Neanderthal and the fossilization of the Third World

Abstract

Neanderthal is the quintessential scientific Other. In the late nineteenth century gentlemen-scientists, including business magnates, investment bankers and lawmakers with interest in questions of human and human societal development, framed Europe’s Neanderthal and South Asia’s indigenous Negritos as close evolutionary kin. Simultaneously, they explained Neanderthal’s extinction as the consequence of an inherent backwardness in the face of fair-skinned, steadily-progressing newcomers to ancient Europe who behaved in ways associated with capitalism. This racialization and economization of Neanderthal helped bring meaning and actual legal reality to Negritos via the British Raj’s official ‘schedules of backward castes and tribes’. It also helped justify the Raj’s initiation of market-oriented reforms in order to break a developmental equilibrium deemed created when fair-skinned newcomers to ancient South Asia enslaved Negritos in an enduring caste system. Neanderthal was integral to the scientism behind the British construction of caste, and contributed to India’s becoming a principal ‘Third World’ target of Western structural adjustment policies as continuation of South Asia’s ‘evolution assistance’.

Rethinking Neandertals

“…For nineteenth-century Europeans, extinction meant a failure to adapt and thrive and was a deserved consequence of evolutionary processes (Madison 2020). Thus, during the height of European imperialism, "such logic made it easier to defend the displacement, subjugation, and even extermination of human 'races' that accompanied the spread of Europeans across the globe, because these groups were seen to be doomed to extinction due to their inferiority" (Madison 2021, p. 369; see also Higgitt 2021).…”