I met my first Neanderthal in a café in Paris, just across the street from the Jussieu metro stop. It was a wet afternoon in May, and I was sitting on a banquette with my back to the window. The café was smoky and charmless. Near the entrance a couple of students were thumping on a pinball machine called Genesis, which beeped approval every time they scored. The place was packed with people--foreign students, professors, young professionals, French workers, Arabs, Africans, and even a couple of Japanese tourists, all thrown together by the rain. Our coffee had just arrived, and I found that if I tucked my elbow down when raising my cup, I could drink it without poking the ribs of a bearded man sitting at the table next to me, who was deep into an argument.
Above the noise of the pinball game and the din of private conversations, a French anthropologist named Jean-Jacques Hublin was telling me about the anatomical unity of man. It was he who had brought along the Neanderthal. When we had come into the café, he had placed an object wrapped in a soft rag on the table and had ignored it ever since. Like anything so carefully neglected, it was beginning to monopolize my attention.
Perhaps you would be interested in this, he said at last, whisking away the rag. There, amid the clutter of demitasses and empty sugar wrappers, was a large human lower jawbone. The teeth, worn and yellowed by time, were all in place. Around us, I felt the café raise a collective eyebrow. The hubbub of talk sank audibly. The bearded man next to me stopped in midsentence, looked at the jaw, looked at Hublin, and resumed his argument. Hublin gently nudged the fossil to the center of the table and leaned back.
What is it? I asked.
It is a Neanderthal from a site called Zafarraya, in the south of Spain, he said. We have only this mandible and an isolated femur. But as you can see, the jaw is almost complete. We are not sure yet, but it may be that this fossil is only 30,000 years old.
