“The fairy tale,” wrote Walter Benjamin in 1936, “…is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind.” You don’t need an academic to see ancient fears of predators and strangers in the woods, bundled together in stories like “Little Red Riding Hood”. But what academia can do is begin to date these narratives. This has allowed us to trace “Little Red Riding Hood”, and its close variants like “The Wolf And The Seven Kids”, back at least 2,000 years to the Eastern Mediterranean. From there, it spread through the Roman world into Europe, down the Red Sea into East Africa, and along the Silk Road to East Asia, to be told again and again, what must be millions of times a day. Modern academia can also help identify patterns: like the fact a hominid-like wild man from the Himalayan Yeti, to the Australian Yowie, to the Scandinavia troll or the Old English woodwose — exists in practically every culture.

This is eerie given what we now know. The idea that these could be the faintest of imprints of lost hominids has crept into plausibility as our understanding of humanity’s deepest past has changed. The first Neanderthal remains were only discovered in Germany in 1856, and only in the last 20 years have new remains and a revolution in genomics revolutionized our understanding of ancient humanity. The familiar graphic of humanity’s evolutionary lineage — first a chimp on all fours, before rising over his stooped hairy predecessors a man standing tall — has collapsed into a final group photo before an abrupt extinction of other hominids that left sapiens alone on Earth.

It’s now clear that we shared Earth with at least four other branches of the genus homo — with which we interbred. This startling discovery was made as recently as 2010. These were the Neanderthals in Europe; the Denisovans in Asia, only discovered in 2008 from a single finger bone, and of which only a dozen remains have since been found; and two ghost populations in Africa inferred from modeling. This revelation — that we were a wider humanity, a species with sub-species — has been accompanied by breakthroughs in archeology. This began in 2003, after yet more hominids were found in South East Asia, and which overlapped with early man. One such individual, the hobbit-sized Homo Florenesis in Indonesia, caught the world’s imagination with his diminutive size.

More to the point, these archeological developments have transformed our knowledge of Neanderthals. They were more “human” than we realized: using fire, smoking hides, distilling birch tar, wearing jewelry, ritually burying their dead, even practicing a kind of primitive dentistry — closer to many old folktales than to apes. At a distance, it would have been hard to tell them apart wearing furs and ponchos. But there were giveaways. They were a bit bigger than us, their eyes around a fifth larger under a ridged forehead, with little chin, and they were probably light skinned: unlike our own ancestors. It would have been an unsettling mirror.

Suggested Reading

The shadow of Pax Romana

By Tom Holland

How long were we together? Paleoanthropologists divide human history between anatomically modern humans, who emerged around 300,000 years ago, and behaviorally modern humans showing signs of art, symbolic thinking and sophisticated tool-making — gradually building up over 150,000 to 50,000 years ago. Drawing on fragments and hypotheses, we can only ever date fuzzily in deep history: with margins for error spanning tens of thousands of years. But we can deduce from our anatomically modern history that we shared the world with other humanities for nine tenths of our existence.

How constant our contacts were with the African ghost populations we simply cannot say. Perhaps habitual. Maybe fleeting. But of the Eurasian humanities, this would not have been a constant contact: Neanderthals and Denisovans were occupying vast territories as yet unexplored by sapiens. But there was contact in frontier zones like the Levant, where we know that Neanderthals interbred with sapiens: both from dating our DNA, and from the burial of a 140,000-year-old half-Neanderthal child, some 90,000 years before Europe was systematically colonized by sapiens. That colonization, as caves like Grotte Mandrin in France make clear, was not a single obliterating wave — but a 12,000-year period of overlap between Neanderthals and ourselves made up of successive expeditions.

Our ancestors, then, for perhaps most of our behavioral modernity, needed to be aware of Neanderthals. But can we faintly remember them? This requires us to date their disparition. The French archeologist Ludovic Slimak writes hauntingly about the archeological record — “Neanderthals are there and then they are no longer there” — some 40,000 years ago. There is something unsettling sensing their final encounter with sapiens settling Europe sifting through tens of thousands of ancient flints. We see the Neanderthals’ distinctive tool-knapping technique: each slightly different, as if following the rock, compared to the brutal and identical sharpness of the humans, indistinguishable from the slopes of Levant to the Rhone valleys. This is what an encounter with a super intelligence looks like, and it is unnerving as we face our own at the dawn of AI.

“Neanderthals were not a civilization,” writes Slimak. “They were hundreds of civilizations collapsing like dominoes.” Never very numerous, destabilized perhaps by the ferocious temperature oscillations of the late Ice Age, Slimak believes Neanderthals were broken up into small groups and outcompeted by us in a way instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with modern colonization. Their last possible traces — not bones, but those distinctive flints — can be found in the two furthest corners of the continent: above the Arctic circle in the Urals plateau, and in the caves of Gibraltar, some 29,000 years ago. The same fate awaited the Denisovans, and perhaps the hobbits of Flores.

But do we in the faintest way in our stories remember them? This begs the question of how long can we remember anything. Here, recent research by Professor Patrick Nunn in The Edge of Memory is revelatory. Our world has changed enormously since behavioral modernity. We not only live in an empty world but a drowned world, one utterly reshaped by massive coastal flooding from the end of the Ice Age. Yet Nunn has documented 21 Aboriginal stories which recount exact locations off coastal Australia there is no way modern inhabitants could have known about. From vanished islands to marshes and land bridges — not least the one to Tasmania — these memories of what must have been sudden and shocking sea-level rises can be dated to between 7,500 to 12,000 years ago.

But we do not have to go all the way to Australia to find ancient memories. Nunn’s recent research has concentrated on the west of the British Isles, where countless examples of old Cornish, Welsh and Irish storytelling, like tales of the lost land of Lyonesse, recall vanished coastlines stretching out into the Channel and Atlantic. Our geological research has now caught up with the storytelling. These were not, as the archaeologist Osbert Crawford first suggested, the fantasies of “the dreamy Celt”. Rather, the geological record suggests a faint memory of the traumatic loss of the Ice Age coastline — with some tales being able to pinpoint bits of the Scilly Isles lost some 9,000 years ago.

Intriguingly, in the East of England, where the loss of the vast plains of Doggerland stretching towards Germany was even more dramatic, there are next to no folk tales of lost lands, despite fishermen for centuries picking up mammoth tusks and tree trunks deep out at sea. Historical genetics gives us the answer why: while the population in those western regions are largely the descendants of those living there during those cataclysmic sea-level rises, those on England’s eastern coastline were largely replaced by Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes in the Dark Ages.

Suggested Reading

Don't let ancient languages die

By Georgy Kantor

The edge of memory when it comes to events seems nowhere close to 20,000 years ago — and far short of the last traces of the Neanderthals. But there might be another explanation for our ancestors’ fascination with wild men, ogres and giants: their encounters with the fossil record. Because if you have never seen a woolly mammoth or a gigantic extinct cave bear — let alone a dinosaur — and you dig one up and try to arrange it, what comes out looks rather like a monstrous giant.

In her brilliant book The First Fossil Hunters, Professor Adrienne Mayor compares fossil deposits to Ancient Greek and Roman accounts of the discoveries of gigantic bones and heroic skeletons. In so doing, she shows that these finds convinced our ancestors that there had once been a time of giants. During what she calls the “bone rush” of the 7th and 5th centuries BC, the Spartans found the massive remains of their hero Orestes while the Athenians dug up Theseus and gigantic bones attributed to Ajax in spots we can now pinpoint as rich with fossil deposits. Not only did the Emperors Augustus and Tiberius gather chambers of wonders of gigantic bones — which must have been fossils — they also gave instructions on how to bury giants’ bodies that suddenly were exposed in what we know are rich deposits.

We now know, in other words, that the temples of the ancient Mediterranean were in fact full of the kinds of tusks and bones that you might today find in the Natural History Museum. Not only is moving giant bones mentioned in the Epic Cycle about the Trojan War — where Trojan seers prophesied the Greeks could only win if they found the bones of the hero Pelops, whose giant shoulder blade they promptly dug up — there is clearly a fossilized skull, depicted as the beast of Troy, on a 6th-century BC Corinthian vase. These assumptions lingered, as a drumbeat for belief in the background, until modern archeology offered an alternative. And we have extensive evidence of this: from Herodotus and Pausnias inspecting curious bones, to Boccaccio watching Sicilian peasants dig out the skeleton of a giant in 1371, to the important paleontological discoveries made in Chinese drugstores selling “dragon bones” in the 19th century. But if our hominid stories are only fantasies from bones, why the specifics and persistence of Yetis, Yowies and wild men?

Flores in Indonesia is the island where we might find an answer. Here, on an island where apes never trod, not only have archaeologists found the hobbit-like remains of Homo Florenesis — anthropologists have also found an incredibly rich and naturalistic storytelling tradition about ape-men. There is something so specific about these tales, recalling cave burnings to smoke out very violent ape-men, that they just might be recalling some memory of living side-by-side with another species. Could this be where the edge of memory touches our lost cousins? This is especially possible when the rarity of fossilization doesn’t preclude the idea that there weren’t lingering Homo Florenesis thousands of years past the dates of their last known remains. We don’t know. Only archaeology, and time, might eventually tell.

Yet the fact these stories endure today suggests a third explanation: buried deep in the psyche. There is something uncanny about reading accounts of the Flores ape-men, with their tellers even believing they’re still out there, spotted thieving food or by field huts, found dead at the roadside or glimpsed in the higher forests. Might our minds, after so long evolving together, be so strongly wired with the pattern recognition to spot other hominids that we will hallucinate them until the end of our days? Fairies die out only to be replaced by aliens. Hominids from space, this time, not from the forests and caves. Phantom limbs, phantom siblings, still living with us forever in our stories.

More than anything, this perspective reflects the common Leftist belief that Palestinians are the true native people of the land, but were dispossessed of their territory by an invading army of white Europeans.

The sudden outburst of anti-colonial rancour, which glorified the slaying of children and innocent civilians, triggered a wave of condemnation, with some pointing out that Jews are also indigenous to the region. ​​“The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for 1,000 years,” observed Simon Sebag Montefiore in The Atlantic. Jews, wrote Rich Lowry in The New York Post, “are fundamentally identified with the land”, making them an “indigenous people”.

Some in Israel take the argument a step further, however. “When Palestinians were climbing trees, we already had a Jewish state,” Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, argued in a debate with an Arab politician, who had chastised him as a “settler” and a “tumour” that needed to be removed. “There’s no such thing as Palestinians,” declared Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who claimed that David Ben-Gurion should have “finished the job” and forced out every Arab when the country was founded.

This rhetorical war over which ethnic group maintains authentic and historical ownership of the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River speaks to the emotional power of the “indigenous” mantle. In this framework, the justice of a particular cause is determined primarily by whether the people advocating for it are more authentically native. And as a phenomenon, it extends well beyond this conflict, rippling through Western society in recent years. In Europe, for instance, far-Right movements have spent the past decade calling for immigrants to be expelled in order to preserve the racially pure heritage of Europe’s “indigenous” communities. In America, meanwhile, Leftists now demand “land acknowledgment” rituals, which suggest that the US is merely a racist power occupying what should be sovereign tribal territory. During the deadly riots of 2020, activists celebrated the violence as an effort to “decolonise” the country.

More from this author

Republican hawks now want a war with Iran

By Lee Fang

Long before October 7, similar disputes defined the politics that shaped relations between Palestinians and Jews. The process, in many respects, is deeply institutionalised.

Last year, I reported from Israel and Palestine, and visited a number of neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, the largely Palestinian side of the city seized by the Israeli military during the 1967 war. Unlike the West Bank, Israel formally annexed East Jerusalem in 1980, granting Palestinians there permanent residency in Israel, but not Israeli citizenship.

The area is home to the City of David complex — part-museum, part-archeological dig, and part-propaganda apparatus for a project that seeks to exert Jewish claims of indigeneity across all of Jerusalem. The neighbourhoods are like a slow-simmering warzone. Homes are surrounded by razor wire and iron gates. Evictions of Palestinians are celebrated with banners announcing the arrival of Jewish families. The situation is tense.

The excavations and the visitor centre are the project of a group called Elad, also known as the Ir David Foundation, which seeks to increase the Jewish population of Jerusalem to limit Palestinian influence in, and claims to, the city. The project, now funded by billionaires Daniel Loeb and Roman Abramovich, among others, was set up in response to the 1993 Oslo Accords, which floated East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. The proposal enraged segments of Israeli society and the bid to uncover artefacts showing Jewish heritage is a direct attempt to subvert Palestinian claims to the city.

Suggested reading

Can the pro-Palestine Left redeem itself?

By Kat Rosenfield

“Our aim is to Judaize East Jerusalem,” Yigal Kaufman, a spokesperson for Elad, told The New York Times in 1998. “The City of David is the most ancient core of Jerusalem, and we want it to become a Jewish neighbourhood.” Pamphlets from the group at the time openly touted the archeological dig as the “main public diplomacy body in the arena of the battle for Jerusalem”.

When I visited, our guide explained that artefacts had been found from the Biblical era, even though the dig was yet to uncover any conclusive evidence that it was the home of King David of the Old Testament. Then, about 30 minutes into the tour, the talk turned explicitly political.

“As a Jew, as a Zionist, Jerusalem for us is not a narrative,” said James Elgrod, a British-born Israeli. “It’s not just a place — it’s the essence of our identity for 2,000 years.” He flashed a grainy black-and-white photograph from the early 20th century that showed the surrounding Palestinian neighbourhood without many buildings. “Potato fields, no houses over here,” he said, adding that the mostly Arab-Muslim inhabitants had only moved to the city “60, 70, maybe 80 years ago”. In effect, Elgrod, and the broader Elad project, were hoping to use a collection of calcified pots and old coins to justify efforts to remove Palestinians from the area.

Less subtly, Elad has spent years litigating to evict Palestinian families from homes in the Silwan neighbourhood, just outside the gates of its visitor centre. Elsewhere, according to the Jerusalem-based human rights group Ir Amin, an academic from the University of Haifa reported identifying a discovery at the City of David site as Byzantine in origin, only to be dismissed by Elad’s staffers, who insisted that the discovery was related to stories from the Bible.

Suggested reading

Violence stalks Gaza through history

By Justin Marozzi

A less politicised view of archeology, however, reveals a richer, more complex tale. Jerusalem is filled with artefacts that testify to its diversity, a place once inhabited by dozens of ethnic groups and tribes, a city of ancient empires and kingdoms and multiple religions. Stand at the centre of the City of David, look up, and you’ll see Ottoman Empire-built walls encircling the holiest sites of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Like the history of virtually every civilisation, the land fought over today is filled with cycles of migration and conquest, with various groups of people settling and blending with others.

Rafi Greenberg, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, told me that he no longer participates in any of the City of David digs, viewing the entire effort as an attempt to use archeology as a “weapon” to divide the people of Jerusalem. “Palestinians are entirely free to adopt any or all or none of the heritage of the land that they inhabit,” Greenberg said. “One person’s subjective view of the nature of their heritage cannot determine another’s and has no legal or moral implications for that or any other person’s human or civil rights.”

Another way to view the Israel-Palestine conflict — one that is more difficult to politicise — is to look at genetics. According to a 2020 study by a team of researchers at Harvard University and Tel Aviv University, most of the Palestinian-Arab and Jewish populations of the region share a common ancestry that stretches back to the ancient Canaanites, who occupied the territory around 4,000 years ago. Palestinians share about 80% of their ancestry with ancient Bronze Age communities of the Levant, while Iranian Jews share 90% and Ashkenazi Jews have roughly 60-70% of common ancestors.

The findings match earlier studies that show immense genetic overlap between Arabs and Jews in the country, which suggest much of the Palestinian population is descended from ancient Jews and other ethnic groups native to Israel. In that sense, archeological warfare is meaningless: the artefacts represent a shared heritage for all of Israel-Palestine’s residents, not a dividing line to justify expulsions by Israeli settlers or terror attacks by Hamas.

The divisions today, around religion and ethnicity, form a chasm that is exploited by extremists. The coloniser-indigenous arguments are little more than rhetorical devices designed to dehumanise and displace the other. A more productive narrative would recognise the common bonds that unite every Arab and Jew as members of the same community with inalienable rights.