Noble Savages

Archaeological research has demonstrated that the accomplishments of Homo neanderthalensis ranked a good deal closer to those of our own species than had previously been believed. The Neanderthals were capable of symbolic thought and a degree of social organisation; which in a world shaped and dominated by Homo sapiens ipsedixit does remarkably little to mitigate the preponderance of journalistic moral saccharine. In fact, the discovery of fossil evidence that a severely disabled Neanderthal child could survive to the age of six demonstrates nothing whatever about the compassion or the altruism of the society to which the child belonged, because the motives of that society's members are not detectably imprinted on the fossil record. Perhaps the child was the offspring of a dominant individual who insisted purely as a matter of prestige that it be kept alive. Perhaps its handicaps gave it a totemic value, like the deliberately blinded and crippled "kings" among the Yahoos in Borges' "Brodie's Report." Perhaps, since every tribe needs a doormat, the child was a figure of harmless family fun and morale-boosting persecution, whose care made a useful punishment duty for those who fell out of favour. We do not know what the child's existence meant to those who cared for it; and given the Neanderthals' aforementioned kinship with evolution's conquering heroes, there seems little reason to assert that their motives were any purer than our own.