AAAS uses Neanderthals for Racism Lesson

AAAS Science, the leading USA science journal, reports:

Anthropologists take up arms against ‘race science’

At their annual meeting, biological anthropologists began to build a playbook to thwart racist misuse of research

Anthropologists are fighting the erroneous notion that humans are divided into a few separate races. They emphasize that human genes and populations show complex patterns of variation and mixing.

LOS ANGELES—Calling someone a Neanderthal was once an insult, meaning you thought of them as a knuckle-dragging brute. “[Neanderthals] have always been used as a mirror for thinking about ourselves … projecting things we don’t like about ourselves onto another group of humans,” said Fernando Villanea, a population geneticist at the University of Colorado Boulder, last week at the annual meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA) here.

As scientists have learned more about Neanderthals’ cultural sophistication and abilities, though, their public image has gotten a glow-up. For some people, their status was elevated still further by the widely publicized discovery in 2007 that some Neanderthals carried genes suggesting they had red hair and light skin. These ancient inhabitants of Europe and Asia became coded as white, and on social media some people began to claim Neanderthal ancestry as a mark of racial superiority.

Such misuse of science spurred researchers to organize an AABA symposium devoted to combating race science, or the idea that genes and other biological variation can be used to sort humans into races—some superior to others.

They sure picked a funny example, because nearly all the Neanderthal science articles show a bias against them. They nearly always refer to Neanderthal as archaic and extinct, and the African hominins as modern humans. In fact, according to the latest research, the Neanderthals were at aleast as modern and human as the Africans.

The Wikipedia article on History of the chair used to say:

"In Sub-Saharan Africa, chairs were not in use before introduction by Europeans."

The editors removed this for being racist.

So the descendants of Neanderthals were the only ones to ever invent chairs.

The AAAS article goes on to aruge for retracting and censoring scinentific that shows group differences in intelligence.