Paleoanthropology

It must have been strange

to live before i-phones,

to have to have watched TV

on those big public two dimensional screens

or to have called someone

you couldn’t even see

on those weird wired phones

they have in the museum.

I look at these ancient people

on my history pad. They actually

look the same as we do.

So it makes me sad when I visualize

how narrow, how barren their live must have been.

It’s like when our ancestors

encountered, in Northern Europe,

the Neanderthal, and thought strongly

of annihilating them

to put them out of their misery.

Oh, that’s not really so. The thought may have been there,

but they were unsuccessful. It looks now like they interbred,

that at least 2% of our genomes come from Neandertal.

Maybe even more in Asia.