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4.6 • 8.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When you hear the word “Neanderthal,” you probably picture a mindless, clumsy brute. It’s often used as an insult — even by our president, who last year called anti-maskers “Neanderthals.” But what if we have more in common with our ancestral cousins than we think? On this week’s On the Media, hear how these early humans have been unfairly maligned in science and in popular culture.

1. John Hawks [@johnhawks], professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, on our biological family tree—and the complicated branch that is Neanderthals. Listen.

2. Rebecca Wragg Sykes [@LeMoustier], archeologist and author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, on and what we know about how they lived. Listen.

3. Clive Finlayson [@CliveFinlayson], Director, Chief Scientist, and Curator of the Gibraltar National Museum, on how studying what’s inside Gorham and Vanguard caves can help reconstruct Neanderthal life beyond them. Listen.

4. Angela Saini, science journalist, on how Neanderthals have been co-opted to push mythologies about the genetic basis of race. Listen.

Music:Boy Moves the Sun by Michael AndrewsYoung Heart by Brad MehldauSacred Oracle by John ZornTomorrow Never Knows by Quartetto d’ Archi Di Dell’Orchestra di Milano Guiseppe VerdiInvestigations by Kevin MacLeod

Transcript

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0:00.0	You wouldn't usually say that stupid congressman is in the under a tall.
0:05.4	You'd probably say in the under fall.
0:07.5	That's the right way to pronounce everybody's favorite paleozoic insult.
0:12.5	From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.
0:15.4	I'm Brooke Gladstone.
0:16.8	This week we speed-lunk into the real story of our cave dwelling in cousins.
0:22.2	The animals that lived across Europe and Asia from two 300,000 years,
0:26.5	very successfully, we have another 200,000 years to go before we catch up with any other adults.
0:31.9	And expose the world view behind the scientific racism that seems to know no limits of time or place.
0:39.0	So those disbelief that what Europeans were at the top of this hierarchy and other races was slotted below,
0:45.2	and also that those at the bottom of this hierarchy were, like Neanderthals, doomed to die out.
0:52.2	Join us as we reckon with our family history after this.
0:56.4	From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.
1:03.9	I'm Brooke Gladstone.
1:05.1	And I'm Annelie Nuehitz.
1:06.5	That's the Annelie Nuehitz, science journalist and science fiction author.
1:11.5	Their most recent book is Four Lost Cities, a secret history of the urban age,
1:16.7	and their co-host of the podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct.
1:21.4	At some point we discovered that we were both kind of obsessed with Neanderthals,
1:26.5	who they were, what they have to teach us.
1:29.1	So back in January, we decided to co-host an episode on Our Much Maligned,
1:34.9	because this is a rebroadcast of that hour.
	...

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