In 1856 a gang of quarrymen working a cave in the Neander Valley, in the west of Germany, turned up some bones and took them for the remains of an old cave bear. A local schoolteacher, Johann Carl Fuhlrott, saw better. The bones belonged to a strange human, with a shallow, sloping forehead, a huge ridge over the eyes and massive limbs. Fuhlrott gathered them up and carried them to the University of Bonn, where they were judged to be of great antiquity and, possibly, the remnants of Europe’s earliest population. Neanderthal 1 (thal is German for valley) became the first ancient hominin recognised as belonging to another species: Homo neanderthalensis.
In the 170 years since, no early human has been worked over so thoroughly. Fossil sites across Europe and West Asia have yielded more than 350 Neanderthal individuals, and hundreds more sites hold Mousterian stone tools, named for the rock shelters of Le Moustier, where a complete Neanderthal skeleton was recovered in 1908. Those tools were made mostly by Neanderthals. Yet the bones are only half the story. Neanderthals Among Us by Peter Sahlins is, according to Helen Wickstead’s review in History Today, the first book to tell the whole of it: the science, from the skull-measuring of the early racial experts to the latest ancient DNA, set beside a vast multilingual heap of Neanderthal images in novels, poetry, films, cartoons, advertisements and computer games. Sahlins puts science and popular culture in conversation, and the creature that emerges is ‘an ever-shifting chimera’—which is to say, we made him up, and made him up again.
The making began long before 1856. From antiquity the Western imagination kept a lower class of doubles: the satyr of the Greeks, the Wild Man of the Middle Ages. These creatures lacked speech, reason, beauty and chastity. They were hairy, slouching and unable to govern their appetites. They were, in Sahlins’ phrase, Neanderthals before the name.
Colonial explorers then shifted the Wild Man out of folklore and into their reports of indigenous peoples and great apes, and it was on this ground that the first racial sciences grew in the eighteenth century. After 1856, skulls like Neanderthal 1 were sorted into a ladder: European crania at the top, indigenous peoples of colour below, and Neanderthals at the bottom. Though taken for Europeans, they were drawn white-skinned but ‘dark’ and hairy. And though their skulls were on average larger than those of modern humans—a fact one might have thought worth a moment’s pause—they were cast as the ‘missing link’ between ape and man, pressed into service as proof of Darwin.
The brute had a long run. Quest for Fire, a fantasy novel written in 1911 under the name ‘Joseph-Henri Rosny’, imagined a world ‘100,000 years ago’ in which a cannibal tribe of ‘coarse brutes’ with ‘raw, heavy flesh, hairy bodies and low foreheads’ steals the hero’s fire, and the Homo sapiens must win it back with the aid of woolly mammoths. In 1981 it became an Oscar-winning film with a screenplay by Anthony Burgess. The Clan of the Cave Bear novels, which had sold 20 million copies by 1990, carried hair-dragging rape scenes that got the books banned from American public libraries in the 1990s.
Meanwhile the name itself became a stick to beat the living. To call a man a Neanderthal was to call him violent, dull-witted, and backward-looking, and progressive movements in North America flung the word at reactionaries, anti-feminists and conservatives. Sahlins, working through the international News on the Web corpus, finds a worldwide spike in English-language use of the word that coincides with Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns. The fossil had become an insult, and the insult tracked the politics.
After the Second World War the scientists pushed back against the caricature. In 1953 a Neanderthal was unearthed at Shanidar Cave in Iraq who had lived for years with crippling injuries and must have been cared for by others. A few years later another skeleton was found ringed with flowers, laid down in what appears to have been an elaborate burial. Whatever these creatures were, they were not the apish louts of the films.
Then came 2010 and the mapping of the Neanderthal genome. It showed that between 52,000 and 39,000 years ago humans and Neanderthals interbred, repeatedly, across a span of some 7,000 years, leaving nearly a third of the Neanderthal genome in fragments scattered through the DNA of people alive now. On this reading the Neanderthals were not a fundamentally different species at all but a closely related group of human peoples. And the newest result, from 2026, which Sahlins takes up, is that the mixing ran mostly one way: Neanderthal males with human females, not Neanderthal females with human males.
The commerce followed the science. The biotech company 23andMe offered ‘Neanderthal Ancestry Reports’ to more than half of its 14 million customers before going bankrupt in 2025. Sahlins took the test himself; his inheritance is a disappointingly average 2.1 per cent. He is the son of the late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, a social theorist who spent his career arguing against the idea that biology fixes human behaviour, and the son shares the father’s wariness. He warns:
something of a Rorschach test onto which people project ideas and assumptions about ancestry and what it means to be human – or differently human
That is the genome he is describing, and the warning is the spine of the book. Wickstead calls its author an erudite and entertaining guide and judges that Neanderthals Among Us should be read by anyone interested in how humans are made. The deeper lesson is plainer still: for 170 years the creature from the valley has been whatever the living needed him to be, and the test results on our kitchen tables are only the newest version of the old habit. Neanderthals Among Us: The Making of a Prehistoric Human is published by OneWorld, 448 pages, £25.