What happened to the Neanderthals? Our ancestral cousins went mysteriously extinct while Homo sapiens did not. The demise of one and survival of the other continues to flummox paleoanthropologists–but some researchers now think sunscreen and tailored clothing might have played a role.
New Light is Shed on Reason for Demise of Neanderthals, The Wall Street Journal
I don’t claim to have a sixth sense, but I have to say–I feel a change is coming. Maybe we Homo sapiens won’t develop a written language for a few millennia, but there seems to be a separation between the sheep and the goats in the air.
Look at my buddies Ug and Nutz–the difference is like night and day. Ug’s a great guy, don’t get me wrong, but he is hopelessly out of style. He wears loose-fitting cloaks that give him an ominous air, which is probably a good thing. If you’re downwind from him after he’s chowed down on a rotten antelope carcass that the lions left behind, you’ll want to end your role in the evolution of your species before he gets too close. I don’t want to descend to the level of stereotypes, but as my mother used to say, “That’s just like a Neanderthal!”
Nutz, by contrast, wears form-fitting garments that set off his physique nicely. It’s no wonder he has to fight off fertile females–and try saying that five times fast–with a club. If I close my eyes, I can imagine a time in the future when his look will prevail over the strong, silent, stupid type personified by Ug, despite Ug’s physical advantages over him in terms of height, weight, reach, and ability to take blunt trauma to his head.
Me? I’m sort of a descendant of a monkey-in-the-middle. As much as I like the comfortable traditional clothes favored by Ug, I’m afraid it’s not long before they become extinct. I’ve invested a lot in “Neanderthal” togs, and it looks like I’m going to have to write off the whole Middle to Late Pleistocene Epoch as a tragic fashion mistake. As Ug approaches, I nonetheless try to stay on his good side–in case I can’t outrun him someday.
“How they hangin’, Ug?”
He gets a look of effort on his face, as if he’s squinting his brain to see things more clearly in his mind’s eye.
“How what hangin’?”
“You know, our . . . things down there.”
Ug looks, sees nothing amiss other than one lower than the other, as usual, and replies. “They hang same.” You see what I’m up against.
“It’s just an expression of greeting.”
“What . . . expression of greeting?”
“Something we say that’s short and apparently meaningless, but because it’s familiar it makes us feel part of the same in-group.”
“Huh.”
“So, have you been hunting or gathering?”
A look of high dudgeon comes over his face. “Ug HUNTER!”
“Sure, but you need to get some fiber in your diet, too. I just asked because you’re red all over.”
Ug looks down at his arms which, because they’re covered with such thick hair–none dare call it fur–don’t look that red.
“Me same color as before.”
“You can’t see your own face, I’m telling you, you’re scorched.”
Who should appear at just the right moment to make Ug feel vastly inferior but Nutz, fashion plate and probably the winner in the race to pass on his deoxyribonucleic acid–not that any of us knows what that is.
“You look . . . marvelous,” I say, hoping that I, as a “beta male” to his “alpha,” can get the crumbs from his dinner-date table.
“I know,” he says smugly. “If you worked at it . . .”
“Yes?”
“You might come up to like . . . halfway to my level.”
“So . . . not bad looking?”
“I’d say more like–mediocre mediocrity.”
I let that slide by–I’ve learned that the best way to get along with Nutz is to go along with his weapons-grade condescension.
“You seem to have a healthy glow today.”
“Didn’t you read The Wall Street Journal today?”
“The Daily Diary of the American Dream?”
“Yes. If so, you would have learned that the turning point from crude, mesomorphic Neanderthal to suave, sophisticated Homo sapiens is form-fitting garments . . . and a generous coating of mineral pigments that ‘functioned as an ancient SPF’. Unlike this jamboke here, with the Irish tan.”
The insult didn’t register with Ug, who–as you may have guessed by now–isn’t the brightest torch in the fire pit.
“So does this mean . . . we’re leaving him behind in the long, slow, slog to civilization?”
“It’s up to you,” Nutz says.
“What is?”
“You want to hang with a human boiled lobster, who dresses like he’s on his way to work at Jiffy-Lube, or me–the precursor to George Hamilton and his patented Reflect-A-Tan mirror, for that all-around healthy glow, 365 days a year–366 in a leap year?”
Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Let’s Get Primitive.”