Lessons Learned?

He watched the three young, black men as they made their way across the distant field, and as he did his feelings of resentment grew. The woman, knowing her mate’s moods, busied herself over the food.

“Listen to the racket they make,” he grumbled. “Darkies is always going on like that, aren’t they? Can’t act like decent folk and just be quiet for a change, can they? No appreciation for the world around them, that’s what it is. Dancing and singing, dancing and singing…never doing an honest day’s work. Damn spear-chuckers.”

The woman grunted.

“Well, they call it singing,” he continued, “but it sounds like noise to me. And you know what? Those darkies steal. Oh, yes, steal the food right out of our mouths, they will. Just move right in here as if they owned the place. The village over yonder said these blacks swarmed in like fleas. Singing fleas,” he laughed at his own wit, slapping a naked, scarred thigh.

One of the boys sitting on the floor and playing with a couple of sticks spoke up: “But I like the sounds they make, papa.”

The slap sent him sprawling across the floor. His siblings giggled. He came up, nose bleeding, cowed and quiet.

“That’s ‘cause you don’t know no better,” his father said without looking at him. “The song of birds and the wind through the trees—that’s music. These darkies just cover it up with their racket ‘cause they’re too stupid to appreciate the finer things. And the clothes they wear—have you seen the clothes they wear? Talk about fancy! All that tailoring. So what if they know how to use a needle? Makes me sick.”

“I like their clothes,” said a girl. And then, screwing up her prominent eye-ridge in concentration, added: “Looks warm.”

“That just proves how weak they are,” her father barked. “Being cold builds character and keeps us strong.”

He addressed the woman now: “Mark my words. They are thieves. And they ain’t going to stop at stealing food,” he said, casting a significant look at the girls.

The woman nodded. “But what can we do?”

“What can we do? We can attack! We’re stronger than they are, and we were here first. This is our land. You know, I heard they are even painting all over the walls over yonder. Graffiti! We never had any of that when I was a kid. You can’t tell me that’s natural. There weren’t no graffiti here until they showed up, dirtying up the place. We have to do something!”

With that, he stood up and snatched his club from the corner near the fire pit. The children squealed and dashed to various parts of the cave, fearing their father’s temper. The woman laid a quieting hand on his arm.

“Now, now. Don’t be getting yourself all worked up,” she said soothingly. “You don’t know what they are capable of.”

The man was shaking with anger now.

“What they are capable of?” he spat. “What about what I’m capable of, woman. I caught you sneaking a peek at them. You fancy them, don’t you? You wanna be their little whore, don’t cha?” he screamed, raising the club to strike her. But before he could bring the fire-hardened knot of wood down on his her skull, a terrible pain shot through his chest.

“Kcht…?” he gasped and then fell to the floor. By the time his mate and children recovered enough to huddle around his body, his breathing had stopped. He was dead.

“Well, that was to be expected,” she said, consoling the children. “He was nearly thirty-three, after all. He shouldn’t have been pushing himself like that. You children remember that. OK?”

“OK!” they chimed as one.





Mr. Hajah held up the skull and asked the class: “Can anyone tell what this is?”

Thirty pairs of eyes rolled in their sockets with the unspoken amazement of the effrontery of adults: Can you believe this guy?

“Anyone? Jaoquan?”

“It’s a skull, right?” the Adidas bedecked youth drawled, grinning at the kudos from his neighbors.

“Very good,” Mr. Hajah said. “Nice to see the comparative anatomy finally paying off. Now, can anyone tell me what kind of skull?”

Thirty pairs of pimple-free brow ridges crinkled up with confusion.

“A human one? Jesus…” someone mumbled from the back. Giggles swept through the room.

“Yeah, maybe it is Jesus!” laughed Danny Capax, the school’s resident metal head.

Mr. Hajah caught the eye of a couple of uncomfortable students.

“None of those jokes, please, Danny,” he said. “And, actually, this guy here isn’t human. Not in the way you’re thinking, anyway. This here’s homo neandertalis, a Neanderthal or caveman as he is sometimes rather despairingly and unfairly referred to. Now, can any of you tell me something about Neanderthals?”

Thirty jeans-swaddled posteriors squirmed in their seats.

“They lived in caves,” a Jenny Lin finally ventured.

“Yes they did, certainly, but not all the time. We now understand they also constructed some non-permanent dwellings. Anything else?”

“I heard they were pretty stupid,” Holly Ardaneux said.

“Actually, we have no evidence to support this stereotype. Resident digs have found suggestions that they may have had intellectual capacities similar to our own.”

“Oh, come on!” Steve Yamada protested. “They walked around all hunched over and grunted a lot. Everyone knows that.”

“Yeah, just like all you football players,” Kobe Bernaki quipped, earning him a playful punch on the arm from Steve.

“Our current image of Neanderthals is based on the drawings of a rather bigoted and ignorant Frenchman who was unwilling or unable to conceive that human ancestors may have looked anything like us. An actual Neanderthal would likely have walked upright, just like you and me. As for speech, we just aren’t sure, but there’s no reason to assume any mental deficiency prevented syntactically complex speech. Neanderthal brains were as large or larger than our own—perfectly understandable give their larger body mass. But we always associate the word ‘neanderthal’ with stupidity. So, I ask you: What’s in a name.”

“They were bigger than us?” asked Jeremy White.

“Yes, certainly. Well, more massive, but shorter. Compared to modern humans, a Neanderthal man may have been two or three times stronger on average. And they were better adapted for the cold climate of the Ice Age than we were.”

“What do you mean?” asked Molly Jintao.

“Just that Neanderthals were much better adapted to the cold climate than their homo sapien neighbors. For one thing, Neanderthals had white, fair skin, the better to produce vitamin D from the weaker sunlight of northern regions, whereas the homo sapiens had black skin to protect them from the stronger sunlight of the equatorial regions.”

“Neighbors?” said Greg Hans incredulously. “I thought you Darwinians said that we were descended from Neanderthals.”

Mr. Hajah sighed, fearing the theological battle that was about to take place. He had to dance on ice: “Earlier scientists though so, but they were wrong. Yes, it happens, Greg. Recent DNA evidence has shown to most scientists’ satisfaction that we are not descended from Neanderthals. We could think of them as cousins, but not ancestors.”

“Well,” Greg said, leaning forward, “that just proves you scientists are only guessing. If you could get something as big as this wrong, how could you possibly propose to teach us truth?”

“Can anyone guess what happened to the Neanderthals?” Mr. Hajah sound loudly, cutting off Greg before he had a chance to launch into yet another laundry list of complaints about the theory of evolution, the first and foremost being that it was a theory and not an established “fact”.

“I heard,” said Vanessa Epstein, “they got wiped out by the other humans.”

“Cool!” exclaimed Nyguen Wayne. “You mean, like a war or something?”

“Not a war,” Mr. Hajah interjected. “Exhibit A here most likely died of natural causes some time during his thirty-third year, judging by the wear on his teeth. No. No one’s discovered any evidence of a large- or even small-scale war between the two species. Given that they occupied the same region of what is now known as Iraq for about 30,000 years, we should assume they had some contact. The Neanderthals must’ve come into contact with homo sapien art, singing, and maybe even spirituality. Would they have understood it? Would they have tried to copy it, or would they have ignored it in the struggle for survival?”

“Neanderthals didn’t have art?”

“No.”

“Then who did all those cave paintings?”

“That was us, I’m afraid,” the teacher said, sitting on his desk. “Look, the point I want to make for you is this: Even though they were stronger and better adapted to their environment that we were, the Neanderthals died out. They were too specialized. They wouldn’t adapt to the changing environment. When things began to warm up, their traditional food sources likely began to disappear, and the Neanderthals weren’t able to see beyond what they’d always done before and take advantage of other food stuffs. They were, in other words, too conservative, relying on what their fathers had taught them instead of looking out and making their own adaptive, creative decisions. And they died out as a result. If there’s any lesson the extinction of the Neanderthals can teach us, it’s probably this: Mix it up, take in ideas from wherever you can get them, and above all else be able to adapt. OK?”

“OK,” the class muttered as the bell chimed and hands busied themselves gathering their books.