OMG, this guy is so Thal! Hello Mr. Mousterian! Check out that widespace! That longface! That nose! That silly, silly grin. Hi Grandpa.
Don’t be fooled. Tex Arcane is the daddy of the Neanderthal movement, but this here is Granddad. Modern science quails to quantify the two competing intellects, but some speculate that were they to meet, the resulting psionic wave would trigger an helio-magnetic extinction event that only the Old Man of the Earth could survive. Or possibly a rambling 24-hour full-duplex conversation that no modern Homo Sapiens is qualified to follow. Depends on whether it’s mating season.
That both men are located on the same continent is cause for concern. Fortunately, these animals are highly territorial, and they rarely leave their home range. Prone to keeping odd hours and long periods of hibernation, with any luck they’ll never even go outdoors at the same time. So far, the Australian government’s program of keeping them occupied with obscure technical projects and blogging seems to be a success.
Naturally, Granddad is a Librarian. What else would the father of wisdom do, but Rectify the Names and Maintain the Index? Neoliberal economists must die!
We deny any and all knowledge of a secret program to transfer Neanderthal consciousnesses into sentient cybertank chassis. Only someone obsessively crazed with surviving an imminent Chinese invasion and nuclear holocaust would occupy himself building an underground “shelter” atop the world’s richest rutile titanium deposit.
Precognition is the hallmark of the Neanderthal. Here’s what Grandpa has to say:
From a combination of old and new evidence, it appears that at last we have a satisfactory answer to the age-old question of ‘What Happened to the Neanderthals?’. If the current reasoning is correct, their descendants are still with us, and we call them the Basques. …
When the article above was first made available on the Web in 2002, nine years, it contained some perhaps controversial suggestions. …
Nine years on, these suggestions are no longer controversial, and are becoming widely accepted.
That’s 13 years now Grandpa, but who’s counting? Did he publish before Tex? Fans weigh in!
More importantly, Grandpa has something to say concerning the present.
We know Neanderthals were herders, rodeo clowns. Clowning for what? Compound fracture street cred? No, silly. Cheese!
Yes, cheese. Thousands and thousands of calories of it, all winter long. And yogurt! And horrifically, irresponsibly, unhygienically unpasteurized Mastadon milk! (Ever tried combing the dingleberries out of a Mastadon coat? It’s almost as bad as the smell of cheese curdling in an auroch’s stomach. Antibiotics, stat!)
Yum. And ew. Or, oh?
From the late 19th century on, a giant push began to illegalize raw milk – to make pasteurization mandatory. That push was never a comprehensive legal success in the US; little ponds, streams and tortured trickles of creamy liberty remain. Nevertheless, pasteurized milk has become the de facto standard. A million soulless cartons line the aisles.
Meanwhile, we have seen an explosion of bizarre auto-immune and hyper-sensitivity related health problems. These seem particularly concentrated in the Neanderthal population, as a survey of the 23andMe Thal % DNA thread shows.
This despite their supposedly superior immune system. Perhaps superior, in the absence of expected targets, becomes superactive? Dare we say it, auto-immune??
I will spare you the gory details of Mother Nature’s bacterial inoculation mechanisms. Grandpa has covered it well enough. His paper is what you would expect from a genius of tectonic proportions with a penchant for hardcoded HTML.
I close with a question and an imperative.
Could this be it?
Eat shit and live, Neanderthal.
Now scat!