What If?

Last night, while washing dishes, I had a thought. Not a very bright thought, not a very courageous one, but a thought none the less. And it was this:

What if, in the year 12 000 B.C, by the light of a guttering fire in a sooty and ramshackle cave, a Neanderthal man conceptualized the theory of relativity. "Ah ha!" he would have shouted in the guttural equivalent of his still nascent speech mechanisms. "Eureka! Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared!"

Lacking a durable method of communicating such concepts, however, and the theory of relativity having very little practical impact on skinning a woolly mammoth, it was simply lost to the mists of time for another 13 945 years. What if.