In the beginning was the Word, as invented by members of a primitive nomadic tribe and later set down and polished up by their scribes. The Word was a neat and tidy accounting of things: God made the world and everything in it, all the grasses and trees and flowers, all the birds and beasts and fishes–and Man. Man was made from the dust, in his present slender-limbed, dome-crowned form, and he found himself set to work in the dusty profession of agriculture pretty fast. God created the whole thing in less than a week (demonstrating that He definitely was not working with modern tradesmen), and on the seventh day He rested. And so did most of Western humanity rest on this question, snug and a bit smug in the divinely ordered plan of things.
Plenty of distinguished scholars have wanted no part of this hulking lowbrow with the tremendous beaky nose and have tried to consign its skeleton to the closet of evolutionary dead-ends. In the early 1900s, the French paleoanthropologist Marcellin Boule labeled the Neandertal “a degenerate species,” based on his analysis of one elderly, arthritis-ridden specimen.
Wilson and Stringer’s conjecture has enjoyed a great vogue lately, not least because its simplicity appeals to the popular press. But the Neandertal’s claim to human ancestry is not quite dead and buried. A small group of scientists has quietly opposed the “out of Africa” theory (also sometimes called the “African Eve” theory), and the pendulum of opinion has at least begun to swing back in their direction. Among these is Fred H. Smith of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. He agrees that the ancestor of modern man came out of Africa as the popular theory describes, but he does not believe that it replaced the Neandertal; rather he thinks the two types (not two separate species) interbred freely: modern humans, in other words, still owe at least some of their genetic background to Neandertal man.
“You couldn’t be doing this story on a better person than Fred,” says Richard G. Klein, a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago (moving this summer to Stanford). “He’s really first-rate, and he’s done a lot of really fine work.” Klein calls Smith’s work “paramount,” and adds that the contemporary picture of the Neandertal would be very different without it.
“Everyone who opposes the ‘African Eve’ theory takes heat,” says Wolpoff, “but people are loath to attack Fred because they know he won’t be nasty back. He’s a gentleman. Fred doesn’t enjoy acrimony at all.
I went to the University of Tennessee with the idea of studying medicine, and when I got there they began to offer a major in anthropology. My premed curriculum was pretty strict, but I had some elective hours, so I took some classes in anthropology. I really liked it, and I struggled with this all the way up until the time that I was a senior and I finally decided, even after I was accepted into medical school at Tennessee, that I really wanted to go into biological anthropology. When I announced that to my parents they thought I was just absolutely crazy. You have to know the environment, but they had really no conception of being a professor, or this kind of thing. But they completely and totally supported me; never any question about that.
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So I showed up in Zagreb one day and the administrative assistant in the museum, when I came in and announced myself to her, looked at me like I was Adolf Hitler. And she said, “We wrote you and said you shouldn’t come. The bones have all been studied by the great Croatian paleontologist, Dragutin Gorjanovic. What are you doing here?” And my jaw just dropped. So she said, “Well, wait. I’ll call the director.” The director came down, a little short Croatian fellow named Ivan Crnolatac, and he told me the same thing. And I said, “My God, the letter didn’t get there. What am I going to do?” And I didn’t know it, but I had already won the battle, because they were so softhearted. They were trying to be tough, you know. And I talked to the director, and I finally convinced him that maybe I could contribute something; that the great Croatian expert had looked at this stuff more than 50 years ago, and that we had learned a lot since then. Within a week or so I had a key to the museum, I could come and go as I wanted to, and that little group of people became almost a second family to me. I could almost never, let’s say, go out and eat in a restaurant because one of them was taking me home every night for supper. And I got to know all of their families, and I’m still in contact with all of their families.
