Neanderthal Religion?: Theology in Dialogue with Archaeology

Introduction

Dialogue with archaeology on Neanderthals is anything but an established topic in theology. The why and how of entrance upon it may be of some interest. The background lies not only in theology but, I’ll admit, in common enough affinity for the well-known outdoor phase of archaeology. Glimpsed in museum dioramas not to mention National Geographic the mode of discovery by excavation appealed to early love for the outdoors and camping. Maeve Leakey, who among other accomplishments led excavation of the famous H. erectus skeleton known as Nariokotomi Boy, conveys in vivid terms family camping at excavations in the African rift valley.¹ Theology has no comparable phase of data acquisition, although experiential connection with physical nature figures in the lives of eco-theologians.² Additionally, some biblical experts not only have studied archaeological findings but also have lent a hand at digs.³ And archaeologists too spend a lot of time indoors in reading, activity in labs and museums, as well as in writing.

Serving at the Pontifical Biblical Institute-Jerusalem 1986–89 involved initial familiarity with archaeological research. Curious expatriates and pilgrims alike benefitted from on-site lectures by Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, OP, resident scholar at the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem.⁴ An entirely different direction of contact with archaeology emerged upon resuming teaching at Marquette University in 1990. Solo Saturday hikes in state forests stirred attention to and prayerful remembrance of the Native Americans who had preceded European settlers by thousands of years and whose homeland remains close to them. At an Ice Age Trail Association meeting a fascinating talk by featured speaker and now friend, Herman Bender, identified local remnants of Native American pathways.

Bender, an expert on Native American rock art,⁵ invited several of us to accompany him on a field-survey of a small, undisturbed site on the brow of the Niagara Escarpment overlooking the 10,000-acre Horicon Marsh between Waupun and Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. The Marsh has been a waypoint for migrating waterfowl since the last Ice Age and had been prime hunting territory for Native Americans. Bender focused on emplaced rocks with rough buffalo profiles. Humans ancient and modern have had an inveterate tendency to see resemblances—pareidolia—to humans and animals in natural features. Bender kept meticulous notes and precise measurements to test the hypothesis that the axis of stone placements lay along sightlines to points calculated to have been past summer and winter solstices. The sightlines were there, a clue to cosmological observation by earlier peoples.⁶

Visits to Native American effigy mounds evoked curiosity about archaeological data that upset the Clovis-first consensus, which held the earliest arrival of Paleo-Indians in North America from Siberia was 13,000 years ago (13 ka). J. M. Adovasio’s The First Americans gathered evidence contesting that entrenched academic consensus named for the type of stone tool found at Clovis, New Mexico.⁷ Meadowcroft Shelter and Paisley Cave yielded dates at least 1 ka earlier and contained stone tools different from Clovis. Recently, surface-penetrating radar located ancient footprints embedded in White Sands National Park, New Mexico. Layered between sediments dotted with seeds the Carbon 14 technique dated them to between 23 and 21 ka. Other researchers have called the particular use of the Carbon 14 dating technique into question, but it has been defended. Are the footprints the earliest physical evidence of human presence in North America?⁸

As a theologian wondering about the sacred in the lives of hunter-gatherers, I was aware that social-scientific and archaeological explanations usually saw religion as a variable dependent on other factors. To my surprise, and breaking from that methodological habit, Jacques Cauvin’s The Birth of the Gods and Agriculture ventured the contrary view that change in sacred symbolism contributed to the rise of agriculture rather than vice versa.⁹ It wasn’t long before Juan Luis Arsuaga’s The Neanderthal’s Necklace: In Search of the First Thinkers fed curiosity about Paleolithic Europeans.¹⁰ Arsuaga’s account of excavated caves and pits at Atapuerca de Sierra near Burgos in northern Spain stirred attention to archaeologists’ field reports. Detailed accounts of Neanderthal fossils, artifacts, rock art, and indications of symbolic behavior prompted eventual desire for a long-term project in which theology learned about and reflected on what archaeology has been uncovering about Neanderthals.

Acceptance of a proposal, presentation of a paper at the NeanderArt2018 conference at the University of Turin, and then its publication in the Proceedings signaled that something productive might result.¹¹ Neanderthal Symbols: Neanderthal Spirituality? led to Neanderthal Religion?¹² (Spelling ‘Neanderthal’ with the silent ‘h’ dropped by modern German accords with the name of the rail station and Museum in Mettman at the Neander valley outside Düssseldorf, Germany.) Visits to Kent’s Caverns in Torquay and Swanscombe Heritage Park in England likewise afforded access to excavated sites.¹³ NeanderArt2018 participants visited the Fumane Cave site and Museum in the Italian Piedmont.

Proximate Strangers

In 1829 fossilized bones of those now called Neanderthals were discovered in caves at Engis, Belgium, and in 1848 at Forbes Quarry on Gibraltar. But in 1856 quarrymen in the Neander valley came upon the fossils later awarded official classification as Homo neanderthalensis. Since then, Neanderthals have been the most researched of hominins not identical with the anatomically modern human (AMH) lineage alone on the earth since Neanderthals went extinct. Archaeologists have found Neanderthal sites in Eurasia, the Levant, the Altai mountains of Russia, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Iran, Croatia, Belgium, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and Gibraltar, as well as and very early in England and Wales. A few returned from the Near East and Eurasia to northern Africa where some AMH had some Neanderthal DNA. So far, no evidence locates Neanderthals in sub-Saharan Africa, India, southeast Asia, the Americas, Greenland, or Australia.

In the last few years, the reading public’s ideas about Neanderthals have changed, sped by astute science journalism.¹⁴ Until twenty-five years ago most paleoanthropologists and archaeologists—but not Pierre Teilhard de Chardin¹⁵—had considered Neanderthals anatomically and culturally sub-human. Neanderthals were shorter, hairier, more robust, prodigiously strong, lacked a protruding chin, had a sloping forehead and flatter skull, prominent brow ridges, supposedly lacked symbols, language, control of fire, and culture. They were not human with us.

Archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes identifies who may have been the first person to recognize that Neanderthals were a human variant.¹⁶ Samuel Jules Celestine Edwards, prodigious son of former slaves in the British Caribbean, championed socialism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism as a public speaker, writer, and editor in Victorian England. He knew about Neanderthal fossils and doubted their standard classification as sub-human. His opinion was that accumulating, non-identical hominin fossils indicated a common origin, not races separate in origins.

1 million years ago (1 ma) after many parallel branches had ended Homo ergaster/erectus seems to have been the only hominin on earth, the ancestral lineage for all in genus Homo after them, including Homo antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Denisovans, and anatomically modern humans (AMH) emergent in Africa by 300 ka. Homo naledi, recently discovered in South Africa’s Rising Star cave system and dated to between 250 and 300 ka, is an exception. They may have etched meaning-laden rock designs.¹⁷ Apparently, H. naledi was not from the H. erectus line, and was perhaps a relic of the much earlier Homo habilis or an unknown parallel ancestor.

Extinction of Neanderthals as a population by 28.5 to 42–40 ka allegedly proved comparative inferiority to proliferating AMH.¹⁸ Yet Neanderthals had survived for at least 350 ka with a high level of skillful adaptation to changing climates and ecologies for food, clothing, and warmth.¹⁹ Svante Pääbo and associates at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig published the Neanderthal genome in 2010 after years of painstaking research not lacking occasional drama.²⁰ David Reich and Harvard colleagues discovered that about 1.8% to 2.6% Neanderthal DNA has been transmitted down through millennia in AMH outside Africa.²¹ Neanderthal DNA traces survive in all non-African present-day humans. Unexpectedly, DNA research applying a new probabilistic method reported signals of Neanderthal DNA in some Africans too.²² The explanation given is that this results from some anatomically modern humans with traces of Neanderthal DNA migrating back to Africa about 20 ka.

Archaeological, paleoanthropological, and genetic research has begun to unseat the proposition that being human is identical with being AMH. I do not mean that the problem of ascertaining the exact taxonomy of Neanderthals has been solved. Taxonomy is classification. That Neanderthals are in genus Homo is secure. But their species classification is not. Whether they are a distinct species, Homo neanderthalensis, or a subspecies, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, or simply a variant in genus Homo identical to the species of Homo sapiens remains unresolved. Philosopher of science Yuichi Amitani explains the general condition that not having in hand an exact taxonomy does not prevent biologists from advancing their research.²³ In the case of Neanderthals that means, granting evidence for genetic interbreeding and cultural capacities (not necessarily actualizations) like those of AMH, affirming Neanderthal co-humanity does not depend on their precise taxonomic status relative to H. sapiens having been settled.

That is the exact point made by zoologist Frank E. Zachos by way of illustrating that, it may not make a difference if we call two populations subspecies or species.²⁴ Further, there is "evidence beyond reasonable doubt that Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and a third taxon called the Denisovans interbred at some time, which left observable traces in the three respective genomes.²⁵ Zachos asks, [d]oes that make all three conspecific?, and answers that, Neanderthals have been classified as Homo neanderthalensis or as H. sapiens neanderthalensis, and they still could fit either category depending on where one chooses to draw the line.²⁶ Zachos concludes by re-asking about modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, does it really matter if we classify them at species or subspecies level?, and this time Zachos answers that the biological facts are untouched by that and it is those that count and that shed light on our evolutionary history."²⁷

Indeterminacy in the concept of species is why it is acceptable to employ both H. sapiens neanderthalensis and the rather vague descriptor of Neanderthals that I use, as co-human with our AMH lineage. At the same time co-human does not postulate that they are just like us in their humanity. A study of discourse on Neanderthals locates and criticizes a presupposed dualism between us (modern AMH) and them (Neanderthals) that focuses on what makes us different and superior.²⁸ The proposed alternative, is not pure homogeneity, equality without any diversity, however . . . [d]ismantling dualism does not imply erasing all differences . . . [but] requires recognition of a complex, interacting pattern of both continuity and difference.²⁹ Ludovik Slimak expresses it succinctly in stating that Neanderthals had their own way of being human that is not ours.³⁰ That otherness in being human makes them fascinating.

Previous scientific and popular opinion had derogated Neanderthals as sub-H. sapiens, sub-human. Neanderthals served as the cartoon foil for what was thought to be the epitome of AMH in the educated nineteenth- and twentieth-century West. On that premise Neanderthals confirmed the superiority of our AMH humanity. Recognition of Neanderthal co-humanity—certainly in genus and uncertainly in species—raises a new version of the abiding human question.³¹ In treating the question theology accents and explicates something science implies.

Geneticists, biologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists realize they examine fossil, genetic, and artifactual data from actual individuals. Theology underlines that realization. The Neanderthals in evidence and those inferred to have existed were evidential to themselves and did not exist to be specimens or evidence for us. They lived and struggled for their own purposes. Neanderthals were real in their own lifespans in present time for them. Traces of their lives and activities lead not just to advancing knowledge about them as an excellence in us but to them as actual if elusive. The theological concept of their being-created connotes value, which as co-human means dignity, and sharpens the human question on human dignity outside AMH. To speak about the dignity of Neanderthals is no more than to acknowledge what has been learned about their reality.

At the same time a constant epistemic challenge accompanies learning about Neanderthals from archaeology on two levels. One is the level of scientific analyses carried out in the manner of induction yet potentially pertaining by deduction to all in each class of Neanderthals (e.g., era, region, producers of a given type of tools, mode of subsistence). There is no science of an individual but deductive inferences can pertain to individuals. Yet Neanderthals whose fossils have come into evidence were inherently variable individuals in definite if unknown groupings. Interplay between general and particular poses the epistemic challenge of not losing track of either induction or deduction on Neanderthal individuals.

But that holds for individuals in any species that existed and acted for their own objectives. What holds for Neanderthal individuals differs. They too existed and acted according to their own innate and adapted tendencies and only secondarily have fallen into the categories of specimens and evidence in becoming objects of study. But a unique drama takes place in learning about Neanderthals because while evidence for their co-humanity has been accumulating at the same time they are known to be unlike AMH in some biological and possibly cultural respects. Their humanity is analogous to not the same as ours. Consequently, the traditional concept of human nature, if rehabilitated with adjustments for empirical diversity across cultures, cannot be limited to AMH.

The Human Question

The banner on the Smithsonian website for the Hall of Human Origins, asks What Does It Mean to Be Human?³² Neanderthals pose a new test case for understanding the human. Notwithstanding earlier controversy over Darwin on human origins, what does it mean to be human once genetics and archaeology begin to concur on the co-humanity of Neanderthals? Theology by and large has proceeded with traditional philosophical and theological pre-understandings of the human built into documentary and lived mediations of Christian faith. Those pre-understandings are coming up for re-examination and not only because of Neanderthals. For example, editors and authors in Questioning the Human: Toward a Theological Anthropology for the Twenty-first Century explore, what does it mean to be human?³³ The editors state that:

In today’s context, this fundamental question lies at the heart of many debates in the Church and the world. Unseen cultural, political, and scientific developments provoke new challenges that can no longer be tackled from traditional perspectives on the human being. The familiar concepts theologians use to make sense of Christian beliefs about the human being have lost much of their purchase.³⁴

I agree, though less inclined to think everything indebted to Christian beliefs about the human being has lost its effective history since renewed respect for essential human bodiliness has remote roots in Christian belief in the incarnation, resurrection, and the new Jerusalem imaging a transfigured cosmos. New challenges come not least from evolution. Authors in five of ten chapters address or touch on some facet of human evolution—biological, cultural, moral, religious—including the biblical idea of humans in the divine image.³⁵ Members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission independently took up precisely the question of biblical understandings of humans.³⁶

Taken for granted ideas about being human, including those of Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, have been influential in my dialogue with archaeology too. Their durable strengths benefit not only from immanent criticism for the purpose of development undertaken for example by Robert M. Doran, but also from continual testing by application to new situations and new knowledge such as ongoing empirical research into the deep human past. Archaeology no less than philosophy and theology asks what it means to be human. Rudimentary behavioral cultures but not symbolic mediated culture occur among chimpanzees. Increasing knowledge of every species, sub-species, or variant in genus Homo revisits biological and cultural markers of being human. Theology for its part sustains a continual process of recouping the remote and immediate origins, development, and content of Christianity. Meanings, truths, and values on what it means to be human belong to that content. Developments of traditional content come about in ongoing completions of inquiries. For example, in Laudato Si’ Pope Francis in teaching ecological responsibility developed traditional Catholic understanding of the human by engaging new knowledge centering humanity in myriad interconnections with physical nature.³⁷ Archaeological research on Neanderthals affords theologians an incentive to join in the multidisciplinary task of fathoming the human in contribution to theological anthropology.

How were Neanderthals somewhat unlike us yet part of us? Findings and interpretations prompt a new question for faith and theology. What about Neanderthals, not yet to mention others going back to H. erectus and even Homo habilis, and their creaturely relation to God? Did they have something like a religion or spiritual outlook? Do their fossils and modifications of nature provide any clues to a sense of the sacred? Can anything be learned about their spiritual outlook from their material culture? Some anthropologists and archaeologists have replied. Theological inquiry takes account of those hypotheses along with the data prompting their interpretations.

The human question has an essential mode seeking universal, constitutive traits and an existential mode bearing on meanings, values, thoughts, and decisions about ancient or contemporary personal and social life. Paleoanthropologist Richard Potts is not alone in considering both modes, though not in that vocabulary, and starting from the essential mode.³⁸ The essential mode confronts archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and geneticists in technical tasks dealing with classification of what they have come across. In archaeology, are markings in a cave anthropogenic or not? In paleoanthropology the sub-specialty of human systematics again and again embarks on classifying the human by distinctive attributes to arrive at an agreed taxonomy for classifying fossils in genus Homo.³⁹ The human question becomes existential when pondering the meaning of material cultures for the human sources and exploring how new knowledge of Neanderthals affects traditional pre-understandings of what it means to be human.

Both modes of the human question are acute for theology. New data and theories on Neanderthals and their religion represent a new problematic in any theological specialty or current of thought addressing the human question. The existential mode is implicit in every theological reflection insofar as it relies on preconceptions of ourselves as human.

Lonergan points to the role of self-understanding in interpreting what others have written or otherwise expressed. In the case of a text or other expression of meaning the interpreter must be critical not merely of . . .[the] author but also of the tradition that has formed . . .[the interpreter’s] own mind.⁴⁰ This pertains to Neanderthals and theology. Contemporary self-knowledge of being human in theologians undergoes a jolt of otherness in studying Neanderthals. That is, archaeological and paleoanthropological content invites not only critical interrogation of new evidence but at the same time also stirs attention to how theologians’ own minds have been formed on the human by the larger cultural and narrower disciplinary tradition in which they work.

Learning that Neanderthals had the capacity to adjust to extremes of Pleistocene climate change, to manufacture pitch from birch bark for hafting stone spear points, and could symbolize provokes attention to and tests ideas and preconceptions about them and how we see ourselves. Change in individual, ecclesial, and societal self-understanding may be in order, and that has to do with always underlying, ever incomplete, yet continuously operative ideas about being human. Being human may not be what it used to be not only in coming to terms with human evolution but regarding Neanderthals in particular. Even in evolutionary thought until recently Neanderthals were sub-human. Neanderthals now are a case in point tying the human question to ongoing empirical research in archaeology in uneasy alliance with genetics.

Faith and Evolution

Discussion of Neanderthals in Neanderthal Religion? occurs against the background of faith and evolution. I presuppose a view common in the U.S. Pew Religion Research, reporting a revised framing and phrasing of survey questions, found that 82 percent of U.S. adults combine belief in God with concurrence on human evolution.⁴¹ Moreover, belief that God allowed and/or guided evolution can be understood in three ways not factored into the survey. All three views profess it is not a matter of reconciling science and religion as two disparate worldviews but of situating scientific knowledge of evolution within the horizon of faith open to divine reality inaccessible through valid exercise of scientific method. 

Evolutionary theism explains theism as the appropriate understanding of the evolving cosmos as the still incomplete creative and revelatory act of God in Christ. Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry present synoptic visions of this sort. So too in process philosophy do Ian Barbour, John Cobb, and Joseph Bracken. It seems that convergence between science and religion is asymptotic in principle. Consequently, at this point I prefer admiring evolutionary theism as an eventual possibility to adhering to it as a premise. Deistic evolution conceives God’s creative action to have originated and set in motion a universe in which over vast spans of time innumerable possible interactions and selections have occurred as a matter of probabilities that have resulted in geological and biological evolution, including the human species.

In this view, once originated the universe and evolution receive no further influence on world processes from the divine source. But that is to ignore if not deny the indivisibility in fact and thought between originating and continuing creation. Denial would be contrary to inherent and continual dependence of creaturely existing on the creating act from the first moment of creation onward. The challenge of course is explaining how to affirm continual creation underlying evolution without appeal to divine interventions into natural evolutionary processes known by science. Is Bernard Lonergan’s theory of emergent probability an instance of deist evolution?⁴²

No, because Lonergan, like Aquinas, presupposes creational, providential theism with its distinction between primary, ongoing divine causality of existence and secondary causality by finite entities, which is known through classical and statistical laws governing observable effects and outcomes. Neil Ormerod and Cynthia Crysdale synthesize themes in Lonergan’s thought on emergent probability into a clear, cogent alternative to evolution as either chance or necessity. In emergent probability, contrary to a standard understanding of Darwin, the universe exhibits a tendency, a direction without pre-determined outcome, toward more and more complex wholes that integrate more and more complex schemes of recurrence.⁴³

Similarly, Denis Edwards and William Stoeger explain divine action as continuing, primary, creative causality that comprehends random interactions among constituents of the universe. Natural entities acting as secondary causes exhibit directed indeterminacy in which higher, more complex integrations (e.g., sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, organic molecules, cells, multi-celled organisms, plants, animals, etc.) have continually taken place without a pre-determining goal but as a universal tendency.⁴⁴ Consequently, with Lonergan, Ormerod, Crysdale, Denis Edwards, John Polkinghorne, Celia Deane-Drummond, Ted Peters, Elizabeth Johnson, and others I hold theistic evolution.

Theistic evolution affirms God’s ongoing act of creating through Christ and in the Spirit taking place, somehow, in and through evolutionary processes in all of nature. The somehow involves divine action as primary cause of the evolving universe as a whole and in all parts as secondary causes. Minute alterations in DNA, now known to be complicated by organisms’ niche construction and epigenetics winnowed by adaptive pressure,⁴⁵ have yielded biological outcomes and transitions without divine interventions external to natural processes observable by science. Denying external intervention could leave some readers with the subliminal impression that divine transcendence means God is external, distant, and without ongoing effect. Just the opposite is the case. Edwards and Johnson both develop a theistic evolution of the divine immanence of the Holy Spirit.⁴⁶ The model of early revelation in Neanderthal Religion? expounds the creational immanence of the Logos in the cosmos.⁴⁷

Objective

The immediate objective of Neanderthal Religion? lies in the realm of plausible hypotheses on Neanderthal religion, that is, on Neanderthal involvement with whatever to them was sacral. Chapter 6 presents that point of arrival. Chapter 7 caps that hypothesis by explaining how Neanderthal religion exemplifies early revelation. Toward that end, chapter 1 highlights the new perspective in the inquiry and introduces two theological models, religion as spirituality realized in common, and early revelation. Chapter 2 develops an approach to theological dialogue with archaeology that applies ideas from Bernard Lonergan and J. Wentzel van Huyssteen to locate common or adjacent ground. Chapter 3 organizes discussion of Neanderthal stone tools that calls into question the traditional dualism between useful tools and beautiful art. Some Neanderthal tools have an aesthetic property indicative of Neanderthal co-humanity apart from evidence for symbolizing.

In view of physical indications of Neanderthal action with a symbolic dimension in Bruniquel Cave, chapter 4 considers the functional (Ernst Cassirer) and the ontological (Karl Rahner) aspects of symbols. The chapter applies Lonergan on Heidegger’s universal hermeneutic of human existence to Neanderthals and ends with learning from Ian Hodder’s archaeology. Chapter 5 puts in place the Karl Jaspers thesis on the Axial Age to identify the cosmological horizon of Neanderthals and looks to anthropology on animism. Analogy between anatomically modern human (AMH) hunter-gatherers and Neanderthal hunter-gatherers takes a step toward Neanderthal spirituality realized in common as experience of being alive in a network of life-force. Chapter 6 conceives archaeological findings on Neanderthals in reference to three concepts from Lonergan—faith, word, belief. With attention to the Gospel of John and Aquinas, theological reflection in chapter 7 understands Neanderthal faith, word, and belief as early revelation on the principle that divine immanence is indivisible from divine transcendence.

Proviso

Neanderthal Religion? belongs to the traditional genre of theological opinion. Being explicit about the genre prevents the possible misunderstanding that because I am ordained to the Catholic presbyterate in the Society of Jesus I speak on behalf of the Catholic Church and her body of teachings. A theological opinion offers an individual’s considered position from the perspective and tradition of ecclesial faith but without simply repeating authorized doctrine at a catechetical level. Nor is it the case that Neanderthal Religion? stakes out a position on a familiar theological theme. Theology learning from archaeology in seeking Neanderthal religion does not take place in a secured niche in any theological specialty. Instead, in an experimental mode Neanderthal Religion? engages theological reflection with empirical discoveries about Neanderthals. Expanding specialist literature on Neanderthals throws into relief the need for a narrowed focus such as Neanderthal religion. Theological reflection links archaeology on Neanderthals to religion understood as spirituality realized in common, an example of early revelation.

1

. Leakey, Sediments of Time.

2

. McFague, Super, Natural Christians.

3

. Barrett, "

3

. Archaeology; Barrett,

32

. Archaeology."

4

. Murphy-O’Connor, OP, Holy Land.

5

. Bender, Spirit of Manitou.

6

. Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent.

7

. Adovasio, First Americans.

8

. Bennett et al., Evidence of Humans; Oviatt et al., Critical Assessment; Pigoti et al., Independent Age Estimates.

9

. Cauvin, Birth of the Gods.

10

. Arsuaga, Neanderthal’s Necklace.

11

. Seglie, Ricchiardi, NeanderART

2018

–Proceedings.

12

. Hughson, Neanderthal Symbols.

13

. European sites, https://www.ice-age-europe.eu/about-us/the-network.html.

14

. Kolbert, Our Neanderthals, Ourselves; Mooalem, Us and Them; Zimmer, Neanderthals; Wong, Cave Paintings.

15

. Teilhard de Chardin, Phenomenon of Man,

197

–

203

.

16

. Sykes, Kindred,

358

–

66

.

17

. Berger et al., Rock Engravings.

18

. Villa, Roebroeks, Neandertal Demise; for

28

.

5

ka see Slimak, Naked Neanderthal,

60

–

66

.

19

. Baillie, Neanderthals.

20

. Pääbo, Neanderthal Man.

21

. Reich, Who We Are,

49

–

50

.

22

. Chen, Neanderthal DNA.

23

. Amitani, The Species Problem.

24

. Zachos, Critique,

321

.

25

. Zachos, Critique,

321

.

26

. Zachos, Critique,

321

.

27

. Zachos, Critique,

337

.

28

. Peeters, de Zwart, Familiar Strangers.

29

. Peeters, de Zwart, Familiar Strangers,

20

.

30

. Slimak, Naked Neanderthal,

13

.

31

. Papagianni, Morse, Neanderthals Rediscovered; Roebroeks, Soressi, Neanderthals Revised; Finlayson, Smart Neanderthal.

32

. Smithsonian, https://naturalhistory.si.edu/exhibits/david-h-koch-hall-human-origins.

33

. Boeve et al., Questioning the Human.

34

. Boeve et al., Exploring New Questions,

1

.

35

. See Pope, Theological Anthropology,

13

–

30

; Deane-Drummond, In God’s Image.

36

. Pontifical Biblical Commission, What Is Man [sic]?,

34

/

5

. ‘Man’ (Italian ‘uomo’) follows Hebrew ‘adam’ in meaning both male and female but depending on context sometimes male.

37

. Pope Francis, Laudato Si; Hughson, "Interpreting Laudato si’."

38

. Potts, Religious Sense,

95

–

110

.

39

. See Strait, Human Systematics,

37

–

54

.

40

. Lonergan, Method,

162

.

41

. Pew Research: Religion and Public Life. 

42

. Lonergan, Insight,

138

–

57

,

284

–

92

,

470

–

79

; Whelan, Redeeming History,

76

–

81

; McCarthy, Authenticity,

225

–

28

.

43

. Ormerod, Crysdale, Creator God, chapters

2

and

3

.

44

. Edwards, How God Acts; Edwards, Divine Action.

45

. Jablonka, Lamb, Evolution.

46

. Edwards, Breath of Life; Johnson, Ask the Beasts.

47

. See Hughson, Connecting Jesus, chapters

4

and

5

; chapter

7

below.

1

New Humans Are Different

The new situation for theology posed by Neanderthals is reminiscent of an earlier juncture when neither Scripture nor Tradition had prepared European Christendom for knowledge brought home from Renaissance-era voyages of discovery. The Bible said nothing about Greenland, the Western Hemisphere, about peoples on Pacific islands, the Philippines, Australia, and Antarctica. Jewish, Christian, and Islamic authors in the European Middle Ages knew about China, India, and Africa but nothing about lands across the Atlantic. European voyages of discovery induced a theological question. Were those discovered in the Caribbean, in North and South America, on Pacific isles and in Australia really and fully as human as the explorers, and so able to hear the gospel word? The fact of missions was the positive answer, notwithstanding loose association of mission, with exceptions like Matteo Ricci in China, Robert de Nobili in India, and the Jesuit reductions in Paraguay, with colonialism whose exploitative policies and practices contradicted the positive answer.¹

Like Magellan, Columbus, and Cook archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and geneticists have traveled far into vast, unfamiliar areas. Assumptions of AMH superiority held sway at first. David Frayer, disagreeing, comments that, "Neandertals, from the beginning and since then, have been considered to be massively inferior to modern Homo sapiens."² But that has been changing. Research has been relieving minds of false superiority by reconstructing the Neanderthal world piecemeal. Archaeologists and paleoanthropologists have been countering inferiority without for the most part jumping to the indistinguishability hypothesis that Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens sapiens are indistinguishable in all respects, capacities, and achievements.³ Both expert and popular opinion that Neanderthals were inferior to early modern humans in all respects has been undergoing critique and revision.⁴ Consequently the question arises, what do we think it means to be human once we know that Neanderthals held their ground in Eurasia for something in the vicinity of 400 millennia, were capable of symbolizing, and have been extinct for one tenth or less of that time?⁵ The dating of the last Neanderthals has been debated. Was it 30 ka, as was thought for some time, or 40 ka in a more recent estimate? Or was it the 28.5 ka date of Mousterian tools, a type associated exclusively with Neanderthals, excavated in the Russian Arctic at Byzovaya that Slimak reports.⁶

A Question in Common

A question of interest to both theology and archaeology asks, what does it mean to be human? Despite methodological differences, the inescapable question about being human may be an area of common interest. Neither archaeologists nor theologians pondering archaeological