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She’s registering with the Green Party

We know that Neanderthals and early Homo Sapiens (i.e., us humans) overlapped for tens of thousands of years. Neanderthals existed for about 100,000 years before going extinct, and the bulk of the evidence suggests they did not interbreed with us, though we did share a common ancestor. They were our distant cousins.

There must have been some difference that let us flourish but killed them off, but no one knows what it is. We both used sophisticated tools, hunted animals, built shelters, buried our dead and wore clothes. Our DNA is between 99.5 and 99.9 percent identical with theirs.

Common perceptions of Neanderthals as being short, hunched over, hairy, stupid and clumsy cavemen are wrong. They walked as upright as we do. Some lived in caves, but some lived in huts. They were about as tall, as big and as hairless as an average American is today. They also had the same physical capacity for speech. You wouldn't do a double-take if you saw a Neanderthal on the street.

There were some social differences. Neanderthals lived in smaller communities and took care of each other more. They used herbs to cure disease and even buried their dead with medicines. And they didn't specialize as much as we did: Both men and women hunted, and there didn't seem to be as many class divisions. Basically, they lived in communes. They were proto-socialists.

Could their commitment to community have caused their downfall?

It's not surprising that they cared more for their sick and shared their chores more equally. The smaller the unit of government, the closer it can approximate pure communism without crumbling. Think about your own family or close friends. Don't we all chip in? Don't we try to reach consensus on what movie to watch or where to eat?

Then think about your world at large. You hire a taxi driver to take you exactly where you want to go, his particular desires be damned. You pay for a meal off the menu without regard to the personal tastes of the waiter or the restaurant owner.

The larger the unit of government, the closer it must be to pure libertarianism to keep from collapsing. If there is an infinite number of people, it would take an infinite amount of time to ask everybody's opinion, take their votes or redistribute wealth. The only practical solution is local: Every person talks to whichever other people he wants, and others only get involved in the event of a dispute. That's pure libertarianism. It doesn't mean you don't care about your own family — quite the contrary! It means you have hierarchies of caring; you care more for your family than you do for a stranger. A Neanderthal doesn't distinguish.

Will you help someone who is sick? Will you do someone a favor? A Neanderthal says yes, of course, no matter who, because, to him, any other Neanderthal is a part of his group. An early Homo Sapien asks: Who is it, exactly, and if it's not one of my closest relationships, what can I get in return? The Homo Sapiens learned to trade better because there were more gains to his exchanges. The Neanderthals were just one big happy family.

Now, we are likely to soon see a Neanderthal system of government applied to hundreds of millions of Homo Sapiens. Barack Obama's health plan will force us all to pay for the life-threatening illnesses of strangers, while higher taxes and new regulations will continue to discourage free trade. We will take money from those who have it, pay a reasonable wage to the doctors, and save the lives of everybody in our community. What kind of inconsiderate person would balk at slightly higher taxes for more universal health coverage?

That's what the Neanderthals must have thought about those greedy, grubbing humans over there. Just look at them, each only caring about a few particular people instead of everybody. How barbaric. They'll never last, those upstarts.

If they were alive today, how would a Neanderthal participate in politics? They would support more government, on all issues: They'd support Bush's wars and invasions of privacy, and they'd support Obama's health care plan and bailouts. Anything less would be considered uncaring.

Recently, the entire Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA has been mapped. Perhaps they could eventually be cloned and brought back to life.

But what would be the point? And how could we tell the difference?