This has crossed my mind too - I'm glad Neil Degrass Tyson is saying it. Transcript below the video.
I once pointed out to professional racist Steve Sailer that there's a good possibility that his ancestors had sex with Neanderthals. He immediately blocked me.
NOTE: on the page I link to, I use the term "Northern Superiority Hypothesis" because I did not know at the time there was already an established name for it: "Cold Winters Hypothesis." I've learned so much from doing this blog. Charles Murray could be seen promoting that "theory" because Murray, a political scientist, is a leading light of race pseudoscience.
My ancestors are just as likely to have had sex with Neanderthals as Sailer's were, but that doesn't bother me. Except the possibility of a close relationship to a marketing guy who became famous by being horrible and wrong for his entire career.
What Tyson doesn't explicitly say - in this clip at least - is that once it was apparent that white people had Neanderthal DNA, scientists started to think maybe Neanderthals were smart.
But smart or stupid, the fact is that Neanderthals are extinct and so from an hereditarian perspective, genetic losers in the survival of the fittest contest. Which means White people (and Asians) are related to an evolutionary dead end. Another inconvenient truth for racist hereditarians to ignore or explain away.
TRANSCRIPT
TYSON: Suppose anthropologists were Black racists instead of White racists. What would they write? Hypothetical Black racist anthropologists:
"Chimps and other apes grow hair all over their bodies. The hairiest people you've ever seen have been white people. Distinct from their face, hands and feet. Part the hair of most chimpanzees, the way they do to each other when checking for lice and their skin color is white, not any shade of black or brown. Ever hear of a lice outbreak among black children? White children are 30 times more susceptible to lice infestation than are black children. The parasite simply likes to lay eggs in the hair of chimpanzees and White people more than on the hair of Black people."
For most of the 20th century Neanderthals were portrayed as stupid and brutish. Turns out, beginning in the 1990s, genetic research revealed that Europeans are between 1 and 3% Neanderthal, Africans 0%. This goes on. This is what we were doing as humans to each other, not recognizing authentic diversity and who and what we are.
