The changing portrayal of neanderthals in the museum. separating them and us

Abstract

Over the last century our portrayal of Homo neanderthalensis has changed radically. They were initially conceptualised as primitive savages, dim-witted and brutish cavemen, understood either as a missing link in the evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens (modern humans), or an evolutionary dead-end (Moser 1992; Drell 2000; Madison 2021). Although Neanderthals have moved between animality and humanness (Corbey 2005), and in and out of the direct lineage of human origins, the prevailing view considered them as a primitive prototype of our own species. However, modern Neanderthals are visually reconstructed and recognised as essentially human (Peeters and Zwart 2020).
This thesis highlights how technological innovations in ancient DNA (paleogenetics), and archaeological discoveries are providing new and exciting windows onto the past, but questions whether these new relationships and findings are reflected in the context of the museum and hyperrealism (Peeters and Zwart 2020). In this scientific journey of rediscovery, it has become abundantly clear that the assumed modern human-Neanderthal boundary so clear cut when evolutionary studies began, is breaking down (Finlayson 2019: xi). It is increasingly difficult to pinpoint what the difference between Neanderthals and AMHs is and yet there remains a persistent quest for a minimal difference which separates ‘them’ from ‘us’ (Peeters and Zwart 2020).

The archaeology of Neanderthals therefore remains in a philosophical crisis, charged with creating a narrative that centres on the dualistic construction of ‘them’ and ‘us’, and slow modernity, which ultimately perpetuates the great divide at the centre of cartesian philosophy between nature and culture (Peeters and Zwart 2020). This thesis argues a dualistic style of thinking (modernity) and the progressive tendencies of the evolutionary museum are no longer tenable and can no longer encompass the complexity of new data, techniques and interpretations available to archaeologists and the museum (Crellin and Harris 2020).

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ORCID for Jade Liegh Beresford: orcid.org/0009-0001-1996-450X

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