Image
by sculptor Stephen Brois
Was there a historical Garden of Eden? Were there two people named Adam and
Eve? Did Genesis take place? Was there an actual Exodus? Whether or not mankind is able to
answer these questions with any degree of certainty or faith, we know logically
that there had to be a first human being somewhere in the dim past; there had
to be the First Mother (now called “genetic Eve”) and the First Father
(“genetic Adam) of the race, and they existed in an environment that was
conducive to their survival…or two environments, rather, because they lived at
different times and in different places, but it was their DNA (YDNA in the case
of the male, and mitochondrial DNA in the case of the female) that survived and
spread throughout the living species of Homo Sapiens.
Who were the Cro-Magnon men and women? What happened to their contemporaries,
the brutish-looking, yet intelligent race called Neanderthal man who in fact
had brains that were slightly larger than ours? On Sunday, the fourth of July, 1993, in The New York
Times Book Review there was an
essay that discussed three new books on the subject: Did Cro-Magnon destroy
Neanderthal, or did he die out naturally, cataclysmically, because of some
inherent flaw in his constitution?
Back in the mid-'forties when I was a fifth or
sixth-grader living on North Third Street in Meriden, Connecticut, I was crazy
about prehistory. One day I walked
down to Ciotti's sundries store a couple of blocks away, on West Main Street,
and I purchased a pamphlet about cavemen.
As usual, I walked back home with my nose buried in the book, and soon I
was standing in front of my house showing it to Bob Strauss, my best friend
from across the street, who looked over my shoulder as I turned the pages. Shortly we came across the picture of a
Neanderthal, a reconstruction of what he must have looked like, with his
strong-featured face displaying its heavily-ridged brow (a bit like the
brow-ridge I have myself).
As we stood before my two-storied house reading we
happened to glance at my upstairs neighbor, old Mr. Longo, who was leaning over
the railing. To say we were
startled is to understate, for the picture in my book could have been a
photograph of our neighbor. Bob
and I stood comparing the man with his likeness for several minutes. There was
no doubt about it, the man and the reconstruction were practically identical.
From that moment I felt certain I knew what had
happened to Neanderthal man: he had been absorbed into the general Cro-Magnon
population. I have remained
interested in the subject of mankind's origins all my life since. We know that the race of Mankind spread
across the globe from some point of origin in Africa. Therefore, we can invent stories, like the book of Genesis,
to explain our beginnings, and in those stories, though they be
"lies," there will be a core of fact, and they will be lies in the
service of truth. This is a lie I
invented to explain our origins to myself, from my chapbook of poems having to
do with the legendary prehistory and history of the race, Legends of the
Mists (1993):
Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem Dawn Song
DAWN SONG
"...world of the first rose, and the first
lark's song." —
Margaret Mead
I am the first to know dawn for the dawn —
it breaks across my mind as across the eyes
of the beast I was, of the beasts from whom I come,
and the swift sun slows, and I know it for the sun
in the world of the first rose, and the first
lark's song.
I am the first to see the sharp sun dawn,
breaking across my terror and my surprise;
to know that I am the beast who knows his name:
Beast of the Sun, beast of the spinning sun
of the world of the first rose, and the first
lark's song.
I am the first to see stone for a stone,
to heft it in my hand, to feel its weight
and know what it may do to the brittle bone
of the beasts of the sun, in the morning of the
sun,
in the world of the first rose, and the first
lark's song.
I see, and my sight is hard, hard as the stone
held in my hand, and this stone will be my fate.
The beast is my brother — beast is his only name.
He is the child of dust. I am stone's son,
born of the first rose and the first lark's song.
Unfortunately, for decades paleoanthropologists and
other sorts of scientists have been denying that Cro-Magnon and Neandertal ever
interbred, and I have been growing more and more persuaded that these
nay-sayers were correct. However, today, for me, is a red-letter day because as it turns out Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon did, after all, interbreed, and “in the 7 May 2010 issue of Science, Green et al report a draft sequence of the
Neandertal genome composed of over 3 billion nucleotides from three
individuals, and compare it with the genomes of five modern humans. A companion
paper by Burbano et al. describes a method for sequencing
target regions of Neandertal DNA. A News Focus , podcast segment, and special online presentation featuring video commentary, text,
and a timeline of Neandertal-related discoveries provide additional context for
their findings.” Neanderthal man did not entirely die out, for two to four percent of his genome continues to exist in European and Asian human beings (though not in Africans).
Hence, it turns out that a sixth-grader living in Meriden, Connecticut, in 1946, judging from the picture projected from partial skeletons of a Neanderthal in a popular pamphlet and from the heavy ridge that boy himself had on his brow, turned out to be correct and the academic homo-sapiens living and pontificating in the interim between then and now, turned out to be wrong.
This interbreeding did not, however, take place as I and others assumed, for the two races did not meet in Europe and simply combine. Rather, Neanderthal, who had left Africa first and spread into Europe, apparently was driven back into the Middle East by an ice age, and it was there that the two species interacted, living in the same caves at different times, perhaps, but in the same geographical locations simultaneously. This must have been the case because Neanderthal's genes in Homo Sapiens are found not only throughout Europe, but throughout Asia as well, where the Middle Eastern modern humans spread, but it is not found in African strains of our race, in peoples who never left the African continent in ancient times and thus never lived in the Middle East.
People who are interested in this topic may be interested in the chapter titled "Deep Ancestry" in La Famiglia / The Family, Memoirs, New York: Bordighera Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback, 196 pp., $12.00. ORDER FROM AMAZON
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