Neanderthals

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Since the 1960s, paleoanthropologists have promoted the notion that Neanderthals are humans’ closest relative, even ancestor. This belief is so firmly imbedded in scholarly and popular renditions of human evolution that the idea of the two species being “kissing kin” came to inform interpretating DNA as demonstrating the presence in humans of Neanderthal genes through a long history of interbreeding. When DNA was extracted from bones and teeth from Denisova Cave, Siberia, it was interpreted as identifying a new human relative—“Denisovans”—who supposedly interbred and exchanged genes with Neanderthals and humans. But is this true? Only if the assumptions of a close Neanderthal–human relationship and of the existence of Neanderthal and “Denisovan” genes are. As a review of the long-forgotten literature on human antiquity and the discovery and interpretation of human fossils clearly illustrates, a close human–Neanderthal relationship was never demonstrated. In 1962, this assumption was elevated to the level of fact at a conference where the participants—primarily geneticists and behaviorists and only one paleoanthropologist—VOTED to make humans and Neanderthals subspecies of Homo sapiens—meaning they could interbreed. Although the media makes it seem that DNA studies have demonstrated this, they have not: They assume the assumption. And, since DNA typically degrades by 100,000 years, it’ll never be known how many extinct human relatives also possessed the genes touted as Neanderthal or “Denisovan” only because their fossils preserved DNA. It’s time to put assumptions aside and re-evaluate the human fossil record, both taxonomically and evolutionarily.</jats:p>