300,000 years of illicit romance

In the 1950s, Boston had a sanctuary for “fallen women” called the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers. Respectable society had strict rules about morality, chastity, and who was permitted to sleep with whom. Getting pregnant without a wedding ring was a scandal. Getting pregnant by the wrong sort of fellow was worse. 

When Minako and I married in 1965, we were committing a minor social indiscretion ourselves. She was Japanese. I was Caucasian. We had wandered off our respective racial reservations, and some Americans considered that a serious violation of the natural order.

Indeed, in 16 American states, interracial marriage was still illegal. It would take the Supreme Court another two years to discover that marrying someone of a different race was not a threat to civilization.

Well, hold on to your family jewels, because anthropologists have now uncovered a scandal that makes our little indiscretion look like a Sunday school picnic.

Our ancestors were sleeping with Neanderthals!

SHE SEEMS SO REFINED. TOO BAD ABOUT THE NEANDERTHAL ANCESTORS

And not just Neanderthals. There were Denisovans, too, along with mysterious ancient human populations whose identities scientists haven’t even established.

Who were these unidentified lovers? Did they have names? Did they meet the parents? Did they even come from good families? Grandmothers never breathed a word of this for generations.

Apparently, the prehistoric singles scene was considerably livelier than we imagined.

For years, I assumed Homo sapiens had maintained a respectable, if occasionally rebellious, family tree going back some 300,000 years. Perhaps there had been a few embarrassing relatives, but surely the family bloodlines remained fundamentally pure.

Not a chance.

Our prehistoric ancestors were evidently ignoring every rule of respectable society. They were fraternizing across species lines, swapping partners with hot neighboring populations, and leaving genetic souvenirs that scientists are still uncovering tens of thousands of years later.

No marriage certificates. No country clubs. No background checks. And certainly, no Florence Crittenton Home to clean up the consequences.

The entire prehistoric world appears to have been one enormous, poorly supervised fraternity party.

And here’s the delicious irony.

For generations, the guardians of American respectability have obsessed over pedigree. The Mayflower Society, the debutante cotillions, the old Boston Brahmin families—all proudly tracing their ancestry through generations of distinguished, well-bred people.

But has anyone informed these ladies and gentlemen that many people of European ancestry carry roughly 2% Neanderthal DNA?

Imagine the horror!

Great-grandmother belonged to the Colonial Dames. Great-grandfather graduated from Harvard. Great-great-grandfather owned half of Beacon Hill.

And 50,000 years earlier, somebody in the family was making eyes at an ape-like fellow in a cave.

What does one put on the application to the Mayflower Society?

“Additional ancestry: Neanderthal. Possible Denisovan connections. Several unidentified prehistoric lovers. Documentation unavailable.”

Will the Social Register need a new section for distinguished cavemen? Will the debutante ball require DNA testing before introducing eligible young ladies to eligible young Neanderthals?

And what about our precious obsession with pure bloodlines?

It turns out our family tree isn’t a tree at all. It’s a tangled shrubbery, with branches sneaking into everyone else’s backyard.

Perhaps the real scandal isn’t that our ancestors mingled so freely. It’s that, after hundreds of thousands of years of successful mixing, some of their descendants developed the ridiculous conviction that mixing was immoral.

Minako and I thought we were breaking with tradition when we married in 1965.

Apparently, we were merely upholding a family tradition that had been going strong for 300,000 years.

And to think we never even invited the Neanderthal relatives to the wedding.