Who were the Neanderthals? And what can our discoveries about them teach us about intelligence, our extractivist relationship to the planet, and what it means to be human?
Ludovic Slimak is a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toulouse in France and Director of the Grotte Mandrin research project. His work focuses on the last Neanderthal societies, and he is the author of several hundred scientific studies on these populations. His research has been featured in Nature, Science, the New York Times, and other publications. He is the author of The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
We are currently facing the possibility of a sixth extinction. We need to adapt to a two-degree world and people say our only hope for finding a way out of this is through our creativity. However, you've suggested that Neanderthals were actually more creative than Homo sapiens, only Homo sapiens learned how to extract as much value as possible from their environment without considering the impact on the ecology of the planet, and now this is coming back to haunt us. I am wondering what we can learn from this other Neanderthal way of relating to the natural world?
LUDOVIC SLIMAK
This book is not just about Neanderthals. It's a book about us. I wanted to warn humans, to say there is something in us that is so efficient and dangerous. We've effectively collapsed many things and are now inducing the collapse of natural environments on the planet. And after that, we might even cause the collapse of ourselves as Homo sapiens.
Neanderthal Creativity and Adaptability: A New Perspective
After working 30 years excavating in caves, in rock shelters, and really in tracking what I call the creator, my feeling was after many years, I didn't really know what to think about Neanderthals, but at a certain moment, after seeing millions of these tools – they make very nice tools – and I began to realize something very interesting. These two populations have the same technologies, they could produce the same categories of tools and weapons, but when you are dealing with early Homo sapiens, I realized that all these tools were really standardized.
That means that they were very nice, but after you saw a hundred of these tools for Sapiens, the 10,000 after that will be precisely the same. So, there are processes of standardization that are precisely our own way of making crafts, industries, or technologies. We have a project, and then we reproduce this project until we have as many numbers as we need. But for Neanderthal tools, I realized that, okay, the tools are also very nice, sometimes impressive in terms of techniques. But I realized that each of these tools were unique. Absolutely unique. That means that when you find a Neanderthal tool or a weapon, you have to look at it very carefully because a million tools after that will be completely different from that one. And that was not a question of tools or flint or craft. That was the visible part of an iceberg.
The iceberg is how these populations, that means both Neanderthal and Sapiens, understand the world and how they behave in the world. We are not talking about flint and about scrappers of points. It's not that at all. The question is, we have two categories of humans, which are deeply divergent. One is hyper-standardized, and the other is much more creative. It was clear to me that this creativity was related to the raw material that this population used. For example, if he was taking a pebble of flint, and he'd say, “Okay, now I'm going to make my point in that flint.” Neanderthal will adapt his project to the function of the color, texture, and natural morphologies of the block. So you have a kind of dialectic, a kind of discussion between the craftsman and the natural environment. When you are dealing with Homo sapien technology, they have the same categories of technologies, but it's very clear that even very early Sapiens, when they have a project, they will constrain the natural world to their project.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
We are discussing the ecological crisis and the need to restore the balance on our planet. Additionally, we are experiencing the emergence of a new consciousness with the advent of AI. I am curious to know your thoughts on the challenges and opportunities this presents and how we can navigate a path towards the future.
SLIMAK
AI is a fascinating question. You know children are sponges. They look and say this is something different. So your values are no longer good enough for the future. And this is what we are confronted with with AI. And that's a fantastic tool, but at a certain moment, this technology will evolve and become super efficient and smarter than we are. And at this moment, our children could simply reject everything that makes us human. And our society at this moment, and maybe that of our humanity, could collapse on itself.
I begin the book with a question of intelligence outside of Earth. That could be AI, that could be extraterrestrials. This is fascinating for us because this is another intelligence. Now, we have created AI, and we are fascinated by what we see because we can discuss with an AI and it's very clear that the AI understands our concepts and responds with our own concepts.
As long as your children believe your traditions are a good way to be human on Earth, they will continue to be like you. And your society and your civilization will continue. But the moment they see a better and more efficient way to do things, they will no longer believe in your ways, and your traditions will collapse in a whisper.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
As you reflect on the future, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember?
SLIMAK
I think what is very, very important for the young generations - because they hear every day and everywhere that this is the end of our world because of many things, particularly about the question of climate change - and we must tell young generations, first of all, we don't know anything about the future. Maybe the future is incredibly nice. Incredibly nice, because we are going to have at a certain moment absolute energy, the ability to travel anywhere in space, the ability to colonize any satellite in our solar system, and maybe with no more any kind of fitness, no more cancer, nothing else. So the future can be bright and incredible. And the young generations should keep in mind that they are on a magical planet which is full of beauty and they must love it and preserve it as best as they can with hope.
