Chapter 2 - Germany: 30,000 Years Ago part 1

In the days of my youthful humanity, before I became what I am now, when hot mortal blood still pumped through my veins and the glaciers were in temporary retreat after a long and wearying ice age, we early humans shared this planet with several other sapient species, chief among them creatures we called Fat Hands... known now by the moniker Neanderthals.

There were others we knew of: flesh eaters we called Foul Ones, who lived in the cold lands to the north, and the Mammoth Hunters. There were brutish beings who seemed half-man and half-beast, though we spotted them very rarely in our secluded valley. Those proto-sapient creatures flourished briefly and died out before evolution fully refined their intellect. But the Neanderthals were our neighbors. We interacted with them more than we did our own kind. With them we felt a kinship. The valley was our bond.

Think about that for a moment.

I have witnessed not only the passing of centuries, the birth and decline of countless empires and vigorous human dynasties, but even the extinction of other intelligent species, thinking beings who labored, as your kind do now, to survive on this tiny spinning world.

I sometimes think if only one other sentient species persisted to this day, our modern world would be much changed, and for the better. If you humans had to share the bounties of this world with one of those Others, forgotten now by time, your race might not have become so megalomaniacal, mad with delusions of grandeur. Your species would not have become such spoiled only children, unaccustomed to sharing.

Could you, as a mortal human being, really think some mythic deity had set your species apart, that you were somehow special in His creation, if the person sitting across the subway lowered his newspaper—a modern Neanderthal—and said, "Really? Then what about us?"

If Homo Sapiens are superior, it is only because you have survived just a little longer than all the other thinking apes. And the way things are looking now, with your religious fanaticism, global warming, and senseless racial hatred, even that is subject to change without notice. 

Then again, I am a bit biased.

I was, after all, married to a Neanderthal.