Hope you are doing well. I’m back in the old country.
It seems you found a perspective-changer in Them and Us. If you deem this work to be important, it is only right that I delve into it too. Anthropology can be quite fascinating, and there’s much to learn in the tens of millennia of our evolutionary history.
Be aware, though, the topic of Neanderthals can be a divisive one. Varg Vikernes, a vehement Nordicist, believes that we actually descend from Neanderthals, not Homo Sapiens.
He believes Neanderthals were a superior race, due to their skull size and body strength; that Sapiens were an African racial inferior who, through the use of civilisation and its technological advantages, defeated and outbred their forest-dwelling, big-brained cousins.
I have a lot of respect for Vikernes, but I think he is biased towards Neanderthals due to his anti-civilisational worldview, which is clouding his judgment.
Here is a link to Varg’s website, where he “debunks” anti-Neanderthalism.
I centre my philosophy on the 4 Words. I believe it took astronomic hatred to birth blue-eyed beauties into this world.
If you wish to post this email as a comment on WDH, go ahead.
Cheers,
Mauricio
3 replies on “Hello César,”
On preliminary investigation, my intuition too is that his judgement is clouded somewhat. I was under the impression, according to Vedramini at least, that we won due to our newly-developed sheer hostility and aggression, albeit cooperative, not necessarily due to ‘civilization’ or greater tech. I don’t think we are what we are because we interbred with them. If anything, we did our hardest to kill off the mutants.
I’m not sure quite how to comment on the big brains issue – I’m not an IQ-centric person, and I see other qualities beyond intelligence that would perhaps have helped us more, as they would help us more today. The IQ-fixated crowd do not seem to account for the fact that, past a certain point, IQ is an encumbrance, and has no real play on will, and certainly for later psychoclasses, none on the 4 words. As I wrote before, it has no play on sheer driven hate. I think of your Chess champions, are how ineffective they are outside of that specialised field; how much they waste their time/lives. Just enough intelligence to conduct meaningful cooperative action, and only then, in later historical conditions, to consider boosting it.
How does the big brains theory work exactly, is it in terms of depth and weight of neural connection, as some other animals have very large skulls (and indeed greater bone density and muscle mass) and, though impressive on the EQ score, are still not as smart as us? It depends how closely we consider Neanderthals related to us at all. He makes no mention of them being vicious predators who preyed on us when we were at our weaker point, neither does he reference their non-human physiology. A sign of intelligence would also be cultural output, which seems missing in Neanderthals. Also, they cannibalised their own, surely quite a savage, subhuman trait. Potentially smart, or indeed even strong, does not make one human.
It feels like a case of wishful thinking, stemming from admiration. It’s true though, I also think civilization has weakened us greatly, and partially stunted our evolutionary development, and I am not much of a fan of technology. As an aside, I’d like to preserve agriculture though.
I don’t think Vikernes has read Vendramini.
Regarding the Neanderthal skull, dolphins’ brains are also larger than ours, but that doesn’t mean they’re more intelligent.
Vendramini says that if we look at the Neanderthals’ greater cranial capacity, we see it’s the occipital region. This means that this region served the gorilla-like Neanderthal to decode what his enormous eyes saw at night: it’s the area where that brain mass, decoding faculty is located. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, instead of night vision developed their frontal lobes, and thanks to this our ancestors won that ethnic war.
Vikernes neanderthalism mostly comes from ideas that were developed by his wife. She thinks that neanderthals are the originators of an ancient cult and are the ancestors of all nordic people.
More about her can be seen in her youtube channel here:
LINK