Neanderthal

by John Darnton

  There was an awkward silence; then Van said, “Let me ask something.”

  “Go on.”

  “Why haven’t you ever postulated that Neanderthals may still exist?”

  “Because the possibility is so remote it’s absurd.”

  “Oh, yeah? How can you be so sure?”

  Van was almost snarling as he said this. What an odd piece of work, thought Matt. So maladroit. For someone who so clearly was intelligent, the man exploded in bursts of irrationality.

  Now Van was lecturing and he was enjoying it. There were, he said, an estimated fourteen million species on the earth of which only one point seven million—less than fifteen percent—had been identified and classified. New species turned up all the time. Over the last hundred years, an average of five hundred were discovered every decade up until the 1920s; now it was about one hundred a decade.

  “And I’m not talking about two-bit mammals,” he said. “I’m talking about big game. The snub-nosed langur, the African pygmy chimpanzee. Ever heard of Meganuntiacus vuquangensis? Of course not. It’s a rather large deer. Pseudoryx nghetinhensis? An ox-like thing. They were both discovered in Laos—in 1994. A French expedition in Tibet came across a four-foot-high ancient breed of horse in 1995. It looked like it leaped right out of a cave painting.

  “New species turn up all the time. The meat is found in a local market; a new hide with strange stripes is spotted on some native’s chest. Last century nobody believed in the mountain gorilla even though there were a lot of tales about it, because no one had seen it. Only about three thousand Africans had.”

  He recalled the giant panda in western Szechwan, which was hunted seventy years before one was captured. “It always happens the same way. Myth and rumor come first. People don’t be­lieve it until they see it with their own eyes. Then suddenly there it is, and afterward nobody even remembers we disbelieved. It seems ridiculous to have discounted it. It’s all hubris. We think of ourselves as the chosen ones, the supreme beings on the whole planet. We think we own the place, but we don’t know the first thing about it.

  “Take the earth’s surface, subtract the oceans, then the deserts, mountains, and arctic regions. You know what you’re left with? About twenty percent. We inhabit one fifth of the globe and we think we’re everywhere, that there’s no room left for anyone else. We can’t even imagine competitors. But it’s just as preposterous to think we’re the only hominid on earth as it is to think that earth is the only planet in the universe with life on it.”

  Now Matt felt like an undergraduate and he didn’t like it, either. “Wait a minute,” he protested. “We may not live everywhere, but we sure as hell travel everywhere. If we have competitors, why don’t we ever encounter them?”

  “For the same reason that most Americans don’t encounter Indians.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s a natural law. The victors expel the vanquished and make them invisible. They push them into the least desirable areas: the desert where nothing can grow, the scrublands, the arctic. The same reason the Eskimos—you probably call them Inuit—keep moving farther and farther north.”

  “But we do see the native Americans and the Inuit.”

  “Yes, but now imagine if your vanquished group is not just an­other tribe or race but actually a whole different subspecies. Practically wiped out. Think of this poor, pathetic dispossessed minority, down to a handful. And what if they were scared and, God knows, had a reason to be scared, wouldn’t they make damn sure to stay out of sight? Wouldn’t they turn and run at the first sign of the dominant species, the dreaded enemy?

  “Take it a step further. What if this particular minority had some special adaptive feature? For instance, like the Neanderthal, able to survive in climates where we would freeze to death in minutes. Wouldn’t that further reduce the likelihood of contact—at least, contact on any significant scale?”

  Matt listened in silence.

  “Look,” continued Van. “I don’t know who’s right, you or Arnot. Maybe there was a genocidal war or maybe we bred them out of existence. Either way, it’s easy to imagine some of them liv­ing on. Like those Japanese soldiers surviving in the jungle. If there was a war and some kind of apocalyptic victory, what’s to prevent a small band from retreating? Even if it’s a question of living in caves and sitting around a fire recounting the dark days of their defeat over and over, generation after generation.

  “Or how about a group that resists assimilation, that simply moves away. It preserves the purity of the subspecies by turning its back on the mainstream of evolution. Hermits. A relic band living high up in the mountains where almost no one goes. From time to time they spot one of us coming around a bend. The word goes out—an interloper!—and they retreat higher, their world shrinking even more. But at least they’re undiscovered, still safe. You know, even today we’re uncovering new tribes in the Amazon—and people go there. People don’t go into the high Pamirs.”

  Matt saw Susan stirring five rows ahead. “Okay,” he said. “Say there is this relic band, this … parallel species. Why do they always spot us? Why don’t we ever spot them? I mean, one Neanderthal wandering down a path … somewhere. … Even the law of averages—”

  “Oh, c’mon, pro-fessor!” Van drew the title out sarcastically, like an insult. “What do you think got us here? What do you think is in all these folders?” He picked up a handful and opened one.

  “People have spotted them. They’ve just misidentified them.”

  Matt glanced down and saw printed pages, italicized descriptions, dates, maps. He flipped through one and came to a compi­lation of news stories, dozens of pages of them. He picked one at random from The Hong Kong Record, 1948:

  CHINOZCHIA, Dec. 12—Dr. Peter Armstrong and his crew of three as­sistants returned from an inland excursion with news of a startling discovery, a six-foot-tall wild man completely covered with long red hair. Dr. Armstrong said he encountered the beast on a path near a stream …

  He flipped the pages. There were scores of others, in English, French, German, Chinese.

  “These reports aren’t new, professor. They go way back in history. Medieval manuscripts are riddled with references to strange wild men living outside civilization. How are you on Roman authors? Lu­cretius, De Rerum Natura: He described them perfectly, a primitive race, built up ‘on larger and more solid bones within.’ Check out Pliny and you’ll find the Blemmyes, who lived in the Libyan desert. He carried a club and his head was actually on the top of his chest, which is pretty much the way a Neanderthal would look if you stum­bled on one dead ahead of you while out for an evening walk.

  “If you want a historical record, it’s all there,” said Van. “Sight­ings galore. Hundreds of them, all over the place, by all kinds of people. You just have to be aware of them, all these little two-inch stories in little newspapers every few years. You have to spot the relationships. The dots are there; you just have to connect them.”

  He selected a folder and spun its pages through the air so closely that Matt felt the breeze. “I don’t care what you call it. Bigfoot. Sasquatch in America. Yeti in Tibet. Alma in the Tarbagati. Chuchu­naa in the Verkhoyansk—”

  “Wait a minute,” Matt cut in. “You mean to tell me these are all Neanderthals? Yesterday it was hard enough to believe they’re in Outer Mongolia. Now you expect me to believe they’re in Wash­ington State?”

  “Of course not.” Van shifted his tone, as if he were reasoning with a recalcitrant child. “Look. I’m not saying these are all Neanderthals, far from it. I am saying there’s a notable similarity be­tween all these sightings and descriptions of large hairy primates living above the snow line. It goes beyond the laws of probability or coincidence. Almost every country has stories that are told around campfires late at night about strange creatures, and for some odd reason these creatures are almost always the same. What does that tell you?”

  “Maybe they’re just legends.”

  “Maybe—in fact undou
btedly. That’s my point. C’mon, remember your Taylor? Your Rosenthal? The Significance of Folk­lore. The Realm of the Unreal and the Collective Psyche. We both know that legends have meaning. They don’t simply leap into existence spontaneously. They are a means of communication across generations and for coming to terms with something. And these are universal legends, legends that appear all over the world—with local variations, of course. So they are likely to in­corporate an objective reality that actually happened. Origin myths. The flood. Why does the flood appear in dozens of cul­tures? Because it is historical fact. It just occurred before history was written.

  “The sightings of these creatures are everywhere. That means that the myth is everywhere, and that should tell you it’s based on a reality.”

  “All right,” Matt said. “Let me grant you that for a minute. Maybe the reality happened, but maybe it was a long time ago— thousands of years, tens of thousands—kept alive in our collective unconscious.”

  “Ah, that’s where we move from legend to evidence. Scientific evidence.”

  “Okay, give me the evidence.”

  Van smiled an oily smile. “On the simplest level, there are foot­prints. Not one, not five, not a dozen. Scores and scores. One hun­dred and seventy-one authenticated, to be exact. Many more questionable.” He opened a folder and flipped the pages sideways so that Matt could see them. There was page after page of photographs, drawings, maps, and diagrams—a book of nothing but footprints. Most were large and flat, with a curiously distended big toe. Many had wooden rulers placed alongside. There were also photographs of the discoverers, holding up giant white casts or pointing to the ground. Most seemed to be strange-looking men and women with pinched features, mismatched clothes, triumphant, fa­natical smiles.

  Matt stopped at one page. It was the genuine article: an imprint from a known Neanderthal cave in Tuscany. He compared it to the others. They were virtually identical. For comparison there was the footprint of a modern human, three quarters the size.

  “There are a lot of other things. Clumps of hair. Many of them are reddish, at least those found in China. A lot of it is found on the trunks of trees about four or five feet high.”

  “Scratching their backs, no doubt,” said Matt. He was being ironic, but Van missed his tone.

  “Then there’s feces—all kinds of feces.”

  “Spare me the photos.”

  “But most compelling are the sightings. There were one hundred sixty in the Caucasus alone between 1923 and 1951. Most have been by illiterate villagers, so they’re not taken seriously. There are not so many recently—in fact, damned few. It’s possible that they are beginning to disappear there.”

  “Why, if there are so many of these things wandering around, hasn’t anyone captured one? Or found a dead one someplace?”

  “Funny you should ask.” Van handed over another folder. Inside were photostats from a book by Myra Shackley, a British aca­demic, describing numerous encounters, including several in which the manlike beast was killed.

  Matt looked at Van. Physically this strange man with his broad square forehead, hair that stuck out burr-like on the sides, and hooded eyes did not make a pleasing impression, but something about him was formidable.

  “I’m not trying to proselytize,” Van continued. “Like I said, I don’t care if you believe it or not. All I’m saying is you should be open to it, because if the major argument against their existence is that there’s no evidence, the argument is incorrect. There’s a great deal of evidence.”

  “If it’s all there, as you say, how come no one but you and a few other nuts have heard of it?”

  Van gripped the armrest. “You really want to know?” he asked after a moment.

  “Of course.”

  “Because it’s disreputable. It’s crackpot. It goes against the grain. Do you have any idea how vicious the scientific establishment—guys like you—can be when something threatening comes along? It’s like any bureaucracy with a vested interest in the status quo, only worse. If a new theory surfaces that contradicts accepted wis­dom, it’s shot down—bang!—as soon as it’s picked up on the radar. God forbid it should penetrate and get through to the masses!

  “If it’s only mildly threatening, it’s subjected to ridicule. Journals weigh in, academics scoff, the popular press writes funny stories. But if it’s something truly revolutionary like this, they play hardball and it gets the full treatment. Careers are ruined, people are run out of town, nothing appears in print. No one wants to look foolish.”

  “Okay,” said Matt. “I’ll grant you there’s resistance to something new. That’s true in any field. But if evidence accumulates and becomes convincing, then the new theory or whatever it is gets a hearing”

  “Let me tell you a story. In 1906 a Russian explorer named Badzare Baradiyan was leading an expedition across the desert of the Alachan. One night when the caravan stopped at dusk they saw a hairy creature standing on a hill of sand. They pursued it. It got away. But they had all seen it, close up, for certain. The obser­vation created a stir back home, but when Baradiyan wrote up his official report of the expedition, the president of the Imperial Rus­sian Geographical Society made him suppress the incident. The president, no less! And he did. Why? I’m sure if he were here today he could give you any number of reasons. But that sighting was by far the most significant event of the expedition.

  “The point of the story is the way the establishment reacted— the way it always reacts. It prefers to blot out something for which it has no ready explanation. It’s an old story, older than Galileo. Science will turn to superstition and torture to defend its right to be wrong.”

  “But ultimately,” said Matt, “the theories that don’t hold up are junked. It all comes back to evidence.”

  “And I say the evidence is there but is disregarded.” Van gestured to the mound of files. “And of course you’ve seen some of the evidence firsthand, even handled it. The skull.”

  Matt took in the last point. He let the fantasy play out a moment. What if there really was another species as yet undiscovered, a relic band living in a region uninhabitable to humans? Suddenly anything seemed possible. He imagined the three of them working together, him, Kellicut and Susan. They would see things no other human had seen, answer questions deemed unanswerable, publish works that would astound the world. It would not just change what we know about the Neanderthal, Matt thought; it would change what we know about ourselves. Van had mentioned Galileo. This would be greater than his view through the telescope.

  Reality intruded. The larger part of him, the scientific part, still could not conceive of their existence, but he had to admit his resistance was beginning to crumble.

  The stewardess came by with an unasked-for free scotch and smiled as she placed it on Matt’s tray. He handed her the empty glass. “Tell me something,” he said. “Why did Kellicut send that package to us?”

  “We can only assume he knew you would know what to do.”

  “Why didn’t he tell us? Why all these games?”

  Van was silent.

  “And why no note?”

  “Can’t help you there.”

  Van was quiet for a spell and then spoke slowly. “I think you got the message he wanted you to get. After all, here you are.” He turned to look out the window again. “And we’re looking for the goddamned thing.”

  “I thought we were looking for Kellicut.”

  “For him too. We’re looking for both.”

  Matt finished his drink. He saw the top of Susan’s head move, and with a grunt he rose and moved up the aisle. She was stretching her arms ahead, looking tousled, sleepy, and momentarily per­plexed. As she saw him, she smiled openly for the first time.

  Her shoes were off. Matt looked at her feet, bound in black stockings. They seemed so dainty, so perfectly formed with smooth curves and sculpted arches, compared to the photographs of the footprints he had just seen.

  5

  Matt and Susan’s suspi
cions grew as they entered Tajikistan. The trip had been rigorous; the jet made a bumpy landing in Dushanbe on its second try. The country was newly independent and embroiled in civil war. Adolescent olive-skinned soldiers with Mongol cheekbones dozed on metal chairs in camouflage uni­forms, their AK-47s pointing listlessly to the ground.

  The customs officials, who wore sparkling new insignias on old uniforms, examined everything in their luggage, more out of curiosity than anything else, and handled Matt’s small tape recorder and Susan’s cassette player with reverence. Then they hauled Van into a back room, where he got into an argument. The shouting could be heard through the closed door.

  “He’s got a gun,” said Susan.

  “What? How do you know?”

  “I recognize the case, all the markings on it. I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I,” answered Matt.

  “I never heard of a scientist who carried a gun.”

  Matt tried to calm her fears. “Then again, I’ve never heard of an expedition like this.”

  “What is he, some kind of big-game hunter? Is he going to blast his way out?”

  “He’s a cowboy. You know the type.”

  “A cowboy with Ray-Bans. But there’s something peculiar about him—I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “I know what you mean,” replied Matt. “He’s definitely unorthodox. I’ve read some of his articles and I listened to him on the plane. He’s a real believer in the paranormal and he doesn’t enter­tain any doubts.”

  “I still wonder why Kellicut didn’t write to us directly if he wanted us to come.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know where to reach us,” replied Matt. “I know he didn’t have my address. We’ve been out of touch for some time.”

  “Maybe. But what was he doing with these guys? You know what a snob he is. You saw the people in that room. None of them were first rate except for Schwartzbaum and he’s been off the scope lately. Most of the others are pretty far out.”

  “I wonder about the whole Institute. Why is it affiliated with some junior college no one’s ever heard of?”