Caring For Tina: What Neanderthals Can Now Teach Us About Altruism

-Analysis-

MADRID — The first time I had a clear notion of our fragility was in the cave of Nerja. That is where the skeleton of Pepita, a young woman who died in 6,000 BC, is preserved. She died of a simple ear infection at the age of 20. That visit as a child left me with a fascination for caves and an irrational fear of ear infections.

I remembered Pepita when I heard about Tina, who lived long before her. Tina’s story has been reconstructed from a cranial fragment of her right ear – the ear again! – found in the Cova Negra in Xàtiva, in eastern Spain. The curious thing about this Neanderthal child is that it has been determined that she had Down’s syndrome and lived to the age of 6 because her group took care of her. We know that she lived between 270,000 and 146,000 years ago, which places the documented origin of altruism in the Homo genus very far in time.

What led this group of Neanderthals to act this way is the idea that no one is expendable, even if they represent a burden and no matter how unfavorable their living conditions were. What did they have to gain from caring for Tina for six years, whom I imagine as helpless as the “little girl” in Mario Camus’ movie The Holy Innocents?

Absolutely nothing in strictly material terms. Everything would have been easier without Tina: There would be no need to feed another mouth in vain; therefore, there would be no need to hunt and risk suffering for that mouth; there would be no need to stop when Tina required it; there would be no need to play, hug, waste time with a girl who could not even articulate a word.

I imagine that the members of her clan soon understood that Tina’s situation was not going to get much better, and yet they gave her, and themselves, six years of their life, with her. They did the math and knew they were winning.

Sublimation of selfishness

I think there is something very important in this altruism, in the empathy or solidarity of the group with the individual that has more to do with the group of the ables than with the disabled. Today, there is a very narrow idea of altruism. There are those who see it as an acquired and inalienable right of the weak, as if it had always existed. But it is not a right; it is a human condition, and something every human heart has to conquer.

There is no law that forces others to genuinely care for you. The fascinating thing about Tina’s case is that the group, the community, understood that they had to gain from the situation. That their life would be better and larger, with more nuances, with a helpless, useless child, than without her. What Tina had brought to their lives was a gift, not a burden: the opportunity to find themselves capable of much more than just providing food and interacting with the able-bodied. To become, at last, human.

This sublimation of selfishness makes altruism a beautiful and meaningful thing.

Recently, a 2017 interview of former Real Madrid footballer Pedja Mijatovic in El Mundo resurfaced on social media. He speaks about his son with cerebral palsy, now deceased. While he was winning cups and Champions Leagues with Madrid, acclaimed and glorified by all, the Montenegrin helplessly witnessed his son’s crises.

What moved me about his statements was what might seem most selfish: Mijatovic says that his son, who had a short life, a dramatic life if you will, had a mission: to save his father, to bring him back down to earth at a time when others were praising him.

Mijatovic not only lost nothing taking care of his disabled son who did not even speak and made his days difficult, but he came out on top. For himself, mind you.

It is this sublimation of selfishness that makes altruism a beautiful and meaningful thing: knowing that the winner is not only the person being cared for, but also and above all the one who cares. He won in imponderable terms related to his own incomprehensible human condition.

Subcontracting altruism

The essence of empathy shows through humans, not through the law. That is why I am concerned about today’s empathy, atrophic affections, the sterilization and subcontracting of altruism.

Today, contrary to Tina’s time, the group delegates pain and illness: They send their old people to a nursing home, pay taxes so they do not to have to feed the poor directly, walk past a man lying in the street because 911 will eventually come, look for outside assistance to care for the sick, comes up with express discharges for people suffering chronic depression in clinics in Switzerland, and considers the birth of a girl like Tina a failure.

As we acquired material well-being, we lost the ability to fulfill ourselves in adversity.

We believe deep inside, even if we don’t say it out loud, that the whole community wins by protecting it from what is defective and painful. And we are so twisted that we think that they are the real winners, those poor things, for they’ll be better cared for there than here.

In less than a hundred years, as we acquired material well-being, we lost the ability to fulfill ourselves in adversity. The welfare state was created with a philosophy similar to that of the Neanderthals. But in a society damaged by individualism and hedonism, it has ended up being the opposite: a sad franchise, a firewall for those who are fit to keep away suffering and misfortune. Others will take care of it.

No, we are not more empathetic because we have public health services, social security, rights for everything, a variety of heartfelt words to describe the weak, and a thousand ways to get rid of them. We are not better off but worse off, from a human point of view, than that troglodyte community who lived six wonderful years with Tina. Because they lived it with Tina, and that is precisely what matters.