Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

Since 2011, the at-home DNA testing company 23andMe has invited its users to “celebrate your ancient DNA” with its Neanderthal report, which tells users whether their prehistoric genes predispose them to certain behaviors, like hoarding or not getting hangry. In the 1880s, Neanderthals were not being celebrated at all—they were depicted as little more than troglodytes with tools—and the 1980s weren’t much better: rough hair, swarthy skin, dull eyes, jutting foreheads … an evolutionary dead end. Today, armed with recently decoded Neanderthal DNA, researchers are reconstructing these archaic people as lighter-skinned, blue-eyed, and blond. For historian Stefanos Geroulanos, however, this new account raises difficult questions. “Are Neanderthals now smart because they are no longer depicted as dark-skinned? Or, conversely, have they become blond and white because they are now believed to have been smart, able, quintessentially human?” Questions like these form the heart of his book, The Invention of Prehistory: