Neandertals: Images of ourselves

During the last two decades, paleoanthropology has focused increasingly on the global issue of modern human origins, and a preeminent part of that process has concerned the fate of the Neandertals of the northwestern Old World. Not so long ago, working on the origins of modern humans was a niche cloaked in convenient obscurity. Many human paleontologists were content to largely ignore, and thus remained ignorant of, the hominid fossils of the later Pleistocene, an attitude parallel to that of Bordes regarding the Neolithic in comparison to the more glamorous Paleolithic; he referred to the former simply as, “C'est de la merde!” However, the Neandertais have become a topic guaranteed to attract attention, thus drawing in scholars who until recently disdained interest in such basically human fossil hominids. They are now willing to direct their students' and even their own research toward late archaic humans (such as Neandertals) and early modern humans in whatever portion of the Old World is most readily available.