Tooth

One day a tooth was found where it oughtn’t have been. It was 
old. It was older than any other tooth that has ever been found, 
it was so old there were not even tooth faeries yet, or else

there were only tooth faeries. Tooth faeries and Neanderthals.
This person tooth, this Homo sapiens tooth, arrived eight thousand 
years earlier than the person to whom it belonged. Or else

that person was eight thousand years earlier than was expected.
For Neanderthals, though smarter than we think, were not as smart 
as Homo sapiens. Probably they were more emotional, less rational,

more superstitious. For example, they believed in faeries, which 
they called gods. On the other hand, they developed a stone-tool 
industry, made fire, built cave hearths (although apparently they

had to compete with bears), played around with adhesive birch-
bark tar, were crafty with clothes, blankets, ponchos, for they 
could weave, go faring through the Mediterranean, use medicinal

plants. Which was a good thing, for they often injured themselves 
severely. They lived in a high-stress environment. With lots of 
Homo sapiens (and bears). My child still asks me to perform

exorcisms and we lead the bears out of her closet at night. Sometimes 
we pray for them and stroke our thigh bones. We also liked
to adorn ourselves. Why not? Homo sapiens couldn’t have been

easy to live with. Obviously, the Neanderthals stored food
and roasted, boiled, and smoked, and do to this day—I grew up, for 
example, with a smokehouse, but we are not very smart, and once

we forgot to bank it well and the fire burned a hole through
the pine floor and the meat stank all winter a little. I mean Homo 
sapiens are not as violent as bears, probably passive-aggressive,

perhaps rational, as their name suggests, but omyf-ingdeartoothfaerygod, 
so priggish, and the earliest confirmed arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe 
showed Neanderthals somehow shared the land for thousands of years.

So, it is possible. Everyone likes to call them “big-boned,” or “healthy.”
Look, you don’t have to tell me about thunder thighs. But some men like 
thighs like that, apparently. Even though the Homo sapiens ate all the yogurt

and cheese in the house, took the best meat. The Neanderthals could talk, 
of course they could, but they just couldn’t express their needs in a
way that Homo sapiens could accept. They didn’t know the Socratic

method. They preferred to make music. On bear bones—the thigh bones, 
to be specific—they collected unusual objects, which is what Frank calls 
mine, and asks why don’t we throw them out. So why did the Neanderthals

die out, if we were capable of copying the technologies of the new arrivals?
Some scientist called Klein is asking. Klein has obviously never lived 
with a bunch of Homo sapiens who overran his house. If you ask me,

he has probably never lived at all. I think Neanderthals probably slipped 
into a cave painting because we know magic, to wait the Homo sapiens out.

Read more from Issue 18.1.