Why we can’t outrun the Neanderthals

To become a father is to be plunged into a world of stories. Dragons, tigers, talking bears — some of them half-remembered, from when they were read to me — every night before bedtime. No parent needs an anthropologist to tell them there is something primordial about putting your child to sleep. But could there be something more? Can we make out in our stories, like smudged handprints on a dark cave wall, clues to our deepest history? For the past two years I’ve been reading board books, I’ve kept wondering: are all those giants, wild men and ogres a flicker of memory of the Neanderthals? “The fairy tale,” wrote Walter Benjamin in 1936, “…is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind.” You don’t need an academic to see ancient fears of predators and stranger