Neanderthal

by John Darnton

  Now he needed Schwartzbaum there to help him reach a decision or, more precisely, to talk. Eagleton used the man from time to time as a sounding board. Sometimes the decision had nothing directly to do with the subject they discussed. He found it helpful to explore tributaries with a colleague while his formidable intel­lect navigated the shoals of the main river alone. He used Schwartzbaum the way an experimenter uses white noise to blot out encroaching diversions. This was one of those occasions.

  Schwartzbaum walked in with a distracted air, pulled up a chair, and sat down too close for comfort. Eagleton didn’t say anything. He simply rocked his wheelchair back and forth like a runner at the starting line, lit a cigarette, and aimed a projectile of second­hand smoke at the winged tufts of white hair that stuck out over Schwartzbaum’s ears, mad-scientist fashion. It worked. Looking like a man caught in a cloud of mustard gas, Schwartzbaum moved his chair back a foot.

  “Well,” said Eagleton. “Did you complete the report?”

  “Report?”

  “On the session here. The one with Drs. Arnot and Mattison.” Irritation was creeping into Eagleton’s voice and he made no effort to restrain it.

  “Ah, that report. No, not yet. I’ve been preoccupied, I’m afraid, with a paper on the nasal aperture in the Neanderthal cranium. I’ve come to the conclusion that—”

  “You were to have that report on my desk yesterday morning. I have to know what you made of their differing interpretations.”

  “Well, you know what they say: Get two paleontologists in a room and you’ll get three different opinions. This is a group that can’t even agree on the spelling of their subject. Some side with the Germans, who drop the silent h, N-E-A-N-D-E-R-T-A-L, and others—”

  “I had hoped to have a discussion more substantive than a spelling bee.”

  “Ah, sorry. About... ?“

  “About Dr. Arnot’s theory on cannibalism, for one thing.”

  “Hmmm. Cannibalism.” Schwartzbaum tugged at his goatee with the tips of his fingers. The gesture reminded Eagleton of a spider on his back flailing its legs in the air. “That, I’m afraid, is not new. It is the dark underside of Neanderthal research, a shadow that extends back to the work of some of the original fossil hunters.”

  “Explain.”

  Schwartzbaum settled back in his chair, inhaled deeply, and fixed his eye on a spot on the wall. “Unless I’m mistaken, the first reference came in the 1860s in the work of Edouard Dupont, a Belgian geologist. He was rooting around in a cave in ... I believe it was Le Trou de la Naulette ... when he discovered a good-sized piece of lower jaw. It was undeniably human, but also very apelike in the way it sloped back from the teeth to the chin.”

  Suddenly Schwartzbaum became aware that he was stroking his own jaw. Flustered, he yanked his hand down.

  “Don’t forget, On the Origin of Species had only been out a few years. Evolution was struggling to find a foothold as a credible theory, and this bit of mandible was the first solid anatomical evi­dence to back up Darwin. Anyway, a bizarre thing happened. The whispering about cannibalism had already begun, so Dupont took it upon himself to say that his bones were definitely not the left­overs of a feast. But when his findings were translated into En­glish, everything got turned upside down so that people thought he was saying that they were leftovers and that Neanderthals were cannibals. They thought this because they wanted to think it, and the bad rap stuck.”

  Schwartzbaum skipped a few decades to early 1899 and one Dragutin Gorjanovic-Kramberger, a Croat who was the son of a shoemaker and never accepted by the intellectuals in Berlin and Paris. But he got the last laugh; he discovered the site at Krapina, a treasure trove of hundreds of Neanderthal specimens. What struck him was that the skeletons were scattered all over the place and that the large bones were splintered, some even burned. Also, a surprising number belonged to children. All this Gorjanovic took to be irrefutable proof that they were victims of prehistoric banquets.

  Eagleton seemed to be looking intently at Schwartzbaum, but the words spilling off the old man’s tongue came to him through a fog. His mind was beginning to wrestle with the problem he had set for himself. He was already advancing down the main river and his visitor’s little excursion boat was disappearing into the side marshes.

  Schwartzbaum pushed on like a performer drunk on the limelight. “All the theories and dark whisperings reached a climax years later, in 1939, right on the eve of the war.” He told the story of Alberto Blanc, a young Italian fossil hunter honeymooning at Monte Circeo, south of Rome. Some workmen knocked through the roof of a hidden cave and fumbled around in darkness. Presto, one of them picked up a skull for Alberto. The question was, ex­actly where in the cave did he pick it up?

  “The debate over the answer brought everything to a head, if you’ll forgive the pun. It lasts to this day and has wrecked more conferences than I care to think about.

  “You see, Blanc insisted the skull had come from the center of a group of stones arranged in a circle. He called it the ‘crown of stones’ for dramatic effect. That crack in the right temple? Proof of an ancient murder. That large hole at the base of the cranium was, Blanc said, for the extraction of the brain. His hypothesis was that the Neanderthal, having vanquished an enemy, probably by creep­ing up from behind and dealing a death blow, separates the head from the body, eats the brain, then uses the braincase as a holy chalice for his ritual, placing it as delicately upon the ‘crown of stones’ as a priest today balances the communion cup upon the altar. Interesting, yes?”

  Eagleton gave out a noncommittal grumble as Schwartzbaum rat­tled on, oblivious. “Except that today most paleontologists reject the theory. Too many maybes. Maybe the circle isn’t really a circle. Maybe the skull was gnawed by an animal. Maybe Blanc was just being an Italian romantic. It’s okay for supermarket tabloids but it doesn’t pass muster in the Harvard faculty dining room.”

  “And Dr. Arnot?”

  The query brought Schwartzbaum up short. He liked sitting on the fence, and Susan Arnot was a person who tended to knock down fences. “Generally her work has been exemplary, and she’s respected in the field. But of course she hasn’t published anything yet about her latest ... contribution to Blanc’s theory.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  Schwartzbaum became cautious, an expert on the witness stand finally asked to commit himself on a bit of evidence. “I’m not publicly identified with either side. I haven’t taken a firm position yet. But I would say here, in the privacy of this room, that I do not sub­scribe to the notion that they ate each other.”

  “You said earlier that people thought Neanderthals were cannibals because they wanted to think it. What did you mean by that?”

  “You know, today evolution strikes us as so logical and commonsensical; in retrospect it appears obvious. Thomas Huxley said it best: “How stupid of me not to have thought of it.” We for­get how truly revolutionary it was at the time, how it challenged the basic precept of what mankind was all about. In one quick stroke it meant we were no longer God’s creation, set apart from the beasts, endowed with reason and a spark of divinity. We were no longer special; suddenly we were knocked off our pedestal. It turned out we were an animal like any other, a little smarter or even a lot smarter—which explained how we got to the top of the heap—but basically an animal all the same. We prevailed because of our intellect, and that developed largely by chance, thanks to two legs or an opposable thumb or a voice box. Let’s face it, the image of a creature dragging itself out of the primordial swamp isn’t as ennobling to contemplate as the arc between God’s finger and man’s outstretched hand in the Sistine Chapel.

  “So we are no longer lesser gods; we’re simply greater apes. Then, to make things worse, along come these fossils filling in the blank spaces, so that our connection to apehood is even more stark. Okay, so Piltdown Man is a hoax, but even without it there are plenty of other ‘missing links,
’ and the most important one of all is the Neanderthal. Hence we need something to separate us from him to put us back up on our pedestal. We need to transform him into a beast. What better way to do so than to accuse him of violating the most pernicious taboo imaginable, committing the most heinous crime, the symbol of everything that places us above others on this horrible continuum of struggling savages—eating your own kind?”

  By now Schwartzbaum was so enamored of his own eloquence that he had almost forgotten the figure sitting behind the desk in the growing darkness. He was startled when Eagleton interrupted him. “Congratulations. You’ve answered every question except the most important one.”

  “And that is?”

  “Why would they be cannibals?”

  “That’s easy,” replied Schwartzbaum, tugging at his goatee again. “From time immemorial, the reason’s always been the same—to gain the intelligence of your victim.”

  Eagleton dismissed him, curtly.

  Longface’s son was laid out on a slab of packed dirt inside the big hut near the river. His eyes were closed and he looked pale and wasted, but he was still breathing. Susan studied his features. The bun-shaped swelling at the back of his head, the feature of the hom­inids that served as a counterweight to their big elongated faces, tilted his head downward so that in repose his chin almost touched his chest. This posture made him look solemn and peaceful, as if he were already dead, like the stone statue on a sarcophagus in a me­dieval European cathedral. His long eyelashes flickered. He’s not ugly, she thought. He looks noble in a way, though hardly angelic. But he appeared distinguished, like a young prince. He couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen, she thought. She was beginning to lose that almost unconscious shudder of revulsion that used to overtake her when she contemplated their distorted visages.

  She looked at the paint markings on his face, savage slashes intended to inspire fear. They were universal; primitive peoples around the world used such adornment for hunts or battles and sometimes funerals of great warriors. She touched a line of red; a dried flake came off on her finger and she sniffed it. Hematite, or red oxide, which gave the color to red ocher. It was used in prehistoric burials as a blood symbol, and she had seen it recently on the faces of the savages who killed Rudy and tried to trap them in the cave.

  Longface sat nearby, quiet but rocking back and forth slightly as if he were swaying to unseen breezes. He might have been in prayer the way he was collapsed in on himself, walled off from the outside world. Kellicut elbowed Susan aside and once again exam­ined the boy, this time more thoroughly, lifting an arm, thumping the rib cage, checking the pulse. He was overbearing, but Susan knew him well enough to realize it came from nervousness. He was trying to dredge up the slim bits of knowledge he had gleaned from six months in medical school some thirty years ago.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “You’ll see,” he snapped. “That is, if you’ll get out of the way and lend a hand instead.”

  She stifled a reply. Kellicut sent her and Matt scurrying around for all kinds of objects for a purpose not immediately apparent. Matt brought a canteen and the medical kit. Susan provided a tiny container of vodka that she had been husbanding and also handed over her jacket. Like Matt, she fell into the old pattern, obeying her mentor unquestioningly.

  As instructed, Matt and Susan dug a shallow hole, filled it with twigs and branches, and fetched a burning ember from the communal fire to ignite the small pile. It caught quickly, sent up waves of heat that made the trees behind it dance, and released a thin shaft of smoke.

  “Boil the water in the canteen,” Kellicut commanded. “A good ten minutes, but not more. I’ll have to pour it in here,” he added, lifting the vodka bottle, “because I need the canteen for something else.” He poured the vodka over the boy’s forehead and then on his inner elbow, swabbing it with a rag. A thimbleful was left in the bottle; Kellicut raised it and knocked it back. “One more thing,” he said to Susan, setting the bottle aside and turning his back to her as he bent over the boy. “Go get the shaman. We’re going to need him. You know where his hut is. Don’t worry about knock­ing; he’ll know you’re there.”

  Susan did indeed know the place, with its foul smell and ominously closed door. She did not like going there. For a moment she waited outside Dark-Eye’s hut, but there was no sign of life within. Finally she approached the door tentatively and gave it a push. Made of thick branches tied together, it swung inward to reveal blackness and a stench so powerful that she almost gagged. She stood motionless, breathing through her mouth, while her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. Gradually shapes emerged. In one corner was a rudimentary shelf made of a chiseled log. On it were containers made of tortoise shells, filled with a thick liquid of some kind and small round objects, balls of some sort. She took a step closer. The smell shot up so strongly that she could almost feel it through her skin. She looked down. Bits of string were floating in the liquid, attached to the objects. With a flush of revulsion, she suddenly realized they were eyeballs: hundreds of them.

  She felt dizzy. An odd sensation crowded her brain, a clouding, as if it were fogging up on the inside like a bathroom mirror. She took two steps back to leave and fell directly into the arms of Dark-Eye. He carried a long carved stick like a shepherd’s staff whose crook was carved into a wolf’s head, and he held his ground, so that she stumbled backward and almost fell. He made no move to help her but uttered guttural noises that sounded hostile. His white eye blazed like an exploding star—glaucoma, she thought, an advanced case. He must be completely blind in that eye. The other one also showed signs of the disease. Does he see only through the eyes of others? she wondered. But if so, why does he cast his head in my direction?

  Then Dark-Eye took her by the hand and led her outside.

  19

  Eagleton still had not reached a decision and time was pressing. He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and stared across his desk at Schwartzbaum. The man’s a popinjay, he thought, but he is a fount of information. Almost reluctantly, because he treasured the si­lence, he formulated another question. “Tell me. Dr. Arnot’s the­ory about warfare between Homo sapiens and Neanderthal. Do you buy that?”

  Schwartzbaum furrowed his brow and stretched his legs out before him. “Dr. Arnot’s theory, I hasten to say, is not original.

  “Back in the 1920s there was a fellow called Hermann Klaatsch, an anthropologist at the University of Heidelberg. He thought it was impossible for Homo sapiens to be descended from brutish Neanderthal. So he evolved a far-out notion that there had been a primal struggle for survival in which the Neanderthals were all killed and consumed. He called it the Battle of Krapina.”

  “Is it credible?”

  “Well, no one else bought it, and for good reasons. For one thing, Neanderthals were scattered all over Europe. It’s a little hard to imagine them all grouping together and losing their entire population in a single decisive battle.”

  “Armies are defeated in a single battle all the time: Gettysburg. Waterloo. Agincourt. Most wars come down to a pivotal confrontation.”

  “And one side loses. But it’s not completely wiped out. Some of the defeated retreat and go off to a cave to lick their wounds. They’re not totally exterminated.”

  “I take your point,” Eagleton said with a tiny grin. He paused, crushed his cigarette, and asked, “So you side with Dr. Mattison: We merged our genes with theirs?”

  The fence beckoned Schwartzbaum. “There are problems there too. The great dilemma of Neanderthal research is how to explain a single mystery: The fossil that is newer is more Neanderthaloid than the one that is older. It has a more pronounced frontal torus—that’s the brow ridge. It has an elongated skull, squatter limbs, all the characteristics we associate with the classic Neanderthal. So it appears that they were evolving away from Homo sapiens, not toward us, which conflicts with our sense of how things should have happened. How to explain it?”

  “How do you explain it?”
>
  “Well, as you might expect, theories abound. One is that there were different populations of Neanderthal, separated by impassable glaciers during the ice age, and that they evolved in different directions. The critical factor in evolutionary change is isolation, because it obviously stops interbreeding.”

  “How does that apply to the Neanderthal?”

  “The Neanderthal specimens that look more human come from the earlier warmer period and are found everywhere. The classic Neanderthal comes later, during the last glaciation. They’re found in pockets, and their morphology is adapted to a subarctic climate. Their limbs are more robust, their skulls longer, their nasal pas­sages wider, perhaps to warm the air. Interestingly, their brains are also bigger. Why that should be, we don’t know. Otherwise, it’s a straightforward case of adaptation to a hostile environment. It happened through natural selection, or maybe even genetic drift.”

  “Tell me about genetic drift.”

  “A refined concept. Basically it’s statistics applied to genetics. In small isolated populations, random events can have magnified repercussions. When genetic mutations occur, they attain a stage where they’re rapidly perpetuated. The accidents have more effect than if they occurred in a larger population, and the changes can be quite dramatic.

  “Say for example that one small group develops extraordinarily long legs. Those genes become so numerous that they overwhelm all the other so-called normal genes until long-leggedness becomes the norm. The long-legged ones have greater speed, and this in turn brings about all sorts of other changes—say, a change in diet as new types of animals become prey, or a change in habitat be­cause traditional predators can now be outrun. And the changes keep on happening, a kind of self-perpetuating process that results in a quantum leap. But this is not because the new traits are neces­sarily more advantageous in some way; it occurs by accidental drift.”