Pity the poor Neanderthals, who had the misfortune of being discovered at the time Darwin was evoking the outrage of his contemporaries by suggesting that humans, apes, and gorillas have a common ancestry.
Articles with Humans
Modern reconstruction of a Neanderthal • ©2021 Neanderthal Museum—Holger Neumann
A facial reconstruction of Homo floresiensis • Cicero Moraes et al (CC BY 4.0)
What makes us human?
About fifty years ago, a “stone age” tribe was discovered living in an isolated valley of Papua New Guinea. These people had virtually no contact with the outside world, no metal, no cooking vessels, no hearths.
Photo by Mike Arney on Unsplash
What immortal hand or eye…
Chimps and gorillas get about by knuckle-walking. They curl back their fingers and bear the weight of their upper bodies on their knuckles, which permits them a four-legged scoot on the ground while retaining long, grasping fingers for swinging Tarzan-like among the branches. A nice compromise between life in the trees and life on the ground.
NGC 2336 • ESA/Hubble & NASA, V. Antoniou
Even he couldn’t write this script
The noted film director David Lean always felt a bit of a dummy compared to his more academically gifted younger brother.
Reconstruction of Homo neanderthalensis by John Gurche • Photo by Chip Clark (Public Domain)
Are we what we eat?
A shiver went up our spines when we read about the recent discoveries at Moula-Guercy cave in France. Archeologists found a treasure trove of 100,000-year-old bones of Neanderthals — our nearest cousins on the human family tree — along with the bones of deer and other animals.
Modern reconstruction of a Neanderthal • ©2021 Neanderthal Museum—Holger Neumann
The circle widens, much too late
Neanderthal. For most people, the word evokes a hulking, hairy, thick-necked brute, a “missing link” sort of creature who occupied a place on the developmental scale somewhere between the gorilla and modern man.
Photo by Ekaterina Shakharova on Unsplash
Whatever are grandmothers for?
Let me ‘fess up: I’m happily married to a grandmother.
A cross-section from the Visible Human Project • National Library of Medicine (Public Domain)
One male: sliced thin and digitized
Start with a male human cadaver.
“La Bohémienne endormie” by Henri Rousseau (1897)
Get in touch with your inner animal
“An animal and proud of it.”
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
What’s progress got to do with it?
We’ve all seen the familiar image of a fish waddling onto the shore, preceded by a quadruped rising onto its hind legs, a knuckle-dragging simian, thick-browed Neanderthal, and — leading the parade of progress — bright-eyed Homo sapiens striding erect.