Books

One of the problems when someone doesn’t charge you for a service is that there are risks… For example, yesterday I went to see a friend who had stored thirty boxes of books from my library in his house without charging me anything.

A month ago, there was a terrible storm that flooded the room where my boxes were stored. My friend didn’t tell me about it until yesterday when I visited him on his birthday!

All the books that got soaked, the ones at the bottom of the boxes, are now ruined. But what’s valuable about them isn’t the books themselves, but my countless handwritten footnotes! Yesterday, I realised that among the ruined books was an anthology by Octavio Paz that I treasured; Kubrick’s biography and a traditionally bound copy of the Satyricon (which I have already mentioned on this site). Of course, many other books were ruined too. To boot, all of my Parrish paintings are also ruined (for example, these and these that I had on the walls of the house I used to rent in Yautepec).

I didn’t become upset yesterday with the person who is storing them in his house because he will continue to store the ones that didn’t get wet. But I would like to say a few words about the only book I brought from that house to the small studio that I now rent, where I live.

Since I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the revelation that Vendramini’s work on Neanderthals has represented in my intellectual life, and why our ancestors exterminated them all, the book I brought with me—fortunately, it wasn’tdamaged by the flood—is a Spanish translation of one of those old collectible books published by Time-Life (the English title is The Neanderthals by George Constable).

One of the advantages of old books is that they mention things that don’t appear in updated books. To understand why our view of Neanderthals has changed so much in recent decades, we must bear in mind that since the 1960s, when attempts were made to integrate Negroes into American society, that zeitgeist contaminated academia including the minds of prehistorians. It is a myth to believe that academia is objective, something like a parallel universe to the vicissitudes of the culture that surrounds it. In reality, academics jump on the latest axiological bandwagon, and this is true not only of historians but also of prehistorians.

Vendramini, for example, seems radical to us when he suggests that our ancestors saw Neanderthals as bipedal gorillas with spears. But quite a few 19th-century palaeontologists believed something similar.

Let us recall the quotes from Pierce and Walsh in the featured article: since 1945, the zeitgeist of white men has been sliding more and more towards Christian ethics, especially among those we call neochristian atheists.

Well, in this book, which survived the flood that caused such calamity to my beloved belongings, we can see this 19th-century reconstruction of what Neanderthals looked like. It is impressive because I now discover that Vendramini has not been alone: it is only the political correctness that reigns in academia that causes his work to be ignored (just as the racial right ignores mine for the reason I told Benjamin today).

What’s more, George Constable, who wrote his book in the early 1970s and already sides with this mania of anthropomorphising Neanderthals, at least had the honesty to publish this image:

And in the note next to the image, Constable wonders whether the version of the Neanderthal face that is currently accepted is accurate, given that the same skull can lead the person reconstructing the face to create either a human or an ape-like face.

In the past academia was dominated by a view of prehistory based on the book of Genesis, which is why some scientists were irritated by the discovery of pre-human fossils. Scientists today may not be Christians, but neochristians are as religious as humanity has always been, even though their secular religion is now the dogma of equality among all wingless bipeds.

Returning to Vendramini’s thesis. In Constable’s book, I learned yesterday that Thomas Huxley himself, upon examining a Neanderthal skull, said it was the most monkey-like he had ever seen. And William King, professor of anatomy, wrote that the Neanderthal skull was so distinctly ape-like that, he surmised, Neanderthal behaviour would be like that of an animal. In the 19th century a spade was called a spade, especially that Neanderthals must have been stocky, short in stature with elongated low heads, very pronounced brow ridges, and bulky faces projecting forward; powerful jaws and receding chins.

In fact, Marcellin Boule (1861-1942) was ahead of Vendramini in a way. He published the first analysis of Neanderthals and characterised them as beastly bipeds. In an illustration he made Neanderthals looked like hairy gorillas, and he determined that there wasn’t enough room for frontal lobes, as we have them, in the front part of the Neanderthal brain. (Although the Neanderthal brain was larger than ours, it wasn’t used as much for abstract thinking. The very elongated occipital part of their skulls hosted huge brains, yes: but that side of the brain served another purpose: their superb night vision.) Boule placed Neanderthals between apes and modern humans, but closer to the former, and he despised the beastly appearance of their muscular bodies, whose skulls with strong jaws revealed, according to him, the predominance of a beastly nature.

Boule was not the only one who considered Neanderthals to be gorilla-like in appearance. Even in the 20th century, but obviously before the great reversal of values that began in 1945, Elliot Smith, a London anthropologist working in the 1920s, said that the Neanderthal’s nose wasn’t clearly differentiated from the face, but was fused into: what in another animal we might call a snout. He also pointed out that Neanderthals not only had a coarse face, but probably had a hairy covering over most of their bodies.

H.G. Wells himself said that Neanderthals were hairy or grim-looking, with large mask-like faces, large brow ridges and no forehead, wielding huge flint tools and running like baboons, with their heads forward and not like men with their heads held high. Ahead of Vendramini, Wells speculated that their appearance must have been frightening to our ancestors when they encountered them.

It is curious that, despite its great political correctness, Constable’s book has at least one passage in which he says that, 40,000 years ago, true human beings jumped onto the evolutionary scene by killing the “beast-men” (on the previous page he had talked about our Skhul-Qafzehs ancestors).

By the end of the 1950s, the decade after the fateful 1945, the stain of simianism that had been placed on Neanderthals began to be removed, and neochristian “science” accommodated this new point of view by repudiating the earlier approach. Present-day scientists have even christened Neanderthals as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.

This information is so pivotal that, when I finish reading Constable’s book, I will add another appendix to my very recent PDF on the extermination of the Neanderthals.