its crazy to me when people say they cant understand cat body language cause maybe its the ambigous neurodivergence in me but i find them easier to understand than people. they literally come with a rumble feature to let you know theyre happy. i wish i had that.
I’m very bad with cat body language, but fortunately they are fairly assertive animals who will let you know what they want by their behaviour if their more subtle signals aren’t being read properly. If they move away from me or bat/nip at me warningly (or, with less patient models who aren’t being listened to, bite or scratch) then they want me to stop what I am doing immediately. If they want to be pet they will rub the body part they want pet on my hands. If they want my attention then they will stand between me and whatever I am paying attention to. Even if you’re bad with subtlety, a cat will lose patience and get its message across pretty clearly. And when you get to know an individual cat, it becomes easier to read more subtle signals even if you’re naturally bad at it, and the cat learns to read you.
The weirdest part of 2021 for me was being around humans again. I had spent about nine months in isolation with my cat. She’s a solid roommate and very aware that she is also the responsible one. Not a bad lockdown companion at all! But, it was very strange to realize that most humans don’t grok feline social cues, which I had taken to using quite unthinkingly.
Which is a shame because slow blinking is a simple way to communicate pleasure when one is covering their nose and mouth. Honestly I kinda prefer it to smiling.
The thing is that the portrayal of Neanderthals as having been inherently grotesque and alien to H. sapiens is something we will never have proof of. But we do have proof that, in different locations and in different populations across time, we all found eachother desirable. We saw eachother and wanted to touch. And the offspring were held by their mothers and raised and had their own offspring in turn.
When you look for the first proof that H. sapiens found Neanderthals repulsive, you have to wait until the Victorian era, when the white masters of empires were busy portraying Neanderthals as stupid, brutish, and (of course) dark-skinned.
In more modern times, we’ve had people arguing that instead of seeing Neanderthals as Benighted Savages, they should instead be seen as Noble Savages, (allegedly) cruelly destroyed and driven from their lands by H. sapiens. Which one of their two you believe says more about your modern political views than it does about ancient H. sapiens.
And, whether we construct Neanderthals as Savage or Noble Savage, the fundamental assumption we project into the unfathomably distant past is still that H. sapiens saw Neanderthals as an Other, with the language we use being almost explicitly that of modern racial dynamics.
But we have no proof of any of that. We have no proof of hostilities. We know we co-existed and we had sex. That’s it.
Humans obviously have sex with some humans and kill others. We also know that, when small groups of humans occupy vast spaces with infrequent contact with others, unique cultures will always form, some more hospitable, some more neophobic/xenophobic. But many cultures of small settlements placed among huge unpeopled landscapes place supreme emphasis on hospitality to strangers. Plus, we fucking love other social animals, as evidenced by how we befriended wolves.
I’m a humourless weirdo and a wet blanket about popular constructions of Neanderthals as “monstrous”, and I freely admit it. But that’s because it’s tied up in legacies of imperialism. Not only that, but it also privileges one culture (yours, mine, modernity’s) as being most human by implicitly assuming we can project it onto people in the past. Since you don’t pretend that all global cultures share exact same values as you do, it doesn’t take more than a few moments’ reflection to realise you can’t do that to the past.
We also have more and more proof of how inventive, social and caring the Neanderthals were. So I really don’t believe that the Homo sapiens would have found them particularly weird and unlikeable or hard to get along with.
Homo sapiens on twitter, 90,000BC:
Can I say something? 🥴😳
sometimes I think about the fact they probably wouldn’t have known neanderthals were particularly different from them
Like, idk, we have a wide phenotype variation, idk why someone back then wouldn’t have just been like Those Guys Have A Slightly Different Shaped Head.
Yeah if anything, rather than being “monsters”, they were the original Short Kings.
Compare the two Neanderthals examples on the left with the H. sapiens skeleton on the right:
rebloging but not letting this be ommited
I knew this website wouldn’t let me down
I have the proportions of a Neanderthal. They look like. Well. Me.
“they took pluto from you” “they took dinosaurs from you” “they took neptune from you” grow a second personality trait and stop getting upset that our understanding of the world has grown since you were in 3rd grade
They took naptime from you
Neptune and Pluto are still there?
If you think Pluto is gone because it was reclassified, you might be an idiot.
On the other hand right now I am comfy and safe and it’s quiet and I have a candle that smells like roses burning so it’s not too bright and I don’t want to move. I don’t want to do things.
