Family trip to the Musée de l’homme! Did you know that humans still carry Neanderthal DNA? The Musée de l’homme has an entire room on Neanderthals and the human view of them. Media has historically portrayed Neanderthal-like characters as unintelligent cave dwellers carrying clubs and speaking in grunts. However, we should be careful to so quickly criticize our distant relatives. We now know that Neanderthals had Broca’s areas (the language-processing part of the brain), suggesting that they may have communicated with language (Lieberman, 1992). As a response to the stigma against our ancestral relatives, there was a sculpture in the Neanderthal the museum of a being with typical Neanderthal features, wearing modern human clothes.
Lieberman, P. (1992). On Neanderthal speech and Neanderthal extinction.
