Nina In New York: But Grandma, What A Low, Flat, Elongated Skull You Have

A lighthearted look at news, events, culture and everyday life in New York. The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.
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By Nina Pajak

I guess those GEICO caveman ads were onto something after all.

By studying the oldest homo-sapien fossil ever found outside of Africa or Asia, scientists were able to work their mumbo jumbo and devise that many eons ago, a modern human man got it on with a neanderthal woman. Nine months and roughly 50,000 to 60,000 years later, out popped billions of members of our species as we know it.

Damn, lady. Nice work.

Perhaps not new news, but a bit of information that sprung from this story and shocked me is the fact that many modern humans still possess a bit of actual Neanderthal DNA. That means this anonymous, hairy old lady is probably our great-to-the-bazillionth-power and quite possibly the source of all my and my Eastern European sisters' depilatory woes. And if that's the case, I find myself wanting to know a little bit about how Infinity Greatest Grams and Gramps wound up getting together and spawning this crazy, mixed up family.

Maybe Ugg was looking for some revenge after getting dumped by his marginally better looking homo-sapien girlfriend, and Gruugg happened to be there. Maybe he over-indulged one night and had on a seriously effective pair of grog-goggles (groggles!), or fermented Pterodactyl blood goggles, or whatever they used back then to rationalize ugly hookups. Or, and this is my favorite theory, maybe the two of them met by chance and became the world's first and most extreme pair of star-crossed lovers. The prehistoric Romeo and Juliet. Tony and Maria for the heavily-browed set. Their families forbade their romance. Their friends escalated the conflict. No one would ever understand this ground-breaking love which transcended all terrestrial values—appearance, body hair, brain function, posture, language development, species classification. We're all the same in the dark, amiright?

Okay, we're taking some liberties here. There's no indication that Ugg and Gruugg were the first Neanderthal and early human to get it on inter-specially, nor that they were the only ones doing it at the time. But let's pretend for a moment that these two primitive, crazy kids are the reason that we people today evolved into the fine specimens we are. And if they saw how upright we walked, how sleek and noble are our brows, how far we've taken that whole "language" thing, and how much we still value brute strength and how often we fly into violent fits of primal rage . . . well. I'd like to think they'd be proud of us.

Nina Pajak is a writer living with her husband, daughter and dog in Queens. Connect with Nina on Twitter!