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For Jason
Close, in the name of jesting!
Lie thou there,
for here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling.
—Maria, from Twelfth Night
I
THE DELIGHTS OF SOLITUDE
NEANDERTHALS WERE PRONE TO DEPRESSION, he said.
He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking.
Although it was likely, he said, that these noble and mysterious Thals (as he sometimes referred to the Neanderthals) extracted nicotine from the tobacco plant by a cruder method, such as by chewing its leaves, before that critical point of inflection in the history of the world: when the first man touched the first tobacco leaf to the first fire.
Reading this part of Bruno’s email, scanning from “man” to “touch” to “leaf” to “fire,” I pictured a 1950s greaser in a white T-shirt and a black leather jacket as he touches a lit match to the tip of his Camel cigarette, and inhales. The greaser leans against a wall—because that is what greasers do, they lean and loiter—and then he exhales.
Bruno Lacombe told Pascal, in these emails I was secretly reading, that the Neanderthals had very large brains. Or at least their skulls were very large, and we can safely infer that their skulls were likely filled, Bruno said, with brains.
He talked about the impressive size of a Thal’s braincase using modern metaphors, comparing them to motorcycle engines, which were also measured, he noted, for their displacement. Of all the humanlike species who stood up on two feet, who roamed the earth for the last one million years, Bruno said that the Neanderthal’s braincase was way out in front, at a whopping 1,800 cubic centimeters.
I pictured a king of the road, way out in front.
I saw his leather vest, his big gut, legs extended, engineers’ boots resting on roomy and chromed forward-mounted foot pegs. His chopper is fitted with ape hangers that he can barely reach, and which he pretends are not making his arms tired, are not causing terrible shooting pains to his lumbar region.
We know from their skulls, Bruno said, that Neanderthals had enormous faces.
I pictured Joan Crawford, that scale of face: dramatic, brutal, compelling.
And thereafter, in the natural history museum in my mind, the one I was creating as I read Bruno’s emails, its dioramas populated by figures in loincloths, with yellow teeth and matted hair, all these ancient people Bruno described—the men too—they all had Joan Crawford’s face.
They had her fair skin and her flaming red hair. A propensity for red hair, Bruno said, had been identified as a genetic trait of the Thal, as scientific advancements in gene mapping were made. And beyond such work, such proof, Bruno said, we might employ our natural intuition to suppose that like typical redheads, the Neanderthals’ emotions were strong and acute, spanning the heights and depths.
A few more things, Bruno wrote to Pascal, that we now know about Neanderthals: They were good at math. They did not enjoy crowds. They had strong stomachs and were not especially prone to ulcers, but their diet of constant barbecue did its damage as it would to anyone’s gut. They were extra vulnerable to tooth decay and gum disease. And they had overdeveloped jaws, wonderfully capable of chewing gristle and cartilage but inefficient for softer fare, a jaw that was overkill. Bruno described the jaw of the Neanderthal as a feature of pathos for its overdevelopment, the burden of a square jaw. He talked about sunk costs, as if the body were a capital investment, a fixed investment, the parts of the body like machines bolted to a factory floor, equipment that had been purchased and could not be resold. The Neanderthal jaw was a sunk cost.
Still, the Thal’s heavy bones and sturdy, heat-conserving build were to be admired, Bruno said. Especially compared to the breadstick limbs of modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens. (Bruno did not say “breadstick,” but since I was translating, as he was writing these emails in French, I drew from the full breadth of English, a wildly superior language and my native tongue.)
The Thals survived cold very well, he said, if not the eons, or so the story about them goes—a story that we must complicate, he said, if we are to know the truth about the ancient past, if we are to glimpse the truth about this world, now, and how to live in it, how to occupy the present, and where to go tomorrow.
My own tomorrow was thoroughly planned out. I would be meeting Pascal Balmy, leader of Le Moulin, to whom these emails from Bruno Lacombe were written. And I didn’t need the Neanderthals’ help on where to go: Pascal Balmy said to go to the Café de la Route on the main square in the little village of Vantôme at one p.m., and that was where I would be.
BECAUSE BRUNO LACOMBE had been positioned in the briefings I was given as a teacher and mentor to Pascal Balmy and Le Moulin, I was looking for references in his emails to what Pascal and his group had done, and what they were planning.
Six months ago, earth-moving equipment was sabotaged at the site of a massive industrial reservoir being built near the village of Tayssac, not far from Le Moulin. Five huge excavators, costing hundreds of thousands of euros each, were set on fire under cover of night. Pascal and his group were suspected, but so far there was no proof.
Bruno’s emails to Pascal covered a lot of ground but I had encountered nothing incriminating beyond Bruno’s assertion that water belongs in the water table, and not in industrial holding bays. Bruno lamented that the state had decided it would be a good idea to siphon groundwater from subterranean caverns and lakes and rivers, and to capture this water in huge plastic-lined “megabasins,” where it would absorb leached toxins and be evaporated by the sun. This was a tragic idea, he said, with a destructive power that perhaps only someone who had spent considerable time underground might understand. Water, Bruno said, was already captured, in nature’s own ingenious filtration and storage facilities inside the earth.
I was aware that Bruno Lacombe was against civilization, an “anti-civver,” in activist slang. And that the rural, southwestern department Guyenne—and this remote corner of it to which I’d just arrived—was known for caves that held evidence of early humans. But I had assumed Bruno would be guiding Pascal’s strategies for stopping the state’s industrial projects here. It had not occurred to me that this mentor of Pascal’s would have a fanatical belief in a failed species.
We can all agree, Bruno said, that it was the Homo sapiens who drove humanity headlong into agriculture, money, and industry. But the mystery of what happened to the Neanderthal and his humbler life is unresolved. Humans and Neanderthals might have overlapped for a good ten thousand years, Bruno wrote, but no one yet understood whether and how these two species had interacted. If, for instance, they knew of each other but kept apart. Or if there were so few people in Europe in the era when they overlapped, that amid rugged and impassable stretches of forest and mountain and river and snow, they weren’t aware the other was there. Then again, Bruno said, geneticists have established that they mixed, and had offspring together—a sure indication that they knew the other “was there.” Were these unions love? Or were they rape, the spoils of war? We will never know, Bruno said.
At first I wondered if these emails about the Neanderthal were a prank, as if Bruno had planted them for whoever had gained access to his account, to divert them from his actual correspondence with Pascal and the Moulinards. He covered a lot of ground but included nothing about sabotage, and he kept circling back to the Neanderthal—a species who, let’s face it, could not hack it, or they’d be here still, and they weren’t. They had vanished thousands of years ago, and no one seemed to know why, and no Neanderthal had come forward to explain.
Bruno pushed back against assumptions that Homo sapiens were simply cleverer and more adaptable, stronger, more indefatigable than the Neanderthals. In his treatment of these two species as opponents, I started to see them not in the diorama but in Ultimate Fighting Championship, with Homo sapiens a fighter who either gradually or all at once blazed into the ring on a winning streak.
It’s tempting to picture the Neanderthal as a weak competitor, Bruno said, who was trounced by Homo sapiens (it was like he had access to my mental image of the two species facing off on Fight Night), but this was a cheap solution to the mystery, he said.
If there had been a war between them, it had been a soft war, a competition for resources, slow and relentless. The Neanderthals were skilled hunters, but as Europe warmed, the standards of excellence changed. The ice was gone, and a different body style was needed, lighter and built for endurance, along with new tracking methods, involving large groups in coordination, and different weapons and tools. While the Neanderthal bravely risked his life with a short-range thrusting spear, the Homo sapiens opted for a long-range throwing javelin. To kill from a distance was less valiant. It was killing without engaging in an intimate commitment to mortal danger, an embrace of gore, which Thal’s weapon required. And yet, Bruno said, the concept of an air-propelled spear, a far more clinical approach to targeting game, was surely a winning method. Another advantage would have been Homo sapiens’s lighter frame, which required less food. And he—or rather she—was a more frequent propagator. Not by a lot. It was suspected that female Homo sapiens produced just ever so slightly higher numbers of offspring than female Thal. But after long stretches, thousands of years, these numbers would compound into huge population differences.
And yet many people carry Neanderthal traces, he said. Two percent, four percent, this measure of ancient life was stunning, given that there have been no living communities of full Neanderthals actively contributing to the gene pool for forty thousand years. It’s as if our chromosomes cling to this old share, he said, as if it were a precious keepsake, an heirloom, the remnant of a person deep inside us who knew our world before the fall, before the collapse of humanity into a cruel society of classes and domination.
There are some who might say, “Two percent Thal, four percent Thal, why, that’s not much, a rounding error. It leaves a whopping ninety-eight percent sapiens.”
Indeed, Bruno wrote. Let us have a look at that majority share. Let us not deny that we are occupied by the Homo sapiens, and that we are, like it or not, ourselves sapiens, a figure who, we can all agree, has found himself in crisis. A man whose death drive is in the driver’s seat.
