The Naked Neanderthal (Pegasus Books) by Ludovic Slimak is a captivating scientific journey that delves into the enigma of our ancient cousins, the Neanderthals. For over a century, Neanderthals were considered inferior to Homo sapiens. However, recent discoveries have shifted our understanding.
Slimak argues that Neanderthals possessed a distinctive form of intelligence, which in some ways might have been superior to that of Homo sapiens. Contrary to previous assumptions, Neanderthals had their own history, rituals, and customs. They were not merely inferior versions of us but a unique species with their own story to tell.
Slimak takes readers on an archaeological adventure, tracing their footsteps across various landscapes, from the Arctic Circle to Mediterranean forests. His research sheds light on Neanderthal life, intelligence, and culture, challenging preconceptions and revealing how much we still have to learn.
The Naked Neanderthal invites readers to reconsider deep history and recognize that Neanderthals deserve to be understood on their own terms. It’s a thought-provoking adventure that broadens our perspective on our ancient relatives.
Ludovic Slimak took a moment from his busy schedule to discuss his research and The Naked Neanderthal with SCINQ.
What inspired you to write The Naked Neanderthal, and how does the title reflect the core message of your book?
Our perception of what Neanderthals were like results from decades of scientific constructions. It is evident that the conceptions of the 1970s, for example, only imperfectly align with those of the 1930s or the current image of these populations. Our perception of this humanity has become particularly burdened with frameworks that depend not only on the history of research but also on the sociology of our own societies.
This is a fundamental pitfall since science should, first and foremost, be completely emancipated from preconceptions, fantasies, or projections of our values onto these distant populations. But this pitfall is almost impossible to overcome and requires not only constant effort but also a shocking confrontation. Confronting profound cultural otherness is inevitably a particularly shocking experience. And, as scientists, we are generally ill-equipped to confront societies that may not share any of our major moral values.
I had a professor of ethnography when I was a student who told us, “The day you understand that a Barruya who plants three arrows in the back of his wife because she didn’t bring back enough dead wood is a good guy, you can start doing ethnography.” And imagine that when I talk about cultural divergences on this scale, I am only referring to tiny divergences; they are here only cultural and are inscribed within our own humanity, Sapiens. But this otherness is already, for everyone, mentally insurmountable. We never fully manage it, and that’s entirely understandable, of course. Nevertheless, it turns out that faced with this impossibility of thinking difference, it occurred to me that we had remarkably simplified Neanderthal, either making it an inferior creature or another version of ourselves. And my book fits into this intellectual environment.
In this moment of research where it is crucial to overturn all our conceptions to rethink what I call “the creature.” And this creature, I expose it naked, to extract an original image, finally liberated from all our assumptions and from this history so heavy with our Western perspectives on total human otherness. Here at last is The Naked Neanderthal.
In your research, what have you found to be the most common misconceptions about Neanderthals?
I believe that we need to literally rewrite everything. To rethink everything. Not that our data is wrong, but the perspective we associate with our data, our Western perspective, to reconstruct what Neanderthal was is simply deeply biased. And in doing so, projecting our views without any distance onto an extinct humanity, far from elevating it to ourselves, far from “doing it a favor,” we constrain it within ourselves, we imprison it in our narrow, comfortable, and politically correct visions. We kill Neanderthal a second time.
I read some reviews that attempt to “dig in their heels” against this demonstration given in my book of the necessity to deeply turn our perspectives. Obviously, faced with these objections, I sometimes feel alone, but my perspective has been formed over three decades of close contact with Neanderthal living areas and craftsmanship, emancipating myself from any form of preconceived thought, like a chess game. But in this game, I have never played against my colleagues. I played against myself. I considered myself as my main opponent and deconstructed, without any concession, and even with some violence, my own ideas. My own perspective. It is this deconstructed and reconstructed perspective, on new and unexpected landscapes, that I finally offer in this book, which has a universal scope.
In the end, The Naked Neanderthal, in its final chapter, no longer speaks of Neanderthal, but of Us. Sapiens. Of what we are in the world. And I then use this new conception of Neanderthal to understand what We, Sapiens, are in the world. The Naked Neanderthal is also The Naked Sapiens. The Mirror of Sapiens. And the scope of this perspective then becomes universal and casts a raw look at what we are in the world. And where we are heading now.
Your work has significantly contributed to our understanding of Neanderthals. Could you share one of the most surprising findings from your research?
When I wrote this book after 30 years of wandering, constantly tracking Neanderthal, I realized that it was now fundamental to pause and engage in introspection, to question the creature. But ultimately, I had never directly questioned what I truly thought about this extinct humanity. And it was in the writing of this book, very gradually, that I saw emerge a completely unexpected image that deeply questioned me myself.
I then followed the thread of my own demonstrations and found myself facing the astonishing creature that I describe in The Naked Neanderthal. An astonishing creature. And unexpected. Even more astonishing because it invited me, in return, to question Sapiens very directly. Neanderthal, an extinct creature, became a tool to question our world and our own way of being human in the world. These final chapters, these final words, and where they lead not only the reader, but myself, are not only surprising but also deeply unsettling, of course.
Can you discuss the primary sites you’ve worked on that you describe in your book and their significance in Neanderthal evolution?
I led archaeological missions from the equator to the Arctic Circle, excavating for 3 decades, including 7 years in Turkey, Ethiopia, the Polar Urals in Russia, between Siberia and Europe, and in the Mediterranean region of France. Each context is quite unique, and each ancient archaeological site is a miracle of preservation. But surprisingly, most of the time, we don’t know where Neanderthal is.
Was it him who abandoned the obsidian tools that I found on the slope of that volcano in Anatolia? Was it still him who had brought down all those mammoths left behind on the Russian Arctic Circle?
We need not only the remains of their activities but also the fossilized traces of their biology, marking the biological presence of these populations. Teeth, some traces of DNA… to complete the picture. But these remains are rare.
Through perseverance, and sometimes sheer determination, I had the chance to discover ancient human remains, including the first Neanderthal body found in France since 1979. In one of these caves, in the Mediterranean region of France, a collection of about ten teeth would allow us to specify which populations had successively settled in a cave over 70 to 80 millennia.
It is on this site that I discovered the oldest traces of Homo sapiens migration to the European continent. Here, entire sections of the historical structure of Neanderthal populations are emerging, rewriting large parts of European history. We see populations with very different traditions succeeding each other in this cave, sometimes only a few seasons apart.
For the first time, I was able to document these extremely rapid replacements of societies and human groups thanks to a method we developed with my teams by analyzing subtle traces of soot on ancient fragments of the cave wall. Here, the work of one of my students, Ségolène Vandevelde, allowed us to redraw, for the first time, chronologic resolutions previously unmatched in ancient archaeology. And when we obtain these resolutions, not only in time, but also in technical traditions, territories, and the organization of these populations, we begin to concretely measure the immensity of what escapes us regarding these distant human groups.
What challenges do you face when trying to piece together the daily lives of Neanderthals from archaeological evidence?
The weight of the unknown lies at the heart of research on extinct human groups. We discussed the issue of human bone remains or DNA, which can determine if these remains were indeed left by Neanderthals. But the problem is actually much broader because reconstructing the universe of these populations, rather than just compiling the syntheses of dozens of hyper-specialized researchers, requires a diverse intellectual background ranging from statistical questions about dating methods to DNA analysis and infinitely more subtle knowledge of human and animal behavior in extreme circumstances.
This entails being a bit of an archaeologist, a bit of a physicist, a bit of a paleontologist, a bit of an anthropologist, a bit of an ethnologist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a writer, a bit of a thinker, a bit of a mathematician, and a bit of a logistician, all while being able to cast a diagonal and shifted gaze on our own society. It also involves rejecting the simplifications of our perspectives, our culture, our time. And obviously, being able to handle sometimes violent reactions from our fellow citizens, who often struggle to accept diverse perspectives on the world.
The West is enamored with universalism. But ethnography and ancient archaeology confront us with the risk of ethnocentrism. Of a thought that would like to consider itself superior or emancipated from the views of other humans, past and present. My book also highlights the pitfall of our projections, where, based on data of infinite fragility, we have projected our consciousness onto that of Neanderthal. Perhaps here, not only is everything to be rewritten, but maybe, as my book illuminates, we are not yet capable of truly decentering ourselves to really approach what Neanderthal truly was.
How has modern technology and methodology changed the way we study Neanderthals compared to decades ago?
Technology enables us to achieve remarkable feats, such as 3D reconstructions of our archaeological sites, extracting DNA from tiny sedimentary particles, or increasingly precise dating of archaeological contexts. But all these technologies, while formidable, are merely tools, mathematical representations, statistical analyses of the world that may have led us to believe that we could finally grasp these distant populations.
However, the more these technologies have advanced, the more convinced we have become that the answer would come from them, the further we have strayed from the reality of human matter. Man is an irrational substance, infinitely more subtle and never bending to simple reasoning. It’s an elusive thing, a bit messy, and one that requires us to struggle to find not the right technologies, but the right questions, the right words, the right ways to approach it so that it truly becomes conceivable in our minds.
Our technologies offered us the best and the worst; a technical approach to the world that has been, and still is, thought to be emancipated from human complexity. More than a trap, it’s a fundamental mistake, almost an original sin, regarding our ability to think about humanity.
Could you explain the significance of other geographic locations where Neanderthal artifacts have been found and what they tell us about their migration patterns?
The subject is immense because we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of years of human migrations in a world of diverse human populations. These territories where populations move during major migratory phases are generally occupied not only by other societies, other cultures, but also by other creatures, other human populations. In our simplified universe, where only one humanity has survived, it’s almost impossible for us to fully conceive of this.
For now, we still can’t fully distinguish between the cultural and the biological, and this touches on one of the key issues in my book. Immense questions are emerging regarding the mental, behavioral, and ethological structures of these Neanderthal populations. I can’t be too specific here because it relates to very important studies that I am currently directing, and the embargo on them has not yet been lifted as I write these lines.
However, my research has led me to discover a previously unknown late Neanderthal population that had no genetic relationship with classical European Neanderthals, yet still occupied the heart of the territories where classical Neanderthals were prevalent. The analysis reveals that these two Neanderthal populations coexisted for 50,000 years in close proximity without exchanging any genetic material during this incredible span of time.
This is astonishing, unexpected, and raises direct questions about what these Neanderthal populations really were. There is also no evidence of recent genetic exchange with Homo sapiens in the latest Neanderthal populations, which echoes a humorous chapter in the French version of my book titled “Neanderthal, Sapiens, I love you, me neither…”. Beyond the wink and the aphorism, such observations and isolations powerfully question what these remarkable Neanderthals were like in terms of their organization, and even more so in terms of their mental universes. We are touching upon essentially uncharted territories in scientific thought that urgently need exploration.
The Naked Neanderthal is a first step in this direction.
Obviously, this entails shaking up the concepts we have built to study Neanderthals. And in doing so, by shaking things up, we must first shake ourselves. Questioning our own mental frameworks that, in the shadows, unconsciously guide our perceptions of these human populations. We are always our own best enemy, aren’t we? So, shaking ourselves, and shaking the reader, so that starting from one perspective, with one worldview, they open their eyes, at the end of the book, to a totally unexpected world. Completely unexplored. And finally offering new questions to turn over our own ways of being in the world. You understand, The Naked Neanderthal could just as easily have been titled “The Naked Sapiens”…
Why is it important to take Neanderthals on their own terms and not as some lesser version of modern humans?
You know, the Western relationship with otherness is a challenging issue when analyzed from a historical perspective. We find ourselves facing the structure of all our colonizations, their effects, and our views on the populations we encountered during our exploration of the world.
When we reread Darwin himself, we see a worldview entirely centered on the white man and deeply racist in its relationship to non-European populations. It’s not Darwin himself who is at stake here, but the vision of the West as a whole; he is only the revealer of our extremely poor perceptions of anything that is not us. But this reality, this observation, does not speak to a distant past. This racist view is still present, unconscious, but deeply shapes the Western view of our world.
In The Naked Neanderthal, I mention Antoine de Saint Exupéry and his magnificent The Little Prince. There is this passage where an Ottoman astrophysicist presents a remarkable theory at a world scientific congress, but no one pays attention to him because he is dressed in Ottoman fashion. Therefore, he cannot be considered a serious person. Some time later, this researcher presents the same theory at another scientific congress. In the meantime, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk has Westernized Turkey, and everyone is asked to dress in European fashion.
Our researcher is now in a Western suit. And the scientific community finally gives credence to the presentations of this researcher. Clothes make the man. Definitely. Radically. Yesterday as today. Neanderthal is precisely on this frontier today. For decades now, researchers have wanted to rehabilitate him, to make him another version of ourselves, even unconsciously twisting archaeological data to fit a certain narrative. What I am telling you here is indeed somewhat harsh, as it is a frontal critique of research and my colleagues. But, to be very clear, I do not exclude myself from this mode of representation, and in writing The Naked Neanderthal, I found myself forced to twist my own arm and reject whole sections of my previous conceptions.
In this writing process, I highlighted the unconscious reasonings that had led me, myself, to conceive of Neanderthal in a certain way, as this other version of ourselves. This vast process of rehabilitating Neanderthal populations expresses a widely prevalent fact, not only within the general public but also within the international scientific community. But we must realize what is really at stake here. Rehabilitation is also Assimilation. And the Western relationship with otherness has always been about assimilation.
Here, our history with all the indigenous peoples, the “root” peoples as Jean Malaurie called them, comes into play. The First Nations. And this assimilation says this: “For you to be human, you must be like me.” Rehabilitation, assimilation, always well-meaning, politically correct, is actually another face of Western racism. Unconscious racism, but real racism is always unconscious. The rehabilitation of Neanderthal means well, of course. But intellectually, it falls short of this incredible challenge. The rehabilitation of Neanderthal is actually racism. A racism that means well but, along the way, forgets the reality of the other. Forgets to accept it for what it is. Or for what it was. “Be quiet and be proud, I tell you that you are like me…”
In this sense, The Naked Neanderthal is a book of profound realism, but it also carries a sadness within it. A sadness not about the death of Neanderthal, but about what We are, in this world.
Where do the so-called super-archaics and the Denisovans fit into the Neanderthal narrative?
This notion of super-archaic is unevenly employed by the scientific community because it remains a vague concept, a drawer in which anthropological realities are not really mastered but still used. We need to organize all these complexities into realities, even simplified ones, in order to try to verbalize past human experiences. What’s important here is to understand that Neanderthal is not alone.
Across these vast Eurasian territories, various human forms spread over some 2 millions of years and had long lineages. We don’t quite understand or fully perceive this universe where not only new human forms like Neanderthal or Denisova flourished but where older, more archaic forms also persisted and underwent parallel developments.
Twenty years ago, the discovery of the Flores man on a small island in Southeast Asia caused a powerful stir within the scientific community. This sort of Hobbit was simply inconceivable from an evolutionary perspective. This small humanoid defied all our classic frameworks, and the scientific shockwave is still reverberating. The general public has also embraced it, profoundly impacting everyone’s conceptions of what our world was really like not long ago. But that’s precisely why ancient prehistory is fascinating—it illuminates a remarkable moment in the history of human populations: the tipping point.
The moment when we transitioned from a multitude of human forms to a time when only one human form persisted. Our Sapiens world is therefore an incredibly simplified and biologically poorer world. There’s only Sapiens left. We no longer have any other genetic resources. No reservoirs to mix with other populations to ensure the survival of our species.
In this sense, the survival of Sapiens, after the extinction of all other ancient human forms, is now infinitely more fragile and uncertain than it was 40,000 years ago when interbreeding with cousin species still allowed us to diversify our genetic heritage. One of the keys to the survival of Sapiens over the millennia to come certainly lies here.
How do you envision the future of research on Neanderthals and what are the questions you hope to find answers to in the years to come?
My vision of the future of research opens onto uncertain paths. The scientific community stands at a crossroads where the hard sciences, such as dating methods or genetics, have made remarkable contributions to knowledge, but in doing so, they have also, unwittingly, staged a sort of coup d’état on our understanding of human societies. It’s likely that we, specialists in human societies, have not fully realized our role as a safeguard. Faced with this incredible upheaval in our understanding, particularly stemming from genetics, we have not clearly expressed the distinction between populations (biological) and societies (the cultural and social organizations of human populations).
We, too, as researchers, have been somewhat stunned by the biological, the mathematical, the statistical. And in doing so, we have been swept away by this wave of new technologies, without being able to regain our composure to warn of the dangers that these new technologies carry with them. And foremost, no statistics, no genetic definition will ever allow us to understand human nature.
As I mentioned, human societies are irrational, subtle, elusive when reduced to numbers. And if we believe we can sum up humanity in numbers, we condemn ourselves to never truly understanding what humans are, deeply, in the world. Will we experience a resurgence of thought? A counter-revolution of the humanities against the simplifying sciences of numbers and quantification? I earnestly hope so.
The Naked Neanderthal is part of this intellectual resurgence. It’s an SOS. But it’s also a battle of the underdog against the establishment. And in this battle, I have only blows to gain. But I must fight this battle to the end. Don’t I?
IMAGE CREDIT: Pegasus Books.
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