During the period of Neanderthal predation, Neanderthal teems were amazingly adaptive. Someone who had never seen a Neanderthal could identify one just by the emotions released by their teems. And when Cro-Magnons gained the upper hand, the teems could release homicidal impulses that helped eradicate Neanderthals. But there was one thing teems and sign stimuli could not achieve. They couldn’t be 100 percent accurate every time.
This is to be expected as neither teems nor their sign stimuli are regulated by cerebral modules in the brain. Nor, at the time, were cognitive-logic networks sufficiently developed to vet the sign stimuli for accuracy or to mitigate their expression. It must be remembered that the amygdaloid complex that controlled the library of human teems is part of the reptilian brain and functions only as a kind of crude but effective hair-trigger. It generates emotions, hunches, urges and intuitions, but not concrete thoughts, ideas or cognitive precepts.
This inevitably led to errors—not a problem during the years of Neanderthal predation because natural selection blindly opted for a policy of ‘better safe than sorry’. But in the post-Neanderthal world, when Cro-Magnon groups encountered each other and had to decide on the spot whether strangers were friends or foes, they were relying on an archaic emotional method of identification.
The pressure this placed on accurate interpretation of Neanderthal sign stimuli was clearly enormous. But what made it even more difficult was that Cro-Magnon physiology varied a great deal. Being nomadic people, the chances were that a group from, say, Greece could bump into a North African group and the small physical and behavioural differences they had accumulated by genetic drift during their separation would often be enough to trigger ancient fixed action responses.
Additionally, the sign stimuli that activate teems are subject to individual interpretation, including personality and gender factors. What one Cro-Magnon man considered deviant and symptomatic of them, another might consider within the range of normality. And when a Cro-Magnon woman might trust her intuition that the mob of scruffy humans she came across were harmless, her male partner might equally respond with paranoid aggression. In the end, they were all trying to make the same difficult call: is that stranger one of us or one of them?
The life-and-death decision as to whether strangers were them or us would have usually been made by groups of hyper-aggressive males. Cro-Magnons were so innately xenophobic, and their decisions so blurred by a torrent of testosterone, they could hardly be called impartial. When it came to assessing strangers, they were more lynch mob than judicial review committee.
Finally, vestigial Neanderthal teems need to be considered in their environmental context. The environment the Cro-Magnons inhabited as they spread out to colonise the world was inherently dangerous and stressful—and not only because of the hostile terrain and dangerous animals they encountered. The Cro-Magnons felt they were at war, even if they didn’t know with whom. They lived in a perpetual state of subliminal vigilance and anxiety. Because they couldn’t know that a large part of their mental functioning was preoccupied with monitoring for others, they were left with a generalised sense of unease—what can best be described as low-level paranoia. At the back of their minds were two beliefs—both encoded by teems—one said ‘someone or something’s out to get me’, and the other said ‘there’s something or someone out there I’ve got to kill’.
Because teems do not produce detailed descriptions, the exact source of the threat was always open to interpretation. Even innocent events, like the appearance of a harmless stranger, could trigger a Neanderthal fixed action pattern—be it fear and trepidation or bluster and aggression.
In other words, Cro-Magnons had two major innate responses related to Neanderthals—‘fight’ and ‘flight’—and paradoxically they were contradictory and mutually exclusive.
Schools teach our children that humans have a fight or flight instinct that originates from encounters with large dangerous animals. That may be true but we know from field studies on other animals that early humans would never choose to fight a dangerous animal if they had a choice. When confronted by a dangerous animal, the most adaptive response was flight.
This raises the prospect that the fight or flight reflex emerged as a result of two contradictory innate behavioural proclivities—to fear and flee Neanderthals, and to confront and engage them. This presupposes that, during the period of Neanderthal predation, humans encoded a number of prey teems that predisposed avoidance and escape. Following the population bottleneck, however, they encoded new teems that predisposed aggression and confrontation. Which kind of teem was released depended on the circumstances. If you were in a group of 100 heavily armed Cro-Magnon males, and you came across a small party of foreign interlopers in your territory, there is little doubt the collective consciousness would favour a fight.
Applying these hypotheses to interaction scenarios between Cro-Magnon groups produces a number of likely outcomes. Young males would tend to interpret superficial cultural, linguistic and physical differences in other groups as signs of deviancy. Because deviancy is a primary Neanderthal sign stimulus, it would trigger one of two basic deviancy teems. One releases disgust, loathing and lethal aggression, while the other releases trepidation. In actuality, whenever two equally paranoid groups of armed Cro-Magnon males met, hyper-aggression and the absence of cultural restraints almost guaranteed there would be some form of violent interchange.
Another predicted scenario concerns the attitude of Cro-Magnons tribes towards outside groups. The tribes that annihilated the Eurasian and European Neanderthals did so because they were militarily superior, which would have been interpreted as evidence of their superiority as a species. This was part of the broader dehumanisation process that created a distinct hierarchical divide between the species. As this divide became innate, it manifested as an inherent belief in the Cro-Magnons’ own mental, emotional, physical, intellectual and military superiority. This anthropocentric mindset would fuel a gung-ho attitude—male bravado—which would have been highly adaptive in the war with the Neanderthals, giving Cro-Magnons the confidence, courage and audacity to take on a formidable enemy. However, when male bravado and the dehumanisation process were directed at other Cro-Magnon groups, they would be anything but adaptive.
With the males of both Cro-Magnon groups—genetically hardwired to perceive their enemy as inferior, with each group innately confident of victory, and in the absence of cognitive faculties able to control these dehumanising mindsets—violence was inevitable.
This vestigial sense of superiority predisposed Cro-Magnons to underestimate the military strength and resolve of rival groups. This meant they occasionally went into battle against overwhelming odds in the belief that they were inherently superior and therefore destined to win.
DEHUMANISATION AND UNDERESTIMATION LIVE ON
Even today, the propensity to see one’s enemies as inherently inferior (dehumanisation), means that warring sides continue to underestimate their opponent’s military capacity and resolve. Historians and cultural anthropologists have cited underestimating the enemy as a major factor in innumerable military debacles, including the Americans in Vietnam,669 and Iraq670 and Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah.671
Anthropocentrism contributed to intergroup violence in other ways too. It was originally adaptive (and selected for) because it helped distinguish humans from the others—it effectively dehumanised Neanderthals. It also emboldened Cro-Magnons with an innate belief in their ultimate victory. But now, long after the demise of the Neanderthals, anthropocentrism was being redirected at human surrogates. The propensity towards de- humanisation continued, but acquired a new focus. It exaggerated minor cultural differences between tribes into an irreconcilable abyss, where each tribe saw the other (subliminally at least) not as a different tribe, but as a different species.
In 1966, psychologist Erik Erikson coined the term pseudospeciation to describe this kind of mind-set. In The Biology of Peace and War,672 Austrian ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt showed how pseudospeciation is used to dehumanise enemies and opponents and justify inhumane treatment and atrocities.
Applied to a prehistoric standoff between two tribes glaring at each other across a clearing, it is not difficult to see that, with both sides hardwired with the same anthropocentric networks (predisposing them to perceive the other group as subhuman by virtue of some deviant characteristic), conflict was unavoidable.
These scenarios suggest that, from the extinction of the Neanderthals (around 28,000 years ago) through the Mesolithic Period and into the Late Neolithic period (2500 years ago), lethal violence between coalitions of armed Cro-Magnons was practically continuous.
Throughout this period, nomadic groups of Cro-Magnons attacked, raped, pillaged, tortured and killed each other in a bloodbath of indescribable proportions.
This hypothetical scenario may seem overly dramatic and judgmental towards men, but it is emphatically corroborated by a sizeable body of evidence from crushed skulls and arrow-riddled bodies from countless Neolithic and Mesolithic mass graves and massacre sites. The data confirm an unprecedented period of endemic intergroup and extragroup warfare from the Mesolithic onwards.673,674,675,676,677,678
The same palaeoanthropological data also identify who was behind this prehistoric wave of violence. They point squarely to male coalitions (or armies) competing for females and material resources. Stefan Bracha, research psychiatrist from the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Honolulu, and his team describe it in their paper “Evolution of the human fear-circuitry and acute sociogenic pseudoneurological symptoms”:
Neolithic inter-group warfare almost exclusively involved attacks against non-combatants in unsuspecting settlements by raiding parties of mateless young, post-pubertal males in search of material and especially reproductive resources.679
Although scholars originally took the view that intergroup warfare was not widespread enough to play a major role in prehistoric society, the latest archaeological data conclusively proves otherwise,680 and the ubiquity and ferocity of this prehistoric conflagration is no longer in doubt. The debate now centres on the evolutionary origins of this prolonged period of intergroup conflict and what if any functional advantage it may have provided, given its seemingly maladaptive nature.
This is where NP theory comes in. It proposes that, although this attenuated period of violence appears haphazard, disorganised and ultimately maladaptive, it achieved two functional evolutionary results. Firstly, it was an expression of artificial selection which, as we have seen, can be a high- speed, super-efficient form of natural selection. Secondly, it directed human evolution down a very narrow physical and behavioural path. The reason for this becomes evident when examined through the perspective of Teem theory. Although Cro-Magnons were now spread out all around the world, their intergroup violence was guided by the same Neanderthal derived teems and sign stimuli. This ensured that the artificial selection occurred in virtually identical forms, all over the world. Guided by identical teems, widely dispersed Cro-Magnon tribes applied lethal violence to exterminate exactly the same kind of people. For exactly the same reasons.
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.
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.
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,681 the wide birth canal in chimps and gorillas and the small head size of their babies normally allows safe, unassisted delivery.682 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. It also meant that a normal isolated birth became much more dangerous.
The obvious solution would be for tribal females to assist the mother during the final stages of her delivery. By guiding the neonate from the birth canal, untangling the cord if necessary and starting the baby breathing, tribal females could neutralise the maladaptive impact of a larger head size. This kind of intelligent intervention was only possible because the assisting females now possessed the cognitive capacity to perform these tasks.
A review of the cross-cultural anthropological literature on human childbirth shows that today isolated birth is virtually unknown,683 and that humans remain the only primate species to require assisted delivery.684
The amount of body fat a baby was born with may also have come under positive selection. Why? Because if, like all nonhuman primates, Neanderthal babies were born with almost no baby fat (antipodal tissue) to make birthing easier and safer, then skinny human babies (with minimal fat) may have triggered Neanderthal sign stimuli.
This equates to a simple protocol—the fatter the Cro-Magnon baby, the more chance it had of surviving. This would result in neonates getting fatter and fatter, until natural selection limited the maximum body size that a woman could deliver and survive. It would explain why a fat baby today is considered a bonny baby and its birth weight proudly announced.
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 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.685 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,686 but a recent review of the data suggests occupation as early as 42,000–45,000 years ago.687
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.688 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,689 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,690,691,692 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 sub-species 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.
Finally, the hypothesis of a hyper-aggressive clade of Cro-Magnons sweeping across the planet killing anything that set off their hair-trigger Neanderthal sign stimuli is also consistent with the extinction of a number of large animal species (megafauna) in Australia and elsewhere coinciding with the appearance of modern humans.693,694,695