Chapter 3 - Germany: 30,000 Years Ago part 2

I was a typical man of my day. The youngest surviving child of five sons, I enjoyed my youth during the warm interglacial period that preceded the last glacial maximum. I lived in a fecund valley that was nestled within the mountains of the Swabian Alb in Germany. There was really nothing unusual about me. I was not especially handsome, intellectually gifted or particularly witty. I was above average in height by the standard of those times but otherwise I was just an ordinary prehistoric male living in a wooded mountainous region in Europe.

My father, whose name was Gan, was inordinately proud of his five strapping sons, as if the act of producing five boy children was a testament to his manhood. My father had a tendency to be overly prideful, but everyone I knew forgave him that flaw because he was an honest and honorable man, and because his heart was broken when the love of his life, my mother, died when she was young.

Can any boy say he did not admire his father? Perhaps, but not I. Gan was the model on which all my notions of manhood were based. My father was stubborn and loud and uncouth, yes, but he was also patient and wise and fair, and I worshipped the ground the man walked on.

He was stout, and he had a great wild mane of grey hair, and his voice was roughened by years of smoking merje and all the hearty cries his broad barrel chest had given birth to. He had a full, fleshy face that was seamed by time and exposure to the elements, and a large bulbous nose, which perched like a fat potato above the tangled wilderness that was his beard. A great old lion of a man, that was my father, and I loved him fiercely.

My brothers were just as ordinary as I. Their names were Epp'ha, Grent and Aldh. There was one other, my younger brother Vooran, but he died when we were children, snatched from our father's tent one night by a hungry old speartooth. The people of our tribe called us Gan's Wolf Cubs, partially due to the fact that we were rather similar in appearance, with our mother's auburn hair and our father's sturdy build, but mostly because we were always into mischief, and battling one another constantly for supremacy.

Ours was a hunter-gatherer society and the epoch in which I lived was a time of plenty. There was little violence between my tribe and the other races that lived nearby. I hunted and fished and sought pleasure during my leisure time. The winters were cold but not terribly so. The summers were warm and pleasant.

I had two wives during my mortal lifespan: Nyala, a Cro-Magnon like me, and my Neanderthal mate Eyya. I also had a male companion named Brulde. Between us we had six children, Nyala and Eyya birthing three each. We were a close, happy family before I became a vampire. Our children were plump and rambunctious. The four of us were freely and joyously intimate with one another. There was no jealousy among us, as there was sometimes with group marriages like ours.

The other men in my community ribbed me quite a bit for taking a Fat Hand as a mate, but our quartet was fruitful and I grew accustomed to ignoring the petty prejudice of my peers.

It was not unheard of among our kind to marry outside the species, but it was considered a debasement of our human bloodline—a comical thing. Among my people, mating with a Neanderthal was a little less sordid than mating with a phurgh, our word for a non-sapient animal. It was a bit of hypocrisy, as my people mated with the Neanderthals regularly (there were even ritual orgies on special occasions), but it was just one of those petty bigotries that persist among humans, even to this day.

(You still do it, you know. Only now you divide yourselves by color and religion and political ideology, rather than species. It's a fault of your kind. Always has been.)

The general consensus among the members of my tribe was that the Fat Hands were dumb and ugly, but they weren't. Not really. The popular modern notion that these people were violent, stupid primitives is a huge misconception.

Neanderthals were a short and muscular species, with broad chests and hips and proportionally short, powerful limbs. They were generally hirsute and had bony brow ridges and retreating chins. In all other ways, however, they looked just like us. We called them Fat Hands because their fingers were short and stumpy and they were somewhat clumsy with them.

Although we liked to think their arts were less sophisticated than ours, we traded with them regularly. Their weapons were sturdy, their clothes and housewares durable and aesthetically pleasing. They were just as intrigued with the tools that we produced, which were usually more advanced than their own. They had stone knives and spears and hatchets, which they produced by knapping flint just as we did, but they didn't have bows, except when we traded with them, and then, more often than not, they broke the weapons soon after acquiring them.

You might even argue they were more advanced than my people culturally. The Fat Hands had developed an elaborate belief system, populated with a vast multitude of gods and devils and supernatural beings, and they practiced complex religious rituals to appease those deities. My people were simple ancestor worshipers and held only a few basic religious and moral restrictions.

For instance, we buried our dead and honored their spirits. We did not eat the flesh of other thinking creatures, like the Foul Ones in the north were known to do. If a creature could speak or otherwise communicate intelligently, we called them yemme and killed them only in self-defense or during acts of warfare. Never for food. We did not procreate with our parents or siblings, even during ritual orgies, and we did not kill other members of our tribe.

As such, we had no gods. No Yahweh. No Zeus. No Odin. No Allah. Our pantheon was a litany of our ancestors' names, passed down through oral tradition. We believed their spirits watched over us. We believed the stars in the night sky were their campfires, their Ghost World a reflection of the living world below, as if the spirit realm were a dark mirror suspended in the sky. We swore on their names. We prayed to them for good luck. I can still recall the names of my great-to-the-twentieth-degree grandparents.

Our summer camp was not far from the territory of the Neanderthals, so our groups mingled regularly in the warm season. Our neighbors called themselves the Gray Stone People because they lived in a big limestone cave a day's walk from our summer settlement. We called ourselves the River People, as we mostly settled along the waterways of the valley we considered our territory.

Our camp was a sprawl of animal hide or bark-roofed tents, similar in construction to the wetus of the North American Indians. They were dome-shaped structures, about eight feet high, which housed the majority of our tribe's child-rearing group families. The elders resided in a cave at the center of the encampment, which we called the Siede. During the day, as the adults hunted and gathered, the children assembled at the cave of the elders to be cared for and instructed. The Siede was the hub of our community, where we met to make decisions and practiced what few rituals we observed.

Brulde and I often fraternized with groups of Fat Hand fishermen who came down to the river during the summer months, when our people lived at what we called Big River Camp. Like most of the members of our tribe, we spoke their language and bantered with them while we fished and gathered crayfish and mussels.

Fat Hands divided their labor among different family groups, so we normally saw the same half dozen or so Neanderthal men at the river every year. There were the brothers Kulp and Stodd, the oldest of the fishers, their sons, and then there was Veltch, who was Eyya's father, and Veltch's son Tod, my wife's older brother.

The Fat Hands were good company. They were just as clever as us, with a highly developed sense of humor, and they seemed to enjoy our company as well.

The Neanderthal fishermen enjoyed our crude jokes and took keen delight in our riddles. I think modern scholars would be surprised at how advanced both our spoken languages were. We had no written language but our oral communication skills were nearly as sophisticated as your own modern languages. We certainly didn't grunt and fling feces at one another!

Well... usually we didn't.

I was always fascinated by the Neanderthals. Even as a child, I was excited to see them come down to the river to drink or fish or bathe. I think their size and strength impressed me, as young boys are often impressed by large, powerful things. They were, on average, only five and a half feet tall, but they seemed huge to me when I was a child, and they were stupendously powerful. I also liked their exotic manner of dress.

In the cooler months, they dressed in clothing made of softened leather sewn together with gut string, with heavy outer coats trimmed in animal fur. In late spring and summer, they wore light vests and breechclouts, sometimes even chest armor made of woven plant material or plated bone. I liked the way they bound their hair with string and worked colorful feathers into their braids. They wore necklaces made of shells or animal teeth, and bracelets on their wrists and ankles. They painted their faces in vivid hues of orange and red and white and black, with zigzags and mystic symbols dabbed onto their protruding brows. They always looked so bright and flamboyant that when I see your modern depictions of them, dark-skinned brutes in tattered loincloths, I can do naught but laugh.

When the weather was fine, they would strip down nude and wade into the river to fish, leaving their clothes neatly folded on the bank beneath the trees. In those days, men were not so embarrassed of their genitals. Shame had not yet been invented by the pious.

Even for our people, the young more so than the adults, summer was a time to run naked beneath the open sky, or dressed in as little clothing as possible. Although the adult men normally wore breechclouts and the women grass skirts, summer was always marked by the sight of several dozen Cro-Magnon children playing naked on the hillside or gathered at the Siede for instruction.

I had little patience for the elders of the Siede, however. I took instruction only when I was dragged kicking and screaming to the cave of the old ones, and to be honest, I had only a little more interest in playing with the other children in my village. I had the soul of an otter, my father always said, and I was always down at the river with the Neanderthals.

Their potent masculinity impressed me as a child. I remember wading out with them, naked as the day I was born, to frolic in the water between their sturdy thighs and furry, muscular torsos. I enjoyed helping them fish in the cool rapids. It was my job to pull the flapping fishes from the ends of their harpoons and carry their catch to the creels sitting on the bank. They laughed at my eagerness and called me Little Worm and teased me for being so small and slim and hairless, but it was always with affection, and they were always very careful to see that I was safe. Once, when the river was especially swift, I lost my footing and was almost swept away by the frothing currents, but Stodd snatched me up by the arm and carried me to shore.

"You play here on the bank, Little Worm. The river is too dangerous for you to help us fish today," he said.

"Yes, Stodd," I breathlessly replied, water dripping from my hair.

I'll never forget how carefully Stodd watched after me. He always kept a wary eye on me whenever he was around, as if I were his special responsibility and not just some brat hanging around and pestering the adults. In that he was like a kindly uncle. Contrast that with the modern perception of those prehistoric men!

My father rarely chastised me for my unusual disposition. Gan had a lot of respect for our Neanderthal cousins and trusted them to keep an eye on his rambunctious son. My brothers, however, were not so understanding. Sometimes Epp'ha would tell me I should go live with the Fat Hands if I loved them so much, or Aldh would drag me cruelly by the ear when father sent him down to the river to fetch me home.

The Neanderthals were gentle with us most of the time. We were like children to them, I think. Even our burliest men were slight compared to them. Sometimes they would pull one of our young ones into their lap and sing to them or relate one of their strange religious fables. Neanderthals had larger craniums than their Cro-Magnon counterparts. I do not think they were smarter than us, but they certainly thought differently than we did, if you can imagine that. Their reality was wilder and brighter and much more colorful than ours.

They called us what could roughly be translated as Fast Feet. I think they were amused by our frenetic activity. We were always running hither and yon, making tools and weapons, building new tents or repairing old ones, squabbling and hunting and mating.

By comparison, they were a sedentary people. They rarely hurried. They rarely even seemed to get angry, although when they did it was best to clear the area and let them fight it out. When he was a boy, my companion Brulde had gotten caught in the middle of a knife fight between two enraged Fat Hands. The encounter left him with a pitted scar that curled from his left eye to his jawline. It was a rare outburst, something I witnessed only twice in my life. Poor Brulde was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If I sound overly sentimental about this long vanished race, don't expect me to apologize. It was from this stock of strong but genial people that my Eyya descended… my beautiful, beloved wife.