Baku, April 1, AZERTAC

Calling someone a Neanderthal was once an insult, meaning you thought of them as a knuckle-dragging brute. “Neanderthals” have always been used as a mirror for thinking about ourselves … projecting things we don’t like about ourselves onto another group of humans,” said Fernando Villanea, a population geneticist at the University of Colorado Boulder, last week at the annual meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA), according to Science.

As scientists have learned more about Neanderthals’ cultural sophistication and abilities, though, their public image has gotten a glow-up. For some people, their status was elevated still further by the widely publicized discovery in 2007 that some Neanderthals carried genes suggesting they had red hair and light skin. These ancient inhabitants of Europe and Asia became coded as white, and on social media some people began to claim Neanderthal ancestry as a mark of racial superiority.

Such misuse of science spurred researchers to organize an AABA symposium devoted to combating race science, or the idea that genes and other biological variation can be used to sort humans into races—some superior to others.

Villanea and other symposium speakers urged attendees to engage head-on with potential racist misuse of their data, and to proactively make their work’s conclusions unambiguous. “In the rotten harvest yielded by race science, research has real-world consequences,” said Charles Roseman, an integrative biologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who helped organize the symposium.

When it comes to Neanderthals, claiming a connection as a mark of European pride makes little sense, Villanea said. Recent research suggests Neanderthal ancestry is widely shared among global populations, including some in Africa. What’s more, according to some recent studies, South Asia, not Europe, contains the greatest diversity of Neanderthal genes.

Yet those are nuances in a picture of human variation—which is both what biological anthropologists study and what racists seize on. That’s why trying to present anthropological work “impartially,” letting the data speak for itself, leaves the door open to co-option, said Robin Nelson, a biological anthropologist at Arizona State University. Researchers need to explicitly condemn racist interpretations of their work, whether on social media or in scientific papers, she says. “Think about where your strengths are and where you are interacting with the public. Maybe it’s emailing editors, maybe it’s visiting your kids’ classrooms,” she says.

Rebecca Sear, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, is targeting problematic papers. She’s been on a quest to convince journals to retract articles based on widely discredited data from Ulster University psychologist and self-described “scientific racist” Richard Lynn, who died last year. In 2002, Lynn and colleagues published a “national IQ data set” based on IQ tests given in 81 nations, then extrapolated those scores for an additional 104. Among other faults, Lynn’s methods included “wholly” unrepresentative sampling, and cognitive tests of a kind that could not allow valid comparisons between populations, Sear notes. Psychologists and anthropologists alike have roundly described the data as worthless, yet some academic studies still cite them.

Sear contacted the editors or publishers of 12 journals about 14 papers that used Lynn’s data set. Most editors declined to take any action; others added a note of caution to the manuscript but did not retract it. One exception was the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In what Sear described as a “ray of hope,” editors there responded promptly to her complaint about a June 2010 paper linking the worldwide distribution of parasite prevalence to the cognitive variations Lynn claimed to have mapped. They investigated and retracted the paper earlier this month.

Certain visualization tools can also perpetuate distorted views, added Sheela Athreya, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University. For example, she noted, researchers frequently use software that displays modern populations as endpoints on separate evolutionary branches. But those depictions ignore how much mixing there has been—and continues to be—between human populations, Athreya said. Noting that “race science requires evidence from the past to elevate race as a biological concept,” she urged anthropologists to depict gene flow over time in ways that don’t emphasize branches as endpoints—perhaps, instead, as a braided stream with channels intersecting at some times, diverging at others.