"Card, Orson Scott - Heal Thyself" - читать интересную книгу автора (Card Orson Scott)

The woman went away.

My parents picked up binoculars and searched. I also picked out a set and
tried to figure out how to focus it.

"It senses your vision automatically," Father explained. "Just look, and it
will come into focus."

"Bacana," I said. I looked.

There was a lot of dry grassy land, interspersed with drier, sagebrushy land.
In one direction were some trees. That must be where the water was.

"Spotted them yet?" Mother asked.

"To the left of the trees?" asked Father.

"There too?"

"Where did you see them?"

"In the shade of that rock"

I searched and finally found what they were looking at.

Men and women. Long-haired. Filthy. Naked.

My straitlaced parents brought me here to see naked people?

Then I looked again, more closely. They weren't exactly people after all.

"Neanderthals," I said.

"Homo neanderthalensis," said Father.

"They've been extinct forever!"

"For about twenty thousand years, most conservative guess," said Father.
"Maybe longer."

"But there they are," I said.

"There was a long debate," said Father. "About how the Neanderthals died out."

"I thought that Homo sapiens wiped them out."
"It wasn't so simple. There was plain evidence of communities of sapiens and
neanderthalensis living in close proximity for centuries. It wasn't just a
case of 'kill-the-monsters.' So there were several theories. One was that
the two species interbred, but Neanderthal traits were discouraged to such