Even in a conventional representation of Neanderthal physiognomy (decades ago my father acquired a large book with this illustration), the authors/artist portray them as they were: cannibals.
Last year I read Danny Vendramini’s Them & Us on Kindle. Now I’ve reread it in print.
Reading on Kindle should only be done with mediocre books. It’s astonishing how much information is lost in a screen-based read, unlike on paper where we can use a yellow highlighter and jot down numerous footnotes—a practice that helps us absorb the content.
The fact that Them & Us was one of the few books that greatly improved my worldview doesn’t mean it’s without flaws. Far from it! Vendramini is as liberal and anti-racist as other authors who revolutionized my way of thinking. I’m referring to Lloyd deMause and Alice Miller’s work on the mistreatment of children; how Richard Weikart demonstrated that Hitler was privately a pantheist highly critical of Christianity; and how historian Tom Holland showed that Christian values were transmuted into the ethno-suicidal ethics of contemporary Westerners.
It doesn’t matter that all these authors, including Vendramini, are archetypal liberals. What matters is that it’s perfectly possible to use their findings for the cause of 21st-century National Socialism.
Vendramini published his book in 2009, after Jorge Velasco and an associate of his, “Varg,” wrote their lengthy essay on the new racial classification. An abridged version of that essay appears as an appendix in The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour. But now that I’ve reread Vendramini’s book and better understood its content, I realise that Velasco and Varg relied on accepted wisdom about Neanderthals, who, according to Vendramini, have been anthropomorphised by naïve and politically-correct scholars to the point of being considered human.
František Kupka based his work on Marcellin Boule’s interpretation of the Neanderthal remains found in France: much closer to reality than the primitive humans in the first image.
I’m writing this post because our point of view must be consistent, especially in the texts linked in the featured article. So yesterday I removed a couple of pages from Velasco and Varg’s essay, where the authors failed to notice that prehistoric Neanderthals resembled apes, not humans.
The February 2026 edition of The Fair Race can be read here, and it’s the one now linked in the featured article. However, the PDF of that appendix without this recent censorship is still available on this site, here.
These days I’ve been reading a printed copy of Them and Us, which I used last year in its Kindle version for my excerpts from that book.
A common mistake among young Aryans who rebel against the System, even while admiring National Socialism, is wanting to imitate the men’s sports of the Third Reich.
I’ve often mentioned this moment of the 1959 film when Messala tells Sextus how to confront a Jewish idea that is infecting the Romans: with another idea!
The mistake of these young men lies in not knowing the saying, “For a stick to tighten, it must be made of the same wedge.”
We cannot move beyond the collective Jewish unconscious that has seized the Aryan soul with rough sports for Aryan men. We need to follow Messala’s advice. And to do so, it is necessary to become a philosopher, not in the way philosophy is understood in academia today, but in its ancient sense which implies questioning dogma.
There are several books that revolutionised my view of the world today. In my work on parental abuse of children, I have mentioned Alice Miller, whom I discovered almost a quarter of a century ago.
The next bibliographical milestone was two books by William Pierce: one fiction and one non-fiction, which I have mentioned countless times on this site. Pierce wasn’t a National Socialist, and I had to supplement his work with the memoirs written by Savitri Devi. Both authors address exterminationism.
After I had uploaded many hundreds of posts to The West’s Darkest Hour, I discovered Richard Carrier’s work on the highly dubious existence of the historical Jesus, which profoundly impacted my thinking because, since my early teens, I had been internally struggling with the Catholicism instilled in me by my father.
Last year, just when I thought my worldview was complete, I discovered Danny Vendramini’s book: a study of real prehistory which complements what Pierce wrote in his story of the white race.
We will never defeat the Jewish ideology that has seized our souls without these superb readings. It doesn’t matter that Miller, Carrier, and Vendramini are antagonistic to National Socialism. What matters is that it is perfectly possible to use their findings to further the National Socialist cause, as I have demonstrated on this site.
To young lads who believe that by practising rough sports in semi-secret societies—a healthy Männerbund—they will challenge the System, I suggest they follow Messala’s advice.
Become philosophers! Physical fitness is not enough.
As returning visitors know, our seminal essay, published since The West’s Darkest Hour was hosted by Blogger, is “The Red Giant” which collects comments from a blogger who used to comment under the pen name Conservative Swede (Eric).
In 2009, before discovering white nationalism, I used to argue with Eric on Gates of Vienna: a pro-Western, anti-jihadist forum. One of the things Eric said stuck with me. This “Nietzschean of the North”, as Larry Auster who also used to comment on Gates of Vienna called him, said that he would transvalue some of the values of the 21st-century West to the values of the 1950s; others, to the 19th century; but still others ought to be transvalued to the times of ancient Rome.
As we can see even now, sixteen years after my interactions with Eric, the American racial right only wants to transvalue the decadent values of our century back to the 1950s: these racialists are de facto conservatives. Eric realised that some other values should be reversed to before the 50s. For example, the interaction between men and women was infinitely healthier in the world of Jane Austen, before the first wave of feminism took hold of the Aryan collective unconscious. However, as Eric believed that the primary cause of white decline was Christian axiology (after all, over time that axiology would give rise to feminism), other values would have to be reversed to pre-Christian times, Nietzsche’s ideal.
All of this seemed very logical to me when I discussed it with Eric in July and August 2009. Now that I have discovered a great book about our prehistoric past, I would add something to it.
Since reading Danny Vendramini’s Them and Uschanged my worldview, as to re-evaluating some things back to the 1950s, others back to Austen’s time, and others back to the values of the Greco-Roman world, I would now add a final touch. In our interaction with the Other, it is not enough to behave like tough citizens of the Roman Empire. Let us remember that they committed the sin against the holy spirit of life: mixing their blood with mudbloods. We must re-evaluate much further back in time: to the values of prehistory, when our Cro-Magnon ancestors exterminated the ape-like Neanderthals.
This transvaluation of all values perfectly portrays the subtitle of this site: “National Socialism after 1945”, and contrasts dramatically with those who remain stuck on Mein Kampf as if it were similar to the Christian Bible. In reality, NS is a living philosophy that, over the years, has developed and rediscovered itself.
Eric would disagree with me that some aspects of our notion of good and evil need to be re-evaluated back to prehistoric times. Despite the nickname Auster gave him, “Nietzschean of the North”, he still subscribed somehow to Christian ethics, which forbids us from fantasising about genocide, let alone exterminationism, as if it were something good and noble.
Our Cro-Magnon ancestors would not agree with the Swede. Nor with Auster. Nor with white nationalists. Either our ancestors exterminated the evolved apes, or the genetic foundations for the Nordic race to flourish wouldn’t have been laid.
For the 1909 illustration “The Man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints,” artist František Kupka relied on Marcellin Boule’s scientific interpretation of Neanderthal remains found in France.
I have referred to Neanderthals so many thousands of times in my soliloquies over the decades that I have abbreviated the word to “nerdels” (I use my Spanish expression, which doesn’t capitalise the word Neanderthals).
I want to clarify a point: even evidence by normies challenges the debunkers of Vendramini’s Neanderthal Predation Theory.
The book by George Constable and the editors of Time-Life that I finished reading today, despite subscribing to the current POV on Neanderthals, presents data that confirms what I said about the alleged debunkers: those who claim that Neanderthals lived in climates similar to those of present-day Europe.
Constable’s book states that the hominids who lived in Europe were confined by the seas during the Riss glaciation, and bands of these hominids had no easy way to escape to warmer regions. Later, the nerdels themselves were occasionally isolated during certain periods.
He adds that 75,000 years ago, this pressure acted with renewed force on the nerdels when, once again, the glaciers began to grow. This most recent glacial period, called the Wurm, wasn’t severe at first. It began with snowy winters and cold, rainy summers; however, open grasslands spread, and parts of Germany and northern France, once populated by forests, were transformed into tundra or a mixture of forest and tundra in open areas where mosses and lichens alternated with trees.
The nerdels, Constable’s book states, must have been first-rate hunters because the tundra regions offered little plant food to cover the lean days (exactly what Vendramini says). Many pages later, Constable states that even in the middle of summer, the weather remained rather cold, with average temperatures of ten degrees Celsius, and that winter storms would confine the nerdels to their smoky caves.
Although Constable and his editors fall into the fashionable fallacy of saying that the nerdels were human like us, at least they have the honesty to acknowledge that when nerdel and Cro-Magnon fossils are observed side by side, the difference seems enormous, given that the nerdel has a very elongated and low skull, bulging at the sides and with a protruding “bump” at the back of the skull. This creature had a protruding face, a wider nose and a broad jaw with no chin.
The book mentions the Skhul-Qafzehs fossils, which denote hybrids between nerdel and the hominids of the area: once again, this is in line with, and does not contradict, Vendramini’s NP theory. And on the following page, Constable’s editors mention the possibility that the Cro-Magnons exterminated them.
As I said in last month’s posts: we need academia to cleanse itself of its egalitarian psychosis in order to address Vendramini’s theory on its own merits. In the meantime, I find it sad that we only have Vendramini’s book (who is a liberal atheist) and my appropriation of his work in The West’s Darkest Hour.
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.
Yesterday I watched the critics on YouTube of what Danny Vendramini says in Them and Us: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans. I don’t know if Vendramini still lives in Australia (his website is defunct). At any event, it’s very easy to debunk these “debunkers”.
One of them tried to refute Vendramini’s claim that Neanderthals had fur by arguing that fur can fossilize, and the Neanderthal remains found do not show fossilized fur. What the YouTuber omitted is that this, fossilized fur, rarely happens, so only if the remains of a mummified Neanderthal were ever discovered would we know who is right: the orthodox view of the Neanderthal as furless, or Vendramini.
More than one YouTuber claimed that Vendramini’s statement that Neanderthals evolved in Ice Age Europe was false and that the climate then was similar to that of Europe today.
These “debunkers” haven’t even read the Wikipedia page on Neanderthals and other hominids, which tells us that the origin of Neanderthals dates back to the Mindel Ice Age (between 400,000 and 350,000 years ago), during which climate change and the rise of the Arctic ice cap apparently forced European populations of H. heidelbergensis to seek refuge from the cold on the continent’s southern peninsulas. These migrations isolated H. heidelbergensis populations, inducing a population bottleneck and favouring speciation. By the end of the Ice Age, heidelbergensis populations had already begun to acquire Neanderthal traits. Finally, between 230,000 and 200,000 years ago, H. heidelbergensis had acquired enough physical range to be differentiated into a new species, Homo neanderthalensis.
A YouTuber misrepresented Vendramini by omitting that his bottle-neck theory only referred to our Skhul-Qafzehs ancestors of the Levant, not to other hominids in other parts of the globe (insofar as the latter didn’t clash with the Neanderthals). Another YouTuber misrepresented what Vendramini said, that Neanderthals belonged to the group of primates, as if implying that Vendramini was unaware that Homo sapiens was also a primate—a clear straw man since Vendramini never implied that! He also said that Neanderthals and early humans probably became best friends, good neighbours. I could mention other wishful thinking arguments, strawmen and misrepresentations from YouTubers but I will limit myself to saying that the final straw came when these “debunkers” showed Neanderthal and human skulls side by side on their own cameras.
Anyone not infected with the kind of egalitarianism that wants to make us see niggers as brethren will see with his own eyes the enormous differences between the two skulls. I couldn’t believe what I was watching in the “debunkers'” videos…For example, although the visual impact is that we are looking at another species, one that looks more like an evolutionised ape (see the protuberances above the eye sockets and the great occipital elongation), these YouTubers were claiming, by posting images like the one above in their own videos, that Neanderthals were humans like us! Of course, not a word came from the lips of these “debunkers” about the fact that Neanderthals had eye sockets much higher than ours.The “debunkers” also didn’t say a peep regarding another of Vendramini’s observations: that Neanderthals had larger eyes than ours.To grotesquely insult our intelligence, one of the main “debunkers” included this image of… a purported Neanderthal girl several times throughout his video! Another of the “debunkers” had no choice but to acknowledge that throughout Europe multiple caves have been found whose remains prove that Neanderthals were cannibals. But he was quick to exonerate them by claiming that Homo sapiens had also eaten human flesh. This reminded me once again of how anthropologists, so imbued with the precept of loving one’s neighbour, write about the “noble savage” while idealising infanticidal cultures (see the delirious cases I compiled on this subject in my Day of Wrath).
Many other things the “debunkers” alluded to in their videos, such as whether Neanderthals could sew or use flowers at their funerals, can be answered simply by reading the Wikipedia page on Neanderthals—taking into account that Wikipedia is aligned with these YouTubers’ anti-white agenda. A calm reading of that Wikipedia article puts in its place the exaggerations the YouTubers had to resort to in their eagerness to dismiss Vendramini’s Neanderthal Predation theory.
Forget the YouTubers. They’re white trash. Only when academia returns to the hands of scholars who don’t hate the white man (and that would only happen after a revolution) can Vendramini’s work be valued on its own merits.
I just realised that I made a mistake at the beginning of the “Neanderthal Extermination” series by omitting the reasons why prehistoric Neanderthals didn’t look like what museums, collection books and TV documentaries show us. This video by Danny Vendramini himself corrects that mistake.
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.
A motley collection of yetis, abominable snowmen and sasquatch from popular culture and mythology, all bear a striking similarity to Neanderthal physical characteristics.
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.
“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 Dominionhelped 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.
Intergroup violence is so pervasive in human history, we tend to take it for granted. (From top) a prehistoric drawing of archers and victim from a cave in Castellón, Spain; the biblical massacre of the innocents; the shooting of Kiev Jews by Nazis; the My-Lai massacre by American troops in Vietnam; and skulls of the victims of the Rwandan genocide.
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.
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’.
Gorham’s Cave (centre), Gibraltar. Although the water now laps at its entrance, when Neanderthals lived there the sea level was much lower. According to Clive Finlayson, this is where some of the last European Neanderthals held out, hunting seal, dolphin and fish.
____________
N.B. You can read the first 35 pages of Vendramini’s book here.
