Embracing Our Ancestry

I remember learning about Neanderthal Man in Mr. Crosser’s 10^th-grade history class.

Neanderthal Man was a short, heavy-browed, hairy, ape-like creature with a large jaw full of teeth, one of modern man’s earliest ancestors. At least that’s how I remember it. He was a humanoid who always carried a club fashioned from a tree branch. He probably went around saying “Ugh!” and grabbing Lady Neanderthal  by the hair to drag her off to his cave home, where in my 15-year-old mind some pretty weird stuff went on. (The irony here is that Mr. Crosser bore a striking resemblance to the ape-man. But I digress.)

Or did some of that information come from watching cartoons? It’s a little jumbled in my mind …

You know how you come to believe stuff without really knowing why you believe it? Somewhere, sometime, I must have read an article. Probably around the time I was regularly perming my hair, I came to believe that Neanderthals were not, in fact, ancestors to modern Homo sapiens, but rather a distinct species which died out.  Cro Magnon was my real great-great-great grandpa.

Flash forward to March 2018.

Our daughter Angie sent  her DNA to 23 and Me for analysis. The ethnicity results were no surprise—all northern, western European. But then she adds in a text message to all her family, “I apparently have a lot of Neanderthal.” She has 285 Neanderthal variants, which, they tell her, is more than 62% of all their customers have.

This is what it means, according to our 

eldest daughter. And yes, this is my

Facebook profile pic.

Well, I was having none of that. First of all, I clarified that Neanderthals were not actually modern humans’ ancestors. Wrong! Apparently modern science has determined that Neanderthals interbred with Cro-Magnon 40,000 years ago. OK, then, Neanderthal genes are obviously from your dad’s side of the family—witness your grandmother’s heavy brow bone!  Besides, my religious Dutch ancestors would never commit the sin of interbreeding with another species, so it wasn’t possible it came from my side. No, sorry, says Angie. “I have 19 markers with two Neanderthal variants, which means I got one from each parent.” I don’t even know what that means! Our daughter, Kim, ever the educator, texted a photo which explains it all.

I had to conduct my own research, so I consulted that mainstay of modern education, Google. Accordingly, I exhibit these actual, expressed traits of Neanderthal genes:
1) Large jaw with plenty of space for all my wisdom teeth.  Check.
2) Projecting nose. Check
3) Not much chin. Check.
4) Extra-large eyes.  So I’ve been told.
5) Tendency toward visceral fat. Ouch.

But Curt contributes the elongated skull, the brow ridge, and nicotine addiction (sure, he quit when he was 25. But I never took up the filthy habit.) My belated apologies, daughters: I’m afraid you fell into the shallow end of the gene pool.

Regardless of Mr. Crosser’s teachings, or Fred Flintstone’s, that cave(wo)man was a handsome specimen. Until further research proves otherwise, that's my opinion.

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