Good stop to see the breadth of humanity: The Daily Mail online. * Some hard news, but lots of people stuff revealed in photos and stories you might encounter at a checkout line in a grocery store. Intriguing in a gossipy-libelous-slanderous-hyperbolic kind of way. People at haute couture parties and young women in bikinis on holiday with celebs. Murder victims and movie stars, kings and princes and spouses favored and despised, disputed hedgerows and fizzy drinks that lead to alcoholism, advice on love and finance, sports and fashion…
I wonder whether there was any such complexity in the daily life of a Neandert(h)al (henceforth Neanderthal). ** Surely, as members of a big-brained species that seems to have interbred with members of Homo sapiens sapiens, these relatives of ours must have had some similar daily concerns. And as paleoanthropologists apply more accurate reconstructive techniques, this relative might easily pass among us unnoticed as a recent image of a Neanderthal reveals. *** Well, maybe a sideward glance…”Did you see that guy we just passed?”
Looks, however, can deceive. Maybe our relatives were no-nonsense beings. Maybe they would not be like the chauffeur who allowed a friend to drive and subsequently wreck his boss’s £380,000 Ferrari, leading, of course, to a civil court case and the firing of the 17-year chauffeur. **** Maybe they would not be like the woman who, feeling menopausal, went on a car-keying spree that cost her neighbors thousands of pounds in repair costs. ***** But, if not perpetrating similar acts, would it have been because those hominins died out some 35,000 to 40,000 years before there were cars, nay, before there were wheels? If Neanderthals were not like us, their difference begs the question, “How did we come to be what we now are?”
I suppose there are corollary questions you might ask. Are we so sophisticated that we can spend our short lives engulfed in matters so transitory that they take only a short TikTok video? Or are we only ostensibly sophisticated but in fact are very simple because we spend our lives watching virtual reality, TikTok, and YouTube shorts? Did we reach our current occupation with frivolous stories about celebrities, civil disputes, fashion, and sports because we had a moment of technological invention and relative safety and satiety never experienced by any hominid or hominin relative? And in an age when encyclopedias in libraries and online, reports, and studies give us access to trillions of facts about philosophies, psychologies, sciences, world history, and current affairs can so many of us be not just unwise, but also ignorant?
You want a cross section of our species and its concerns? You want an encapsulation of our species? Read through one issue of the Daily Mail online.
*https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html
**Big problem here and so typical of my species: Do I accept Neanderthal over Neandertal? I suppose I should because the Britannica uses the former and not the latter. Nevertheless, some publications use the latter and not the former, among them Scientific American (https://grammarist.com/spelling/neandertal-neanderthal/). There’s a nice explanation of the controversial spelling at https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/is-it-neander-tal-or-neander-thal . But then, this whole footnote might be just way too much information and an indication of how the smallest things—that is, things that would never occur to a Neanderthal— occupy our human brains probably because the bodies that house them are fed, clothed, sheltered, and free from attacks by roaming predators like Smilodon, the sabre-toothed cat, and Aenocyon dirus, the dire wolf.
***https://www.the-sun.com/tech/9572715/handsome-face-neanderthal-man-digitalized-photo/
****https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12724179/multi-millionares-chauffer-friend-boss-ferrari-crash-court-battle.html
*****https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12722993/Moment-woman-keys-cars-8-000-vandalism-spree-leaving-owners-thousands-pounds-pocket-feeling-menopausal.html
I wonder whether there was any such complexity in the daily life of a Neandert(h)al (henceforth Neanderthal). ** Surely, as members of a big-brained species that seems to have interbred with members of Homo sapiens sapiens, these relatives of ours must have had some similar daily concerns. And as paleoanthropologists apply more accurate reconstructive techniques, this relative might easily pass among us unnoticed as a recent image of a Neanderthal reveals. *** Well, maybe a sideward glance…”Did you see that guy we just passed?”
Looks, however, can deceive. Maybe our relatives were no-nonsense beings. Maybe they would not be like the chauffeur who allowed a friend to drive and subsequently wreck his boss’s £380,000 Ferrari, leading, of course, to a civil court case and the firing of the 17-year chauffeur. **** Maybe they would not be like the woman who, feeling menopausal, went on a car-keying spree that cost her neighbors thousands of pounds in repair costs. ***** But, if not perpetrating similar acts, would it have been because those hominins died out some 35,000 to 40,000 years before there were cars, nay, before there were wheels? If Neanderthals were not like us, their difference begs the question, “How did we come to be what we now are?”
I suppose there are corollary questions you might ask. Are we so sophisticated that we can spend our short lives engulfed in matters so transitory that they take only a short TikTok video? Or are we only ostensibly sophisticated but in fact are very simple because we spend our lives watching virtual reality, TikTok, and YouTube shorts? Did we reach our current occupation with frivolous stories about celebrities, civil disputes, fashion, and sports because we had a moment of technological invention and relative safety and satiety never experienced by any hominid or hominin relative? And in an age when encyclopedias in libraries and online, reports, and studies give us access to trillions of facts about philosophies, psychologies, sciences, world history, and current affairs can so many of us be not just unwise, but also ignorant?
You want a cross section of our species and its concerns? You want an encapsulation of our species? Read through one issue of the Daily Mail online.
*https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html
**Big problem here and so typical of my species: Do I accept Neanderthal over Neandertal? I suppose I should because the Britannica uses the former and not the latter. Nevertheless, some publications use the latter and not the former, among them Scientific American (https://grammarist.com/spelling/neandertal-neanderthal/). There’s a nice explanation of the controversial spelling at https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/is-it-neander-tal-or-neander-thal . But then, this whole footnote might be just way too much information and an indication of how the smallest things—that is, things that would never occur to a Neanderthal— occupy our human brains probably because the bodies that house them are fed, clothed, sheltered, and free from attacks by roaming predators like Smilodon, the sabre-toothed cat, and Aenocyon dirus, the dire wolf.
***https://www.the-sun.com/tech/9572715/handsome-face-neanderthal-man-digitalized-photo/
****https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12724179/multi-millionares-chauffer-friend-boss-ferrari-crash-court-battle.html
*****https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12722993/Moment-woman-keys-cars-8-000-vandalism-spree-leaving-owners-thousands-pounds-pocket-feeling-menopausal.html
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