The Writer As Paleoanthropologist

It comes as no surprise to Dead Beat, amateur paleoanthropologist that he is, that Neanderthal skeletal remains have been found further east than previously known - in Southern Siberia and Uzbekistan.

Neanderthals as you know are our closest relatives - remains date back 400,000 years and they are believed to have died out about 30,000 years ago as modern humans spread around the world - yes, it's an old story.

Still and all, these nomadic traits are ever increasingly more important to the writer wishing to understand the human condition. Russell Banks got it right in Continental Drift and that was back in the mid-Eighties. Who can ever forget Bob Dubois?

Anyway, the thing that Dead Beat is urging here is that all of us who would lean towards the writing line of business should understand that we are evolutionary historians. There are no two ways about this, and no way around it.

Paleonthology. Physical Anthropology. That's the real business we are in.