The Nobel Neanderthal

The Nobel Neanderthal

Oct 04, 2022

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Svante Pääbo won the Nobel Prize. 

Pääbo, a Swedish geneticist working in Germany at the Max Planck Institute was able to reconstruct the genome of Neanderthals by finding a way to extract their 400,000-year-oldDNA.  According to the Smithsonian article by Sarah Kuta, this was a “moon landing moment” in the field of genetics.   Kuta quotes:

As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in her book The Sixth Extinction, the process was like trying to reconstruct a “Manhattan telephone book from pages that have been put through a shredder, mixed with yesterday’s trash, and left to rot in a landfill.”

The ramifications for humans, to learn that we are not all human but to some degree Neanderthal, is important for our health.   But it is also important for another issue.  Humility. 

We humans believe we may have created art, music and the very sciences.  We pride ourselves on our achievements.  But what if those achievements did not exactly come from us?  What if art came from the Neanderthals?  What if the first scientific experiment was done by a Neanderthal?  The very notion of that sounds alien to us, because we have been programmed to believe that we are “it” when it comes to being special.  Hell, even the lousy dinosaurs couldn’t survive an asteroid.  We now have the means to blast them into a new trajectory. 

We humans have long prided ourselves that somewhere back in time, we bested the Neanderthals.  That they were stupid, might not have even talked and had big foreheads.  Pääbo, along with another colleague have suggested that a Neanderthal gene may be the culprit for some people getting severe Covid.  Go figure. Neanderthals again.  

My suspicion is that the Humility gene may be a Neanderthal trait as well.   Humans in order to survive need a good dose of humility.  You can see the absence of it with certain high-profile people on the news.  Or even that jerk who this weekend in Chicago, in a fit of road rage, fired shots at a woman and kids in a car, killing her three-year-old child.

That we humans lack that sufficient humility gene could be our downfall.   We only are 1 to four percent Neanderthal, after all.


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