Author: C .T.

extermination, 12

 
Editor’s note:

The modern man’s body beautification didn’t end with Cro-Magnon: it is a task that continued throughout later prehistory. In some passages from the final chapters of Them and Us, we read:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

The journal, Evolution and Human Behavior recently published a study by Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost, which claimed the genetic mutation in the hair colour gene that resulted in blonde hair occurred about 11,000 years ago and quickly spread through sexual selection. Researchers at Copenhagen University have identified the single point mutation in the OCA2 gene that is responsible for all the blue-eyed people alive today. They calculated the mutation happened between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago in Europe.

This genetic data supports NP theory’s argument that by 10,000 years ago, artificial selection and sexual selection of the nascent human phenotype was in full swing. […]

For example, so thoroughly had the genes for hairiness been expunged, rendered inoperative (turned into what are called pseudogenes) or silenced (which means they are no longer expressed) that today, anyone born with full body hair is considered a medical curiosity. Since records began in the Middle Ages, only about 34 cases of the condition, called congenital generalised hypertrichosis, have been described in the medical literature.

Because of its importance in differentiating the warring species, the Cro-Magnon human face received the full makeover. Faces became more symmetrical. Skin became wrinkle-free, clear and unblemished. The eye whites really were white, the lips fuller and the nose (petite by primate standards) protruded conspicuously from the face. Gone were the two forward-projecting gaping nostrils of the primate nose. Gone was the leathery skin. And gone too was the coating of protective body hair, even in hot tropical regions. Beauty became the prevailing guide to mate selection, and meant the opposite of what Neanderthals looked like.

Further accentuating the divide were mutational alleles for novel hair and eye colours. Amongst some Northern European groups the new lighter colours became highly-prized. From a distance nothing stamped a person one of us better than blue eyes and a coiffure of blonde, brunette or red hair, especially if it was well-groomed and decorated—something the others never did.

The 35,000-year-long process of genetic pruning was so comprehensive that it rendered Cro-Magnons almost unrecognisable from their former selves. They were now much smarter, more artistic, more creative… more human. Behaviourally though, it was a different story. There was still one step to go—one final transition before you’d let one of these Neolithic men date your daughter or sit down with you to discuss the economic meltdown over a decaf cappuccino. The last challenge was to curb—or at least control— hyper-aggression in young males. […]
 

Let ’s be logical about this

Hyper-aggression is derived from the emotional centres of the ‘reptilian brain.’ This means that Cro-Magnon fixed action patterns would have been inflexible, emotional responses. The non-cognitive nature of these behavioural responses is reflected today in psychological attitudes like racism, colourism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, chauvinism, pack rape mentality, vigilantism, hooliganism and vandalism. For the most part, these are not specific behaviours. They are emotional states and psychological mindsets that, under certain circumstances, may predispose violent behaviour such as lynching, gang rapes and ethnic cleansing. Once they are triggered, these behaviours are normally resistant to cognitive constraint. […]

But despite the glacially slow progress, by 1790 the Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French Revolution was empowered in a genuine attempt to curb the devastation of barbarism, anarchy and mob rule.

The theory argues that all the great empires of antiquity—Phoenician, Persian, Greek, Roman, Mongol, Egyptian, Byzantine, Mogul and Aztec—engaged in expansionist re-enactments of the first great conquistadorial campaign by Cro-Magnons against the Neanderthals. Their strategies and techniques have uncannily mimicked Cro-Magnon tactics—classifying the alien enemy as inferior and sub-human; killing the men and raping the women; subjugating, pillaging and enslaving; occupying enemy lands; and showing no mercy. The same innate Neanderthal responses that find expression in ethnic cleansings and internecine conflicts have also been intuitively applied by dictators and unscrupulous politicians.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s note: our gospel or good news

The trauma of Neanderthal predation and Cro-Magnon hyper-aggression shaped our psyches. This is such a significant revelation that I will need to modify the featured post of this site. For the priest of the sacred words the good news is that, under the right circumstances, the desire for extermination can be triggered today as Vendramini himself, a neochristian from our POV, acknowledges.

____________

N.B. You can read the first 35 pages of Vendramini’s book here.

extermination, 11

 
Editor’s note:

“We have to fight to secure the existence and expansion of our race and of our people; to enable them to nourish their children and to preserve the purity of their blood; to secure the freedom of our Fatherland”.

—Hitler

Unlike the movies, the drama did not end with the extermination of the prehistoric Neanderthals. The rest of the hairy hominids that didn’t undergo the genetic changes that led to the ‘naked ape’ had to be exterminated.

Alas, after the passages quoted in the previous instalment (#10), Vendramini’s book falls apart. Like the normie Tom Holland, whose book Dominion helped me understand how Christianity transmuted into neochristianity, Vendramini is also a slave to Christian/neochristian ethics. That is why in the final chapters, despite his professed atheism, Vendramini insists that contemporary humanity is one. In fact, Danny Vendramini had probably the most iconic last line in this book with saying “there is no them and us. It’s all an illusion. There is only us.”

To combat this claim, it is useful to familiarise oneself with Jared Taylor’s books on racial realism, and better still, with the first chapter of Pierce’s Who We Are. It is this first chapter, in which Pierce discusses prehistory, that serves us well in building a bridge between what we have seen so far in Them & Us and history.

Although Vendramini’s book has been truly wonderful up to this point, from the paragraph in which the last Neanderthal was exterminated onwards, the rest of his chapters must be taken with caution (“there is no them and us…”).

Even so, given that a priest of the sacred words longs to ensure the beauty of our females (the drive that motivated the prehistoric exterminators!), some subsequent passages in Vendramini’s book are relevant to understanding that the work of extermination only began with Cro-Magnon man. And had it not been for the greatest historical blunder committed by the Anglo-Americans, Himmler and the SS would have continued the work of eugenics in territories that shouldn’t belong to the Russians but to the Germans who would have fulfilled their Master Plan East.

In the chapter following the one in which, in southern Spain, the last Neanderthal suffered the fate of the dodo, Vendramini wrote:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

This hypothesis proposes that top of the hit list for eradication on six continents were deviants and those perceived to be the others. Theoretically, this could mean anyone who triggered a Neanderthal teem. Pragmatically though, it could include anyone who looked different. If your nose was too flat, your eyeballs not white enough, your pupils not circular enough or your lips too thin, you were at risk of being subconsciously perceived as a Neanderthal—and treated as such. In a world where first impressions were often a matter of life and death, coming across as dumb, crass, humourless or gruff was likely to get you killed. And because nothing creates a first impression better than posture, having a stooped (monkey-like) gait, hunched shoulders or a head that jutted forward on your shoulders was a recipe for a short life.

Because artificial selection was almost exclusively exercised by men, females would be more prone to scrutiny than males. If girls were considered too flat-chested, straight-waisted, wrinkled, thin-lipped, or if the labia protruded beyond the vulva, they would be less likely to pass on their genes.

It was as if these spontaneously self-forming death squads had all been issued with the same orders. And the same hit list. From Spain to eastern Mongolia, and from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego the same motley collection of ill-formed deviants became the target of this sustained campaign of lethal selection. Although it is sometimes argued that ‘death squads’ only emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in South America, they have existed under different guises since prehistoric times. The all too familiar lament of ‘the day men came with guns’ to rape, murder and pillage has its antecedents in the Mesolithic, when men came with flint-tipped spears—to line up the innocents and make their lethal selection. But had a CSI unit of forensic pathologists examined the bodies, they would have seen a pattern to the victims. The selection was anything but random. By this simple expedient, a unique homogeneous human physiology and behavioural repertoire began to emerge simultaneously around the world. This blunt, brutal but chillingly effective scenario is, along with mate selection derived from Neanderthal teems, the only evolutionary scenario that can explain how and why modern humans are today one species.
 

Learning to dance

As a result of this lethal form of artificial selection, behaviours that had previously provided little or no contribution to fitness (like the ability to dance, hold a tune or laugh at a joke) now assumed an adaptive function. When a Cro-Magnon raiding party descended on a community, the villagers’ ability to speak fluently, decorate their bodies or even crack a joke could mean the difference between living and dying. This brings new meaning to conformity—and to being ‘human’. If Neanderthals were thought of as an artless, humourless, crass bunch, then art, tattoos, music, dancing, laughter and singing would become reliable indicators of us.

This generated pressure for everyone to acquire these external identifying signifiers. Men and women began wearing jewellery, tattooing their bodies and painting them with red ochre because they found these cultural accruements to be like passports—facilitating free and safe movement.

Cro-Magnons invented musical instruments and played them as a stamp of their humanity. They told stories, brewed alcoholic drinks and sang songs around the campfire. And they painted pictures on cave walls and fashioned ivory into figurines. Back in the Mesolithic, ‘artistic’ was not an affectation or indulgence—it was a much admired survivalist skill that could very well save your life. Styling their locks, embellishing clothes, tools and weapons—in effect, ‘making a fashion statement’—became ingrained in the human psyche as an adaptive behaviour. In a very real sense, the Cro-Magnons were the first slaves to fashion.

Designer babies

There is every reason to believe that the relentless selection process included newborns. Neonates displaying atypical characteristics were ‘soft targets’ and infanticide was unquestionably the simplest, most cost effective application of artificial selection.

This tells us that the most dangerous time in the life of a Cro-Magnon was immediately after birth. That was when the males would inspect each baby and euthanise any infant they considered beyond the norm. This blunt policy of infanticide probably concentrated on conspicuous Neanderthaloid indicators such as the amount of body hair, facial wrinkles, head size and body fat.

For example, while birth is a challenge for most primate species because of the large size of the foetal head compared to the pelvis, the wide birth canal in chimps and gorillas and the small head size of their babies normally allows safe, unassisted delivery. This predicts that Neanderthal females also had wide hips and small-headed babies to make birth easier and safer.

Applying the differentiation hypothesis predicts that selection pressure would be generated for a larger head size in Cro-Magnon neonates. But even if a large head proclaimed to the tribe that a newborn was ‘one of us’, this reassurance came at a price. If the baby’s head was too big, neither mother or infant would survive. […]
 

Eliminating the competition

The theory that blind senseless violence—that most loathsome of human proclivities—has played a pivotal role in the emergence of modern humans by eradicating vestigial Neanderthaloid remnants from the Cro-Magnon genome, may be disagreeable. However, the model now goes even further. It predicts that as Cro-Magnons colonised Africa and Asia, they inevitably encountered ancestral hominid populations such as Homo floresiensis (below) and Homo erectus. The model proposes that the perceived deviancy of these indigenous people would also trigger them and us teemic responses, that would predispose Cro-Magnons to treat them as if they were Neanderthals, even though they had never seen a real Neanderthal. In other words, the hotchpotch campaign of sexual selection and artificial selection that they applied to one another would now be applied to other species of Homo they came across.

Once labelled generically as them, indigenous hominid species would be subject to the full force of Cro-Magnon aggression. With inevitable consequences.

Could this explain what happened to all those pre-existing populations of hominids and early modern humans spread across Asia, Africa and the Americas? The archaeological evidence certainly confirms that, while there were numerous hominid species living from Africa to Asia before the arrival of Cro-Magnons, once the Cro-Magnons arrived, they all disappeared. The first to vanish were two species of Homo erectus—one in China, the other in Indonesia.

Until then, erectus had been probably the most successful hominid species of all, a tenacious hunter-gatherer who had survived for 1.75 million years and colonised half the globe.

For ages, it was believed that Homo erectus—thought to be the first hominid species to leave Africa—became extinct long before modern humans arrived in their areas. But we now know this is not the case. Recent dating of fossilised bones and artefacts reveals one population of erectus held out on the isolated island of Java until as recently as 25,000 years ago. This coincides with the time humans reached Java. After that, Homo erectus disappears from the fossil record.

Their new cognitive capacity enabled Cro-Magnons to build seaworthy vessels and cross the Timor Sea to Australia. The earliest widely-accepted date for their arrival in Australia is around 38,000 years ago, but a recent review of the data suggests occupation as early as 42,000–45,000 years ago.

When Cro-Magnons arrived, there appears to have been at least one other hominid species already living in Australia—in the south of the continent. Known as the Kow Swamp people, they had relatively large and robust bodies and thick skulls indicating they were related to Homo erectus. It’s thought the Kow Swamp people arrived when there was still a land bridge between Australia and Asia.

The Kow Swamp people appear in the fossil record about 20,000 years ago, and then abruptly disappear. Given that Cro-Magnons entered Australia from the north and the isolated Kow Swamp lived in the south, it is conceivable that the two groups did not make contact for thousands of years. NP theory suggests that when they finally did, the humans promptly wiped them out.

Whether humans were also responsible for the extinction of the diminutive Homo floresiensis—the ‘Hobbits’—on the remote island of Flores in Indonesia about 13,000 years ago, is also impossible to confirm. But again, anthropologists Peter Brown, Michael Morwood and their Indonesian colleagues, who discovered and named floresiensis, argue that they were contemporaneous with modern humans on Flores. This makes them the longest-lasting hominid (apart from humans), outlasting the Neanderthals by about 12,000 years. It also highlights Peter Brown’s claim that these resilient species of the genus Homo may have been direct descendants of australopithecus (like ‘Lucy’), one of the earliest African hominids. If so, then these resilient little fellows managed to survive in a unbroken line for a whopping five million years. Until, that is, modern humans arrived on their island. Once humans arrived, floresiensis abruptly disappeared.

This represents only circumstantial evidence of genocide and requires more proof, but some points are unequivocal. Firstly, by 13,000 years ago, of the at least seven—and possibly dozens, or even hundreds—of different subspecies of hominids which had inhabited the world, there remained only one. Secondly, their disappearance occurred only after the arrival of modern humans. Thirdly, because all other species became extinct, everyone living today can trace their ancestry to the original population of Cro-Magnons in the Levant. In effect, this ‘purification’ of the gene line was evolution by genocide. As an instrument of artificial selection, it was systematic, methodical and extremely efficient. Modern humans owe their present homogeneity to the thoroughness of the genocidal eradication of anyone considered too deviant to fit into the Cro-Magnon culture.

____________

N.B. You can read the first 35 pages of Vendramini’s book here.

extermination, 10

 
The last Neanderthal bites the dust

Despite the sporadic late flowering of Neanderthal culture, the last Châtelperron assemblages (at Arcy-sur-Cure and Quinçay, in France) vanish about 34,000 years ago. Among the last surviving populations of European Neanderthals are those from Gibraltar, dated to 28,000 years ago, but with some bone samples reliably dated as recently as 24,000 years ago. With them disappeared forever one of the toughest and most durable hominid species of all time.

The reason why the European Neanderthal population became extinct when the Levantine human population recovered after its own near-extinction event was, I think, because the persecution of European Neanderthals by Cro-Magnons was not based on dietary predation. When predation is simply about killing for food, prey species usually recover in number when they are no longer worth the time and effort to hunt.

But if the objective of Cro-Magnon aggression was not dietary, then the cyclical pattern that normally allows the prey species to recover its numbers would not occur. Because NP theory nominates genocide as the objective of the European territorial incursion, it predicts that successive generations of humans kept relentlessly hunting Neanderthals throughout their entire European habitat until they were eliminated.

While the genocide model may seem somewhat melodramatic to those who take an anthropocentric view of humanity, it is a lynchpin of NP theory. Ironically, it is also one of the few elements of NP theory that accords with conventional anthropological thinking. The idea that Cro-Magnons killed off the European Neanderthals is a view held by a sizable proportion of academics.

In anthropological terms, it is known somewhat euphemistically as the competitive replacement model, and it was first proposed by French palaeontologist Marcellin Boule (the first person to publish an analysis of a Neanderthal) in 1912.

Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, a computational social scientist from George Mason University in Virginia, calls the replacement a “large-scale violent eviction accompanied by purposive massacre” and defines it as history’s first genocide.

Another supporter of competitive replacement is Jared Diamond, who points out in his book The Third Chimpanzee that the genocidal replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans is similar to modern human patterns of behaviour that occur whenever people with advanced technology invade the territory of less advanced people.

The competitive replacement model is not, however, universally accepted and one of the reasons for this is that it does not explain why Cro-Magnons eradicated the Neanderthals. NP theory’s contribution to the competitive replacement model is to provide the all-important motive—the hatred of a former prey species of its erstwhile predator.

Another criticism of the competitive replacement model is a familiar one—that there are no mass graves or other unequivocal evidence of a genocide in either the Levant or Europe. We learn from watching shows like CSI that violent crimes usually leave some forensic evidence, so we half expect to unearth mass graves or other unequivocal forensic evidence. Realistically though, it cannot be expected that archaeologists will dig up a pile of 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bones from some long-forgotten massacre site, complete with Cro-Magnon arrowheads embedded in their ribs.

Usually, the only time we find fossilised hominid bones is when they’ve been purposely buried or thrown into a bog. Unlike modern massacres like Srebrenica, where an estimated 8000 men and boys were shot and buried during the Bosnian War, Cro-Magnons would not be concerned about burying their victims. It is more likely that Neanderthals would be left to rot at the kill site, or butchered and consumed for their meat. […]

Ultimately, the only certainty is that by 24,000 years ago, the Neanderthals had disappeared forever. […] The world had changed. After more than 75,000 years, the great struggle was over. For the first time—humans were alone. They were now the undisputed ‘masters of the universe’.

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N.B. You can read the first 35 pages of Vendramini’s book here.

extermination, 9

There is reason to believe that hyper-aggression included a sexual component. I proposed earlier that one method of achieving hyper-aggression in young Cro-Magnons males was by selecting for extremely elevated levels of serum testosterone. Testosterone also happens to be the primary male sex hormone, elevated levels of which predisposes increased sexual arousal and activity. This means that, not only were Cro-Magnon men hyper-aggressive compared to modern humans, they were almost certainly hyper-sexual as well.

If Cro-Magnon social groups resembled modern hunter-gatherer groups, they would ostensibly congregate in tribes close to fresh water and good hunting grounds. From there, the young men would launch hunting and gathering expeditions, sometimes lasting weeks, or even months. These bands of heavily-armed hyper-aggressive, hyper-sexual young men—genetically charged with a bevy of powerful hormones—posed a threat not only to Neanderthals but to other human populations.

As a hunting and fighting group, the Cro-Magnon men depended on each other for their survival. They hunted, fought, suffered and died together. And doubtlessly they celebrated their victories together. These emotionally shared experiences would create an indelible bond between the men, far more intense than today’s male bonding of football teams and fishing buddies. For Cro-Magnons, male bonding was not just social, it was a life and death issue. As such, it was a functional adaptation that directly contributed to their survival and reproductive success.

Also deeply ingrained in the Cro-Magnon psyche was the concept of them and us. For them, it represented more than a species divide. It was a life and death distinction, adaptive because it was plain and simple enough for them to understand at a visceral, intuitive level. It had almost nothing to do with rational thought and objective reasoning and everything to do with gut instinct—innate prejudices, sex and violence and deeply entrenched them and us mindsets.

There was no precise intellectual concept of them. The description applied to almost anyone and anything outside the group. Any mix of sex and violence could be meted out without the slightest remorse to anyone branded ‘them’. The Cro-Magnons were probably the most psychopathic humans who ever lived—but they were creatures of their time. With a job to do. And if they had not done their job, none of us would be here.

 
The first genocide

From a broader sociological perspective, it is immediately apparent what these nomadic bands of hyper-aggressive, hyper-sexed Cro-Magnons were doing. They were practising genocide. It was undirected, haphazard and certainly inefficient by today’s standards, but it was highly motivated. And over a few thousand years, the Cro-Magnons drove the Eurasian Neanderthals to extinction.

The genocide hypothesis fits with sociological studies of lethal aggression by male coalitions (modern armies) and with a long history of human warfare, xenophobia and genocide. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin has this to say on the propensity of humans to kill off those they considered inferior:

All that we know about savages, or may infer from their traditions and from old monuments, the history of which is quite forgotten by the present inhabitants, shew that from the remotest times successful tribes have supplanted other tribes.

More importantly, the theory that humans annihilated the Eurasian Neanderthals is consistent with the fossil record of the Levant that shows the Neanderthals disappeared just after the first appearance of the first Upper Palaeolithic humans in the Levant.

John Shea says:

Throughout Western Eurasia, the end of the Middle Palaeolithic period marks the last appearance of Neanderthals in the fossil record. Between 30–47 Kya, Upper Palaeolithic humans expanded their geographic range to include all the territory formerly occupied by the Neanderthals and other anatomically archaic humans. The Middle Palaeolithic period in the Levant was the last period in which modern humans had serious evolutionary rivals for global supremacy.

NP theory goes even further, predicting that a genocidal war took place, that it was successful, and that it was relatively quick. Why? Because the Cro-Magnons were not only militarily much more advanced than the Eurasian Neanderthals, they were socially bonded into a single massive military group that can only be described as an army—or at the very least a proto-army. This was the strategic application of the new socialisation process—a process that effectively united the disparate tribes of Syria, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and other areas of the Levant into a single combative force that swept all before it.

As the raggle-taggle proto-army grew, a tipping point was reached, and the tide began to turn. The Cro-Magnon campaign accelerated its onslaught into a blitzkrieg. Over time, this search and destroy operation became genetically encoded in testosterone-charged adolescent and young adult males and continued unabated—generation after generation—until not a single Neanderthal was left alive from northern Turkey to Egypt.

This view is supported by the archaeology. John Shea concludes in Modern Human Origins and Neanderthal Extinctions in the Levant, “that around 45,000–35,000 BP, Neanderthal fossils cease to occur in the Levant at exactly the point when Upper Palaeolithic industries first appear in Israeli and Lebanese cave sites.”

At the Amud Neanderthal cave, northwest of the Sea of Galilee in Israel, for instance, materials dated from the lowest levels of the cave reveals that Neanderthals first occupied the site 110,000 years ago (±8,000 years). The youngest date measured at the site comes from a single tooth from Level B1/6 which tells us the occupation ended 43,000 years ago (± 5000 years).

Until recently, it was generally assumed that the disappearance of Eurasian Neanderthals from the Levant was caused by a deterioration in the climate. But in April 2008, at a meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Miriam Belmaker from Harvard University deftly demonstrated that the climate in the Levant at the time of their extinction was stable, ruling out climate change as a factor in their disappearance.
 

Power plays and mind games

If NP theory is correct and Cro-Magnons were a hyper-aggressive new transitional species, purpose-built by natural selection to kill Neanderthals, then it follows that even after the disappearance of the last Neanderthal, Levantine males would simply disperse further afield in search of more victims. They had spent several thousand years relentlessly hunting their ancestral foe—this is what young Cro-Magnon males did—and they were not going to stop now.

But NP theory and an understanding of human nature also predicts something else happened: the proto-army of the Levant began to fall apart, and ultimately turned against itself.

The alpha males who, by force of strength and aggression, had maintained cohesion within the group became besieged by eager and ambitious young males determined to assume their mantle. Here, I suggest, is the origin of that unique and ubiquitous pattern of human group dynamics, distinguished by male intergroup competition, power plays, political divisions, leadership challenges, Machiavellian intrigues, betrayals, ‘civil war’ and chaos. The techniques that had been so effective in conquering Neanderthals had found a fertile new outlet within Cro-Magnon society.

As the proto-army grew too large to be effectively managed, fed, organised and controlled, secondary leaders (beta males) saw an opportunity. Taking advantage of the increasing frustration, they agitated, conspired and aspired to be alpha males with access to all the fertile females. Leadership challenges became a constant fixture of the times. Retributions for unsuccessful coup attempts were swift and violent, and deposed leaders would be banished or killed. Dissent spread, disorder became the status quo and eventually some beta males broke away or were expelled, taking their warriors and their families with them. These smaller armies then spread out from the Levant to conquer and colonise their own territories.

While this scenario is, at best, informed conjecture, it is supported by the genetic and archaeological evidence, which reveals the Levant human population did split into at least three large groups that eventually dispersed out of the Levant at precisely that time.

One group migrated east, around the coast of India into eastern Asia, and eventually across the Bering Plain (Beringia) to people the Americas.

A second group dispersed from the Levant to Europe, while a third migrated back to Africa. These migrations all date to between 45,000 to 40,000 years ago.

Suggesting that the third group of Levantine humans migrated south into Africa—their ancestral homeland—is at odds with the long-held assumption that the world-wide dispersal of modern humans began in Africa. Corroborative evidence for the back migration theory only emerged in December 2006, via a landmark study of mitochondrial DNA from ancient human fossils by an international team of 15 geneticists lead by Antonio Torroni from the University of Pavia in Italy. The study, published in Science, reports that between 40,000 to 45,000 years ago, a group of modern humans living in the Levant split into genetically separate groups. Torroni traces one group as it moved north into Europe, and another that moved back to Africa.

By measuring the amount of genetic diversity in the mtDNA and on the Y (male) chromosome, Torroni’s group concludes, “the first Upper Palaeolithic cultures in North Africa (Dabban) and Europe (Aurignacian) had a common source in the Levant”, spreading by migration from a core area in the Levant.

The Upper Palaeolithic Levantine people that Torroni refers to (that first appeared 46,000 to 45,000 years ago) dispersed to south-eastern Europe via Turkey around 43,000 years ago.

The date of the dispersal from the Levant (45,000 to 40,000 years ago) agrees with the near-extinction hypothesis of NP theory and the emergence of a new human species as a consequence of Neanderthal predation.

The pace of this dispersal fits with my more nuanced view that Cro-Magnons, unlike their Middle Palaeolithic predecessors, were not averse to risk-taking, exploration or territorial expansion. It also supports NP theory’s proposal that the incursion into Europe was not a nonchalant nomadic migration in search of hunting and gathering opportunities, but a militaristic blitzkrieg by hyper-aggressive males inherently confident of their colonising and military capabilities. This indication of a new ‘conquistadorial’ component of human nature creates the impression that Cro-Magnons believed their technological and psychological superiority made them invincible—that nothing and no one could stand in their way. This was the first example of military expansionism, and it set the stage for the first real world war.
 

Chapter 20: The invasion of Europe

In Europe, the Cro-Magnons encountered the European species of Homo neanderthalensis for the first time. The narrative history of the two species proposed by NP theory predicts an inevitable outcome of this interaction: that from around 44,000 years ago, when they first entered Europe from the east, hyper-aggressive Cro-Magnon males threw themselves into a protracted campaign against a well-entrenched (and much larger) population of European Neanderthals. This first successful incursion into traditional Neanderthal territory had all the hallmarks of an invasion. Its intention was nothing less than the complete eradication of Neanderthals from their ancestral homeland.

The archaeology shows that the euphemistically named ‘replacement’ began in the east and progressed in a westerly direction across continental Europe. The first Neanderthals to be replaced by Cro-Magnons were living in Eastern Europe, followed by those in France, Greece, Italy and finally Spain.

What the fossil record and carbon dating agree on is that in every individual case of replacement, the Neanderthals disappear from the fossil record only after modern humans have moved into their territory. Even though Neanderthals had survived in Europe for over 300,000 years—often in the most extreme climatic conditions—it was only once Cro-Magnons occupied their territory that they disappeared. In other words, Cro-Magnons swept across Europe in an east-west direction and Neanderthals became extinct in the same east-west direction at exactly the same time.

This is not to say that the European Neanderthals were a pushover. They were a well-entrenched, formidable adversary, with exceptional hunting and tracking skills, knowledge of the terrain, superior physical strength and indomitable courage. And they were now fighting for their lives. The fact that the replacement began around 44,000 years ago and took 20,000 years to complete suggests the European Neanderthals put up one hell of a fight.

Another factor that almost certainly contributed to the protracted nature of the conflict was the size of the Neanderthals’ territory. When Cro-Magnons from the Levant invaded Europe, they could have had no idea that the enemy occupied an area of 10 million square kilometres. And in the Late Pleistocene, a few hundred thousand Neanderthals could easily disappear for long stretches, particularly in the forests and mountains, avoiding contact with the intruders.

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N.B. You can read the first 35 pages of Vendramini’s book here.