So turns out, the Neanderthals didn’t die out naturally. Nope. Sapiens happened.
I recently read a fascinating book by a French archaeologist Ludovic Slimak, based on his 30+ years of studying Neanderthal remains and sites in the field. Apparently, geneticists recently discovered that some of our DNA is actually Neanderthal, leading to the speculation that Sapiens simply interbred with the Neanderthals and absorbed them like a great big old spongey thing. All gentle and nice and clean.
Nope.
We killed ’em. Because of course we did.
Sapiens are very efficient and ruthless. We pillaged our way to the top of the food chain with our big brains and our logical thought processes, and we have held on to that for 45,000 years, give or take.
The Neanderthals actually had bigger brains than us, but they were organized very differently. They were amazing craftspeople, making gorgeous tools that were utterly unique to whatever material was to hand. But so far, archaeologists have not found one bead, one pot shard, one figurine, indicating that the Neanderthals were creating art. They were creating beautiful things that were functional, but they weren’t decorating them, or creating art for art’s sake. Fascinating, but I digress.
Mating was apparently hit and miss between Sapiens and Neanderthals. The current theory is, Sapiens women could be impregnated by Neanderthal men, but only the girls born of the union would be fertile. Boys, apparently not so much. And the DNA that we have from our Neanderthal cousins doesn’t actually seem to do much for us – like it’s vestigial, not functional. And maybe that’s why they were wiped out – they weren’t viable breeding partners, so they were competitors for resources and we can’t have that.
If you’re wondering where our capacity for brutality came from, it ain’t from our Neanderthal side. It’s a Sapiens thing.
Disheartening! Though not really surprising.
The really interesting thing is, the Neanderthals were around for somewhere between 1.9 and 2.1 million years. Yeah. We’ve been around for about 190,000. We’re not even toddlers. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for about 180 million years, and it took an asteroid to wipe them out. We haven’t even friggin’ warmed up yet, and look at the destruction we are already responsible for.
So I have to consider this in a couple different ways in order to not go full Thanos on y’all. First of all, life on this planet has survived multiple meteor strikes; having the whole planet turned into an ice ball – twice – and multiple catastrophic volcanic eruptions going off all at the same time. Somehow, life has hung on through all of that. None of those events were anybody’s fault. We can’t point a finger and say, “It was Steve, he threw that asteroid at us that caused a mass extinction and an ice age.” Steve had nothing to do with any of it. (He did plenty of other shit though, don’t be fooled.)
There have been cycles, fluctuations in temperatures, changes in the chemical make-up of the atmosphere, that have happened due to natural causes – some crazy critter or plant starts to thrive just a little too much and changes the balance of oxygen to nitrogen or whatever, and suddenly a whole bunch of other things die – or every volcano around the entire Ring of Fire goes off all at once and dumps enough CO2 into the atmosphere to cause the Arctic to be a tropical paradise – and suddenly the planet is not so sympathetic to existing life. (Please note, I’m not saying that humans haven’t caused the fastest ever change in global temperature by irresponsible dumping of CO2 like a bunch of drunken pixies, because we have, and nobody has any idea how that’s ultimately gonna work out.) Fortunately, geologic time is, like, massively slow. The planet can be a snowball for 300 million years and it’s fine. We currently have about another 5 billion years before the sun starts going red giant and swallows us in a fiery ball of death. No worries. Bags of time, even on a geologic scale.
Humans, like it or not, are part of the ecosystem.
We evolved here, and are symbiotically integrated with all the other life that we need to survive. Trees need our carbon dioxide, but give us the oxygen we need in exchange. Plants produce fruits and greens and other things that we need to eat for energy. Bugs pollinate. Some of us eat others of us, but what the hell, nobody’s perfect. Lions gonna lion, lambs gonna make tasty kebabs. But I digress. Humans belong here just as much as lions, lambs, whales, alligators, boa constrictors, mice, birds, chameleons, trees, flowers, bees, bats, and even stupid box elder bugs (and nobody knows what purpose they actually serve in the ecosystem other than covering the front of my house making it totally gross to go in or out).
Is anything we do “unnatural?” We can sure as shit do harm, but … since our big rational brains evolved here, and nothing (so far) has been able to wipe us out (and I think She’s been tryin’ lately, you know), well … if human-caused climate change (thanks, Steve) causes mass extinction (check), droughts (check), famines (check), wars over resources (check), and huge numbers of refugees just trying to get their children someplace where they might live to adulthood (check), is that really any different than early trees flourishing so much in a carbon-dioxide rich atmosphere that they caused CO2 levels to plummet causing the whole planet to become a giant ice ball?
Hey, were any of those trees named Steve?
But I digress. The planet has experienced worse, and life has gone on. It probably won’t be humans that dominate next time, which is probably good. Or maybe Mama Nature can find a way to restart the Neanderthals, but give them better bullshit filters. I think I could be quite happy as a Neanderthal.