A Neanderthal as depicted in 1909.
In the nineteen-fifties, a pair of anatomists, William Straus and
Alexander Cave, decided to reexamine the skeleton from La Chapelle.
World War II—not to mention World War I—had shown the sort of
brutishness the most modern of modern humans were capable of, and
Neanderthals were due for a reappraisal. What Boule had taken for the
Neanderthal’s natural posture, Straus and Cave determined, was probably
a function of arthritis. Neanderthals did not walk with a slouch or with
bent knees. Indeed, given a shave and a new suit, the pair wrote, a
Neanderthal probably would attract no more attention on a New York
City subway “than some of its other denizens.” More recent scholarship
has tended to support the idea that Neanderthals, if not necessarily up to
riding incognito on the IRT, certainly walked upright, with a gait we
would recognize more or less as our own.
In the nineteen-sixties, an American archaeologist named Ralph
Solecki uncovered the remains of several Neanderthals in a cave in
northern Iraq. One of them, known as Shanidar I, or Nandy for short, had
suffered a grievous head injury that had probably left him at least
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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