The well-wishes are appreciated, but they don't seem to have worked. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) was on TCM tonight and all my sympathies were with the portrait. I'm going to read some more Frederic Morton and go to bed.
2010-05-13
Of course I want to know if I have Neanderthal ancestry. The recent research is fantastically cool. And I appreciate that Olivia Judson, whose book I think we may have downstairs, feels the same way. That said—
And the results stoke the imagination, for they provide more evidence for something that has long been suspected: Neanderthals are not just a quirky sideshow in human evolution, but an intimate part of our own story. Many of us have Neanderthals in our family tree, just as some of us have Hottentots, or Aztecs, or Genghis Khan.
I got about four hours of sleep with time off for coughing, so my critical skills are a little blunted at the minute, but I think that last sentence just failed something hard. Quite possibly several somethings at once. Just to start with, Hottentots? Also, quite a lot of people still speak Nahuatl. And being descended from Genghis Khan, for large portions of Asia, is actually pretty normal. (Like Jón Arason and Iceland.) But for the sake of several gods, I thought we'd spent centuries disentangling scientific thinking from the idea that interracial equals interspecies.
All the same, the idea of Neanderthal ancestry brings a vividness to the distant past. Were the men exotic and sexy? What were half-Neanderthal, half-human children like? Were they extra-beautiful, as people with mixed ancestries often are? Did they have an unusual hungering for red meat? Did we learn Neanderthal customs, or languages?
I would love to know the answer to that last question, and not only because I tried to teach myself to use a sling after reading The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980) in seventh grade. As regards half-Neanderthal children, mostly I hope they were, as children should be, loved. But it is difficult to dismiss the idea of an evolutionary sideshow, I think, when your first question is whether our closest genetic relatives were sexy and exotic.
It may be that kind of day. The first thing I saw on my friendlist was![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tithenai on Dan Fanelli. I feel like finding a grave and putting flowers and red ochre on it.
And the results stoke the imagination, for they provide more evidence for something that has long been suspected: Neanderthals are not just a quirky sideshow in human evolution, but an intimate part of our own story. Many of us have Neanderthals in our family tree, just as some of us have Hottentots, or Aztecs, or Genghis Khan.
I got about four hours of sleep with time off for coughing, so my critical skills are a little blunted at the minute, but I think that last sentence just failed something hard. Quite possibly several somethings at once. Just to start with, Hottentots? Also, quite a lot of people still speak Nahuatl. And being descended from Genghis Khan, for large portions of Asia, is actually pretty normal. (Like Jón Arason and Iceland.) But for the sake of several gods, I thought we'd spent centuries disentangling scientific thinking from the idea that interracial equals interspecies.
All the same, the idea of Neanderthal ancestry brings a vividness to the distant past. Were the men exotic and sexy? What were half-Neanderthal, half-human children like? Were they extra-beautiful, as people with mixed ancestries often are? Did they have an unusual hungering for red meat? Did we learn Neanderthal customs, or languages?
I would love to know the answer to that last question, and not only because I tried to teach myself to use a sling after reading The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980) in seventh grade. As regards half-Neanderthal children, mostly I hope they were, as children should be, loved. But it is difficult to dismiss the idea of an evolutionary sideshow, I think, when your first question is whether our closest genetic relatives were sexy and exotic.
It may be that kind of day. The first thing I saw on my friendlist was
tithenai on Dan Fanelli. I feel like finding a grave and putting flowers and red ochre on it.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}