If you had a load of money to burn, and used some of it to take a sophisticated genetic test, the chances are that you would discover that you were around 97% Cro-Magnon man and about 3% Neanderthal.
When Cro-Magnon man rocked up into Europe around 40,000 years ago, no one quite knows how the meeting of the two species went other than a) Cro-Magnon man came out on top, and b) there was a certain amount of ‘under the mistletoe’ stuff, consensual or not, between the two.
This is what is behind your 3%. You are a hybrid, and I suggest you treasure the fact. Here’s why.
Our neanderthals got cut off from other ones by some ice age or other, a quarter a million years ago, just at the point that your ancestors were thinking about how to cook meat. They were short, with big round faces and enormous noses to help them cope with the extreme cold. Obviously, we are not talking Claudia Schiffer beautiful, but they were handy with tools, respectful of their dead and knew a thing or two about decoration.
When I finally get round to tertiary education, now that my entire family has done it, I will take a degree in Evolutionary Science, a Masters in bird flight and then do my doctorate in how much happier the earth would have been if Neanderthal man had triumphed. (This replaces the one I was going to do to answer the question: ‘how many million of the UK’s 27 million song birds that are killed each year, are taken out by cats belonging to RSPB members?’; to my astonishment, it has been done already, and apparently a well known conservation charity never published the results.)
The point is this. Neanderthal man didn’t eat enough fish and other protein to grow their brains into a size that could eventually come up with the concept of arable farming and the domestication of certain animals. So, whilst the descendants of Cro-Magnon man went on to become so clever that they killed off 95% of the megafauna with which they shared the planet- (the average mammal weight went from about 90 kgs to 7 kgs under our stewardship), Neanderthals would have just gone on hunting the odd mammoth, foraging the odd berry and looking at the odd sunset.
I could go on, possibly pausing to point out that our human population (based entirely on my guesswork) might have been around half a billion by now, that the world would still be quite cool and that we wouldn’t spend our time doing things like chucking away plastic water bottles and injecting pulped sand eels into farmed salmon pens in Scottish inlets.
Clearly, there would be a slight price to all this. However defined his sensitivities, I am not sure that he would have had the candle power to come up with a Mozart, a JMW Turner or even plain digestive biscuits, nor that he would have been able to execute the kind of exquisite square drive that Joe Root delivers. Well, obviously not last night, but normally.
But the one thing that Neanderthal man is famous for, the one characteristic that is still there when everything else has been riddled away by the passing millennia and the remorseless progress of science, was the art of not having office parties. Ever. Office parties, to misquote EM Forster, were another country.
So I suspect that they would have woken up this morning, as did that 3% of me that is them, and blinked their eyes in wonder at the now famous office party held in Downing Street in the semi lockdown of last December.
‘Twats,’ they would have mumbled, as they headed back out into the hedgerows of winter berries, ‘Utter twats.’
‘Let’s see if we can’t find a giant sloth.’
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