{"id":3585,"date":"2022-07-27T21:05:27","date_gmt":"2022-07-27T21:05:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3585"},"modified":"2022-11-06T21:12:28","modified_gmt":"2022-11-06T21:12:28","slug":"the-idea-that-life-is-absurd-bothers-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3585","title":{"rendered":"“The idea that life is absurd bothers him\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal by Juan Jos\u00e9 Mill\u00e1s and Juan Luis Arsuaga for the Telegraph, 27 July 2022<\/a><\/p>\n

In 2013 the oldest known human DNA was discovered, in a complex of caves in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain. It belongs to an early hominid, Homo heidelbergensis, who lived 400,000 years ago, and to whom we owe the invention of the fireplace.<\/p>\n

Arsuaga has built an illustrious career around excavations in Atapuerca, a site humans have occupied continuously for a million years, from the dawn of Homo sapiens to the bronze age. He knows a lot about how humans evolved, and he is an eloquent communicator. \u201cAs he talked,\u201d the novelist Juan Jos\u00e9 Mill\u00e1s recalls, \u201cI realised what a great sense of the theatrical Arsuaga had. He was a master of oral storytelling. He knew when he had his audience, and when he was running the risk of losing them. He endeared himself by combining intellectual precision with a kind of helplessness.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Aruaga\u2019s eloquence that first persuaded Mill\u00e1s that the two of them should collaborate on a book — a Boswellian confection in which Mill\u00e1s (humble, curious, a klutz, and frequently brow-beaten) follows Arsuaga around with a dictaphone capturing the great man\u2019s observations. \u201cIn Spain,\u201d he remarks, early on, \u201cthere are two principal periods: the first runs from the Neolithic to 1958, at which point the social planning by the Opus Dei technocrats comes in. Until then, the countryside was a place full of people, full of voices, life here was not a sad thing, there were children running around. It would be like walking down the street. By 1970, the countryside was empty, there was nobody left.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mill\u00e1s casts Arsuaga as the representative of Homo sapiens: articulate, eclectic, self-aware and tragical. Mill\u00e1s casts himself as Homo neanderthalis, not quite as quick on the uptake as his more successful cousin. Neanderthals are a species not exactly lost to history (Sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, after all) but no longer active in it, either.<\/p>\n

The idea is that Arsuaga the high-brow leads our beetle-browed narrator hither and thither across northern Spain, on foot or in his trusty Nissan Juke, up lost valleys (to understand the evolution of hunting) and through deserted playgrounds (to grasp the mechanics of bipedalism), past market stalls (to grasp the historical significance of diet) and into a sex shop (to discuss the relative size of primate testicles) and building, bit by bit, a dazzling picture of the continuities that exist between our ancient and contemporary selves.<\/p>\n

For many, the devil will be in the detail. Take, for example, Mill\u00e1s\u2019s Neanderthals. He is not exactly wrong in what he says about them, but he is writing, in the most general and allusive terms, into a field that is developing frighteningly fast. It\u2018s hard, then, for us to know how literally to take the author\u2019s showier gestures. Mill\u00e1s says, about that famous interbreeding, that \u201cThe Sapiens, being the smart ones, did it out of vice, while the Neanderthals, who were more na\u00efve, did it out of love.\u201d With Neanderthal intelligence and sociality a topic of so much fierce debate, such statements as this may be met with more scepticism than appreciation.<\/p>\n

This is as much a buddy story as it is a virtuosic work of popular science. In unpacking our evolutionary past, Millas also brings his human subject to light. Arsuaga holds to the tragic view of life espoused by the fin de siecle Spanish essayist Miguel de Unamuno. Mill\u00e1s, a more common-or-garden depressive, finds Arsuaga\u2019s combination of high spirits and annoyance hard to read. Deposited on the outskirts of Madrid, and half suspecting he\u2019s been actually thrown out of Arsuaga\u2019s Nissan, Mill\u00e1s realises that the palaeontologist \u201cexperiences sudden bursts of sadness that he sometimes conceals beneath an ironic demeanour, and sometimes beneath passing bad moods. I think the idea that life is absurd bothers him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aruaga\u2019s tragic sense entends to the species. We are the self-domesticating species: \u201cTo the Neanderthal,\u201d he says, \u201cthe Sapiens must have seemed like a teddy bear.\u201d We have evolved social complexity by shedding the adult seriousness we observe in less social mammals. (\u201cI\u2019ve been to Rwanda, looking at old gorillas,\u201d says Aruaga, \u201cand I can assure you they don\u2019t play at all, they don\u2019t laugh at anything.\u201d) Over evolutionary time, we have become more playful, more infantile, more docile, and we have done this by executing, imprisoning and marginalising those who exhibit an ever-expending list of what we consider anti-social traits. So inanity will one day conquer all.<\/p>\n

I wish Mill\u00e1s was a less precious writer. Very early on the pair arrive at a waterfall. \u201cWhat had we come here for?\u201d Mill\u00e1s writes: \u201cin principle, to see the waterfall, and perhaps so the waterfall could see us, too.\u201d Such unredeemable LRBisms are, I suppose, a form of protective coloration, necessary for a novelist and poet of some reputation: an earnest of his devotion to propah lirtritchah.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s when Mill\u00e1s forgets himself, and erases the distance he meant to maintain between boffins and scribblers, that Life becomes a very special book indeed: a passionate, sympathetic portrait of one life scientist\u2019s world view.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal by Juan Jos\u00e9 Mill\u00e1s and Juan Luis Arsuaga for the Telegraph, 27 July 2022 In 2013 the oldest known human DNA was discovered, in a complex of caves in the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[837,408,1018,879,1005,1017,287],"class_list":["post-3585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-archaeology","tag-evolution","tag-hominins","tag-human-evolution","tag-palaeontology","tag-spain","tag-telegraph"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3585"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3587,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3585\/revisions\/3587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}