Aztec Treasure House

by Evan S. Connell

  Years later these bones would be unpacked and scrutinized again, compared with similar finds, and subjected to a variety of microscopic, electronic, and chemical tests, with the result that we now know quite a lot about Fuhlrott’s caveman. It has even been determined that he was unable to raise his left hand to his mouth because of an elbow injury.

  And we have learned enough from other Neanderthal remnants to make a few tentative generalizations. For instance, it could be deduced from an Iraqi skeleton that the owner was arthritic, blind in one eye, and had a birth defect limiting the use of his right side. Now what this means is that he would have been unable to hunt, which in turn means that somebody had to provide his food. Care of the infirm and elderly is not what comes to mind when the word Neanderthal is mentioned.

  Something else we don’t think of in relation to these people is a concept of life after death; yet the Neanderthals buried their dead, which implies concern. Furthermore, the characteristics of a burial may tell us what the survivors were thinking. At least that is the assumption we make. Fires had been kindled on the graves of two Belgian Neanderthals, presumably to lessen the chill of death. And in France, at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, a hunter was interred with a bison leg—food for his long journey.

  Another French site held bits and pieces of a man, a woman, two children about five years old, and two babies. Flint chips and bone splinters were discovered in the man’s grave and a flat stone lay on his head, either to protect him or to prevent him from coming back. The woman was buried in a tight fetal position, as though she had been bound with cords. Perhaps, like the stone slab, this was meant to confine her. Or maybe it saved work by reducing the size of the grave.

  On a gentle slope near this family plot another child had been buried—its head separated from its body. The head lay almost a yard higher on the slope. Why this child did not lie with the others, and why the head was detached, is not known.

  Quite a few Neanderthal graves were found at the Shanidar cave in northern Iraq. Several of these people appeared to have been killed by rocks falling from the roof, possibly during an earthquake. In one trench lay a hunter with a fractured skull, and when the surrounding soil was analyzed it disclosed pollen from a number of brightly colored wildflowers related to the hollyhock, bachelor’s button, grape hyacinth, and groundsel. The existence of so much pollen could not be attributed to wind or to the feces of animals and birds. The only other explanation is that flowers were scattered on his grave by somebody who loved him.

  A less agreeable picture came into focus at Monte Circeo, fifty miles south of Rome. Laborers at a tourist resort were widening a terrace when they exposed the entrance to a cave that had been sealed long ago by a landslide. The owner of the resort, accompanied by some friends, crept on hands and knees through a tunnel leading deep into the hillside and finally they entered a chamber that had not been visited for perhaps 60,000 years. By lantern light they saw a human skull, face to the earth, within a circle of stones. Anthropologists suspect the skull may have been mounted on a stick and dropped in that position when the wood decayed; but the unforgettable part of this ceremony must have occurred before the skull was mounted, because the aperture at the base had been enlarged, almost certainly in order to extract and eat the brain.

  Neanderthal rituals in Switzerland clearly focused on the bear. A number of boxlike stone structures found in Alpine eaves contain bear skulls. One of these crude chests held seven skulls arranged so that the muzzles pointed to the chamber entrance, while farther back in the cave six more skulls had been set in niches along the wall—one with a bone thrust through the arch of the cheek.

  What this bear business means, nobody knows. Maybe the earliest human pageantry involved a bear. Even today a few Stone Age tribes conduct ceremonies whose principal figure is a bear, and some ethnologists regard this as the last glint of light from Neanderthal times.

  Says Herbert Wendt: “It was in the time of cave bears that the first cultural and religious ideas arose, that the first magicians appeared, that Man achieved dominion over Nature and began to believe in the support of supernatural powers.”

  What did they look like? —these people we faintly abhor and seldom think about, yet who seem always to be not far away.

  Museum dioramas are familiar: shambling, hairy, ape-faced monstrosities wearing animal pelts, the males holding spears or clubs, the females usually crouched beside a fire. This is the image, but it may not be accurate. Our impression is based on a skeleton reconstructed and studied in 1908. The relatively uncorrugated inner surface of the skull suggested that the brain had been simple, with convolutions resembling those of apes. The 1908 examiners also deduced a “simian arrangement” of spinal vertebrae and concluded that Neanderthal man slumped along with knees bent, on feet very much like the feet of a gorilla.

  In 1957 this skeleton, which was that of a male, was reexamined. The gentleman was not exactly typical. He might have been fifty years old, which in those days was very old indeed. He suffered from arthritis of the jaws and spine, and perhaps of the lower limbs. The 1957 inspectors issued this statement: “There is no valid reason for the assumption that the posture of Neanderthal man . . . differed significantly from that of present-day man.”

  And in museum displays their faces are never painted because it was assumed that Neanderthals had not crossed that threshold of humanity where the idea of decorating something—a wall, or themselves—would occur to them. Well, maybe. But powdered black manganese, yellow ocher, and various red pigments are found at their campsites, frequently in stick-shaped pieces that appear to have been rubbed on a soft surface.

  As for other artistic efforts, probably there were none. No sculpture has been found, nothing but tantalizing hints. A bone with a hole drilled in it. An ox rib with a collection of unnatural streaks. A bit of ivory polished and artificially stained.

  Yet these same people, struggling toward a new plateau, seemed unable or unwilling to distinguish between animal meat and the carcasses of their neighbors. Twenty mutilated skeletons were discovered in a Yugoslav cave, skulls bashed, arm and leg bones split lengthwise to get at the marrow. And in France another grisly accumulation turned up—some of the bones charred, implying a barbecue.

  Neanderthal front teeth, when examined under a microscope, often show a number of parallel scratches, the result of an eating habit. Even today certain primitive people stuff big chunks of meat into their months and use a knife to hack off what they are not able to chew, which leaves scratches on their teeth. These scratches almost always run diagonally from upper left to lower right, proving that the gourmets in question are right-handed—as you will see if you act out the scene. Now this information is not as useless as you might think, because man is the only animal that prefers one hand to another, and neurologists suspect there may be some kind of relationship between this preference and the development of speech. If that is correct, those minuscule marks on Neanderthal teeth could help to solve one of the most fascinating questions about our predecessors—whether or not they could speak.

  The answer would seem to be: Yes.

  Yes, but only a little. So say linguist Philip Lieberman and anatomist Edmund Crelin who reconstructed the vocal tracts of some fossilized men. They concluded that European Neanderthals did not have much of a pharynx, and without a decent pharynx it is impossible to articulate g or k or several vowel sounds. Consequently a Neanderthal’s power of speech would be limited. Furthermore, say Lieberman and Crelin, he could not have pronounced his few sounds in quick succession. He spoke slowly, about one-tenth as fast as we do, perhaps one-twentieth as fast as a Spaniard.

  It is alleged that Pharaoh Psamtik in the seventh century B.C. had two infants reared beyond the sound of human voices on the theory that when they began to talk they would necessarily resort to man’s earliest language. One child finally said “bekos”—which is the Phrygian word for bread. But that k would seem to preclude Phrygian as the Neanderthal language.

 
James IV of Scotland conducted an almost identical experiment. He gave two babies to a mute woman who lived alone on Inchkeith Island, and we are told that the children grew up speaking perfect Hebrew. However, with a stunted pharynx it would be exceptionally difficult to speak Hebrew. At the moment, therefore, all we can do is speculate.

  But the absorbing question about Neanderthals is not what they spoke; it is what became of them.

  Did they vanish because of some inability to meet a changing climate?

  Could they have been slaughtered, liquidated, terminated with extreme prejudice, by the Cro-Magnon people?

  Or could these two supposedly distinct races be, in fact, the same?

  Present wisdom holds that the last unadulterated Neanderthal died 40,000 years ago. However, one April evening in 1907 some Russian explorers led by Porshnyev Baradiin were setting up camp in an Asian desert when they noticed a shaggy human figure silhouetted against the late sun on a ridge just ahead. Whatever the thing was, it appeared to be watching them. After a while the creature turned and lumbered away, so they ran after it but were quickly outdistanced. This was the first meeting between Westerners and Yeti, or Sasquatch as the beast is called in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

  Soviets do not treat these encounters with as much levity as do Americans; there are Soviet anthropologists who believe that a few Neanderthals have survived in the deserts and mountains. European and American scientists doubt this. More significant than such reports, they say, are the features of people around us. In other words, although the race is extinct, Neanderthal characteristics have endured.

  So they are among us at least in a vestigial sense, and just possibly as an isolated race that exists like the giant condor in remote pockets of the earth. Frequent reports of midnight brushes with humanoid monsters indicate a certain tremulous anticipation—which is to say, an abiding belief—but thus far no hairy pelts have been tacked to the wall.

  In any event, while Rudolf Virchow and his nineteenth-century colleagues were disparaging Fuhlrott’s caveman, a most outrageous book was published. Its author—a tall, bald, white-bearded gentleman—subsequently became known as the Shy Giant. He read so slowly, wrote so slowly, even thought so slowly, remarks biographer William Irvine, “that he always felt desperately behindhand, like a tortoise concentrating every energy on the next step, as he creeps in frantic haste toward impossible horizons. . . .”

  This sounds exactly like a living Neanderthal, but of course it was Charles Darwin. And twenty-eight years earlier he almost did not get to sail on the Beagle because Captain Fitzroy, who believed one could pretty well judge a man by his features, mistrusted the shape of Darwin’s nose. He thought the young man looked indecisive. We can only guess what might have happened, or failed to happen, had Fitzroy himself been more decisive and stamped his foot and lifted the gangplank so Darwin could not slip aboard.

  Then the Scopes trial, that little masterpiece of idiocy, might never have been staged.

  Nor should we have had that immortal debate between Thomas Huxley, on behalf of Darwin, and Bishop Wilberforce, known unkindly as Soapy Sam, on behalf of God:

  “It would be interesting to know,” said the bishop, “whether the ape in question was on your grandfather’s or your grandmother’s side.”

  But it is not a sound idea to prick a man as intelligent as Huxley, who whispered, “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands.” And getting to his feet he answered aloud: “If you ask me whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, then I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”

  Whereupon, we are told, a lady in the audience fainted. And good Captain Fitzroy, trembling with honorable Christian rage, picked up a Bible and was just prevented from throwing it at Huxley. Fitzroy later was promoted to vice-admiral, which seems to be the natural course of events.

  One is tempted to caricature Fitzroy. Still, whatever his faults, the man was not a simpleton. He came from a distinguished family, which perhaps proves nothing, but he had traveled around the world on the survey ship Beagle once before, and had been appointed a captain at the age of twenty-three. His surveys were accurate and highly valued, and he was a Fellow of the Royal Society. It is said, too, that after getting to know Darwin he changed his opinion. All the same, no matter how hard you try to look without prejudice upon Captain Fitzroy, it seems best to admit that this is an individual you cannot love.

  However, the important thing is the debate, not the audience, and those traditional opponents Science and Religion once again entered the arena when Thomas Huxley challenged Soapy Sam.

  It is the scientist, of course, armed with some impertinent fact, who attacks first—though the maneuver may be oblique or heavily veiled. Then the ecclesiastic must counterattack, for the very good reason that he perceives a threat to his office and to his life’s work. The status quo must be protected, the heretical march of knowledge obstructed, whether it be the development of anesthetics, the experiments of Galileo, or the deductions of infamous bulb-nosed naturalists.

  Both attitudes are easy to understand. Science feels obligated to inquire, whereas the Church comes armed with infallible dogma.

  Thus we have Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge and Master of Saint Catherine’s, nailing down the particulars in Archbishop Ussher’s article of faith: “Heaven and earth, center and circumference were created all together and in the same instant, clouds full of water. This took place, and Man was created by the Trinity on the 23rd October, 4004 B.C. at 9 o’clock in the morning.”

  Gilgamesh the Sumerian may have been eating ham and eggs at that hour, but never mind; what impresses us is Dr. Lightfoot’s stately assurance.

  By contrast, old Darwin frets about each mistake he makes, telling us he is ready to weep with vexation, referring to himself as “the most miserable, bemuddled, stupid dog in all England.” He goes then, we are informed, and walks through the winter morning—this aloof old genius—walking by himself and meditating, so early that he startles foxes trotting to their lairs at dawn.

  Accompanying these famous champions we now and again meet an individual who, like some overexcited spectator at a wrestling match, resolves to assert himself by clambering into the ring. Consider a certain Denis or Didier Henrion, a seventeenth-century French engineer, who measured various bones that probably came from a brontosaurus and then announced without qualification that our progenitor Adam stood 123 feet, 9 inches tall. Eve, he said, had been five feet shorter. M. Henrion did not calculate their weight, which is too bad, nor Eve’s other measurements, which must have been formidable; but what we would like to know most of all is why he positioned himself so awkwardly in the path of common sense.

  Then we have the case of a respected historian named von Eckhart.

  Early in the eighteenth century Professor Johannes Bartolomaus Beringer who taught natural history at the University of Würzburg, and who collected fossils, dug up hundreds of stones containing the imprint of fruits, flowers, spiders, turtles, snakes, frogs, and so forth. He studied them carefully because he had never seen anything like them and he therefore assumed that his report would have unusual scientific value. He published his conclusions in a handsome book titled Lithographiae Wirceburgensis, illustrated with twenty-two plates of the finest specimens. Unfortunately, von Eckart had persuaded some boys to carve and bury these fakes where Professor Beringer would be sure to find them.

  It was a practical joke born of petulant dislike for Beringer, yet something beyond malice seems to have been involved: there is an undertone of hostility toward science.

  This brings up the American Goliath, born of animosity toward hard-shell Protestants. An Iowa cigar manufacturer named Hull and a preacher named Turk argued about giants in the earth. Reverend Turk of course defended t
he Bible. Hull, choking with disgust, resolved to mock him as viciously as Eckhart had mocked Beringer.

  In the summer of 1868 Hull bought a five-ton block of gypsum at a quarry near Fort Dodge and sent it by rail to Chicago where a stonemason was hired to sculpt a proper giant. The monster was then aged with acid and shipped to the New York village of Cardiff where Hull had a relative—William Newell—who buried it on his farm.

  A year later Newell employed some laborers on the pretext of digging a well. Very soon their picks struck a stony ten-foot corpse, and considering that they knew nothing of the plot their fright does not seem unreasonable.

  Thousands of sightseers arrived, so many that the town of Syracuse put a horse-drawn omnibus in service to Newell’s farm. Among these visitors was Ralph Waldo Emerson who judged the slumbering colossus to be “undoubtedly ancient.” The curator of the New York State Museum called it “the most remarkable object yet brought to light in this country”—a comment that might be variously interpreted. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes also paid a visit. Dr. Holmes drilled a hole behind one ear in order to inspect the substance, which suggests that at the very least he was uncertain. Most people thought it was a fossilized antediluvian man.

  Whether or not Reverend Turk made a pilgrimage to Newell’s farm, we don’t know; but it would be safe to assume that when he heard about this giant in the earth he fairly quivered with satisfaction. How vindicated he must have felt. How joyous. How proud. Maybe a little complacent. Even a bit pontifical. If only we knew what he said to the diabolic cigar manufacturer.

  And when Hull at last decided to crucify the gullible pastor, how did Reverend Turk respond? Did he pray? Did he forgive? Did he foam at the mouth? Furthermore, one can’t help wondering if the experience taught him anything. Probably not. Fundamentalists are apt to be so fundamental.

  More sophisticated, more enigmatic, and infinitely more knowledgeable than our cranky American atheist was the British sponsor of Piltdown Man—that veritable missing link with a human cranium and the jaw of an ape.