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Chapter Six. Disclosing
LATER IN THE DAY Dr. Mclntyrc arrived at the doll-house for his second visit with Timmie. Miss Fel-lowes 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."
Mclntyre smiled his small, precise, not very radiant smile. "I'm pleased to have been of some help, Miss Pel-lowes."
"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 Pel-lowes was determined not to allow Mclntyre 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 diflferences 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."
Mclntyre'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," Mclntyre 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. Mclntyre? Pro-sapiens prejudice?"
Mclntyre'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, Mclntyre 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 die hundreds of centuries drat 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 Paleolidiic, 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." Mclntyre 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 Mclntyre 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," Mclntyre 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 diey 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," Mclntyre said. He pointed toward Tim-mie. "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?"
Mclntyre sighed heavily. "The question of Neanderthai extinction. Miss Fellowes, is such a vexed one, so fraught with controversy-"
"Well, what's your view? Were they simply exterminated, because they were as slow-witted as you seem to think? Did their special genetic characteristics disappear through intermarriage with the other line? Or was it some combination of-"
"May I remind you, Miss Fellowes, diat I have work to do here today?" Mclntyre said. Exasperation was begi