The Ugly Little Boy

by Isaac Asimov

  There seemed to be several different theories to explain why the Neanderthals had suddenly become extinct. But one thing all the experts agreed on was that they had vanished from the Earth late in the period of the ice ages.

  The Neanderthals, then, hadn’t been some brutish ape-like ancestor of modern man. They weren’t ancestral at all. They were simply humans of another form, different in various ways from their contemporaries, who were the kind of human that had survived into modern times. Distant cousins, perhaps. The two races had had a parallel existence in Ice Age times, an uneasy coexistence. But only one of the two forms had lasted beyond the time when the great glaciers had covered Europe.

  “So you are human, Timmie. I never really doubted it—” (though she had, for a bad moment right at the beginning, for which she still felt shame) “—but here it is in black and white. You’re just a little unusual-looking, that’s all. But you’re as human as I am. As human as anybody here.”

  Clicks and murmurs came from Timmie.

  “Yes,” Miss Fellowes said. “You think so, too, don’t you?”

  And yet, the differences, the differences—

  Miss Fellowes’ eyes raced over the pages. What had the Neanderthals really looked like? At first there had been hot debates over that, because so few fossil specimens of Neanderthals had been found, and one of the earliest skeletons to be discovered turned out to be that of a man whose bones had been crippled by osteoarthritis, creating a distorted impression of how a normal man of his people would have appeared. But gradually, as more skeletal evidence was uncovered, a generally accepted picture of the Neanderthal people had emerged.

  They had been shorter than modern humans—the tallest of the men were probably no more than about five-feet-four in height—and very stocky, with wide shoulders and deep barrel-chests. Their foreheads sloped backward, their brow ridges were enormous, they had rounded lower jaws instead of chins. Their noses were big and broad and low-bridged, and their mouths jutted forward like muzzles. Their feet were flat and very wide, with short stubby toes. Their bones were heavy, thick, and large-jointed and their muscles probably were extremely well developed. Their legs were short in proportion to their torsos and possibly were naturally bowed, with permanently flexed knees, so that they might have walked in a sort of shuffle.

  Not pretty, no. Not by modern standards.

  But human. Unquestionably human. Give a Neanderthal man a shave and a haircut and put him into a shirt and a pair of jeans and he could probably walk down a street in any city of the world without attracting anyone’s attention.

  “And listen to this part, Timmie!” Miss Fellowes ran her finger across the page and read out loud to him. “‘He had a big brain. The brains of skeletons are measured by cranial capacities—that is, how much volume, in cubic centimeters, the skull cavity has. Among modern Homo sapiens, the average cranial capacity is something like 1,400 or 1,500 c.c. Some men have brain capacities of 1,100-1,200 c.c. The average brain capacity of Neanderthal man was about 1,600 c.c. for male skulls, and about 1,350 c.c. for female skulls. This is higher than the average figure for Homo sapiens.’” She chortled. “What do you think of that, Timmie? ‘Higher than the average figure for Homo sapiens’!”

  Timmie smiled at her. Almost as if he had understood! But Miss Fellowes knew there was no chance of that.

  “Of course,” she said, “it isn’t really the size of the skull that counts, it’s the quality of the brain inside it. Elephants have bigger skulls than just about anybody, but they can’t do algebra. Nor can I, for that matter, but I can read a book and drive a car, and show me the elephant that can do those things!—Do you think I’m silly, Timmie? Talking to you this way?” The boy’s face was solemn; he offered her a click or two. “But you need someone to talk to in here. And so do I. Come over here for a moment, will you?” Miss Fellowes beckoned to him. He stared blankly but stayed where he was. “Come over here to me, Timmie. I want to show you something.”

  But he didn’t budge. It was a pretty fantasy, imagining that he was beginning to understand her words; but she knew very well that there was no substance to it.

  She went to him instead, sitting down beside him and holding out the book she had been reading. There was a painting on the left-hand side of the page, an artist’s reconstruction of a Neanderthal man’s face, massive and grizzled, with the typical jutting mouth and great flattened nose and fierce tangled beard. His head was thrust forward from his shoulders. His lips were drawn back a little, baring his teeth. A savage countenance, yes. Brutish, one might even say: there was no getting away from that.

  But yet there was the indisputable light of intelligence in his eyes, and a look of something else, something—what? Tragic? A look of anguish, a look of pain?

  He was staring off into the distance as though looking across thousands of years of time. Looking into a world where none of his kind existed any longer, except for one small boy who had no proper business being there.

  “How does he look, Timmie? Do you recognize him at all? Does he seem anything like the way your people actually were?”

  Timmie made a few clicks. He glanced at the book without apparent interest.

  Miss Fellowes tapped the picture a couple of times. Then she took his hand and put it on the page to direct his attention toward the plate.

  He just didn’t understand. The image on the page seemed to mean nothing to him at all.

  He ran his hand over the page in a remote, uninterested way, as though the smooth texture of the paper was the only aspect of the book that had caught his attention. Then the boy turned the lower corner of the page upward and began idly to pull on it, so that the page started to rip from the binding.

  “No!” Miss Fellowes cried, and in a quick reflexive gesture she pulled his hand away and slapped it, all at once—a light slap, but an unmistakable reprimand.

  Timmie glared at her. His eyes were bright with fury. He made a ghastly snarling sound and his hand became a claw; and he reached for the book again.

  She pulled it out of his reach.

  He dropped down on his knees and growled at her. A terrifying growl, a deep eerie rumbling, eyes turned upward, lips drawn back, teeth bared in a frightful grimace of rage.

  “Oh, Timmie, Timmie—” Tears welled up in Miss Fellowes’ eyes, and she felt a vast sense of despair, of defeat—of horror, even—rising within her.

  Groveling on the floor and growling like a little wild beast, she thought, appalled. Snarling at her as if he’d like to jump at her and rip her throat out just as he had clawed at that book, wanting to tear out a page.

  Oh, Timmie—

  But then Miss Fellowes forced herself back to calmness. This was no way to react to the child’s little outburst. What had she expected? He was four years old at most and came out of some primitive tribal culture and he had never seen a book before in his life. Was he supposed to look at it with respect and awe, and thank her politely for having made this valuable source of information available to his eager young mind?

  Even modern four-year-olds from nice educated households, she reminded herself, have been known to tear pages out of books. And also sometimes to growl and snarl and look angry when you slap their hands for doing it. Nobody thinks that they’re little savage beasts, just because they do things like that. Not at that age. And Timmie isn’t a beast either, just a small boy, a small wild boy who finds himself a prisoner in a world he can’t begin to understand.

  Carefully Miss Fellowes put the books McIntyre had given her away in one of her lockers. When she returned to the other room she found Timmie calm again, playing with his toy as though nothing unusual had taken place.

  Her heart flooded with love for the boy. She yearned to beg his forgiveness for having seemed once again to give up on him so quickly. But what good would that do? He couldn’t begin to understand.

  Well, there was another way.

  “I think it’s time for some oatmeal, Timmie. Don’t you?”

  C
HAPTER SIX

  Disclosing

  [26]

  LATER IN THE DAY Dr. McIntyre arrived at the dollhouse for his second visit with Timmie. Miss Fellowes said, as he came in, “Thank you for the books, doctor. I want to assure you that I’ve been doing my homework very thoroughly.”

  McIntyre smiled his small, precise, not very radiant smile. “I’m pleased to have been of some help, Miss Fellowes.”

  “But there’s still more I’d like to know. I mean to keep reading, but since you’re here, I thought I’d ask you—”

  The paleoanthropologist smiled again, even less glowingly. He was all too evidently eager to get down to his session with the Neanderthal child, and not at all enthusiastic about stopping to answer a nurse’s unimportant questions. But after the fiasco of the last visit, Miss Fellowes was determined not to allow McIntyre to drive Timmie into tears with the intensity of his scientific curiosity. The session would proceed slowly, at the pace Miss Fellowes intended to set, or it wouldn’t proceed at all. Her word was going to be law: that was Hoskins’ phrase, but she had adopted it as her own.

  “If I can help you, Miss Fellowes—something you weren’t able to discover in the books—”

  “It’s the one central question that has troubled me since I came to work with Timmie. We all agree that Neanderthals were human. What I’m trying to find out is how human they were. How close they are to us—where the similarities are, and where the differences. I don’t mean the physical differences, particularly—those are obvious enough and I’ve studied the texts you sent over. I mean the cultural differences. The differences in intelligence. The things that really determine humanity.”

  “Well, Miss Fellowes, those are exactly the things I’m here to try to learn. The purpose of the tests I’m going to give Timmie is precisely to determine—”

  “I understand that. Tell me first what’s already known.”

  McIntyre’s lips quirked irritably. He ran his hand through his fine, shining golden hair.

  “What in particular?”

  “I learned today that the two different races, the Neanderthal race and the modern human one—is that correct, calling them races?—lived side by side in Europe and the Near East for perhaps a hundred thousand years during the glacial periods.”

  “‘Races’ isn’t quite the proper word, Miss Fellowes. The various ‘races’ of mankind, as we employ the term nowadays, are much more closely related to each other than we are to the Neanderthals. ‘Subspecies’ might be more accurate when talking about ourselves and the Neanderthals. They belonged to the subspecies Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and we’re classed as Homo sapiens sapiens.”

  “All right. But they did live side by side.”

  “Apparently they did, at least in some areas. In the warmer places, that is—the Neanderthals probably had the colder regions all to themselves, because they were better adapted to deal with the conditions there. Of course, we’re talking about very small populations, widely scattered bands. It’s altogether possible that an individual Neanderthal tribe could have persisted for centuries without ever once encountering Homo sapiens sapiens. On the other hand, they might have been next-door neighbors in some places, especially as the last glacial period started to draw to its close and more of Europe became habitable by our ancestors.”

  “You don’t think there’s any chance that the Neanderthals were our ancestors at all, then.”

  “Oh, no. They’re a separate group, off on an evolutionary branch of their own, or so nearly every scientist believes today. Close enough to us so that they could interbreed with Homo sapiens sapiens—we have some fossil evidence that they did—but mainly they must have kept to themselves, conserved their own gene pool, contributed very little if anything at all to the modern-day human genetic mix.”

  “Backwoodsmen. Country cousins.”

  “That’s not a bad description,” McIntyre said.

  “Thank you.—And were they less intelligent than Homo sapiens sapiens?”

  He looked impatient again. “That’s something I really can’t say, Miss Fellowes, until you let me get down to some serious testing of Timmie’s mental capacity and ability to—”

  “What’s your guess, as of this afternoon?”

  “Less intelligent.”

  “Based on what, Dr. McIntyre? Pro-sapiens prejudice?”

  McIntyre’s delicate complexion flooded with color. “You asked me to offer an opinion before I’ve had a chance to examine the only real evidence that’s ever been available to science. What else can my answer be except an expression of prejudice? By definition that’s what it is.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand that. But it must be based on something concrete. What?”

  Controlling himself, McIntyre said, “The Mousterian cultural level—that’s our technical term for Neanderthal culture, Mousterian—wasn’t very sophisticated and didn’t show much sign of progress over the hundreds of centuries that it lasted. What we find at Neanderthal sites are simple flint tools, scarcely ever changing with time. Whereas the sapiens line made steady improvements in its technology all during the Paleolithic, and has continued to do so until the present day, which is why it is sapiens humans who have brought a Neanderthal child out of the depths of time and not vice versa.” McIntyre paused for breath.—“Also, there’s no Neanderthal art that we know about: no sculptures, no cave paintings, no sign of any decoration that we could consider to be religious in nature. We assume that they must have had a religion of some sort, because we’ve found Neanderthal graves, and a species that buries its dead almost certainly has to have some kind of belief in an afterlife, and therefore in higher spiritual entities. But those few Neanderthal dwelling sites that we’ve examined don’t give us evidence of anything but the simplest, most basic sort of hunting-and-gathering tribal life. And as I mentioned the other day, we haven’t even been altogether certain they were physiologically capable of using language. Or that they had the intellectual capacity to do so even if their larynxes and tongues were able to shape sounds.”

  Miss Fellowes felt herself bogging down in gloom. She looked over at Timmie, glad that he could understand nothing of what McIntyre was telling her.

  “So you think that they were an intellectually inferior race, then? Compared to Homo sapiens sapiens, I mean?”

  “Certainly we have to think so on the basis of what we know as of now,” McIntyre said. “On the other hand, that’s not being entirely fair to them. The Neanderthals may not have needed the sorts of cultural frills and fol-de-rols that the sapiens sapiens subspecies thought were important. Mousterian tools, simple as they were, were perfectly well suited for the tasks they had to perform—killing small game, chopping up meat, scraping hides, felling trees, things like that. And if the Neanderthals didn’t go in for painting and sculpture, well, they may simply have felt that such things were blasphemous. We can’t say that they didn’t. More recent cultures than theirs have had prohibitions dealing with making graven images, you know.”

  “But even so you think the Neanderthals were an inferior race.—An inferior subspecies, I should say.”

  “I do. It’s prejudice, Miss Fellowes, sheer prejudice, and I admit it freely. I can’t help it that I’m a member of Homo sapiens sapiens. I can make a case out for the Neanderthals, but the fact remains that I basically see them as a slow-witted unprogressive form of humanity that was outmaneuvered and eventually obliterated by our own people.—Of course, when we talk about physical superiority, that’s a different matter. In terms of the living conditions that existed in their time, the Neanderthals could well be considered the superior form. The very features that make us think of them as ugly brutes may have been marks of that superiority.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “The nose,” McIntyre said. He pointed toward Timmie. “His nose is a lot larger than a modern child’s.”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “And some might say it’s ugly, because it’s so wide and thick and protrudes so
much.”

  “Some might say so,” Miss Fellowes agreed coolly.

  “But then consider the climate that Paleolithic man had to deal with. Much of Europe was covered by permafrost. A constant cold, dry wind blew across the central plains. Snow might fall in any season of the year. You know what it feels like to breathe really cold air. But one purpose that the human nose serves is the warming and moistening of inhaled air on its way to the lungs. The bigger the nose, the more effective the warming capacity.”

  “Serving as a kind of radiator, you mean?”

  “Exactly. The whole Neanderthal facial structure seems designed to keep cold air from reaching the lungs—and the brain, too; don’t forget that the arteries that feed blood to the brain are located just back of the nasal passages. But the big Neanderthal nose, its forward location, the extremely large maxillary sinuses, the large diameter of the blood vessels serving the face—they may all have been adaptations to the glacial environment, making it far easier for the Neanderthals to deal with the cold than were our own ancestors. The heavy musculature as well, the sturdy body structure—”

  “So the so-called ‘brutish’ look of the Neanderthals may have been nothing more than natural selection at work, a specialized evolutionary response to the harsh conditions with which man had to cope in ice-age Europe.”

  “Quite so.”

  “If they were so well designed to survive,” Miss Fellowes said, “then why did they become extinct? A change in the climate making their specializations no longer advantageous?”