Just when you thought that the annual intellectual bar-lowering had gone as far as it could, with record GCSE and A-level successes recently announced for the umpteenth year running, a small item in The Times this week declared: “Neanderthals were not as stupid as we thought.”

What lunacy is this? Have the educational revisionists simply no shame at all? For 20 years we have been fiddling the statistics to make it appear that our imbecilic and delinquent children are getting cleverer (rather than selling drugs, stabbing each other and fornicating), and thus fooling ourselves into believing that all is well in our schools. But surely we do not have to apply the same touchy-feely, pretend-you're-cleverer-than-you-are tactic to an extinct race of proto-humans.

This retrospective revelation of Neanderthal genius comes from Exeter University, and is presumably the work of some Blairite educationist who reasons that encouragement is more constructive than honest assessment, and that we must save the blushes of Neanderthal Man (who has worked ever so hard all term, whacking things with sticks and shouting “Ug! Ug! Ug!”) by giving him grades good enough to ensure a place on a media studies degree course at the University of the West of England at Bristol. Or even Oxford, hang it all, where he will no doubt be a great asset come the Boat Race.

“An investigation of Neanderthal tools [oo-er] suggests that they were just as technologically advanced,” ran the Times item, “as those used by our ancestors Homo sapiens.”

Ye Gods, equality now, after all these millennia. Balls to Darwin. Up yours, Dawkins. Survival of the thickest, that's what we want to ensure.

And I can see where this is going. We're going to have to apologise to them. Gordon Brown is going to have to stand up at some televised black-tie dinner at the Mansion House and say: “On behalf of the British Government, the Commonwealth, and every human being who ever lived, I offer my sincere apologies for ever having suggested that Neanderthal Man was a bit of a durr-brain. And also for the part played by Homo sapiens - which is now unclear, seeing as he turns out not to have been superior in any way - in the extinction of that embattled species 28,000 years ago...”

From there, Mr Brown will no doubt go on to describe Neanderthal Man's recent surge up the intellectual league table as evidence that eleven years of Labour investment in education has paid off, rendering the “individual formerly known as the missing link” more economically mobile than ever before, a veritable torch-bearer for social inclusiveness in 21st-century Britain.

But that will not be enough to satisfy Neanderthal Man's long-nurtured victimisation complex. Camden council will set up trauma units. Students will march. “We're here! We're Homo neanderthalensis! Get used to it!”

You know what? I might sue. I'm pretty hairy. If I squat my knees a bit I can almost drag my knuckles on the ground. And I never did get the hang of trigonometry (I got a B in maths in 1985 which, by today's “standards”, makes me a bona fide moron). I am almost certainly descended from Neanderthals. And I feel retrospectively humiliated by all this talk of our being “stupid”. I want reparations. I want my looted artworks back. I want flint-whittling recognised by the International Olympic Committee. I want a supermodel with a supraorbital torus on the cover of Vogue. I want council leaflets available as a series of grunts.

Now all I need is a Neanderthal lawyer. Shouldn't be too hard to find.

When I saw on the front page of The Times on Thursday that we only had “four months to save £300m masterpieces” I was put briefly in mind of Dale Arden's desperate cry in Flash Gordon: “Flash, I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the Earth!”

I assumed, you see, that something terrible was about to happen. I thought maybe there had been a fire in some gallery somewhere and that if the damaged pictures were not restored immediately then they might in some way cease to be restorable in 16 weeks (I do not know much about art restoration).

Or maybe it was to do with Venice. The big picture on the front page looked vaguely foreign (I do not know much about art either), and I thought perhaps we had only four months to move the church on whose wall it was painted before it was engulfed by the flood waters. Or something.

But it turned out to be nothing more than the old moneybags who inherited them being a bit short of the green and folding just now (join the club, old bean), and deciding to give us, the nation, four months to come up with £100 million to buy them off him.

Or what? He's going to burn them? Now that would be a tragedy. Something would have to be done. I can just see the Duke of Sutherland standing there, ringed by police, holding a flame-thrower to the painting's ear: “Throw the money down over there. Nice and slow. One false move and the Titian gets it!”

But that's not it. What is going to happen if the Government does not come up with the hundred mill for Diana & Actaeon and Diana & Callisto is that his grace is going to sell them for £300 million to some other mug, and they'll go abroad.

Who the hell cares? Art is not about ownership or geography. It is about values greater than time and space. I don't give a damn where a work of art is. I just care that it is. The Taj Mahal is in India (presumably) and the Mona Lisa in Paris, but I don't have to go and see them to enjoy the benefit of their cultural impact.

These two paintings are in no sense more artistically valid by being located in the National Gallery of Scotland than if they were sold to furnish the lobby walls of some hotel in Abu Dhabi. Indeed, I am personally more likely to bump into them there than where they are now.

It's not about the money: the Government could easily raise the cash by selling a big London hospital. It's about getting over the outdated habit of imperial rapine - the “Elginian fallacy”, if I may - that imparts meaning to the mere ownership of art.

If you want to see Diana & Actaeon, there was a perfectly good copy of it on the front page a couple of days ago. Just dig it out of the recycling bin and glue it to the fridge.

But I wouldn't bother - it's no more than a wan snapshot, caught leadenly on canvas as if by some teenage happy slapper with an iPhone, of what appears to be a poacher in very bad sandals coming upon an outdoor brothel for tubby-fanciers, and expressing his horror at the sight of a load of hefty girls with massive bums but no boobs at all - the nightmare combo.

I say we hold on to our hard-earned cash and let the Duke flog it to some crooked Russki so he can wallpaper his sauna.

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