Afterword: Ted Kosmatka
This discussion of the story’s origins contains spoilers.
Ted Kosmatka, author of "N-Words," said that the story was inspired by his discovery, during college, that science can not only be wrong, but racist.
"During my sophomore year of college, I had a three-hour gap between classes twice a week, and with nothing better to do, ended up at the campus library where I eventually found my way to the scientific periodicals. The library had issues of various scientific journals dating all the way back to 1906. So that’s where I started, 1906, and I spent the next two years reading my way up to the present. I read every single issue of one prominent scientific journal– nearly a hundred years worth. I’m not sure many people have ever done that. It changed my whole view of science. I learned that science is fallible, and that in the wrong hands, it can absolutely be racist."
"I learned that scientists have always had a talent for proving that people who looked and acted just like themselves–who came from backgrounds just like themselves– were the smartest, best kind of people in the world," he continued. "Don’t believe me? Go to the scientific journals; read the 1920s. You’ll find entire issues preoccupied with racial hierarchies; you’ll find several studies dedicated to helping readers perceive the vast universe of significance which can be inferred from differences in average cranial capacity that amount to little more than a few dozen cc’s. (You don’t even want to see what science did with the US army’s helmet-size data from WWI). But these same scientists who made mountains out of 30cc mole hills are strangely silent on the subject of the Neanderthal– a walk of man whose cranial capacity is actually larger than modern man’s. In some cases, much larger. Another thing I learned about science from reading those periodicals is this: science is very good at ignoring facts which don’t fit the accepted paradigm."
Things are much better now than they used to be–science is better at weeding out the biases of its practitioners–but you can still see those biases bleeding through in spots if you look hard enough, Kosmatka said. "I think this has been particularly true in the case of the Homo neanderthalensis," he said. "If you go to a museum and look at the old displays, a lot of what you see is just wrong. Recent DNA studies are proving that. What you see in those old museum displays isn’t really science at all– but an interpretation filtered through a series of faulty presumptions which are indicative–if they are indicative of anything– more of the biases of the scientists who made the model than of any ultimate truth about the Neanderthals themselves. Why put dark hair, dark eyes, and olive skin on a Neanderthal? Yet again and again, that’s what you’ve seen."
When Kosmatka reads the modern scientific take on Neanderthals, he sees the same old arrogance. "I see scientists displaying a talent for proving that people who look and act just like themselves are the smartest, best kind of people in the word–and our lowly Neanderthal places a distant second," he said. "There is one particular Neanderthal fossil that has always fascinated me beyond all others: Amud I. Amud I was a truly massive individual. He was tall, and not just for a Neanderthal. He was a shade under six feet, and had a cranial capacity of 1740ccs. (Modern European’s average around 1410.) In certain scientific circles, they’re still debating if Neanderthals had language! What the hell was Amud I doing with 1740cc’s worth of gray matter, if not speaking? Brain tissue is metabolically expensive. All that muscle, all that bone, it has to be paid for."
"What do we really know about Neanderthals? We know what their bones tell us," Kosmatka continued. "By the ratios of the carbon isotopes in their bones, we can reconstruct their diets. We can study the marks left by their muscle attachments. We can pour mustard seeds into their skulls and then empty those seeds into graduated cylinders in order to estimate their cranial capacity. So we know this: they had large brains; they had truly massive musculatures not typically found today except in elite athletes. They were hunters of big game. That they are no longer alive isn’t evidence of some intrinsic inferiority."
There is a change coming, Kosmatka said. "We’re at a point when some very difficult questions about cloning need to be addressed; and by addressed, I don’t mean just creating more laws against it which most of the world won’t be bound by anyway," he said. "It’s not enough to create laws against certain procedures because the truth is that man has proved again and again that when a new technology becomes available, it will be used–somewhere. We’ve cloned dogs, and sheep, and monkeys. At some point in the very near future we’ll clone humans. It will happen. But the bar won’t stop there. That bar will keep moving, and I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, because it’s what we do, as humans–we keep moving that bar; that’s our specialty. But there are a lot of different way things can go. And while we’re out there practicing the art of being who and what we are, somebody needs to stop and wonder what will happen if we bring back something that’s better than us."