The Crowded Grave

out?” Horst paused again, and raised his arms and slowly let them fall, as if in bafflement. “Or perhaps it was simply evolution, or maybe the inability of the dwindling Neanderthal gene pool to adjust to rapid and repeated changes in climate. Perhaps they could not compete for limited food supplies. Each of these theories has been proposed.”
    Horst paused again, his delivery given gravity by the way the light of the projector, playing on his white beard and casting stark shadows on his cheekbones, gave him something of the look of an Old Testament prophet. He stroked his beard thoughtfully before lowering his voice to speak in almost conversational tones.
    “But we do know that almost every creation myth in human culture keeps alive the terrible and haunting possibility that our ancestors prevailed though deliberate violence, that theydestroyed their competitors. It is indeed possible that modern humankind was born through an act of genocide. Some scholars have suggested this might be the real original sin.”
    Bruno found himself sitting forward, almost on the edge of his chair, unexpectedly captivated by Horst’s narrative. This was not like the other talks by Horst that Bruno had attended, one on cave art and the other on the diet of the people who had produced it. They had been interesting but somehow passionless, as if Horst were playing the role of scholar. Now, however restrained his delivery, Horst seemed to be afire.
    Behind Horst on the screen the images of two early humans appeared side by side. One was squat and hairy, with a thrusting forehead, a barrel chest and long arms. This was the image of the Neanderthal, of the brutal caveman that Bruno recalled from schoolbooks. The other was taller, slimmer, with a narrow skull and features that were somehow more familiar as human, despite the clothes of fur. Bruno felt a sudden chill, thinking of other contrasting images he recalled from his schooldays, the way Nazi propaganda had depicted Jews as alien and thuggish creatures to make the contrast with the Aryan as some human ideal. Was it so easy to indoctrinate through images, he wondered, or was Horst right to suggest some human archetype at work from thousands of years ago?
    “Almost wherever we look in the human past, we find the two great narratives of our origins, of a gigantic flood, and of a fratricidal killing or a civil war,” Horst went on. “Amid all the mystery that still shrouds the birth of humanity, those two myths stand out in the folk memory of people after people, tribe after tribe, culture after culture. But now, we have a scientific revolution. We have forensic genetics and the ability to read DNA from bones.”
    Horst explained the latest genetic evidence that the Neanderthals did not disappear entirely. Some Neanderthals sharedthe type O blood group of so many modern humans and all shared the FOXP2 gene, which is what gives us speech and language. So there must have been inbreeding. He spoke of the collection of Neanderthal DNA from the El Sidrón cave in Spain where eleven Neanderthals died some forty-nine thousand years ago. Cut marks on their bones suggested they had been butchered with stone tools.
    Horst paused, clicked his remote and the photograph of the dig that Bruno had seen that morning reappeared on the screen.
    “And some of what we are about to learn will come from these three bodies at the burial site outside St. Denis that I am describing in public for the first time this evening,” Horst said. “And it is at this point that we enter the field of speculation, and probably of controversy.”
    Bruno narrowed his eyes to concentrate as Horst explained the orthodox theory that Neanderthals and modern humans shared a common ancestor some four hundred thousand years ago, after one of the great migrations from Africa. A minority of experts thought there may also have been some limited interbreeding about a hundred thousand years ago. There was an alternative theory, called hybridization, that Neanderthals and their successors lived together and interbred and shared their skills and their culture as recently as thirty thousand years ago.
    There were three kinds of evidence for this, Horst explained. The first was fossil evidence, at sites such as Arcy-sur-Cure, where Neanderthal bones were found alongside tools and cultural signifiers and personal ornaments usually associated with their successors. That suggested trade and interaction between the two groups. The