“The latter becoming increasingly necessary as the centuries passed and the Neanderthal species started to gradually become more daring, spending ever more and more of our time above ground.   Not only when we were observing our Cro-Magnon enemies to see if they had started to evolve out of their murderous ways, but also when we hunted animals in small groups and picked fruit and berries to eat.   Gradually down the millennia we had developed skills in carpentry and weaving, allowing us to build crude weapons to kill game and baskets to carry fruit back to our underground world.

“From time to time we were spotted by Cro-Magnon descendants who coined new names for us: Yeti, Big Foot, MI-GO, Sasquatch, and, of course, Yowie — a named coined by the Australian Aborigines more than 30,000 years ago.   Although most of the Cro-Magnons now ran in terror at the sight of the hairy man-apes, as they also called us, a few showed scientific curiosity toward us and tried to follow us back to our world.

“If we had had reason to believe Cro-Magnon had lost his savagery down the millennia we might have welcomed the scientists.   But the truth was otherwise.   We had been watching Cro-Magnon on-and-off for thousands of years and everywhere we looked we saw our enemy waging war after war against his own kind.   Civil wars and World Wars, Hundred-Year Wars and religious wars, race wars and wars of every persuasion, waged for every possible reason, or often for no discernible reason at all.   So, despite our desire to return to the surface of the planet permanently, we knew that it would be suicide to do so.   Homo Sapiens-Sapiens was no less a threat to our existence than Cro-Magnon Man had been 50,000 years earlier.   So, we have continued to go our separate way, living in underground stone cities while Homo Sapiens-Sapiens rules the over world alone….”

The Elders stopped for a moment and Ernie and Bear both thought that they had finished.   But then they started again and Ernie continued to translate for Bear:

“We still watch the progress of your species above ground from time to time,” Ernie translated, “still hope that one day our two types of humans can live together above ground.   But we fear that day may still be many millennia away in the future.