Ludovic Slimak, paleoanthropologist: ‘We’ve killed Neanderthals for the second time by not wanting to understand them’

Ludovic Slimak, 51, is a paleoanthropologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research and the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail. In his latest book, The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (2024), he recounts his experiences excavating sites around the world in search of the essence of the last extinct human species.

The author reflects on subjects that transcend science, touching on art, psychology, anthropology and philosophy. His central idea is to use Neanderthals as a mirror, so that we can look at ourselves clearly and identify the impulses that have the potential to annihilate us.

In this interview with EL PAÍS, Slimak discusses his latest discovery: the remains of what is possibly the last known Neanderthal. The man, who was about 50 when he died, hailed from a clan that was completely isolated for 50,000 years.

Question. What do you think happened when our species met the Neanderthals?

Answer. To understand this meeting between two [versions of] humans, we must find the right words to express what the Neanderthal is. So far, we haven’t succeeded. There are two schools of thought: one that considers the Neanderthals to be an inferior humanity, as well as another that — almost as a reaction — says that this is a racist view, that the Neanderthals were the same as us.

Q. And what do you think?

A. I’ve spent 35 years working in caves. I’ve had direct contact with the objects [that the Neanderthals] made, with their way of life and their weapons. While doing this work, something very problematic happened to me: I didn’t recognize anything from those two schools of thought. They weren’t seeing the fundamentals of the Neanderthal question. It’s not about understanding their technologies for carving flint, or knowing which animals they hunted, or [identifying] what their genetics were. All of these things are just tools. We’ve confused the methods with the subject of study, which is the human being.

We sapiens are so complex that we have a hard time understanding ourselves. We’ve fragmented human knowledge into many disciplines: anthropology, psychology, etiology, sociology… but the human is not in any of these fragments. We [need to ask] ourselves a much bigger question: who are we and what are we in the world? And once we’ve posed this question, we can ask ourselves what the existence of another independent form of humanity means and what its role was. We cannot understand the Neanderthals by projecting our ghosts.

Q. In your book, you discuss a “scarecrow Neanderthal,” whom we’ve disguised as ourselves. Can you elaborate?

A. For the general public, the Neanderthal is a popstar. The word “Neanderthal” is used in all cultures of the planet, with many variations. In the United States, it’s used to insult political rivals. In other cultures, the Neanderthal embodies the dream of the so-called “noble savage” (a derogatory term). In popular culture, the Neanderthal has escaped us: it has a life of its own. It’s not the real Neanderthal, but rather one that has been disguised, dressed up in different ways. We might expect that the scientific field would face the problem coldly… but that’s not the case, either. The data is so complex that the scientific community has become bogged down. It hasn’t been able to take a step back to analyze all the data as a whole.

Q. Can you speak to the charges of racism that have flared up in the debate over Neanderthals?

A. Racism isn’t saying “I don’t love you because you’re different,” but rather, “in order for you to be human, you have to be like me.” By wanting to do good, scientists have fallen into racism 2.0. We’ve killed the Neanderthals for the second time by not wanting to understand them as they really were. The same thing happened in the [European] colonization of Africa, Australia and the Americas… and it continues to happen in the 21st century. We cannot conceive of extraordinary human forms that aren’t identical to us. We’re prisoners of this refusal to see.

Q. Is everyone in the field so misguided?

A. There’s a site in Italy where remains of large, showy wings of some birds have been found. There were marks from flint tools on them. They were made by Neanderthals from the last period before their extinction. The conclusion was that they collected those feathers to adorn themselves with plumes, as we once did. But I found writings by the French explorer Jean Malaurie, who spent time with the Inuit people of the Arctic, and he said that they pluck the feathers of birds to suck the marrow of the calamus, which is very nutritious. Suddenly, [the whole theory] collapsed. The Neanderthal wearing feathers turned out to be a caricature.

Q. Is there a sense of guilt in all of this?

A. Yes, there’s guilt. In the 19th century, the myth of the “noble savage” was created. In the 20th century, we moved on to racism. But all the horror of the 20th century doesn’t change the fact that evolution exists: that we have two humanities, one that lived in Africa — us — and another in Europe, the Neanderthals, who were there for 500,000 years in totally different climates and environments. If after all that we still think that they were the same as us, it’s because we don’t believe in evolution. It’s creationism 2.0. There are unconscious movements to “rehabilitate” the Neanderthal… but be careful, because that always ends in assimilation.

Q. And thinking in terms of assimilation is a mistake?

A. When I was a student, I had an ethnography professor, Pierre Lemonnier, who invented the anthropology of technology. He would say that, the day we understand that a Papua New Guinean who kills his wife by putting three arrows in her back is considered to be a great man within his tribe, only then we can be good ethnographers. Confronting cultural otherness is always a shocking experience. Not one of our so-called “Western values” is universal. What they do in Papua New Guinea shocks us… but what we do also surprises them. And when we confront the Neanderthal, there’s not only cultural otherness, but also biological otherness. The Neanderthal cannot be a politically correct subject. We have to face it and look at it without masks, with total honesty, to try to understand what it is. We’re talking about the last great extinction of humanity… the last time there was a human being on Earth who wasn’t us.

Q. Why do you think they disappeared?

A. In recent decades, [the disappearance] has been thought of as being [similar] to the extinction of the dinosaurs. But human beings don’t become extinct just like that. It’s been said that both species (Homo sapiens and Neanderthals) had the same technological knowledge. But after having held [countless] Neanderthal and sapien objects in my hands, [I can say that] they have nothing in common.

Sapiens follow processes of normalization and standardization… of uniformization. It’s not something exclusive to the 20th and 21st centuries. The same [is notable] with objects that are 140,000 years old found in the Rhône Valley, or 200,000 years old in the Horn of Africa. When I’m presented with an object that was made by sapiens, as soon as I see it, I immediately understand it. But the Neanderthal object is like a game of chess. I know how to make tools with flint, it’s part of my training as a paleoanthropologist. When I pick up a Neanderthal tool, I see that it’s very beautiful… but I don’t understand it. Days can go by until, suddenly, the answer comes to me. The interesting thing is that this object is unique in the world. I can see [tons] of them and not one of them is identical to the other. With sapiens, after seeing 100, I know what the next ones will be like.

Q. Does technology allow us to understand the Neanderthal mind?

A. These tools open up their mental structure to us and show us that it has nothing to do with ours. We call soldiers’ outfits “uniforms.” Why is the soldier asked to dress the same as everyone else? So that he disappears as an individual and is only part of an anthill. In sapiens, there are ways of being and understanding that are very dangerous. They’re in our nature. That desire to do things at the same time — to go all in — makes us more effective than any other human species.

Q. But when sapiens encountered Neanderthals in Europe, they had sex. And they had children who were accepted.

A. Geneticists have shown that all ancient sapiens — and even those from today — have Neanderthal genes. However, the last Neanderthals didn’t have sapiens genes.

[Slimak shows EL PAÍS a reproduction of a fossilized lower jaw.] This is a discovery that still hasn’t been published. It was found in the Mandrin Cave in the Rhône valley and belongs to one of the last Neanderthals. We’ve managed to extract DNA from a molar and it tells us that they lived about 40,000 years ago. This individual didn’t have any sapiens genes. However, they come from a site where, about 10,000 years earlier, sapiens used to live. When the DNA was extracted, we realized that this is a totally unknown group of late-Neanderthals. We’re dealing with one of the last Neanderthals… possibly the last.

The population that this individual and his ancestors belonged to hadn’t exchanged a single gene with any other Neanderthal group for 50,000 years — not even with those who lived a week’s walk away! We’re dealing with elements of population behaviour that are fundamental to understanding extinction: 50,000 years of evolution is the difference between a wolf and a poodle. During the time that this population lived there, sapiens began to generate communication networks that spanned [1,800 miles] between the two ends of the Mediterranean. An object was found next to this individual that was a true technological feat. Nobody on Earth today would be able to reproduce it: it’s a completely straight stone point, 10 centimetres long and two millimetres thick. These people had surprising technical capabilities, but their way of understanding the world was different. Each object was unique and showed great creativity and freedom.

Q. Aren’t we sapiens creative and free?

A. We would like that to be the definition of the human being, but it’s not. If it were, we would have disappeared 40,000 years ago. What we are is a normalized, standardized, hyper-efficient species. There’s something very dangerous about sapiens that leads to the extinction of any other human form. Today, we’re applying our efficiency to the natural environment. We see a collapse of biodiversity. This isn’t because we evil sapiens want to destroy everything… but if we don’t become aware of this, the natural world will collapse on our heads.

Q. If Neanderthals were so special, why did their minds not give rise to art?

A. My colleagues have looked for Neanderthal art in the caves. But they look for what sapiens did. If we go to the Altamira cave (Spain), we see the bison [drawings]. The details of the legs are the same as those we see thousands of miles away, in the Ural Mountains of Russia. What does this tell us? That it’s not art: it’s technique. They all do exactly the same thing, like with flint. The Palaeolithic caves use the same code that communicates the message: “We’re together and we’re equal.”

Art appeared in 1863, with the Salon of the Impressionists. Before that, everything was academic art; everyone painted the same thing. It wasn’t art, but technique: extremely refined and artisanal. Manet, Pisarro, Monet and Renoir rebelled and began to paint in a different way… and they were rejected for it. But in the end, they opened the world’s eyes. That’s true art. Sapiens don’t consider art to be anything except anecdotal, individual moments of light. The academy has a kind of collective neurosis. With the Neanderthal, it’s different. Their artisanal objects, like the one found in the Mandrin Cave, are unique, unreproducible. That object says: “I’m the only one capable of doing this.” It’s the fusion of art and craftsmanship. We haven’t seen it because we’ve projected our sapien mentality. There’s Neanderthal art everywhere, behind the spotlights. However, in sapiens, there’s no art. They were freer than us.

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