Why are we so obsessed with a group of ancient humans who disappeared 40,000 years ago?

We have struggled to make sense of Neanderthals ever since their discovery in 1856. Are they our brutish ancestor or noble cousin, a stupid ape-man or compassionate kinsman, a vanquished species or resilient survivor? Neanderthals return again and again, haunting scientific inquiry and popular culture, demanding that their story tell us something about ourselves.

In Neanderthals Among Us, historian Peter Sahlins offers a sweeping interdisciplinary history of an obsession that has made Neanderthals into a distorting mirror of our claims to human uniqueness and our anxieties about human difference. When the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010 confirmed our interbreeding with Neanderthals, it powerfully advanced a reputational reconstruction long in the making. At their discovery, Neanderthals helped invent prehistory itself, saturated with racial science; initially cast as ugly, stupid, and hairy, they underwent a long and uneven rehabilitation, with science and popular culture moving at different speeds, and sometimes in opposite directions. The reputation of “Neanderthal Man,” our Paleolithic double, has been in constant flux, remaining a site of endless fascination and debate about human uniqueness, race, gender, and the very look of the human.

Illuminating, entertaining, and provocative, Neanderthals Among Us traces the many faces of our closest relative from the medieval Wild Man tradition through nineteenth-century race science, museum reconstructions and horror films, science fiction and genetic ancestry testing. Long extinct, yet integral to modernity, Neanderthals remain in our thoughts and our bodies, still shaping what we take to be the essence of ourselves.

Peter Sahlins is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of 1668: The Year of the Animal in France.