You don’t come down here. Less you’re looking to score.
You’ve heard since childhood about the Neanderthals, and none of it was very complimentary. Yeah they had bigger brains, but we out-competed them into extinction, yeah? So they must have been knuckle-draggers in the end, unfit for even the most menial modern service jobs.
Maybe you heard about the Hobbits too, aka Homo floriensis. Short little bagginsy dweebs from Indonesia, Polynesia, someplace like that.
After that it starts to get a little more complicated. It seems there was … something else vaguely Sapient living in the Denisova Cave until recently. In fact, they pulled DNA from the finger bone of a thirteen-year-old girl, enough to determine that her mama was Neanderthal and her daddy something else. A ‘Denisovan’, so-called.
Even that’s not the end of the story. We know Neanderthals and ‘humans’ interbred. In China there’s evidence that humans and Denisovans did too, as recently as several thousand years ago. Their progeny has been given the temporary designation of “Red Deer Cave People”.
People.
All we really know for sure is that things have been more complicated than we ever thought, for a long time. Maybe just not complicated in the brainfogging modern way. I’m sure that if interbreeding with a Denisovan is a pleasurable experience, modernity would have a law against it. Even if … hmm, maybe especially if, it were for the purpose of procreation.
But beyond that I offer the conjecture that Humanity, whatever it is, has reached the point of diminishing returns, and like capitalism, it is bound to crash under its own weight any year now. In cultural history terms, we’ve reached our Mannerist phase, and are just going through the motions.
As evidence for my theory I offer the following.
When polled recently, 74 percent of Americans (god’s own people don’t you know), say Yes–they would totally be in favor of imposing a no-fly zone over eastern Ukraine, as Ukraine’s own manly heroic President has been begging for, for days.
Seventy-four percent of Americans are either criminally stupid or suicidally insane.
You see, imposing a no-fly zone means shooting down planes that fly into that zone.
Russian planes, in this case. The planes of another nuclear-armed power.
If Russia imposed a no-fly zone in Baja California, and an American plane flew into it anyway, and the Russians shot it down like they’re supposed to in a zone they’ve declared no-fly … how do you think America would react?
We already know.
74 percent of them at least would be screaming for blood and war. Warm up them nukes, baby, and give Red Vlad a taste of his own medicine. Poor Bajans. Poor Ukrainians. I mean eastern Ukrainians, whatever. Kill for peace. It’s the American way. We’ll be greeted as liberators. It’s our job to make the world safe for democracy, even if we abandoned actual democracy for ourselves a couple decades ago at least.
But … dammit to fuck. I’ve done it again.
This is a story about the Denisovans, who, as far as we’ve been able to tell, never invented toothpaste, political parties, or nuclear weapons, and not one of them ever shopped at a Walmart, so what the fuck did they know anyway.
Breathe.