Unmuddied, Ludovic Slimak essays the Naked Neanderthal
This is the author in their natural habitat, but curiously unmuddied or dusted, from the inside of the dustjacket of the book The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature. The title riffing on Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape (tell me, if you’re under 40 would you have any idea?) but the nakedness here refers to removing our H. sapiens investitures, our projections, seeking to unclad our investments, our skin in the game, remove all that baggage from Homo neanderthalensis, and not the clothes that reveal our nudity.
There is no new ‘understanding’ here, perhaps we can blame the publisher for the colonic subtitle. And while knowing we don't know is not always obvious, it has occurred to some of us for the longest time.
Ludovic Slimak is basically saying we cannot know them, thus we cannot assume whether or not they are like us, nor by how much, nor how little. We do not have enough evidence for starters.
He has the mud of experience to prove this.
The book is an excellent essay, or lesson, in actively suspending judgement. It shows that a blur is arguably a type of understanding, if rarely accommodated in the world.
The essay assays, and so advises us to avoid, the rash favour of our perspectives with which we address this question, both rose-colour glasses and the demon eyes. I would add that this is good advice for most questions we worry at.
Besides this most valid point, the author does feel with the evidence now collected, it likely follows, that, they probably are not like we can even imagine them to have been. It is possible that they did not have even some element of how we perceive ourselves, unlike Star Trek aliens, or fantasy races of elves & dwarves, which have some Sapiens element turned up to 11.
No, but… —we cannot say it was not either. If there is a difference so great we cannot imagine it, we may never know that, let alone understand them if they stood before us, even if we could meet them… —again. Even if we carry their DNA in or own lines.
I like this position.
This will run true for those other human species, Denisovans and the ghost populations in the taphonomy of our DNA, for whom we have even less material evidence, especially material culture which might betray hints of the world they inhabited. We Sapiens by contrast world away culturally, variously, politically, religiously, artfully in increasing horns of plenty.
The bigger question is how may types of modernity could there possibly be available in a fitness landscape there was once, and not just as a variation of Thomas Nagel’s What is it like to be a bat?
But how human is Homo sapiens, or rather how much of our own worlding is required to be human, how common is this in Homo as a genus, and how much of us is an over-extension, and how different can various humanities can actually be. I.E how much can the Homo genus diverge from whatever palaeolithic commonality we came from.
How can we guess at any of that when we cannot even map the range of possibilities?
Even that question probably assumes too much.
How do we even begin to ask these questions?
It refocuses the debate and tackles their material reality head on. It asks questions about notions of the historical and ethological truth of populations of which we know little, and which we urgently need to stop dressing up as ourselves. [page 148]
Especially, I would argue, when we don’t know what we are, or at least, which bit of who we are, is what we are.
Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com
See also:
Postscript: Ludovic Slimak essays the Naked Neanderthal
When constructing the post Unmuddied I added a profile piece by the Guardian to the photo of Ludovic Slimak that open the post. I only skimmed the article before adding it as a link in the caption.
References
Nagel, Thomas. 1974. ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, The Philosophical Review 83(4): 435. [via https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf]
Gooch, Stan. 1977. The Neanderthal Question. London: Wildwood House. (mentioned in this other post on the clothes we dress our bones with: guilty pleasures of an aquatic ape, Elaine Morgan and a scientific noyau)
Segalov, Michael. 2023, September 10. ‘“I Feel like a Man from Another Era”: Neanderthal Hunter Ludovic Slimak’, TheGuardian.com. [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/10/ludovik-slimak-neanderthal-hunter-reinterprets-our-prehistory]
Slimak, Ludovic. 2024. The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature (First Pegasus Books cloth edition.). New York: Pegasus Books. [ISBN9781639366163]