"Your Anthropology"

In 666 Words:

"YOUR ANTHROPOLOGY"

by
John Aalborg

Take your Neanderthal blood. Of course there is no proof that our upper-paleolithic, Cro-Magnon ancestors mated with their bulkier, evolutionary-deadend contemporaries. Unthinkable! But it wasn't the smarter, lighter Cro-Magnon males who were pimp-walking back to the campfire to brag about who just fucked the grossest, badest Neanderthal chick.[1]Even if they had, they would have abandoned the ugly mother and resulting child just as our distantly-related males do in similar circumstances today. Consider, also, that the Neanderthal female in her prime was five feet tall in her stocking feet at 175 fighting-trim pounds, without an ounce of couch-potato fat.[2]The males were even more formidable and it is surely they who did the raiding and raping. "Those little Cro-Mag chicks are cute!" [3]There probably wasn't even a fight. Picture it, our homo sapiens forefathers either paralysed with fear or herding their foxiest women toward the mouth of the cave. "Chicks up front!"[4]

Feel the top of your head. Some of us have a little front-to-back ridge there. If this bothers you, better check the top of your mate's head, too, especially if s/he wants children.

If we homo saps suddenly died out today, and anthropologists from another race dig through the Earth's fossil record in the distant future, who do you think they would determine to be evolution's homo sapiens winners? Western rocket scientists and mathematicians? I don't think so. When our more intelligent types mate or marry, their reproduction rate is less than .5 percent and their fossil remains would be near zero. So it's back to Africa once again for the mother-lode. Imagine future paleontologists waving their shovels and shouting for joy with each new discovery. "This strata here is three bodies thick!" Yup, you guessed it, the evo winners are AIDS victims. Bangladesh will yield more achievers: flood and cyclone victims preserved in river-delta silt. "Leaky-deakie, this population was flourishing!" Chinese and Indian sites will yield other rich finds: hundreds of bodies of all ages and with family groups buried intact under the rubble of their shitty, collapsed buildings. Winners all. Oh, and those 3rd world discotheque fires, I can see the headlines:

ALTAR OF FIRE DISCOVERED!

Teenage victims sacrificed in ancient rituals! Burned alive with their finest clothing and jewelry! Musical instruments and drinking vessels found! Food offerings to the gods still edible!

Since most readers are human, most of you may need to reconsider the picture you have of yourselves regarding where you fit in the evolutionary scheme of things. It's not your fault but you are probably not worth much, and what you know you learned from others. Consider the high-tech stuff you own. Somebody smarter than you invented it and wrote the manuals. Your status depends on which schmucks stayed in school longer and did their homework and graduated, but 99.99% of all of us are still dumb schmucks. We have the same or smaller sized brain as the cavemen of yore, but how much brain does it take to operate the TV? From earliest proto-human times the evolutionary winners have been the breeders, not the occasional geniuses. Sure, a few of the higher types had a kid once in a while, but not a scrap of them has been found in the fossil record. Fragments of their genes, however rare, are floating around in the present gene pool, and every now and then a combination hits the jackpot and an Einstein is born, or a J S Bach. But you are not Einstein and you are not Bach and you are not a winner. All you are is a dismal, incomplete heap of bones in the future fossil record, common as dirt, waiting for a future paleontologist to find your teeth and mistakenly proclaim you or your mother the winner.

Living one's life with a true perspective of one's place in the universe is the key to a healthy mind. Hope this helps.

FOOTNOTES:
1. The term "chick" referring to, in those days, young emus.
2. The legendary Neanderthal female "Krapina C" comes to mind. The theory that she had "nipples like lug-nuts" would be hard to prove, however, despite that frisky Croatian diorama duplicated by so many natural history museums around the world, from just a few skull fragments. 3. Leg shaving is an inherited Neanderthal trait. Oddly enough, modern, western-hemisphere, snotty Spanish women -- in order to distinguish themselves from the naturally smooth-legged aboriginal/Indian women -- do not shave their legs. Duh.
4. That anti-Vietnam war-era, protester chant goes way way back. [back to text]