Read an extract from Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake

taken from Creation Lake Author: Rachel KushnerPosted by Jonathan Cape, last pick New Scientists Book Club. Sign up to read along with us here.

NEANDERTHALS WERE PRONE TO DEPRESSION, he said.

He said they were prone to addiction, and especially to smoking.

It was likely, he said, that these noble and mysterious Thal (as he sometimes referred to Neanderthals) extracted nicotine from the tobacco plant by a crude method, such as chewing the leaves, before this critical turning point in history. in the world: when does he have first the man touched it first tobacco leaf first the fire

Reading this part of Bruno’s email, scanning from “man” to “touch” to “leaf” to “fire,” I pictured a 1950s greaser in a white T-shirt and black leather jacket touching a lighted match at the tip. His Camel cigarette, and he inhales. The greaser leans against a wall—as greasers do, they lean and walk—and then he inhales.

Bruno Lacombe told Pascal, in those emails I was secretly reading, that Neanderthals had very large brains. Or at least their skulls were very large, and we can infer that their skulls were probably full of brains, Bruno said.

He spoke of the impressive size of Thal’s braincase using modern metaphors, comparing it to motorcycle engines, which were also measured, he noted, by their displacement. Of all the bipedal human species that walked the earth in the last million years, Bruno said it was the Neanderthal brain. road aheadAt a whopping 1,800 cubic centimeters.

I imagined a king of the road, in front of me.

I could see his leather vest, his big belly, his outstretched legs, his engineer’s boots resting on wide, chrome footrests mounted forward. His chopper is equipped with monkey-hangers that barely reach, and since they don’t seem to tire his arms, they don’t cause excruciating shooting pain in his lumbar region.

We know from their skulls, said Bruno, that Neanderthals had enormous faces.

I imagined Joan Crawford, that facial scale: dramatic, wild, convincing.

And from then on, in the natural history museum in my mind, the one I was creating by reading Bruno’s emails, his dioramas full of simple figures, yellow teeth and matted hair, all those ancient people Bruno described—men, too. they all had Joan Crawford’s face.

They had fair skin and red hair. The propensity for red hair, Bruno said, was identified as a genetic trait in Thal as scientific advances were made in gene mapping. And beyond these works, beyond these evidences, said Bruno, we can use our natural intuition to think that, like typical reds, Neanderthal emotions were strong and sharp, through height and depth.

Bruno wrote other things to Pascal that we now know about Neanderthals: They were good at math. They did not enjoy the crowd. They had strong stomachs and weren’t particularly prone to ulcers, but a diet of constant barbecuing took its toll on it like anyone’s gut. They were very vulnerable to tooth decay and gum disease. And they had overdeveloped jaws, great for chewing cartilage and cartilage, but inefficient for getting softer foods, that jaw exaggeration. Bruno described the Neanderthal jaw as characteristic of the pathos of its overdevelopment, the burden of a square jaw. He talked about sunk costs, as if the body were a capital investment, a fixed investment, parts of the body were like machines bolted to the factory floor, equipment that was purchased and could not be resold. Neanderthal jaw a sunk cost.

Still, Thal’s heavy bones and solid, heat-conserving build were to be admired, Bruno said. Especially compared to modern man’s breadcrumbs, A wise man is wise. (Bruno didn’t say “little bread”, but as I was translating, writing these emails in French, I drew from the full breadth of English, a superior language and my mother tongue).

The Thal survived the cold very well, he said, if not eons, or so says the story about them, the story we have. it has to be complicatedhe said, if we want to know the truth about the ancient past, this the world, now, and how to live in it, how to occupy the present and where to go tomorrow.

——

My tomorrow was well planned. I would meet Pascal Balmy, the boss of Le Mouline, to whom these emails from Bruno Lacombe were written. And I didn’t need the Neanderthal’s help with where to go: Pascal Balmy told me to go to the Café de la Route in the main square of the small village of Vantôme at one o’clock in the evening, and I would be there.