Modern-Day Neanderthal

Abstract

Advances in contemporary genetic science have reshaped the narratives whereby individuals and communities make sense of their personal, family, and communal histories. In this process, unknown connections have been revealed and familiar orthodoxies disrupted. This essay examines the consequences of a particularly unusual revelation—the dawning awareness of the presence of nonhuman and archaic human DNA in human genetic lines—for efforts at writing about identity and society. In this autoethnographic account, I examine my own genetic inheritance of Neanderthal DNA, and posit a performative concept of genetic life writing that begins to unpack the complexities of this new knowledge about our human condition. Rather than providing the key to unlocking an “essential” humanity, the murky, messy, and multispecies genome reveals an essentially ecological quality to humanity, and to our individual identities.