VIKING, AUGUST 2016It’s hard—if not impossible—to crack open a book about human evolution and not read about the history and significance of Neanderthals. They remain the first discovered fossil hominin species, and over the last 150 years they have given us a framework to think about them as a character, a species, and a concept.
Neanderthals have been written into the evolutionary narrative as an “Other”— a foil, a double, an easy contrast to our culture that discovered and interpreted them. As any student of literature will tell you, a foil takes a particular character and heightens that character by comparing him with another one; the foil is usually created to project the protagonist. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The most effective foils are generally created by contrasting the two through some set of essential characteristics.
In order for a foil to be truly successful, the character must have something in common with the story’s protagonist. Twentieth-century writer Vladimir Nabokov imagined Shakespeare’s Caliban and Ariel as classic foils that illustrated ...
