David Beresford
Another Country
I’ve made an application to Grenoble, France, for the brain operation to deal with my Parkinson’s. Whether I will be accepted, despite being a known admirer of that scourge of Napoleonic France, Lord “‘Oratio” Hornblower, is another matter. I must also confess to a certain anxiety as to whether my schoolboy French will stand the test, the operation being conducted without anaesthesia and the patient being required to “talk in” the surgeons.
I take comfort in my decision from a recent wire-agency report I stumbled across in which a group of German archaeologists announced they had found a stone-age skull bearing a carefully made hole in the head, which indicated the owner had been subjected to brain surgery.
The patient had seemingly lived on for a further two years, so it was presumably considered a success by the standards of the time. Naturally I was delighted to learn of this early and happy precedent, my only regret being that the operation was conducted 5 000 years ago, which rules out the possibility that the surgeon involved was a Neanderthal a people who had seemingly vanished by then.
I have become a bit of a fan of the Neanderthals, since realising that like Richard III with regard to the boys in the tower they have had a bad press. In fact, the popular reputation of the Neanderthals could be described as one of the public relations disasters of all time.
It was a reputation that began to be fabricated in 1856 when bones were discovered buried in a cave in the Neander Valley, near Dusseldorf. They were at first mistaken for the remains of a deformed Cossack. By the time they had been identified, as a different kind of human being from those with whom we are familiar nowadays, the collective burial site (as more recent excavations have discovered it to be) had been flattened by quarry workers.
Early anatomists lumped Neanderthal man with the image that has endured ever since: a brutish, if muscular character, with a low brow testifying to his stupidity, who walked with a hunch, knuckles scraping the ground, and fed off raw mammoth steaks.
It took some time before it was realised that the original bones, while not those of a deformed Cossack, were those of a deformed Neanderthal who had suffered particularly badly from arthritis. Subsequent discoveries have shown that Neanderthals were, by and large, tall and upright characters with a larger brain than Homo sapiens. They seem to have cared for less fortunate members of their community, to have buried their dead with religious ceremony, to have been able to reason in the abstract and to have built primitive shelters. They may even have construct- ed and played on what seems to be a flute made of bone, which is believed to be the world’s oldest known musical instrument.
Indeed the only ugly questions attendant on the lives of the Neanderthals are those surrounding the mystery as to what made them vanish at a time when the so-called second wave of Homo erectus was springing out of Africa, in the form of Homo sapiens. Or, to put it simply: “What did we do with them?”
Gazing back through lenses tinged with 20th-century genocide and notions of diplomacy grounded in the “balance of terror”, the issue seemed to be resolving itself into nervous speculation that, with the invention of the stone club, Homo sapiens made a technological leap comparable to the Allies at Los Alamos and that such as Stonehenge were early prototypes of extermination camps.
Fortunately, just as the reputation of Homo sapiens seemed about to be damned with responsibility for yet another Holocaust, the good news has arrived: we made love with them, not war.
For this reassurance we are eternally indebted to the Radcliffe Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford, which has announced that it has discovered a Neanderthal gene in modern man. The Radcliffe researchers claim the “ginger gene” is between 50 000 and 100 000 years old. As Homo sapiens only emerged out of Africa about 40 000 years ago, while Neanderthals lurked about in Europe about 200 000 years before that, the assumption is that the two interbred. Which comes as a great relief.
Now we know that our Neanderthal past is safely preserved, subsumed in the great melting pot of our genetic inheritance, emerging now and then in such company as Elizabeth I, Botticelli’s Venus, Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo, the little girl next door who was the love of Peanut’s life and Shaun, the son of Peter Pollock.
So I feel comforted as (hopefully) I approach the ordeal in Grenoble that, if my rudimentary French does fail me and exasperated surgeons lose their way, I will be understood across national boundaries if I inquire plaintively: “Is there by any chance a redhead, a ginger kop, a carrot-top in the house today?”