Defining Humanity in the Popular Imagination: The Neanderthal and the Early Modern Human in H.G. Wells and Yuval Noah Harari

Popular depictions of Neanderthals place them in a liminal position between the human and nonhuman. Examination of how such depictions have changed over time reveals evolving and enduring ideas about humanity and nature. Descriptions of Neanderthals and the prehistoric anatomically modern humans who encountered them in Europe reveal the features their authors see as essential to humanity. Not only do authors project their contemporary ideas onto Neanderthals, but doing so but then naturalizes those ideas. H.G. Wells, one of the first popular writers to discuss Neanderthals, depicted Neanderthals as shambling, inhuman brutes, whereas he used colonial ideas about the primitive to describe the anatomically modern humans who encountered Neanderthals. A century later, Yuval Noah Harari presented a more human image of Neanderthals and a less explicitly colonial idea of prehistoric anatomically modern humans, but his conceptions of both remained rooted in latent cultural ideas of the primitive stemming from colonialism.