Love in the Paleolithic

What do volcanoes, cavemen and STDs have in common? Don't you wish you knew?

Image generated by dall-e-3 on the first try! Full prompt after the article.

I watched a documentary about Neanderthals on Netflix the other day. As these things do, they put some time at the end into wondering why there aren't any neanderthals anymore. The last of them¹ seems to have died out between 30 and 40 thousand years ago. Before that, they had been around for 400 thousand years, which is a long enough time that you'd think they'd have their stuff together and know how to get along in the world. Right?

The reasons the documentary gave for Neanderthals disappearing were the usual ones. Climate change. Competition with humans for food. War with humans. Maybe a big volcano. It would have to be REALLY big, of course. Neanderthals lived throughout Europe and Asia. There's some evidence they even got into Africa. So something that could take them all would be impressively big. More on that later.

One thing I haven't heard mentioned often (if at all?) about the disappearance of the Neanderthals, is disease. What if there was a disease that humans had some resistance to but Neanderthals didn't? Personally, given that most modern humans have a smidge of Neanderthal DNA², I think we should consider that not only was the Neanderthal population brought down by a disease but it was most likely an STD. When I was a kid we might have used the term, "social disease" but I think most people know the more modern acronym, which we now use because our entire society has acronymitis.

The unfortunate thing about my theory that Neanderthals were devastated by an STD is that you can't prove it. All we have are a very few sets of bones, almost all of them incomplete, meaning that there's not a whole skeleton in the bunch. Bits and pieces. Of old bones. There's no way to run a blood test or to sample the organs or even to ask probing questions like, "Have you ever experienced a burning itching rash in your nether regions³?"

There are a few things you can see in the bones. Syphilis can leave lesions on the bones, which sounds painful. We have examples of those lesions in the Americas going back maybe 8,000 years. By that time, Neanderthals (who never made it to the Americas anyway) had been gone for at least 20,000 years. There's also evidence in a small number of Neanderthal skeletons of what might have been tuberculosis (TB). Who knew it went back that far?

Tuberculosis is a fascinating illness. In the 19th century it was known as the White Plague or Consumption. It killed Edgar Allen Poe's mother and his wife (who was also his cousin. They were a close family.). It also killed Doc Holliday, which is a surprise mainly because, living the way he did, you'd expect a bullet to have gotten him first. Lots of people, including many very well known artists and public figures, have died from TB.

It's not very fast. Poe's wife lingered for years before it finally took her. Same with Doc Holliday. It mostly affects the lungs but can also get into the bones and different organs. It's nasty stuff. Trust me on this, you don't want it.

Our civilization has been powerfully affected by diseases for as long as we know. Small Pox. The Black Death (aka the bubonic plague). The Plague of Justinian. The Spanish Flu. Covid. Polio. Why shouldn't it have affected Neanderthals, too? Actually, it would be kind of weird if they hadn't been affected by disease.

According to a combination of genetic and archaeological evidence, the human (non-Neanderthal) population nearly disappeared somewhere around 75,000 years ago. Coincidentally, this wasn't long after the Toba Super volcano⁴ erupted, probably sending up such a cloud of ash that it affected the weather all over the world. For years. Someday I have to do an article about volcanoes, super volcanoes and related stuff. Did you know that the biggest volcano in the solar system isn't even on Earth? Volcanoes are cool.

But, to get back to the topic of this article, which is not at all what I expected it to be by the way, you might have noticed that after that super volcano, not only did the human population drop A LOT, the Neanderthal population only held out about 30,000 or so years after that. Huh. Do you think that means anything⁵?

I think that strengthens my STD theory. No, really! Hear me out! What if both populations were so badly affected by the after effects of that volcano, that they started breeding with each other because they couldn't find enough of their own kind when they wanted to? To be fair, other creatures would have been affected, too, meaning the humans and the Neanderthals would have been competing for food as well as ... friends. I'll say friends, okay? It gives us a nice glowing picture of two species' uniting to try to stay alive in very rough times. That's downright inspiring!

I'm told by the people who know everything about writing, that I should end a story like this by saying what it means to us, or by giving a lesson people can use to make their lives better. But I'm having a hard time coming up with a lesson. Don't live on the same planet as a super volcano⁶? Learn to make your own antibiotics so that those long lonely nights you spend with neanderthals don't come back to bite you?

You might think that, since the Neanderthals are all gone, that wouldn't be an issue anymore. But we live in an age where technology can do amazing things and some people think it would be a great idea to clone extinct creatures, or make genetic hybrids of them and modern types. Mostly you hear about that in connection with bringing back mastodon but I've run across discussions that mention that if we brought back Neanderthals that way, we would be able to learn once and for all whether they could talk and understand language, what they looked like, how smart they were.

It sounds to me like one of those terrible ideas that someone is almost guaranteed to try just as soon as they can find funding. But, terrible idea or not, it would be interesting. ... Really interesting. Does anyone out there happen to know a billionaire who's interested in caveman STDs?

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Here's that prompt: "In the foreground, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals are meeting and dancing under a disco ball. They are dressed in a mix of primitive and modern attire, enjoying themselves. In the background, a volcano is erupting, with smoke and lava flowing down its sides. The scene combines elements of prehistoric and modern times, creating a surreal and lively atmosphere."

1. Neanderthals, not Netflix documentaries.

2. 3% to 4% of most modern human DNA is believed to have originally come from Neanderthals. The percentage is lower for people from Africa. Funny thing is, that it's not all the same 3%-4%. I heard one paleogeneticist (a wonderful name for a specialty if ever there was one) say that if you combined the Neanderthal DNA from all modern humans, you'd have about 80% of the full Neanderthal genome. In other words, there was a LOT of interbreeding!

3. In this context, "nether regions" is a euphemism for even sillier euphemisms.

4. In case you haven't heard, a super volcano is to an ordinary volcano what Superman is to Ordinary Man. Bigger. Stronger. In volcano terms, instead of blowing up a mountain and sending out some lava to the surrounding neighborhood, a super volcano can blow up an entire continent.

5. The subject of human and neanderthal interactions and the disappearance of one, while the other nearly died out too, is a subject I could practically write a book about (after a few years of intense research)! I already have enough unfinished book projects lying around, though, thank you very much.

6. Too late! Yellowstone is set to blow sometime in the next million years. We're doomed!