Emily Dickenson and The Neanderthals

Emily Dickenson said, "To live is so startling it hardly leaves time for anything else" and that got me to thinking about Neanderthals. Emotionally I am a Neanderthal. I like them, I feel close to them.

They didn’t stray far from the familiar, liked routine, predictability, a permanent home site ---- didn’t desire to expand and had no interest in colonizing Mars. They generally distrusted change, novelty and innovation. Lacking the optimistic warrior’s insensitivity and its positive expectations about outcomes, they had a reluctance to compete. There was restlessness enough within their mind without crossing continents in search of more. They just wanted a comfortable cave to gaze out over the Savannah and muse, to let the mind drift, imagine and make connections between things. They were properly startled, cautious, and fearful—my kind of people.

That made me wonder if those characteristics were somehow connected with some of us; how and why they lasted so long. Recent evidence strongly supports that there was interbreeding at some point between us and that seems to suggest that the traits of introversion, diffidence, and depression in some of us, of feeling overwhelmed by diversity in general could be just be a long genetic echo. But that didn’t seem enough by itself to account for such a gap of difference in our evolving fates. What was it that really distinguished Neanderthals from ourselves, who in a comparatively short time, despite our superior gifts, are on the verge of self destruction. What did they possess that we lack? No sooner had I asked the question than I realized the answers.

First and most important, they were graced with possessing the lack of a language, of not being able to talk to each other. They couldn’t communicate their differences and disagreements as elaborately as we can. They didn’t have to endure the dominance- submission chess games of conversation with all their submerged agendas. With the sharpening of the stone tool of language Homo Sapiens found it increasingly difficult to say something without saying something else—those slippery meta messages that emerge from submerged agendas, those power dynamics of territory, food, love, sex, and status.

It seems obvious that there had to have been less tension in their silence and more peace in their nervous systems than we have. Finally but not of small significance, they possessed the absence of therapy-they didn’t have to get in touch with feelings, not even ordinary feelings, let alone ‘authentic’ or ‘real ones.’ Also it should not go unnoticed that they didn’t have mirrors which lets them off of another rather large hook. So if you think about it, I mean-being generally reclusive, not wanting to leave your residence and having all that time to just sit around and muse about it all I think its pretty convincing evidence that Emily Dickenson was a Neanderthal.