The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

found the bones perplexing. Neanderthals had very large skulls—larger,
on average, than people today. This made it hard to fit them into a
narrative that started with small-brained apes and led progressively up to
big-brained Victorians. In The Descent of Man, which appeared in 1871,
Darwin alludes to Neanderthals only in passing. “It must be admitted that
some skulls of very high antiquity, such as the famous one of
Neanderthal, are well developed and capacious,” he notes.
At once human and not, Neanderthals represent an obvious foil for
ourselves, and a great deal that’s been written about them since The
Descent of Man reflects the awkwardness of this relationship. In 1908, a
nearly complete skeleton was discovered in a cave near La Chapelle-aux-
Saints, in southern France. It found its way to a paleontologist named
Marcellin Boule, at Paris’s Museum of Natural History. In a series of
monographs, Boule invented what might be called the “don’t-be-such-a
Neanderthal” version of the Neanderthals: bent-kneed, hunched over, and
brutish. Neanderthal bones, Boule wrote, displayed a “distinctly simian
arrangement,” while the shape of their skulls indicated “the
predominance of functions of a purely vegetative or bestial kind.”
Inventiveness, “artistic and religious sensibilities,” and capacities for
abstract thought were, according to Boule, clearly beyond such a beetle-
browed creature. Boule’s conclusions were studied and then echoed by
many of his contemporaries; Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, a British
anthropologist, for instance, described Neanderthals as walking with “a
half-stooping slouch” upon “legs of a peculiarly ungraceful form.” (Smith
also claimed that Neanderthals’ “unattractiveness” was “further
emphasized by a shaggy covering of hair over most of the body,” although
there was—and still is—no physical evidence to suggest that they were
hairy.)