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  • Unknowability and Indeterminacy:Neanderthal Histories
  • Zoë Crossland (bio)

INTRODUCTION

Preparing for this article, I ran a search for "Neanderthal" with Google Images, which conjures up a remarkably consistent constellation of pictures. Absent is the characteristic portrayal of Neanderthals familiar from twentieth-century media presentations, invariably slumped forward, hairy, and brutish in physiognomy and attitude. Instead, image after image shows Neanderthals reimagined as stocky ("robust" in the parlance of physical anthropology), poorly dressed, and weatherworn, but always visibly human. These are people who lived hard lives, expressed in the wrinkles and creases of their faces and the windblown, unkempt condition of their hair. They are also mostly men; the very few images of Neanderthal women or children come from recreations of specific individuals, usually the Neanderthal woman and child found at Gibraltar (Finlayson 2019).

This collection of pictures captures the range of possibilities that are imagined and actualized in contemporary reconstructions of Neanderthals. The images are constrained by current scientific knowledge but also go beyond what is known. They act as a convenient point of entry for thinking about the question of unknowability. All knowledge of such deep prehistory has to be inferred from material traces—there are no documents, oral histories, or living testimony to bolster these claims about the past. And Neanderthals offer a particularly [End Page 75] good subject to think about the question of unknowability, given that they were unknown before the mid-nineteenth century. Since then, knowledge of Neanderthal history has shifted dramatically, most recently due to the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome and innovations in other analytical techniques. We're in a moment when not only what is known but also what is possible to know about Neanderthals changes from year to year. The archaeology of Neanderthals therefore opens itself up to a kind of thought experiment, offering a means to think about unknowability and indeterminacy via the deep past, its continuing traces in the present, and the constantly reconfigured fields of possibility engendered around these traces.

When we think about unknowability in archaeology, we tend to focus on the relationship between our tangible archaeological evidence and the past that it points to. But there is also another dimension to the unknown, which is more future-oriented. These traces and the past they summon are understood in an unfolding present and an emergent future. How is that unfolding field of possibility involved in the way in which the past is known and unknown? How are future unknowns conceptualized as possibilities and when do they come into view as topics of study? Related to this is the question of what we do with evidence for possibilities that cannot be put to the test, neither validated nor disproved. How do these possibilities shape the scope of archaeological inquiry? These are questions that are wider and deeper than that of the Neanderthal unknown. Examining the workings of such archaeological evidence also informs us about the nature of experience more generally. How do we come to know the previously unknowable, and how is this knowledge constrained by how we imagine and experience the possible?

When Neanderthals were identified in the second half of the nineteenth century, something novel was discovered; a species previously unknown and unknowable came into view. The name comes from the first partial skeleton to be recognized as a prehistoric species of human. Found in 1856, dug out of Feldhofer Cave in the Neander Valley (Neander Thal in the German of the time), the bones were [End Page 76] identified and saved by schoolteacher and natural history enthusiast, Johann Carl Fuhlrott. He was able to recognize that the bones were not of a cave bear, as had at first been thought, but were rather more human in character. The local newspaper quickly published a report on the find. The following year, Fuhlrott published his findings with Hermann Schaaffhausen, a professor of anatomy at the University of Bonn, arguing that the discovery offered evidence of an archaic species of human (Drell 2000).

The bones of the Neanderthal specimen revealed the potential for a previously unknown world. Who would have thought that another human species had once walked around Europe? At that moment, this past world existed as...

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