Snap Out of Our Neanderthalism!

Orientalism — stereotyping cultures, histories and peoples through a colonial, and later, First World media, prism — is something that plagues many of us Indians. But at least some of us are around to contest and correct much. Imagine if we were not there and Macaulay or Fox News was allowed to run rampant. This was, unfortunately, the case with Neanderthals, an extinct species of prehistoric humans — an extinct ‘cousin’ species, if you will — who lived alongside ancestors of modern humans till about 40,000 years ago. Historians, much like orientalists, considered these Neanderthals as unsophisticated and brutish. That is, till now.

New analysis based on a 2018 study has found ‘cave art’, thought to be formed by nature, to have been, indeed, created by sentient beings, in this case, Homo neanderthalensis artists. The cave art, more than 60,000 years old, is paint applied on stalagmites — upward-growing mounds of mineral deposits used as a canvas. What clinches the argument in favour of our Neanderthal Ganesh Pynes is that the red ochre colour has been found to be the result of ‘splattering and blowing’, not of a natural flow of red oxide. This is not unlike Jackson Pollock’s splatter art. Which, one day, we hope, won’t seem to be various forms of mud splatter by a presumptuous future civilisation and those brainwashed by it.