Neanderthalers Poem by gershon hepner

Did humans walk into the parlours
of neighboring Neanderthalers,
and did miscegenation follow
in a cave or sleepy hollow?
In their culture Aurignacian,
who experienced more elation
when these species met in bars
under prehistoric stars,
and cavorted and canoodled
while on caves the brightest doodled?
Did the human male when coming
think, ” Good God, I’m really slumming! ”
or did Neaderthalers think,
when offering a human drink,
“I shouldn’t mix with such a primate;
eventually he’ll change the climate,
unfriendly to the ecosystem? ”
And did they share their mutual wisdom
with signs, if not with words, like rabbis
or passengers with Asian cabbies?
Who knows? Perhaps their DNA
will tell if humans had their way
with those Neanderthalers who
explained that they were free to do
with them whatever they found pleasing,
like rape and pillage. “I’m just teasing! ”
they’d all begin, and then behave
as humans still do in a rave,
their DNA the coded text
explaining why they’re highly sexed.


Nicholas Wade (“New DNA Test is Yielding Clues to Neanderthals, ” NYT, November 16,2006) :

The Neanderthals, who flourished for some 400,000 years before their extinction about 30,000 years ago, physically resembled modern humans, but the middle of their face jutted forward and their large brain case had a distinctive bulge or bun at the back. They were heavily muscled and presumably well adapted to the cold conditions of the last ice age. They may well have been terrifying to the lighter-boned modern humans who first encountered them, except that their weapons were considerably less advanced. The Neanderthals still used a million-year-old stone tool kit that modern humans abandoned 5,000 years before they encountered the Neanderthals. Archaeologists have shown that as the first modern humans, known as the Aurignacian culture, moved westward across Europe, the Neanderthals receded in parallel. By 30,000 years ago or even earlier, the Aurignacian conquest of Europe was complete and the Neanderthals had disappeared from their last refuges in what are now Spain and Portugal.

11/16/06