In his new book, "Neanderthals Among Us: The Making of a Prehistoric Human" (Oneworld Publications, 2026), historian and author Peter Sahlins examines our complicated view of Neanderthals, with this lost human lineage being viewed through the lens of cultural and political ideologies. In this excerpt, he looks at our theories for why they went extinct and the philosophical reckoning we've placed up on them.
Sometimes it's the newspapers that translate a more neutral science into easily relatable headlines. "Immigrants Halt Neanderthal Era," announced the Glasgow Herald (29 July 2011), claiming that "Europe's earliest residents may have been crowded out by uncontrolled immigration 40,000 years ago." Glossing a highly technical study by Cambridge archaeologist Paul Mellars about the notable increase in population size during the Upper Palaeolithic, the news reports tweaked the science to speak to contemporary anxieties.
Of growing importance over the last twenty years is the thesis that climate change, our own existential challenge of the Anthropocene, was the principal cause of Neanderthal extinction. The idea takes many shapes, beginning with an update of French geologist Georges Cuvier's "catastrophism," where species died off in cataclysmic geological events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Since 2007, researchers point to the Campanian Ignimbrite eruption near Naples (Italy), now dated to around 39,280 BP [before present] (+/- 110 years), fictionalised in the 2013 animated film The Croods.
But perhaps "Climate Change Killed the Neanderthals," that is, the extreme climatic fluctuations during the Upper Pleistocene that National Geographic (9 February 2004) announced, following the work of an international team of thirty scientists who laboured for more than seven years on the study. The team identified a general climatic instability during the Middle Palaeolithic marked by a severe cooling event around 41,000 years ago, lasting six centuries — interstadials GIS 13 to 7 of the Greenland ice-core records, to be precise.
St. Michaels Cave in Gibraltar, which was used as a refuge for Neanderthals until around 40,000 years ago. (Image credit: UCG via Getty Images)The trope, we've seen, is a frequent one in Neanderthal fiction, including Claire Cameron's "The Last Neanderthal" (Little Brown & Co., 2017), a moving, feminist revision of "Neanderthal Woman." It's also been widely used in popular nonfiction, including in Ludovic Slimak's 2023 account of twenty-five years of research in the Mandrin Cave .
That Neanderthals died out because of their conservatism, while humans alone mastered innovation, and with it, conquered the world, is the principal claim in Philip Lieberman's "The Unpredictable Species: What Makes Humans Unique" (Princeton University Press, 2013), and it's a widely shared belief.
Exclusive to Live Science ProAside from the fact that the high value placed on "innovation" corresponds to the ideological superstructure of contemporary neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism, it seems fitting that Neanderthals died out because, in this view, they were, well, truly Neanderthal. The rhetorical figure returns to haunt the science: Neanderthals were conservative, backward, clinging mindlessly to the past in a changing world.
Just as "savages" were once seen as descendants of Neanderthals, so too is their conservatism a cultural legacy, even when anthropologists, transcending an outdated comparative method, no longer deem them ancestral, or even savage.
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Harvard University Press Neanderthals Among Us: the Making of a Prehistoric HumanIn "Neanderthals Among Us," historian Peter Sahlins offers a sweeping interdisciplinary history of an obsession that has made Neanderthals into a distorting mirror of our claims to human uniqueness and our anxieties about human difference.
The reputation of “Neanderthal Man,” our Paleolithic double, has been in constant flux, remaining a site of endless fascination and debate about human uniqueness, race, gender, and the very look of the human.
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