Homo sapiens neanderthalensis

‘Half of bloody humanity is extinct,’ he expostulated. ‘That doesn’t bother you?’

He hunched over and dribbled saliva into the little vial.

‘Gone – like the dodo, like the bloody elephant soon enough. Just an idea. An emptiness. Nothing.

‘Imagine the people in the next flat, a different species!’

‘Subspecies,’ she mumbled.

‘Perhaps, but imagine the world now if the Smiths next door were Neanderthals. What are we stuck with instead as relatives? Bloody bonobos and chimpanzees – one too busy humping his aunty, the other too busy inventing murder, but both too busy to bother learning to speak, both unable to tell us anything about the world from a different perspective. We have to fall back on Trumpian racism – have to pretend that it’s a profound difference if someone speaks Spanish: “Excuse me, what is the world like from the viewpoint of a poor Mexican?”

‘Imagine the real, profound difference it would make to have two species of intelligent creatures living together here. It’s not that long ago.

‘You know they were more intelligent than us? They were bigger and stronger and smarter than us and we killed them all. What does that tell you? That sapiens sapiens was the nasty one, the brutal one. We are descended from the genocidal monkey.

‘And yeah, we screwed them literally as well as figuratively. So yeah, everyone who isn’t an African has Neanderthal DNA.’

‘But not everyone cares,’ she said, staring out the window at the rain.

He slipped the vial into the package and sealed it. 23andme.com/dna-ancestry.

He zipped his raincoat, put the package in the pocket and walked out the door.

She picked up the book lying open and face down beside his chair: “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac.

Effing Beats. ‘Deadbeats’ more like it.

She flipped the book over:

I lay there staring sadly at the burlap ceiling. It was our last night, we both felt it.

… He brought me my supper and we sat crosslegged and chomped away as on so many nights before: just the wind furying in the ocean of trees and our teeth going chomp chomp over good simple mournful bhikku food. ‘Just think, Ray, what it was like right here on this hill where our shack stands thirty thousand years ago in the time of the Neanderthal man. And do you realize that they say in the sutras there was a Buddha of that time, Dipankara?’

‘The one who never said anything!’

‘Can't you just see all those enlightened monkey men sitting around a roaring woodfire around their Buddha saying nothing and knowing everything?’


Dhiraja