THE ANCIENT N-WORD

What is it about Neanderthal, or as I like to call him, Uncle Neander?

   Supposedly he’s been rehabilitated. He was once known as a knuckle-dragger, a thick-browed ape-man who literally hit on his girlfriend by knocking her out with a club.

   Recently, scientists have shown Neanderthal was a more sophisticated, adaptive and compassionate hominid than we previously believed. Neanderthal families cared for the sick, buried the dead, crafted houses of mammoth bones, maybe even built boats to colonize distant islands. Apparently they made glue out of birch bark, a process so difficult scientists have had trouble replicating it in the lab.

   And hey, they may even be related to us through inter-marriage or inter-clubbing, it seems we have some of Neanderthal DNA in our genes.

  So why does Neanderthal still get razzed by Homo sapienites? If you check out the latest news items about Uncle N, amid the latest findings in the lab or the field, you’ll find comments like the article in the British Daily Mail about “heavyweight Neanderthals,” disgraceful boxers who treat the sport with callous, cynical, self-serving disregard.

  Sure, nobody likes disgraceful boxers. But why tar Neanderthal with the brush of callous cynicism?

   In the old days, people would toss off derogatory remarks about minority groups or gay people. They can’t get away with that any more. But writers who don’t know any better still regularly defame my Uncle Neander.

   Maybe it’s because (they believe) he’s not around any more to defend himself. But lots of his relatives are. And we think people who use the ancient N-word without thinking may be guilty of callous cynicism themselves.

  

NO SHIELDS, NO WAR

Here's an example of what prehistory can teach us:

There are about 500 known cave art sites in Europe, dating from 30,000+ to 10,000 years ago. The total number of illustrations in these sites runs into the many thousands.

Of all these illustrations, none depict war or battle scenes.

So does that mean that contrary to widely held belief, war is not a natural, inevitable element of human nature?

Now, historically, when people fight wars, especially if they win, they memorialize them, with statues, plaques and paintings.

So if wars were fought in the Paleolithic era, it's likely they would have been memorialized in cave art.

Also, there are cave illustrations of spears, spear points, speared animals, even, in rare cases, a speared person. There are no illustrations of shields.

In cultures where spears are used as weapons of war, invariably, shields are devised to defend against spear attack.

So the lack of shields in cave art is another indication that war was unknown in Paleolithic culture. *

Let's remember, these were small populations, running in the thousands, rather than the 100s of millions we find in Europe and Asia today.

People in Paleolithic times were not organized in societies or states, with defined borders, large accumulations of resources to be coveted and raided by a neighboring group.

No doubt there was murder in Paleolithic times, likely cannibalism as well.

But perhaps no war, no organized, sustained attack of one group against another, perhaps no genocide, no destruction of another people, settlement, culture. Perhaps.

If so, since the people of those times are thought to be the same species as us, then war is not an essential human trait, now, any more than it was then.

So let’s point this out to the generals and political leaders next time they suggest we solve an international crisis through war.

Because if wars of the 21^st century reach their obvious conclusion, the survivors may end up back in Paleolithic times, but without the clean, abundant environment of the Stone Age.

* I learned about the absence of war scenes and shields in Ice Age art from an excellent book called The Nature of Paleolithic Art, by R. Dale Guthrie.