Once upon a time there was an original profane kiss. As George Bataille put it: ‘A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.’ We do not know the details, whether it was between a man and a woman, or same sex people, or perhaps it wasn’t a kiss at all but a transmission of saliva that involved the sharing of a meal? It happened about one-hundred thousand years after the last common ancestor between Sapiens and Neanderthals. During this kiss, or meal sharing event (two very intimate situations) Methanobrevibacter oralis was passed from the mouth of the Neanderthal into the mouth of the Sapiens. It still lives on and thrives there in our mouths today. Even though the Neanderthals who once developed this micro-organism no longer walk around in their entirety, another type of reproduction still happened, the reproduction of a very small being that still exists in all our mouths today, passing its lineage down even now. Reminding us that none of us are ‘clean’ in the imagined sense, all of us have been infiltrated, all of us have the Other inside us.
As mammals we are each a larger organism upon which smaller organisms live. Though we may attempt to exert some control over some of those organisms, especially during an epidemic, we can never truly be conscious of what requires our flesh as its home, or what is jumping from another body to ours, and copying itself for the next fifty-thousand years. When we begin to consider this the layering of the cannibalism motif becomes more complex. We start to consider who really ate who? When you consider that it is Sapiens who survives today, or at least 97% of Sapiens, but that we each carry up to 3% of Neanderthal DNA it is worth considering who cannibalised the other. When we think about these survivals, such as those of Methanobrevibacter oralis the outliver bacterial form that has gone on from one mouth to another for all these tens of thousands of years, we begin to realise that infiltration, extinction, and survival happen at numerous levels. Some of them seep up through the pages of my soon to be available People of the Outside, reaching up through the darkness of ancestral memory, hoping to stir up the witch-blood in someone, hoping to activate the well of memory underneath us.
1.Weyrich, L., Duchene, S., Soubrier, J. et al. Neanderthal behaviour, diet, and disease inferred from ancient DNA in dental calculus. Nature 544, 357–361 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature21674