We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article.In "Creation Lake" (Scribner), a tricky comic thriller from Rachel Kushner, a female American secret agent infiltrates a rural French commune of environmental terrorists who follow a mysterious spiritual leader whose teachings are aimed at replicating the lives of the Neanderthals.Read an excerpt below. "Creation Lake" by Rachel Kushner $23 at Amazon Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now.Try Audible for free Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said.
He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking.Although it was likely, he said, that these noble and mysterious Thals (as he sometimes referred to the Neanderthals) extracted nicotine from the tobacco plant by a cruder method, such as by chewing its leaves, before that critical point of inflection in the history of the world: when the first man touched the first tobacco leaf to the first 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 a black leather jacket as he touches a lit match to the tip of his Camel cigarette, and inhales.The greaser leans against a wall—because that is what greasers do, they lean and loiter—and then he exhales.
Bruno Lacombe told Pascal, in these emails I was secretly reading, that the Neanderthals had very large brains.Or at least their skulls were very large, and we can safely infer that their skulls were likely filled, Bruno said, with brains.
He talked about the impressive size of a Thal's braincase using modern metaphors, comparing them to motorcycle engines, which were also measured, he noted, for their displacement.Of all the humanlike species who stood up on two feet, who roamed the earth for the last one million years, Bruno said that the Neanderthal's br...