderthal archaeology (Çep et al. 2021) should be seen as a genuine achievement and not as a deficiency or as somewhat inferior to the often-rigid serial or quasi-serial production of laminar blanks in Sapiens-associated Upper Palaeolithic contexts (and even this stereotyping is questionable).

As Churchill (2014) rightly notes, the inherent flexibility of deploying tools and drawing from a differentiated pool of production systems to meet various challenges and environmental conditions – what with Weißmüller (2003) can be qualified as a rich and deep technological ‘concept reservoir’ – may be one of the reasons why Neanderthals survived so long under changing circumstances. Such a view contrasts with the popular reading of Neanderthals as ecological rather than cultural agents – as reactive rather than proactive inhabitants of past worlds. Neanderthal technology would testify to a broad spectrum of strategic decision-making, not different in nature, but perhaps in kind, from that of contemporary Sapiens populations in Africa and elsewhere (cf. Shea 2011). The structure and motility of Neanderthal technological worlds may accordingly be understood as a broader design feature of their technologically-mediated way of life – a design enabling them to creatively and effectively navigating ever-changing external conditions and to remain vigilant in the face of crises. Interestingly, the mangle of crisis faced by human societies today is increasingly taken to indicate that key infrastructure and mitigative/adaptive measures should be designed not with a specific problem-solution context in mind but with regards to optimizing our capacity to flexibly mobilize the resources and means required to address a whole range of possible adversities. It is not impossible that Neanderthal techno-economic rationality was grounded in a similar logic of actionable flexibility. Such worlding – to use a concept from post-human theory – is not predicated on responsive adaptation (and thus elevated rates of change and innovation) but proactive exaptation and bricolage. This facet of Neanderthal life can only be fully exposed if the ‘pharmacological condition’ (Stiegler 1998) of their technological behaviours – as simultaneously affording and constraining – is taken seriously, instead of continuing to cast them in light of progressivist history. Furthermore, it seems to be especially critical to not fall prey to the industrial, output-oriented, and form-centric paradigms of techno-economic organization that are so deeply ingrained in our own ways of living and thinking and that were long an integral part of our own self-devising projects. The Neanderthal archaeological record may simply resist such shoehorning.

A Neanderthal lens for the Anthropocene?

The previous sections have illustrated how Neanderthals are construed by a dialogue between our inherited historical horizons – notably the modernist project and its divisionary politics of ‘Moderns’ vs. ‘Ancients’ – and the evidence provided by the archaeological record. I have tried to show how our ideas about Neanderthals often serve our self-devising project as contemporary humans and that changes in and limitations of the Neanderthal debate can be reconstructed by attention to how such a ‘dialectical anthropology’ (Feige 2022) plays out in deep-time archaeology – a key discipline to forge our contemporary historical imagination. As Peeters and Zwart (2020) have previously argued, what is fundamentally at stake in these debates is the ‘spark’ or ‘mark’ of the human, and, notably, the distinction between the human and the nonhuman, even though the boundaries of them both are continuously re-negotiated. These authors also suggested that some of the paradoxes arising from how scholars conjure up Neanderthals increasingly indicate that a dualistic style of reasoning is no longer tenable. While I generally agree with this critique, the discussion presented here may be taken to suggest that such duality will never fully disappear as long as Neanderthals attract attention primarily because they catalyse our self-constitution in the present – explicitly or implicitly. It is in this context that the historical moment of the Anthropocene may offer a unique opportunity to fundamentally reconfigure this dynamic without denying or unmaking our aspiration to self-actualize in the face of Neanderthal knowledge and critique.

On a fundamental level, the Anthropocene can be understood as a deep-running crisis in human self-understanding as our actions and forms of societal organization draw strongly on how we imagine ourselves and our place on the planet. Without going into the details of this far-reaching diagnosis, it does imply that the Anthropocene moment marks the need for radical novelty and revision in the human self-devising project, including the need to escape past-making politics nourished in the ‘Ancients’ vs. ‘Moderns’ trope as such practices have arguably accelerated and widened the planetary polycrisis (Morin and Kern 1999). From this perspective, it may be counterproductive to foreground the question of who we are as humans in light of who we have become on historical and evolutionary timescales. Instead, we should perhaps ask how we can become different and how we can mobilize the past in order to re-imagine ourselves, not in light of the present but in light of hopefully better futures. In order to do so, archaeology – just like the humanities more broadly – needs to be deployed in a future-serving manner (cf. also Cipolla, Crellin, and Harris 2024). Returning to Neanderthals, this may be translated to the desideratum of interrogating them not with regard to what they lack or in what sense they can be levelled with Sapiens behaviour, but instead to 1) challenge our default Sapiens-lens and to 2) imagine and think with the past otherwise. We can then also ask what we can learn from them, and how to meaningfully ask such questions. This project certainly requires to read Neanderthals ‘against the grain’ and perhaps to ‘queer’ them – i. e. to celebrate the possibilities of the Neanderthal record to resist Sapiens straight-jacketing.

This primarily means to take a more proactive stance vis-à-vis the dialectically constituted Neanderthal and to unpack our framings as well as critically rework them, rather than to give in to what has been called the ‘tyranny of historicism’ (Strauss 2013 [1963]). Neanderthals may so be queried with regard to key questions of our time such as how they shared the landscape with other beings and how they forged mutually conducive forms of co-existence with them (see Hussain, Weiss, and Kellberg Nielsen 2022 for some first ideas). We also need to be more attentive to the oppositions and alterities of the Neanderthal record itself, as these more often than not inform us about our own preconceptions and thus obstruct us from seeing the Neanderthals in novel, inspiring ways, or simply on their own terms. In order to carve a new space for Neanderthals within and at the fringes of our own self-devising projects, we thus need to learn to think with and image them in radically alternative ways. Mapping such alternative pasts is a fundamental precondition for mapping alternative futures. Importantly, this also entails a dialectical proposal for Neanderthal research going ahead: we should more systematically confront weighty questions of our own socio-historical horizon with issues and perspectives emerging from Neanderthals when investigated on their own terms. Neanderthals may so indeed regain their own voice within our ongoing self-devising projects, rather than supressing such voices. The notion of the ‘dialectical’ Neanderthal invoked in the title of this essay therefore draws attention to the necessary constitution of Neanderthals in the present, in lieu of our various historically situated self-devising projects as interpretive animals (Feige 2022), and simultaneously turns this into an opportunity as these self-devising projects can be recovered in analysis, examined, and updated in the light of intellectual and actionable imperatives.

All of this presupposes a radical critique of the historicist project in which most current Neanderthal research is neatly embedded – willingly or not. The archaeological evidence itself yields much revisionary power here. For example, new zooarchaeological and contextual data for elephant hunting during the Eemian interglacial of northwestern Europe challenges traditional ideas of Neanderthal social dynamics such as group size, interconnectivity and situational aggregations at key locations in the landscape (Gaudzinski-Windheuser et al. 2023; Gaudzinski-Windheuser, Kindler, and Roebroeks 2023) – possibly defying long-standing ideas about small and fragmented social worlds to be eventually overpowered by large and interconnected Sapiens worlds (Gamble 1998). Unusual depositions of large ungulate crania, recently reported from the Iberian peninsula (Baquedano et al. 2023) – together with other emerging data on selective and patterned animal body manipulations (Wragg Sykes 2020; Hussain, Weiss, and Kellberg Nielsen 2022) – point to hitherto largely unrecognized and rich worlds of Neanderthal meaning-making, with diverse multispecies engagements wrought in complex more-than-human interrelationships, escaping reductionistic explanations that simply throw Neanderthals ‘back into nature’.

In the wake of all of this, scholars increasingly recognize the plurality of Neanderthal life, undermining meaningful talk of the Neanderthals and complicating direct comparison with other hominins including Homo sapiens (which also needs to be pluralized). I believe that such developments may help to place much more weight on the critical question of who we can become when we engage in certain relationships in our heterogeneous worlds and in certain ways of doing things and not others, rather than foregrounding the static (either-or) problem of humanness. Ironically, such investigations may ultimately disclose – on a general level at least – that Neanderthals had the capacity to dynamically ‘make themselves’ and as such likely entertained self-devising projects of their own. Such self-devising projects would ultimately certify yet another layer of dialectics: the figure of the Neanderthal is not only dialectically constituted in the discursive spaces of the present, these hominins may have also dialectically constituted themselves while engaging with their worlds – another reason why Neanderthals need to be pluralized and their lived diversity recognized.

Conclusions

In their manifesto for a ‘future-oriented humanities’, Markus Gabriel and colleagues (2022) have pivoted the need to belabour our self-conception as humans in order to enable pro-active future-making and transformative change. In their view, how we conceive of and see ourselves is a key source of action and belief and as such should receive much more critical attention across a range of academic and non-academic fields. The global Anthropocene polycrisis presents new reasons and incentives to engage with these imaginaries and simultaneously outlines the urgency of actively re-inventing ourselves. I have argued here that the Neanderthal debate can contribute to these collective efforts as it constitutes a burning lens to how we currently negotiate and think through our purported human nature. The debate also presents another case in point illustrating that foundational preoccupations with humanness have largely clouded our view for our equally important animality and the resulting kinship with all biological life (Challenger 2021). I have suggested that careful attention to the Neanderthal debate as a long-standing vehicle of human self-constitution helps to clarify the limits of certain questions traditionally asked in archaeology but also points to the need to develop a ‘new archaeology’ of Neanderthals that can better serve a humanity in crisis. A key challenge, I suggest, is thereby not so much to objectively disclose who they truly were – what it is like to be a Neanderthal may be a question as unanswerable as Nagel’s (1980) famous question ‘[w]hat it is like to be a bat’ – but to engage with their archaeological record and ask questions that inspire us to re-imagine ourselves, not in order to surpass them but to work towards a better world in the present and future. Again, I am not suggesting that the insurmountable alterity of Neanderthal being-in-the-world precludes informative knowledge about how they went about their lives and engaged with their heterogeneous and often rather unique worlds, neither does it counteract the need for contriving meaningful imaginative horizons to engage with them in the present. Rather than to push them back into ‘nature’, archaeology’s responsibility is to curate this difficult dialogue and to ground it in tangible evidence on the variegated existences of Neanderthals. In this, Neanderthals do not necessarily pose greater challenges to archaeologists than fossil societies of Homo sapiens, as those, too, are stained in much (overlooked) deep-time alterity. This being said, Neanderthals nevertheless play an irreplaceable role in the human self-devising project and this is part of their ongoing legacy, and to repel it would certainly be a mistake – and by and large most likely impossible. What we need to do, instead, is to proactively work with them to take stock of the many ambivalences of being human – to challenge us and guide us in how to become different and perhaps better humans as we forge our own futures. The dialectic Neanderthal and its consequential legacy so forces us not only to re-imagine ourselves but also the many vanished Pleistocene worlds we hope to bring closer to and re-articulate with our own historical situatedness.