Emma Kern

This article examines the making of white/European racial identity of the Neanderthals in the context of contemporary direct-to-consumer genome ancestry analysis. It explores the comments in public blog posts and user discussion boards on 23andMe to see how users reacted to adjustment in Neanderthal ancestry percentages with expressions of distrust and anger, including drawing attention to how some users claimed these changes caused them to reinterpret their racial identity. In doing so, the paper also considers the history of Neanderthals in human lineage, including their variable status as human ancestors or nonancestors and their association with different racial identities since the discovery of Neanderthal remains in 1856 and the first complete skeletal analysis in 1908. It concludes with consideration of how other evolutionarily “recent” hominins and prehistoric humans (such as Denisovans or England’s Cheddar Man) are being constructed – or reconstructed – as raced, nationalized, or otherwise specifically ancestral.

In 1963, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published the first volume of its long-awaited cultural and scientific history of mankind. First announced in 1948, the History of Mankind was envisioned as a comprehensive, universal human history, from the evolution of Homo sapiens to the middle of the twentieth century. This article uses editorial conflicts over the site of the cradle of the human species to explore the position of scientific knowledge in world history writing and to examine tensions between different national traditions of expertise at a moment of political and scientific transition.

Today, the most powerful research technique available for assigning chronometric age to human cultural objects is radiocarbon dating. Developed in the United States in the late 1940s by an alumnus of the Manhattan Project, radiocarbon dating measures the decay of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 (C14) in organic material, and calculates the time elapsed since the materials were removed from the life cycle. This paper traces the interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeology and radiochemistry that led to the successful development of radiocarbon dating in the early 1950s, following the movement of people and ideas from Willard Libby's Chicago radiocarbon laboratory to museums, universities and government labs in the United States, Australia, Denmark and New Zealand. I show how radiocarbon research built on existing technologies and networks in atomic chemistry and physics but was deeply shaped by its original private philanthropic funders and archaeologist users, and ultimately remained to the side of many contemporaneous Cold War scientific and military projects.