Nana and Flint

Our closest cousins, Homo neanderthalensis, lived in Eurasia from 400,000 to 40,000 years ago. About 130,000 years ago, our own ancestors, Homo sapiens, first emerged from Africa, although in greater numbers only some 50,000 years ago, driven out by great droughts in Africa.

For 10,000 years Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis lived side-by side in Europe. The Neanderthals were not unlike Homo sapiens. They looked a lot like us. They were a bit shorter and stockier, had larger brains, had bigger noses, and they were in every way perhaps as cultured and expressive and adept as us Homo sapiens. They were not the Donulld Trump or Nurrinder Modi kind of critters people think them to be.

The two species were also sexually compatible. I mean the mechanics of sex, so to say, was not an excuse. The two species could, in short, and did, have sex with each other.

Modern Homo sapiens outside of Africa have between 1 and 4% Neanderthal genetic content. The thing that anthropologists admit to being surprised by is why there wasn’t much more traffic between the two species. They think that might have been because of  ‘cultural differences’!

Speaking of the mechanics of sex, I remember reading somewhere that there was once a maharaja in Gwalior so fat that he was not, mechanically speaking, capable of mating with anything or anyone. The Maharaja hired a pair of Germans engineers, engineers who had retired from a Luftwaffe repair shop, to build him a harness that would suspend him from the ceiling like a human Foucault pendulum, and open him up, sort of, to make him biologically viable. If you see what I mean.

Where did I read that? Abha and the children think that some of my reading tends to be a little more voluptuous than it need be; a little too risqué. They tell me every time I tell them any story like this. They suggest I confine myself to mathematics and physics. Anyhow, I read this somewhere. Can’t undo that.

I read also that the maharaja’s sex-harness was not an unmitigated success. It had its peccadilloes. It went haywire sometimes, whether pre or post ejaculation the article did not mention. The Germans were often summoned to watch the proceedings, in flagrante delicto, to (a) offer advice on aerial maneuvers (the flapping of outstretched hands perhaps, I imagine), and (b) to ponder changes to evolving machine design (like the addition of a gyroscope so the maharaja will know which direction is up, and where his yaw axis currently happens to point).

I did spend a few days myself designing my own harness for the maharaja. I thought I’d give the Luftwaffe a run for its money. Like my daughter Anna says, speaking of Leo, “even a dog has dreams and ambitions”.

We can only imagine what it must have been like for the queen to have to put up with (a) the maharaja, (b) the machine, and (c) the German engineering expedition. All at the same time. Hallelujah man!

And I remember thinking, I was a young man then, only just beginning to come to grips with my physics, and bewildered often by how much bloody lafda Mother Nature puts in our way when we try and aspire to anything worthwhile. Speaking clinically now, I mean: inertia, linear momentum, angular momentum, oscillation, precession, Coriolis effect, drag, turbulence, aerodynamic stability, on and on. How much there is to go wrong! Just the mechanics alone, I mean, all by itself; even if we ignore all the extra mischief electricity and magnetism, relativity, and quantum mechanics are capable of.

Always beware, I tell my children, a fond father’s warning, the plain cussedness of Mother Nature.

—

But all that is not relevant at all. Pardon me for wasting your time. It was all by way of being a preface to what I really want to share: this movie, that shows the twin brothers, Adrie Kennis and Alfons Kennis, in the Netherlands, twins who fashioned the likeness of a Neanderthal mother and her son, Nana and Flint, based on skeletons excavated in a seaside cave in Gibraltar. Enjoy!

– End of story —