Good morning, John! It's Friday!

I'm in Milwaukee. I just talked at the University and it's been lovely. And today I wanted to talk about one of the most powerful images I have ever seen. There was somebody on Bluesky a couple weeks ago who asked like "show me a non-religious image that feels religious to you" and the first image I thought of was this, which is like a ladder-type thing with some animals in it and there's dots over on the outside and then on one side there's like, uh, what appears to be a bunny rabbit with three arms driving, like, a personal fan boat.

But then I realized, this is very likely to be actually a religious image in some way; I just don't know the religious context and so it would be like almost disrespectful for me to post it like with my sort of non-religious take on it when it was originally probably thought to in some kind of religious or ritualistic context that we can never know. Because this is a cave painting. It was found in a cave in Spain, and in 2018, we did some new types of radiometric dating on it to figure out that some of the paint on the cave wall is over over 60,000 years old.

And that's a big deal, because there were no people in Spain 60,000 years ago. Humans didn't arrive there until 20,000 years ago. But you know I actually shouldn't have said that there were no people in Spain 60,000 years ago, because there were. There just weren't humans. There were Neanderthals. And when we did this new radiometric dating on this cave and several others we found that there were indeed several examples of Neanderthal art in our world that we can, like, see and share. And that is not the reason why this image is so amazing to me. That that comes later.

We won't ever know what these people were like. We will learn more things about them, we already know lots about them. They used tools they had rituals they did art. And they lived on the world with us, with anatomically modern humans. We used to share our planet with three other species of people. There was Homo Sapiens, there were Neanderthals, there were Denisovans, and there was the floresiensis. And maybe more! 'Cause we didn't discover floresiensis until like 20 years ago. And we also know that we still carry around pieces of the genomes of those folks. There are lots of people in Asia who have Denisovans DNA. Almost all people who aren't of direct African descent have Neanderthal DNA. We have a fragment of bone from a person who was born around 50,000 years ago and we got DNA out of that bone, and we found that it was exactly half Neanderthal DNA, half Denisovans DNA. This person, who was a real person who lived on the Earth, was a first generation hybrid between two non-human species.

But here's the thing that really makes this image so powerful for me: we're positive that parts of it were done by Neanderthals over 60,000 years ago. But it seems like also other parts of it were done much more recently by humans. And so we're looking at this cave art that is indeed a collaboration—an artistic collaboration—between two human species.

And I feel like it is likely that if that is the case, that for both of those people, the individual people who worked on that, it carried a lot of significance. It was a thing that mattered to them. And whether that was religious or ritualistic, I don't know. But to me it isn't religious. Or, like, it is; it's the kind of religious that I get to have where I'm like "Oh my God, humans. Oh my God, us, our story, our Earth." It's the thing that I like sometimes rarely get to experience of like a secular mysterium tremendum where I'm like, we live on a planet that contains a piece of art that we think is probably a collaboration between two human species. Looking at it and seeing this, like, archaeologist's drawing of it, especially like the this drawing that a human did of this art to try and sort of make it easier for everybody to see, it just gives me like a real sense of the depth and complexity of our story on this planet.

We don't get to live on a planet with more than one human species, and I know that that would probably be a messy and and complicated world. But I mourn for it sometimes. I always used to think that we killed them, that the fact that there are no Neanderthals is just like sort of another tally on our list of brutalities. But it doesn't like, there's no evidence for that actually. It could have been like small conflict after small conflict. It could have been a rapidly changing climate, which was happening back then. It could have been disease that was brought by humans out of Africa. It could have been a combination of all of those things plus other stuff that I we can't guess at. But we really did used to share our world with these people, and I don't know if that was ever beautiful and loving or if it was ever just devastating and brutal. But our ancestors knew that, like the people who I am descended from knew that they lived in a world with these other people. And they told stories about them and they communicated with them and they interacted with them. And we can see those interactions in our genomes. And we can see it on the walls of caves. And I hope very deeply that despite their loss their story continues on in us. And I do think it does, just as like the story of that first worm continues on in us. Like it does go all the way down. We are all related. We all use the same biochemistry.

But I think with Neanderthals we don't just use the same biochemistry, I think we also share many of the same stories deep down. And that is really amazing to see in one image.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.