I take in the journal Nature primarily via its podcast. They've recently begun recording and distributing short speculative fiction stories from their "Futures" feature on bonus episodes of the podcast, and for reasons I can't quite articulate, this month's Futures struck a profound chord with me.
The story was "21st-Century Girl" by Adrian Tchaikovsky (link pops), and I am about to spoil the hell out of it, just so you're aware.
The story is written in the first person from the perspective of a young woman who is, we learn, the first, but not last, member of a species Homo sapiens neanderthalensis resurrected by modern sequencing and cloning techniques. It's a brief but smart depiction of the life of a "caveman" in the face of ignorance and the deeply insipid modern media. It's also an optimistic piece of near-future sci-fi, which is something that I, having cut my teeth on Tom Swift before being introduced to classic dystopias and post-apocalyptic despair, find extremely gratifying.
In the story, the scientists who resurrect our close hominid kin are mavericks; they operate, it is implied, in secrecy, and their result - their child - is placed in the foster care of parents who may or may not have been part of the project, but were certainly in on the secret. As a result, the perpetrators of this crime are found out, condemned, and, finally, exonerated only due to society's pressing need for their genius. It was this chain of events which sparked my wondering.
I have no doubt that international law and popular opinion would be quick to condemn anyone presumptuous enough to engage in human cloning. The popular media has consistently portrayed the idea as an abomination, and there's no reason to think that the largely anti-intellectual public would disagree. It's playing God at its most fundamental, right? And resurrecting an extinct race of brutish half-men would seem, if anything, to be even worse -- even more villainous. After all, in the disaster movie mold, who knows what evils you might unleash by tinkering with forces beyond your understanding? And in a slightly more humanist, Shelley-esque vein, what place might a prehistoric protohuman have in our strange modern world?
Such are the pitfalls of taking one's cultural perspective from popular media.
What struck me about the story is... well, a number of things struck me, all at once. Perhaps some of these thoughts had been percolating for a while; this is not the first piece of Neanderthal-resurrection science fiction I have read. But here's what stuck out to me the most, the ringing chorale which backed the rest of my thoughts about the subject matter:
What moral imperative could be more compelling than to rescue a sister race of humankind from oblivion?
For a certainty, no other race of hominids could possibly be any less well evolved to survive in the modern world than we Homo sapiens sapiens. Forget cities; even the very idea of agriculture, the domestication of useful plants and animals, happened only an eyeblink ago in evolutionary time, and we are not genetically adapted to it. We came about in an age of pressure-flaked stone tools, of hunting and gathering and nomadic tribes. No less so our Neanderthal brethren; when they went extinct, they were making tools, burying their dead with ceremony, and almost certainly communicating with a fluency that was at the least within the same realm as our own. Their culture and technology were every bit the equal of ours, and what evidence remains from such an early period in human culture suggests that they were if anything more peaceable. What they lacked is still something of a mystery; some say it was simply the physiology to adjust to a changing climate and more open terrain, while others think all they needed was the aggression to stand up to their more expansionist and ultimately murderous rivals... us. Perhaps all they really lacked was luck.
But we fancy ourselves better today, don't we? Times are less savage and we are more enlightened. Certainly now that we can look higher up Maslow's pyramid, I at least think that we can spend more time on questions of ethics and less on the pressing needs of our kin versus the world. We have more resources to devote to imagination, and we must imagine the world in which we wish to live.
Humanity is guilty of many genocides. There is some debate as to whether Homo sapiens neanderthalensis is among them, but there is little doubt that competitive pressure from our own ancestors at least helped to push our cousins over the brink. It is, in a loose, poetic sense, our original sin. And yet now, in another age, we have discovered a way to bring back, if not all that was lost, at least a voice of the past. We have the technology to reach into the depths of history and pull back an entire species of humankind from oblivion! We have the ability to un-slay Abel, or at least some part of him. Perhaps it would be more apt to say that we can give Abel a son, though he lies long dead. It is the closest we can ever dream to undoing the sin of Cain.
If we were to go back and ask those last Neanderthals, the straggling few tribes who must have known that their kind was doomed, "When you are long gone and only the new men, small, vicious men remain, far, far forward, when the sun has come and gone many many times, there will come a day when those men and women learn at least some degree of peace, and thought, and they will learn to control the very essences of life. There will come a day when your people can be reborn. Now you must die, but one day, long awaited, you may again have a voice. You will be forgotten, but you may, perhaps, long beyond the memory of children's children's children, be recalled again to the world. Do you wish this? Shall we help you to live again in an impossibly distant summer, though you cannot live tomorrow?" If you were to ask them, do you think they would refuse?
Would you?
There are laboratories in the world today that could resurrect an entire dead species of humankind. With the proper funding, the project could go from possible to almost certain.
We could redeem Cain; for the first time in any human memory, we could not be alone. We could have a human family. We could give speech and will and life to a voice, so very close to our own, that has been tragically, unjustly silent for forty thousand years.
What are we waiting for?
