Did we Inherit the Wind, or Inherit the Fog?

[Becky]

Dear Mr. B.,

I understand that you enjoy around-the-dinner-table style questions, so maybe you'd like to try this one on for size.

I'd like to ask you about Neanderthals. (Prehistoric ones, I mean. Not the ones you occasionally see driving in rush hour traffic.) Now, I imagine that the predominating daily thoughts of your average Neanderthal were taken up with such matters as, "get food, make fire, find cave," and so on. However I've wondered if, sitting around the evening campfire, digesting a particularly yummy woolly mammoth steak, they ever contemplated the meaning of life. Or, more to the point, whether they were able to GRASP the meaning of life... something that our supposedly advanced brains are unable to fathom. I guess what I'm asking is, do you suppose that humans have evolved away from the ability to understand concepts that Captain Caveman had already mastered? I'd love to hear some new thoughts on the subject, if you're willing to give this one a go.

Ug,

Becky

P.S. I think you'd make a crackerjack Matthew Harrison Brady.

[Tom Baker]

Dear Becky,

I think those neanderthal chaps realised that meat and a jolly fire were what mattered and that life has no other meaning. They would also have experienced deep deep jealousy as they realised that the guy with the juiciest and biggest piece of meat had the prettiest girls around him, ogling, pouting and generally doing photo opportunity stuff. A bit like modern times perhaps. And they would have spent a lot of time conjecturing on the meaning of thunder and lightning and perhaps eclipses? I remember in Liverpool seventy odd years ago being brainwashed by oafs in frocks talking fire - hellfire, I mean - and explaining everything their way.

Aaaargh!

Happy days,

Tom