| Neandertal interpretation is changing the paradigm of human uniqueness, but exactly how needs to be examined. This paper provides a qualitative analysis of how Neandertal descriptions embed long-held cultural attitudes and how those cultural attitudes are being challenged and, in some ways, reaffirmed through rhetoric. A rhetorical analysis was performed on the second and third editions of a widely used physical anthropology textbook, Clark Spencer Larsen's Our Origins. Both editions rhetorically favor a view of Neandertals as more similar to than different from us, a view which appears at odds with the disciplinary preference. Larsen appeals to the disciplinary preference in the second edition by only implicitly favoring similarities, but the third edition is more explicit in its favoring of similarities. The analysis of Larsen's text provides examples of how rhetors can continue to move readers toward a new view of Neandertals, despite the current disciplinary preference for Neandertal classification. |
