Years-years-years forward-forward-forward one of “you,” an Anatomically Modern Human (AMH) as you are calling yourselves, said something that resonated with me:

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

For the most part, posterity would misattribute it to Oscar Wilde, when they punched it on the coffee mug and on the tee-shirt in well-read typefaces, Helvetica and Lucida Handwriting. In fairness, though, Wilde is pretty suspect, no doubt, a possessor of traits that ensure recognition. Right? Hauteur; flamboyancy; razor-sharp wit; pith; wryness—scandalous through and through, right? And history, history reads with the more amusing bits highlighted and proves characters like him memorable. Their margins nota bened with flowery stars, their deeds and misdeeds underscored so vigorously as to break through the taut page and mar a paragraph on its other side… (Or spotlighted on touchy screens.) And it does sound like one of Oscar’s mots, just like him simpering, “Why was I born with such contemporaries?”

In actual fact it was George Bernard Shaw in his preface to The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910).

I had unfortunately represented Shakespear [sic] as treasuring and using (as I do myself) the jewels of unconsciously musical speech which common people utter and throw away every day; and this was taken as a disparagement of Shakespear’s [sic] “originality.” Why was I born with such contemporaries?

So it was Shaw, but to hear it it might have been one of my kind asking-asking-asking. Circa 10,000 BCE and already we were musing. Really, you cannot believe the vantage point I have.

You call us “Guy.” Guy by dint of the name of the woman who dug us up first. Funny in so many ways, easy.

Out in the field you held up our bones to the hot sun, cracking, “Look at this Wise Guy.”

Hardly could you believe what our skulls reckoned. Like 1,980 cc. A brain back then one and one-quarter the size of your own! And childlike proportions, too. Faces a mere fifth of our total cranium—pedomorphosis. Retention of juvenile features into adulthood that bespoke rapid evolutionary change. It also meant we looked like your stereotypical alien: large, upside-down-teardrop heads with petite noses, cheekbones, and jawlines. No ovoid, obsidian eyes though, and of course not green.

While I realize that chronology seems topsy-turvy, it isn’t. We did live ago-ago-ago with much bigger brains, were geniuses all of us. We make you look like peabrains and I’m not sure you appreciate that.

When you pieced together a female pelvis: “Alright, smart ass, how’d your head fit through the birth canal?”

You thought perhaps too many died in childbirth, like bulldogs?

But it wasn’t that.

Our minds raced faster and farther. We thought better, even originated the cost-benefit analysis. That was it. Looking around, we noticed. We weren’t like other animals who knew where they stood. We’d make fire, the wheel, bread, beer. Homo would change it all.

It was probably the first existential crisis, you know, and if there was written language we’d have tried a manifesto. The only heirlooms you have are tooled skeletons from gone-gone-gone megafauna, and shells we picked up on a beach one day and strung, for the only reason that we liked them, even rolled them in red ochre and let them bake in the sun, your very same sun. We used to finger those shell necklaces like worry beads. Eventually we all looked up from our chests, into each others’ eyes, and knew.

But bones and shells are just husk without the meaty meaning. If we could have left a manifesto you’d know we weren’t like bulldogs; we were like you, like the some of you just now wrapping their heads around Ecology.

We chose not to reproduce, driving ourselves to extinction instead. And the thing was, even as we were doing it, we saw everything wanted to carry on, even us, but we still cut ourselves off. Suicided.

Maybe had we’d stuck in there it wouldn’t have gone as awry. Some stupid choices wouldn’t have been chosen because a bigger pre-frontal cortex would’ve insisted no-no-no. We didn’t realize there were more of us…actually much stupider ones than us…who would bear you instead. We left humanity in the hands of numbskulls, and we’re here, catalogued piece by piece, sorry as you’ll ever be. A fork in our common, primal road. If you follow Guy’s fork you’ll deadend, we made sure of that. But follow yours down-down-down and you’ll see. Where would you be without thousands of years of precedence? Without memes—culture—telling you what was what and how-to?

Feral children are known to hoard containers of liquid and it occurs as such sense to me. Keep water about you, yes, “duh.” It could only seem questionable to the select, to whom water is so gettable. Those who don’t remember the centuries of watering holes and gourds, whose faucets can drown out the thirsty pant of people the whole world over. Hoarding water is really so atavistic, I love it.

If I seem like parent or grandparent, condescending you because I’m older and have lived, sorry again. If it makes you feel better, something will come after you. Maybe something nothing like you, but something, because something always-always-always does.

Chantel’s background is in cultural anthropology. She believes the characters in literature and the people in ethnography are both rendered by authors seeking to establish a place where strange Others make sense. Her work has appeared at Redivider, Rosebud Magazine, Wigleaf, PANK and elsewhere.