WHAT’S WORSE THAN NEANDERTHAL THINKING?
Don’t get me wrong. I think President Biden is doing a great job. That said, I have to take exception to his criticizing dim-witted state governors for their “Neanderthal thinking.” That slam is directed at Governor Greg Abbott of the Great State of Texas, and to a lesser extent his fellow simians governing Alabama and Mississippi. What provoked the President say such a thing? Because that trio have prematurely lifted mask-wearing requirements and encouraged their citizens to get the party going again before the Covid pandemic is behind us.
Of course that’s stupid. But why drag my ancestors, who have been dead and gone for some 30,000 years, into it? Biden could have just easily, and more appropriately, tagged them with “baboon thinking.” (We Homos have to cover one another’s backs.)
My ancestors? Yes, the good folks at 23andMe inform me that I’m carrying 2 percent Neanderthal DNA in my genome…the deep-past result of some Homo neanderthalensis gent wooing a Homo sapiens lass…or was the lady the Neanderthal? (Check photo above.) Yes, I do have some red body and facial hair, my nose is larger than I’d like, I have a pronounced supraorbital ridge, and my jawbone is prognathous. I can live with that. Moreover, of special relevance for me, the first identified fossil find of Neanderthal remains was in 1856 in Germany’s Neander Valley, the present day North Rhine-Westphalia region. That’s where my mom’s people were from!
You think I’m being touchy? Well, I am. I’m tired of having my kin being put down as subhuman…which, then again, I guess they were, in a way. Confused? Well, let me explain why you shouldn’t stick your patrician noses in the air and look down on us lowbrow, big-nosed, jutting jawed, receding-chinned knuckle-draggers. Why? Because you’re probably one of us! If your ancestors are from Europe or Asia or from anywhere else save Africa (if they never left Africa)—then you too are packing 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal genes in your jeans. (And that includes you too, Joe!)
Since the first discovery of that vanished species, many additional finds have been made in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. For a long time the species got a bum rap as dullards, primitives, intellectual lightweights compared to the late-arriving Homo sapiens newcomers, with whom they just couldn’t compete. (But they could mate, it would appear; you know, closing time in the cave, and the one mead-sipping patron left at the end of the bar is looking at you longingly….)
As some of us know, science is never done sifting evidence for the tentative conclusions it draws, and, as the years have passed, more recent research paints a different picture from the old, demeaning stereotype. Among the revisions, we learn that Neanderthals controlled fire, were accomplished toolmakers, were great close-up hunters of big game (and left their broken fossil bones behind to prove it), adorned themselves with ornaments, created cave art in red ochre, strewed the graves of their departed loved ones with flowers (how’s that for showing empathy!), and, finally—get ready for it!—their brains were as big as or bigger than ours!
The old conclusion that Neanderthal extinction stemmed from the species’ mental and cultural inferiority, leaving them unable to compete with the newly arrived modern humans for scarce resources, has been joined by another viable, even complementary, theory: climate change. Between 60,000 and 20,000 years ago the earth’s temperatures plunged steeply, putting life for the north-Europe-centered Neanderthals in an icy peril they didn’t survive, leaving behind only their genes we carry forward. Is there a lesson for us here?
No, Joe, it isn’t Neanderthal thinking that’s to blame; they managed to live on this planet for 200,000 years. It’s Republican thinking, which threatens to render its party—and perhaps all of us—extinct in less than 200 years.
