Ladies And Gentlemen Of The Jury, I'm Just A Simple Caveman
Some readers have noticed that comments have been offline here at the Lost City for a spell. This is not intentional; it's apparently some twitchy Blogspot-related problem. But rest assured, our crack team of technicians is working around the clock to set things right.
The lack of comment threads did not discourage faithful reader Brer John, who sent an email-borne missive to the city's Hominid Investigations Bureau (pictured above), which eventually made its way to me. Brer John takes issue with my rather casual comment that:
Wow! What a spectacularly bad idea. We ran them into extinction, can't we just let them rest in peace?
John replies in part:
Just because they were on the playing field near the same time and only one of us remains doesn't show a causal relationship between our presence and their demise. I note that Homo Heidelbergensis disappeared from Europe about the same time Neanderthalensis makes the scene. You don't hear me saying Neanderthals popped a cap into Heidelbergs' collective ass, do you?
I think we should clean the skeletons out of our own family's closet before we start rummaging around in someone else's. Tell you what: when the Neanderthals start talking about cloning the Homo Heidelbergensis, I'll be more sympathetic to your argument.
Any number of events (or combinations thereof) could have dropped the Neanderthals without any help at all from the Sapiens. Before you call Homo Sapiens the perp in this case ("I suppose you're all wondering why I called our entire species into this drawing room.") you'll have to make a convincing case.
Sorry, Mr. Mason, you're not getting your client off that easily. While I'm not aware of any track record for Neanderthal aggression against fellow hominids, homo sapiens have a 10,000 year-long rap sheet of mayhem to answer for.
I agree it's a largely circumstantial case, but a strong one.
First, as Jared Diamond and others have noted, Neanderthals disappeared in less than a thousand years after coming in contact with our species. And even a cursory look at our species' long and illustrious history will convince you that whenever we encounter members of a technologically inferior civilization, the result is always the same: displacement, enslavement, and eventually genocide.
Second, the Max Planck Institute genome study has kicked a huge hole in the genetic intermingling theory.
This was supposedly our kind and gentle way of disposing of the Neanderthals: we welcomed them into the family, and the Neanderthal DNA quietly faded away into our much larger gene pool.
Put less elegantly, we fucked them out of existence. Not the worst way to go, right?
But without the evidence that we were doing the wild thing with the Wild Things, that theory falls apart, and we inevitably fall back on two possible scenarios: we either a) entered their territory and pushed them out of their land, dooming them to death, or b) entered their territory and slaughtered them all.
I'm looking hard at Door Number 2, but either way Homo Sapiens are responsible.
Look, I'll leave this in the hands of the jury. I'm sure that if your client is acquitted, he'll devote the rest of his life to finding the real killer, no doubt a mysterious one-armed hominid that no one else happened to see.
