Finally, after many years of avoiding it, I've been reading Clan of the Cave Bear:


                                                          



Yes, I know that you all read it twenty-five years ago, but I didn't. I saw a few minutes of the movie version - just enough to see Darryl Hannah being used by one of the Neanderthals to "relieve his needs" - and decided that maybe the story just wasn't my cup of datura.

It's a very good, and very interesting, piece of science fiction - and, yes, I said science fiction, in that the story itself involves scientific speculation (even though the "science" in this case is anthropology).  Part of the "speculative" aspect of this book is how it plays into the truth that Neanderthal skulls were actually larger than our own, but that the greater volume wasn't in the frontal lobes; it was back in the back, where memories were stored. This allowed the author to play with the idea that Cro-Magnons specialize in learning, whereas Neanderthals were better at remembering - even that they had racial memory, so that anything that an ancestor had learned would be in the memory for all generations.

But the best part about the book, for my tastes, is that it explains Pucketts.

That's right. Pucketts are the result of a cross between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals, just like Ayla's baby, Durc.

It makes a lot of sense, and explains a lot of things. We Pucketts have heavy super-orbital ridges (read: big honkin' eyebrow bones) - our foreheads slope back from our brows pretty severely, and we have short, bowed bodies that are massively strong but ungainly (here's my older brother's page; it may be just me who's a Neanderpuckett, but I don't think so).

We sort of look like prehistoric Van Morrisons and - come to think of it - we sound like him, as well; we tend to speak in grunts.

We never feel really at ease around you Cro-Magnons, since you are all taller and fairer than we are, and you move so gracefully and speak so beautifully (think of Gimli son of Gloin at a Wood-Elves' senior prom). And, while scientific testing shows that we are "intelligent", we don't succeed in the way you Cro-Magnons do; according to  the results some of us get from your (Homo-Sapiens-centric) intelligence tests, we ought to be Cal-Tech or MIT graduates doing nuclear genetics research and playing  experimental jazz in our spare time; unfortunately, most of us end up just barely scraping by at this or that,  and feeling sort of ashamed of being "underachievers" because our test scores indicate that we are supposed to be "smart".

But it ain't Cro-Magnon smarts; mostly, it's MEMORY. I can recite page after page of movie dialog, but I can't figure out how to install my ceiling fans. I can sing you the lyrics of any song published since 1965 (no, hippity-hop doesn't count) but I can't for the life of me do a Rubic's Cube. I can quote long passages from novels or poems that I've read, but I'm so stupid that I left Park City, Utah for Phoenix, Arizona. In June.

But many of those intelligence tests confuse memory with intelligence - so I wind up in classes or jobs that I have no business in, because the folks giving the tests thought that if I could REMEMBER stuff, I must be able to LEARN stuff.

Sure, I'm speaking half in jest - but only half. SOMETHING had to have happened to all of those Neanderthals. I think that North Alabama was as good a place for them  to hide as anywhere else - in fact, they wouldn't even be noticed during football season.