Here Come The Ex-Brutes!

Here Come the Ex-Brutes; the Neanderthal chapter of PrimatePoetics

"Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or woolly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next?" - E.M. Forster

The Neanderthal was not a helpless, incoherent, dumbfounded and abdominal beast eeking out a living at the darkest recesses of the uncanny valley of the dead as their proverbial status long had it. From a zombified and furry man-eater with bad posture the Neanderthaler has now become a wild haired, sligthly hardbrowed but otherwise a sensitive jolly fellow. The curve is similar to the change in perception of the great ape, but more dramatic because the ape remains an ape while the Neanderthal is the other human. Palaeoanthropology places the last common ancestor of human and Neanderthal 400.000 year ago, a fraction of time in relation to the 15 million years we assume to be the age of the PrimatePoetic era. For good understanding: the human and chimpanzee line diverged 5,5 million years ago.

We are in the middle of a Neanderthal boom and the old assessments of Neanderthal language are being rejected. A wealth of new information discredits the old consensus view that the Neanderthal communicated like all social mammals and spoke "albeit simply and probably slowly" but "lacked complex spoken language because they did not need it ... they did not have the social life to require it." In actual fact the Neanderthal appears to have had complex culture which included cooperative hunting, ceremony and art (the evidence of ochre use is substantial but provocative), all arguing against the argument that the Neanderthal did not need language. Brain size, right-hand preference, shape of the vocal tract, the presence of the human version of the FoxP2 gene critical to language development further suggest that the Neanderthal was not merely communicating with pants and hoots but had command of language that could name, coordinate and invent. The presence of at least three simultaneously existing 'races' of Neanderthals in isolated geographical locations indicates at least as many languages.

The proximity in time alone would assure the Neanderthal a momentous place in the PrimatePoetics constellation and several forking paths are now being cut through the undergrowth of prejudice and ignorance and in the distance we can begin to see an outline of (synthetic) Neanderthalese.

* In 2005 archaeologist Steven Mithen arguing for his HMMMMM (Holistic, Manipulative, Multi-Modal, Musical and Mimetic) theory of language promoted the idea that the Neanderthal had strong high-pitched, feminine, sing-song voices with which they sung rather than talked. To poets like Gary Snyder (who himself has a keen interest in the possible preservation of the Neanderthal experience in human myth) this is be a glorious theory as it connects language as much with music as with meaning and and communication

* In 2008 anthropologist Robert McCarthy computer simulation of the Neanderthal vocal tract was broadly covered in the popular scientific press. At present only a one-second sound-clip of the model predicting the sound of a Neanderthal "e" is available, but McCarty has promised to follow this up with the rest of the alphabet. Like with Mithen's theory, there are good reasons to dismiss McCarty's work as an elaborated stack of unverifiable assumptions but to PrimatePoetics this one second of synthetic Neanderthal-speech is an imaginative act worth more than the entire oeuvre of James Joyce.

* In 2009 a German Team headed by Svante Pääbo announced the successful reconstruction of a Neanderthal genome. Soon thereafter Harvard biologist George Church responded by suggesting a way to clone a Neanderthal, estimating the costs at thirty million dollars, a sum that covers the transfer sum for one good soccer player. Even if feasible practically, this would not resurrect a Neanderthal language, it would not even resurrect a Neanderthal as it would still need primate genes and womb, but, but, but, such a creature would be a most welcome PrimatePoetic chimera. A voice from long ago scratched, literally, into present day material.

Here stops the Neanderthal chapter of PrimatePoetics, for now.