She learned that the first Neanderthal fossils had been discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century by workmen digging in a limestone quarry near Diisseldorf, Germany, at a place called the Neander Valley - Neandtr-thal, in German. While cleaning away the mud that covered a limestone deposit in a grotto sixty feet above the valley floor, they came across a human skull embedded in the grotto floor, and other bones not far away.
The workmen gave the skull and a few of the other bones to a local high school teacher, who took them to Dr. Hermann Schaafhausen of Bonn, a well-known anatomist. Schaafhausen was startled by their strangeness. The skull had many human features, but it was curiously primitive in appearance, long and narrow, with a sloping forehead and an enormous bony ridge bulging above the brows. The thighbones that accompanied the skull were so thick and heavy that they scarcely looked human at all.
But Schaafhausen did think the Neanderthal bones were human relics-extremely ancient ones. In a paper he read at a scientific meeting early in 1857, he termed the unusual fossils "the most ancient memorial of the early inhabitants of Europe."
Miss Fellowes looked up at Timmie, who was playing with some toy on the far side of the room.
"Listen to that," she said. " 'The most ancient memorial of the earfy inhabitants of Europe.' That's one of your relatives he's talking about, Timmie."
Timmie didn't seem impressed. He uttered a few indifferent clicks and went back to his game.
Miss Fellowes read on. And quickly the book confirmed what she already vaguely knew: that the Neanderthal people, while certainly ancient inhabitants of Europe, were far from being the most ancient ones.
The discovery of the original Neanderthal fossils had been followed, later in the nineteenth century, by similar discoveries in many other parts of Europe-more fossilized bones of prehistoric human-like creatures with sloping foreheads, huge beetling brows, and-another typical characteristic-receding chins. Scientists debated the meaning of these fossils, and, as Darwin's theories of evolution came to gain wide acceptance, general agreement developed that the Neanderthal-type specimens were the remains of a brutish-looking prehistoric kind of human being, ancestral to modern humanity, perhaps midway on the evolutionary scale between apes and humans.
" 'Brutish-looking.' " Miss Fellowes sniffed. "All in the eye of the beholder, eh, Timmie?"
But then had come the discovery of other types of fossil humans-in Java, in China, elsewhere in Europe- that seemed even more primitive in form than the Neanderthals. And in the twentieth century, when reliable methods of dating ancient sites were developed, it became clear that the Neanderthal people must have lived relatively recently on the time-scale of human evolution. The Javan and Chinese forms of primitive human being were at least half a million years old, perhaps even more, whereas the Neanderthals had not appeared on the scene until something like 150,000 years ago. They had occupied much of Europe and the Near East, apparently, for over a hundred thousand years, flourishing until about 35,000 years ago. Then they had disappeared-replaced at all locations by the modern form of the human race, which evidently had already come into existence at the time the first Neanderthals emerged. It appeared that humans of the modern type had lived alongside the Neanderthals, peacefully or otherwise, for thousands of years before undergoing a sudden population explosion and completely displacing the other human form.
There seemed to be several different theories to explain why the Neanderthals had suddenly become extinct. But one thing all the experts agreed on was that they had vanished from the Earth late in the period of the ice ages.
The Neanderthals, then, hadn't been some brutish' ape-like ancestor of modern man. They weren't ancestral at all. They were simply humans of another form, different in various ways from their contemporaries, who were the kind of human that had survived into modern times. Distant cousins, perhaps. The two races had had a parallel existence in Ice Age times, an uneasy coexistence. But only one of the two forms had lasted beyond the time when the great glaciers had covered Europe.
"So you are human, Timmie. I never really doubted it-" (though she had, for a bad moment right at the beginning, for which she still felt shame) "-but here it is in black and white. You're just a little unusual-looking, that's all. But you're as human as I am. As human as anybody here."
Clicks and murmurs came from Timmie.
"Yes," Miss Fellowes said. "You think so, too, don't you?"
And yet, the differences, the differences-r
Miss Fellowes' eyes raced over the pages. What had the Neanderthals really looked like? At first there had been hot debates over that, because so few fossil specimens of Neanderthals had been found, and one of the earliest skeletons to be discovered turned out to be that of a man whose bones had been crippled by osteoarthritis, creating a distorted impression of how a normal man of his people would have appeared. But gradually, as more skeletal evidence was uncovered, a generally accepted picture of the Neanderthal people had emerged.
They had been shorter than modern humans-the tallest of the men were probably no more than about five-feet-four in height-and very stocky, with wide shoulders and deep barrel-chests. Their foreheads sloped backward, their brow ridges were enormous, they had rounded lower jaws instead of chins. Their noses were big and broad and low-bridged, and their mouths jutted forward like muzzles. Their feet were flat and very wide, with short stubby toes. Their bones were heavy, thick, and large-jointed and their muscles probably were extremely well developed. Their legs were short in proportion to their torsos and possibly were naturally bowed, with permanently flexed knees, so that they might have walked in a sort of shuffle.
Not pretty, no. Not by modern standards.
But human. Unquestionably human. Give a Neanderthal man a shave and a haircut and put him into a shirt and a pair of jeans and he could probably walk down a street in any city of the world without attracting anyone's attention.
"And listen to this part, Timmie!" Miss Fellowes ran her finger across the page and read out loud to him. " 'He had a big brain. The brains of skeletons are measured by cranial capacities-that is, how much volume, in cubic centimeters, the skull cavity has. Among modern Homo sapiens, the average cranial capacity is something like 1,400 or 1,500 c.c. Some men have brain capacities of 1,100-1,200 c.c. The average brain capacity of Neanderthal man was about 1,600 c.c. for male skulls, and about 1,350 c.c. for female skulls. This is higher than the average figure for Homo sapiens.' " She chortled. "What do you think of that, Timmie? 'Higher than the average figure for Homo sapiens!"
Timmie smiled at her. Almost as if he had understood! But Miss Fellowes knew there was no chance of that.
"Of course," she said, "it isn't really the size of the skull that counts, it's the quality of the brain inside it. Elephants have bigger skulls than just about anybody, but they can't do algebra. Nor can I, for that matter, but I can read a book and drive a car, and show me the elephant that can do those things! -Do you think I'm silly, Timmie? Talking to you this way?" The boy's face was sol-*1 emn; he offered her a click or two. "But you need someone to talk to in here. And so do I. Come over here for a moment, will you?" Miss Fellowes beckoned to him. He stared blankly but stayed where he was. "Come over here to me, Timmie. I want to show you something."
But he didn't budge. It was a pretty fantasy, imagining that he was beginning to understand her words; but she knew very well that there was no substance to it.
She went to him instead, sitting down beside him and holding out the book she had been reading. There was a painting on the left-hand side of the page, an artist's reconstruction of a Neanderthal man's face, massive and grizzled, with the typical jutting mouth and great flattened nose and fierce tangled beard. His head was thrust forward from his shoulders. His lips were drawn back a little, baring his teeth. A savage countenance, yes. Brutish, one might even say: there was no getting away from that.
But yet there was the indisputable light of intelligence in his eyes, and a look of something else, something- what? Tragic? A look of anguish, a look of pain?
He was staring off into the distance as though looking across thousands of years of time. Looking into a world where none of his kind existed any longer, except for one small boy who had no proper business being there.
"How does he look, Timmie? Do you recognize him at all? Does he seem anything like the way your people actually were?"
Timmie made a few clicks. He glanced at the book without apparent interest.
Miss Fellowes tapped the picture a couple of times. Then she took his hand and put it on the page to direct his attention toward the plate.
He just didn't understand. The image on the page seemed to mean nothing to him at all.
He ran his hand over the page in a remote, uninterested way, as though the smooth texture of the paper was the only aspect of the book that had caught his attention. Then the boy turned the lower corner of the page upward and began idly to pull on it, so that the page started to rip from the binding.
"No!" Miss Fellowes cried, and in a quick reflexive gesture she pulled his hand away and slapped it, all at once-a light slap, but an unmistakable reprimand.
Timmie glared at her. His eyes were bright with fury. He made a ghastly snarling sound and his hand became a claw; and he reached for the book again.
She pulled it out of his reach.
He dropped down on his knees and growled at her. A terrifying growl, a deep eerie rumbling, eyes turned upward, lips drawn back, teeth bared in a frightful grimace of rage.
"Oh, Timmie, Timmie-" Tears welled up in Miss Fellowes' eyes, and she felt a vast sense of despair, of defeat-of horror, even-rising within her.
Groveling on the floor and growling like a little wild beast, she thought, appalled. Snarling at her as if he'd like to jump at her and rip her throat out just as he had clawed at that book, wanting to tear out a page.
Oh, TimmieBut then Miss Fellowes forced herself back to calmness. This was no way to react to the child's little outburst. What had she expected? He was four years old at most and came out of some primitive tribal culture and he had never seen a book before in his life. Was he supposed to look at it with respect and awe, and thank her politely for having made this valuable source of information available to his eager young mind?