You,Me,and the Neandertals

Abstract

Readers of Qualitative Inquiry are no strangers to the notion of the self and other emerging out of discursive interaction. Neither antecedes the other entity but both require the other to exist. Perhaps the notion that the evolutionary process produces levels of emergent phenomena falls outside of conventional reading. However, each fossil species in the human lineage, for example, constitutes wholes greater than the sum of their parts. Nowhere is this truer than the species commonly referred to as the Neandertal. Furthermore, the Neandertal remains provide us with the first direct evidence of self, other, and death. No doubt, earlier species in our lineage pose the interrelated trilogy, but the Neandertal in burying their dead speak to us most directly of the presence of absence.