Neanderthals in popular culture

Statues at the Homo neanderthalensis finding site in Krapina

Neanderthal statue in Veringenstadt

Neanderthals have been portrayed in popular culture including appearances in literature, visual media and comedy, often in unflattering and inaccurate light.

A reconstruction of a Neanderthal male from the Neanderthal Museum.

Although they are frequently characterized in an unflattering manner, research showing Neanderthals were as intelligent as contemporaneous Homo sapiens, with early stone tool technologies of comparable efficiency, is debunking long-held beliefs.^[1]

Negative portrayals

In popular idiom the word Neanderthal is sometimes used as an insult, to suggest that a person combines a deficiency in intelligence and a propensity toward brute force, as well as perhaps implying that the person is old-fashioned or attached to outdated ideas, much in the same way as "dinosaur" or "Yahoo" is also used.

Positive portrayals

There are sympathetic literary portrayals of Neanderthals, as in the novel The Inheritors by William Golding, Isaac Asimov's The Ugly Little Boy, or the more serious treatment by Finnish palaeontologist Björn Kurtén, in several works including Dance of the Tiger, and British psychologist Stan Gooch in his hybrid-origin theory of humans.

The Neanderthal Parallax, a trilogy of science fiction novels dealing with Neanderthals, written by Robert J. Sawyer, explores a scenario where Neanderthals are seen as a distinct species from humans and survive in a parallel universe version of earth. The novels explore what happens when they, having developed a sophisticated technological culture of their own, open a portal to this version of the earth. The three novels are titled Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids, respectively, and together form essentially one story.

In the Thursday Next series of novels by Jasper Fforde, a small population of Neanderthals were re-created in modern Britain by advanced cloning techniques in the later years of the 20th century. These fictional Neanderthals have intelligence equivalent to normal humans, but have a radically different culture in which aggression and competition are virtually unthinkable.

In novels and short stories

Science fiction has depicted Neanderthals in novels and short stories in several ways:

• Neanderthals appear in H. G. Wells' short story "The Grisly Folk", which portrays them as savage and barbaric creatures who deserved their fate of extinction.
• L. Sprague de Camp's 1939 short story "The Gnarly Man" featured an immortal Neanderthal living in the modern world.
• Poul Anderson's story "The Nest" is told from the point of view of a Neanderthal who finds himself in a peculiar time-traveling colony mixing people from various time periods and locations. He eventually has a crucial role in forging an alliance of people from very many different backgrounds, together fighting the story's villains - bandit adventurers from Medieval Norman Sicily aided by 20th Century Nazis. Eventually, he is able to return to his own time from which he was kidnapped, but finds Neanderthal society (his name for his kind is simply "The Men") too boring and settles on a career of time-traveling adventures along with a Russian woman he fell in love with.
• In The Ugly Little Boy by Isaac Asimov, a Neanderthal child is brought into the present via time travel. Neanderthals are sympathetically depicted as having an articulate and sophisticated society and language, in conscious rebuttal of the above stereotype. In 1992 it was expanded into a novel in collaboration with Robert Silverberg, adding a covergent plot taking part in the Neanderthal society of the past.
• Philip K. Dick's novel "The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike" uses as a plot device the discovery of a Neanderthal skull in the United States. Neanderthal were also shown as living in primitive towns in the rural areas of the former United States in his book The Simulacra.
• In the Riverworld series, Philip José Farmer introduces a prominent Neanderthal character named Kazz, who interacts with modern humans. Jose Farmer's novella The Alley Man concerns a Neanderthal whose family has survived into modern times.
• Michael Crichton's 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead places a small Neanderthal population in Northern Europe as the source of the battles recorded in Beowulf. This novel was also a base for a motion picture The 13th Warrior (1999), though the word "Neanderthals" was never mentioned in the movie.
• Neanderthals appear as characters in Jean M. Auel's "Earth's Children" Series, including the 1986 movie adaptation of the first book, The Clan of the Cave Bear
• Colin Wilson discusses evidence and theories of Neanderthal survival into the modern age, including the possibility of their recent breeding with humans, in his book "Unsolved Mysteries".
• Neanderthals also appear in the 2005 Doctor Who New Series Adventures spin-off novel, Only Human, where they also show good intelligence but struggle with concepts such as fiction and lies, and they appear to not understand why humans 'are always making things up'
• The clash between the last of the Neanderthals and the emerging race of Homo sapiens is portrayed in A.A. Attanasio's 1991 novel 'Hunting the Ghost Dancer'.
• Harry Harrison describes a Neanderthal population in Norway and Sweden in his Alternate History "Hammer and the Cross" series. In these books, Neanderthals hybridize with H. sapiens and are the basis for troll legends.
• The short-lived animated series Cro centered around a Cro-Magnon child being adopted by a tribe of Neanderthals.
• In Harry Turtledove's novella Down in the Bottomlands (a scenario where the Mediterranean Sea has stayed dry since the Miocene), Europe is inhabited by Homo neanderthalensis to modern times.
• In John Darnton's 1996 novel Neanderthal a group of surviving Neanderthals is discovered in the mountains of Afghanistan. In the novel Neanderthals are said to possess the ability to read minds due to their larger cranial capacity. However, in the novel, Darnton denied that Neanderthals had, unlike Cro-Magnons, gained the capability of deception on more than two levels at a time, any more than any known specimens of great ape had. He blamed the near-extinction of the Neanderthals on this shortcoming.
• In William Shatner's Quest for Tomorrow series of novels, Neanderthals were a primitive psychic species which caught the eye of a large alien empire. They decided to try to isolate the telepathic gene and transplanted several subjects to another world. The original Neanderthals were eliminated so that no one else gets the same idea. The homo sapiens were left alone. The transplanted Neanderthals eventually evolved into an industrial society. However, this took much longer than it did for humanity, as a telepathic species would have problems inventing complex technology without the use of writing - an unnecessary tool for telepaths. The Neanderthals eventually joined together and transcended their physical shape, becoming a god-like being.
• In The Silk Code by Paul Levinson (winner of 1999 Locus Award for Best First Novel), Neanderthals are still living in Basque country in 750 AD, and a few survive in the present world.
• The T'lan Imass characters in the anthropologically-rooted fantasy series Malazan Book of the Fallen appear to be physiologically based on the Neanderthals.
• In Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series of novels Neanderthals are portrayed as having been brought back from extinction by cloning to act as medical test subjects thanks to their close relation to Homo sapiens but lack of legal status as human beings. Following a public outcry at the practice they go on to fill low paying jobs. They have an amazing ability to "read minds" from tiny facial movements and indistinct body-language, even into detail such as marital status, job and true love's identity; it is said by Neanderthals that faces can form verbs. They can instantly spot a liar, and therefore respect humans more if they say exactly what they mean, no matter how offensive or obtuse. Their art is abstract, but they can instantly understand it as if it were photorealistic, and they will never work, play or even walk in the rain, to show it respect.
• Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy portrays contact with an alternate world where Neanderthals, not Homo sapiens, became the dominant species. The first book in this series, Hominids, won the Hugo Award in 2003. (Sawyer's 1997 novel Frameshift used Neanderthal DNA as an element of a plot set in modern-day America.)
• Dance of the Tiger by Paleontolgist Björn Kurténce, follows interactions between European Homo sapiens sapiens and neanderthals, possible worldviews and origins for troll mythology.
• In Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear (winner of 2003 Nebula Award), a phenomenon which caused the Neanderthals to die off now threatens modern humans.
• Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Origin prominently features Neanderthals from an alternate timeline. This is a sequel to Manifold: Space where Neanderthal characters also appear, in a narrower context, as genetically engineered slave laborers.
• The novel Heaven by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen features spacefaring Neanderthals who were removed from Earth by powerful aliens for unspecified reasons.
• In S. M. Stirling's novel The Sky People, Neanderthals inhabit an alternate-history Venus.
• In Orson Scott Card's anthology Keeper of Dreams, the story "Heal Thyself" describes the accidental resurrection of Neanderthals during testing of an immune system enhancement.
• In the Italian comic series Martin Mystere published by Bonelli Comics, sidekick of the protagonist is a Neanderthal called "Java".

In film/TV

• In a Looney Tunes cartoon titled Mad as a Mars Hare, Bugs Bunny is turned into a Neanderthal Rabbit after getting hit by a ray from a time-projector gun by Marvin the Martian.
• "Quest for Fire (film)" (1981) features Neanderthals and a Cro-Magnon attempting to carry a vessel containing fire, back to the Neanderthal's tribe.
• "Clan of the Cave Bear" film (1986) was adapted from the Auel's novel.
• "The Iceman" film (1984), from a screenplay written by John Drimmer, depicts a frozen Neanderthal coming to life again in modern times.
• In "Ghost Light" (1989), a serial in the television series Doctor Who, a Neanderthal called Nimrod appears as the intelligent butler of a then-present London household.
• In Night at the Museum, four Neanderthals were put on display on the American Museum of Natural History. Due to the Tablet of Akhemrah, a table from the ancient Egypt, everything on display on the museum, including them, came to life nighttime. After the nightguard Larry Daley showed them fire, they gained an interest in it.
• In an episode of The real adventures of Johnny Quest the mythical yetis are stated to be a relict population of Neanderthals
• Generic "cavemen" have appeared in multiple episodes of the Dinosaurs TV series in the early 1990's, notably season 3 episodes, "The Discovery," and "Charlene and Her Amazing Humans."
• A Neanderthal-like family was a frequent recurring sketch in the children's show, "You Can't Do That on Television." In keeping with the theme of that particular episode, the sketch often parodied modern issues with coarse, overbearing parents outside of a pre-historic cave setting.^[2]

References

1. ^ Science Daily, "New Evidence Debunks 'Stupid' Neanderthal Myth"
2. ^ [YCDTOTV.com FAQ "31. Which sets were used for YCDTOTV sketches?" - see "The cave" under Miscellaneous sets. Note: do not correct url formatting as per Wikipedia's Blacklist, June 2010]