MORPHOLOGY, PALEOANTHROPOLOGY, AND NEANDERTHALS

Morphology carries the primary signal of events in the evolutionary hi story of any group of organisms but has been relatively neglected by p aleoanthropologists, those who study the history of the human species. Partly this is the result of historical influences, but it is also du e to a rather fundamentalist adherence among paleoanthropologists to t he tenets of the Neodarwinian Evolutionary Synthesis. The result has b een a general paleoanthropological desire to project the species Homo sapiens back into the past as far and in as linear a manner as possibl e. However, it is clear that the human fossil record, like that of mos t other taxa, reveals a consistent pattern of systematic diversity-a d iversity totally unreflected in the conventional minimalist interpreta tion of that record. Thus, the Neanderthals, both morphologically and behaviorally as distinctive a group of hominids as ever existed, are c onventionally classified simply as a subspecies of our own species Hom o sapiens-a classification that robs these extinct relatives of their evolutionary individuality. Only when we recognize the Neanderthals as a historically distinctive evolutionary entity, demanding understandi ng in its own terms, will we be able to do them proper justice. And we will only be able to do this by restoring morphology to its proper pl ace of primacy in human evolutionary studies. Anat. Rec. (New Anat.) 2 53:113-117, 1998. (C) 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.