CHAPTER II

Two ideas banged together. One idea – I wanted a kind of Kumbaya-Pete Seeger kind of song that would convey the 1960s and ‘70s that I grew up in. Let’s all find a way to live together in peace. A song that we would have sung in the ‘60s. About finding a better world. Or making a better world out of the one we live in.
The second idea was decades long in the making. “Neander Valley” is a culmination of years of watching people write about Neanderthals and finding, early on, that it seemed like the writers, the scientists, the scholars, were projecting their own prejudices on these ancient beings. Exactly the way we do to each other right now. And how absurd that is. And how most people never seemed to notice it. It drove me nuts. 

So I’ve been tracking Neanderthals, and the way that we learn about them. The way our small minds, right now in real time on planet Earth, project our idiotic notions onto the bones of these long ago creatures. Creatures not only just like us, but actually us.
They are the perfect prism, the honest vessel to convey our thoughts for living a  more humane way in this very moment. That they’re lost in an idyllic past. A past that never was. And knowing that we can make a kinder, more loving world right now, right here.

I definitely was thinking that we’re going to go back to the very beginning. I wanted to go back to the Neanderthals, to talk about what it is to be human. “The Big Bang” and “The Amoeba” and “Neander Valley” all go together. The three of them are companion pieces.
Starting maybe 30 years ago I became conscious of new discoveries about Neanderthals. It was every few months at first, then it started to be faster and faster. They began to discover Neanderthals were more intelligent than they previously thought. Oh, now they realize that the Neanderthals played the flute. Now they found that Neanderthals dive for clams and make jewelry. 
Then came the big argument about whether or not Neanderthals had ever had sex with a version of Homo sapiens or Homo erectus, whatever version of early human was going on. That it was a big battle and from the moment that this argument started I said this is too fabulous. There’s no freaking way that two different kinds of beings, that are anatomically suited toward each other, roaming around in the wild simultaneously, aren’t f******g. I mean people, human beings alive this minute, are having sex with animals. Why wouldn’t creatures that have no biblical teachings or other restrictions have sex with each other?  

But interestingly, scholars managed to put their own narrow ideas on these ancient beings. That they were not as intelligent as Homo sapiens. They were not as artistic as Homo sapiens. That they were brutish and on and on and on. 
I watched them fight it out. Then one day they found the bones of a hybrid Human- Neanderthal child, at which point I didn’t just feel vindicated, I actually was saddened that the people who spend their whole lives in learning institutions couldn’t see something so clearly and it all became even more profoundly urgent for me. I wanted to convey, and use the Neanderthals story, as a way to show people how insidious prejudice is and also how ludicrous.

Because you can’t say there’s an ancient religious war going on with any groups of people alive right now and the Neanderthals, you can’t say that a Neanderthal married your daughter and is having mixed children, you can’t say that a Neanderthal moved in next to you and doesn’t trim their hedges, you can’t say that a Neanderthal is taking your job away from you, you can’t say that the Neanderthals are coming over the Mexican border to steal your lifestyle and quality of life.
I don’t know if I’ll ever find anything as good as a Neanderthal to do that. I don’t hear people use them very much that way. We’re still all kind of freaking out about all of the amazing things they can do as opposed to asking ourselves what’s the surprise?
Why are we eternally thinking that we are the supreme being of the galaxy? The endless superiority, snobbery and actual denseness on our parts that makes us so cruel and so mistaken about so much.

That’s why I wrote the song about them.  And about them in all of us. That was another piece of it, that we’ve been saying they’re the doofuses for so long and then it turns out that Northern Europeans carry the largest percentage of Neanderthal DNA. I don’t think Shakespeare could have come up with a better plot twist than that. They have been the butt of jokes for I don’t know how many years, a century at least or something like that? 

Then they turn out to be our own ancestors, particularly of the Northern Europeans, I should say. And at this point in our learning, it looks like many other people have it in them as well. But I think in the Northern Europeans superior schmucks time we have the greatest percentage.
That’s the funniest s*** I’ll ever know.  
And who knows if it’s not hand-in-glove, that the scholars are realizing that these are their ancestors and they better find signs of intelligence for their own sakes in the genetic material of the Neanderthals? What kind of inverse Anglo-Saxon Germanic Barbaric supremacist philosophy have we imposed on the bones of the Neanderthals? Shoot me. Just shoot me.