SONG: “Alone”. (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Based on “What Killed the Neanderthals? A Lack of Social Connection May Have Played A Big Role In Their Extinction”, IFL Science, 04 May 2026, as used in the post “Neanderthals died out from something like loneliness”.
ABSTRACT: I kinda knew this month I’d be on this research. I have a soft spot for Neanderthals. But I also knew I didn’t want a song about them, about this part of them, to be lonely sounding. For one thing, I really like the Paabo idea that we are the Neanderthals, that Homo sapiens neanderthalensis didn’t die out so much as just interbreed with Homo sapiens sampiens to the point that they could no longer be identified as a separate population. So naturally, the last “pure” Neanderthals were the ones that kept their distance from the new folks. Not alone so much as loners.
So that was the germ of the idea, the lone wolf, leather jacketed, too cool to hang out with the normies and the squares.
The music stumped me for a while. Eventually, I just did the thing where you go through the motions — I put down a drum track (this is one of those Led Zeppelin samples that fell off the back of a truck that I doubled, added some snare hits for a surf-beat feel, and some ride cymbal for some slinkiness), and then put a MIDI guitar down. Not knowing what else to start with, I just thought of Adam Faith singing John Barry’s main theme for the movie Beat Girl, which is all 1960s pre-hippie I’m-a-loner, or really she’s-a-loner. Then I changed that around a little to be more descending (like “Hit the Road Jack”), added a horn part, took out the MIDI guitars and put in a real guitar, and added some lyrics that were a little more in the Bo Diddley/The Cramps vein. The mood is about right — more “The Way I Walk” than “Lonesome Town.” I like that the middle verse is basically almost a Bigfoot sighting. And I like that whole thing comes in tight, in less than two minutes. I like to think a Neanderthal would be proud.
(And yes, the first verse is spelled right — the idea is that our narrator made a kind of stringed instrument by twisting gut into a cord and stringing it across a rib or something. One cord, not a chord. Same as the lead guitar riff, right?)
LYRICS:
I made an axe
From a sharpened stone
Played a cord
On a mammoth bone
Lit a fire
And I called it home
… And wherever I walked, I walked aloneNow I seen
All the newer kids
From the trees
Where I stood and hid
And I waited
till they were gone
… then walked the way I walked, and I walked onI lived
Wherever I would roam
And I carried
Everything I owned
That’s the way
All my people go
….We walked until we stopped and then we died alone