By a precarious and traumatic path, the human race has spread across the earth to become the most successful of all mammalian species. Our achievements are extraordinary and yet, despite the pyramids, the enigmatic smile on Leonardo’s masterpiece and our footprints on the moon, modern humans still carry the emotional, physical and psychological scars from long-dead predators. Our genetic cellars still harbour behaviours and maladies, including depression, phobias, warfare and sexism as well as paranoia, racism, genocide and homicide, all of which have their evolutionary genesis in Neanderthal predation.
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. In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy tapped into this primordial fear to whip America into a fervour of anti-communist hysteria. Israeli descriptions of Palestinians as ‘two-legged animals’ and ‘lice’,785 Hutus labelling Tutsis as ‘inyenzi’ (cockroaches) and the Nazi’s classification of Jews as ‘worse than animals’ all have their antecedents in the prehistoric them and us mindset. George W. Bush’s deft association of ‘Muslim’ with ‘terrorist’ in the minds of post 9/11 Americans is a recent example. Beyond politics, the same tendencies can turn a husband’s suspicion of his wife’s infidelity into homicidal rage They supply the emotions that legitimise stoning women for adultery and are behind the disturbing rise of acid attacks on women and girls in Pakistan, Cambodia and other third-world countries.
Because young Palaeolithic girls were at increased risk of Neanderthal sexual predation once they began menstruating, the onset of menstruation was inevitably associated with increased anxiety, stress and depression. Could this explain modern statistics that show the likelihood of severe depression in modern teenage girls doubles in the year after the onset of menstruation?786 Psychiatric epidemiologist Patricia Cohen from the New York State Psychiatric Institute found that severe depression in girls peaks around 13 and 14. “There’s a tremendous risk for depression in girls in the years following puberty,” she says.787
While paranoia is generally considered to be a mental illness suffered by individuals, NP theory argues that innate Neanderthal identification triggers render humans paranoid—as a species. At a cellular level, we are genetically imprinted with a belief that they are still out there, waiting to strip the flesh from our bones, ravish our daughters and devour our infants. As part of our inborn anti-predator defence, we instinctively develop weaponry, stockpile armaments, fortify borders, impose pass laws and enforce inhumane restrictions on refugees. We watch films like The Terminator, Independence Day, I Am Legend, and Jurassic Park because they tap into our residual fears and satisfy our instinctive desire to vanquish what we now define as ‘the forces of evil’.
We separate ourselves into races, religions, sects, classes and ethnic groups in the hope of distinguishing us from them. We enslave Neanderthal surrogates, burning them as witches and denouncing them as communists, reactionaries, homosexuals, Christians, Muslims, Jews or ethnics but, even so, there are not enough stockpiled nuclear devices to make us feel secure. There are not enough submarines to protect our shores, not enough B52s to protect our skies, and not enough locks to keep out the nightmares. Despite decades of unprecedented wealth and prosperity, the citizens of the developed world seem as fearful and anxious as at any time in history.
How can we reconcile our 21st century perception of ourselves as ‘masters of the universe’—beings Shakespeare eulogised as “noble in reason, infinite in faculty—how like an angel”, with the image of a frightened, angry, even demonic species springing half-formed from our evolutionary cauldron and spoiling for a fight?
The tragedy of Shakespeare’s King Lear, his daughter Regan said, was that “he hath ever but slenderly known himself ”. If this is also our curse, it is easy to see why. Just as individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder often repress all memory of the trauma, as a species, we have repressed the collective memory of Neanderthal predation. It’s simply too painful and, strangely, too embarrassing. Our challenge is to honestly and openly acknowledge where we came from, and to look back with compassion and understanding at the travails our ancestors endured to get us here. We owe our existence to their courage and resilience, but we must also acknowledge the mind virus we have inherited that can turn a sensible man into a rapist or wife beater, transform gentle societies into armies, religions into inquisitions and clear-headed villagers into fanatical witch burners.
And what of the Neanderthals? We can begin by acknowledging that, despite almost wiping us out, Neanderthals were themselves just trying to survive. But more than this, we can recognise that they were responsible for the spurt of evolution that transformed us into modern humans. Without them, we would still be rubbing sticks together to light fires.
Despite their legacy of violence, we owe them our beautiful minds. We owe them the joy of music, art, literature, dance, comedy and culture. Thanks to them, we can fall in love. To them we owe our dualistic nature. We are hardwired with a propensity towards mindless violence, but we are also sentient beings who can contemplate the future and consider the impact we are having on the biosphere. Drawing on that intelligence, we may even negate the environmental catastrophe that threatens our planet.
All that’s left of our former predator—one solitary footprint in a Romanian cave. But despite being extinct for over 28,000 years, Neanderthals remain part of our everyday lives—and will continue to influence us, and the course of human history.
I have used three scientific theories to develop NP theory. The first two, Darwin and Wallace’s theory of natural selection and Darwin’s theory of sexual selection are widely respected and form the backbone of biological orthodoxy. The third theory, Teem theory is in its infancy, but nevertheless has provided insights into how emotional responses of early humans towards Neanderthal predation became innate and surreptitiously influenced our evolutionary trajectory. However, my interpretation of these theories and their specific application to the circumstances under discus- sion may not always be correct. Others may interpret these theories differently or draw other conclusions.
One problem with NP theory is the sheer scope of the hypothesis. The number of sub-hypotheses alone almost guarantees there will be errors of both fact and theory. Some of these may be corrected in future editions as a result of feedback. But if Darwin wrote six editions of The Origin of Species to correct errors and placate his critics (even if some scholars, myself included, believe the First Edition was actually the best), then it will take more time than I have left to fine-tune the theory.
And here is another problem. As an independent scholar and autodidact, I lack the resources to substantiate the hypothesis, except in the most perfunctory manner. My research methodology is almost certainly flawed by current academic standards and I have probably not given enough consideration to alternative explanations. In addition, my decision to write the book for a general audience rather than as an academic treatise may have compromised the argument because it is ‘neither fish nor fowl’.
The question of testability may also have a bearing on the theory’s credibility. Throughout the book, I have continually tested aspects of the hypothesis by the hypothetico-deductive method—an hypothesis is proposed, its consequences are deduced, and these are tested against available evidence. But because the predicted events took place up to 100,000 years ago, the archaeological evidence is often sparse and equivocal. In a recent email, anthropologist and archaeologist Mark Aldenderfer, from the University of Arizona, reminded me that “many topics of the deep past may never be tested in a comprehensive manner” (personal correspondence, September 2008). It will be up to academics to extract further predictions from the model and test them against reliable datasets.
When trying to evaluate his own theory, Darwin was buoyed by the fact that natural selection provided cogent explanations for a large number of different phenomena. After the publication of The Origin of Species he wrote to a friend, “I cannot persuade myself that a theory which explains (as I think it certainly does) several large classes of facts, can be wholly wrong.”788
In other words, even if some of the details were wrong, his theory explained so many important facts and resolved enough problematical issues that it was unlikely to be wrong overall. However, he also added, “Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject my theory.”
Applying this criteria, there can be little doubt that NP theory appears to explain many ‘large classes of facts’ relating to human evolution, physiology, psychology and human nature. In fact, it has been called a unified field theory—a simple explanation of the workings of nature that holds true over a wide range of exploration.
And yet, while this seems its greatest strength, some may see it as a negative. How can the evolution of the most complex being on the planet be reduced to one simple theory? Surely the magnificent complexity of humanity cannot be the result of prosaic animalistic forces. Compare this new picture of humanity’s humble and cowed beginnings to the heroic versions in world mythology and religion. The King James Bible, for example, tells us that “God created man in his own image”. If imitation is the greatest form of flattery, this elevates humanity to a kind of ultimate masterpiece creation—the pinnacle of a divinity’s frenetic week of creation.
The same reverence for humanity as the pinnacle of life is also evident in Islam. The Qur’an singles out Allah’s creation of Adam and Hawwa (Eve) from clay as a special case of creation.
Religious, cultural and anthropocentric dichotomies create a subtle resistance to NP theory that will not easily be allayed by rational argument. Similarly, for many mid-career anthropologists who have spent their working lives subscribing to (and defending) the ‘out of Africa’ or ‘regional continuity’ models of human evolution, NP theory may be challenging. The history of science tells us that, initially, revolutionary new scientific ideas are almost always treated with scepticism by the scientific community. In his paper Peer Review for Journals: Evidence on Quality Control, Fairness, and Innovation, 789 Scott Armstrong, from the University of Pennsylvania, reports that, while “trivial new findings threaten no one and are unlikely to offend reviewers”, innovative papers (which he describes as “those with evidence that existing beliefs are incorrect”) are more likely to be judged as defective. Similarly, science historian Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions shows that resistance to innovative findings is likely to be strong and continuing when those findings conflict with established beliefs.790 And psychologist Michael J Mahoney demonstrates that reviewers tend to reject the methodology of controversial papers while accepting identical methodology in papers supporting the orthodox view.791
An anonymous reviewer of a paper on NP theory I submitted to Current Anthropology wrote, “If CA wants to generate a veritable firestorm of commentary, this is the paper to do it!”
They didn’t.
Ironically, Darwin predicted this kind of a priori response to his The Origin of Species. In the last chapter, he wrote, “I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine.”
There is no clear-cut solution to this intellectual conservatism except, as Darwin said, “to look with confidence to the future,- to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality”.792 And that is what NP theory may need—a new generation of young anthropologists, palaeontologists and archaeologists just out of university, who have not already made up their minds about the crucial issues of recent human evolution and who will be able to evaluate the arguments with greater objectivity.
Eventually, a furry, bug-eyed Neanderthal may emerge from a melted glacier and provide physical evidence to prove or disprove NP theory but, until then, it will retain speculative elements.
This, of course, does not mean the theory is flawed. It simply reflects that, by its nature, it is a theory. And history tells us that new scientific theories often take years to be verified or refuted. For example, although Darwin and Wallace first put forward their theories of natural selection in 1859, it was not until the 1950s that the molecular mechanisms of natural selection, (such as point mutations, DNA, RNA, proteins, polypeptides and genes) were fully understood and accepted. Similarly, although Gregor Mendel published his theory of inheritance in 1865, it took another 50 years to identify and articulate the molecular-genetic mechanisms of inheritance.
While this version of NP theory appears to explain a raft of diverse biological and behavioural phenomena, the final version is yet to be written. That will come only after experimenters, clinicians and hands-on researchers have vigorously critiqued and, where necessary, corrected or refuted it. In the interim, this book will hopefully provide a conceptual framework to guide new lines of enquiries.
Although I have not explored the implications of NP theory in detail in this book, clearly they are many and varied. The theory can be applied to resolve a large number of issues relating to human evolution, physiology, behaviour and history. It can be used to identify the evolutionary puppet master behind personal behaviours such as why someone would pay $245 for a bottle of Chanel No 5, why newborn babies tend to look like their fathers, why some people suffer panic attacks, get jealous or become addicted to post-apocalypse video games.
Or it can be applied to understanding deeper issues of the human condition; what is really behind racial discrimination, genocide, stock market panics, the belief in bigfoot, yetis, UFO abductions or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It may help psychologists understand the behaviour of cults, youth gangs, monasteries and other isolated and introspective groups. Analysis of predation stress may provide new insights into depression, pessimism, school shootings, social anxiety and youth suicide. For examples of the enduring legacy of Neanderthal predation, you need only switch on the six o’clock news.
Knowing the secret history of our ancestors becomes a burden of sorts, like hearing painful news about someone we love. For me, the theory occasionally slips from its scientific moorings to overwhelm me with a profound sense of sadness. How many innocent souls have been turned to unlamented dust by hard-eyed men who came with clubs, then spears, then bows and arrows, guns, napalm, tanks and, finally, nuclear bombs? How many have dreaded the fickle gesture that directed them to the left, and survival—or right, to the gas ovens, to be casually exterminated like a cellar of rats.
Just as tragic is the realisation that the wars humanity has waged on itself since the Stone Age are so arbitrary, irrational and so horribly misconstrued. The leader of the murderous Ugandan LRA rebels Joseph Kony is convinced he is on a God-given mission to “cleanse the Acholi people”—ironically something he gleaned from biblical references.793 The Nazi terror was inspired by the concept of an Aryan race and the need to prevent its adulteration by them—Jews and other non-Aryans.
But intuitively we all know it could be sparked by anything. For the victims of firing squads, bayonet charges, scorched earth policies, ethnic cleansings and naval bombardments, the justification is irrelevant. Surely there was only one question in the minds of the victims—how can men be so heartless?
Them and us not only refers to the prehistoric confrontation in the Levant but also acknowledges the ongoing divide amongst modern humans. Understanding and overcoming the redundant them and us mindset looms as the greatest challenge facing humanity today—because in its deadly circuitry lies the potential destruction of our planet.
However, sometimes there is a flash of sanity. On Christmas Eve in 1914, on the western front, English and German troops (above) came out of their trenches and briefly fraternised. They walked across no man’s land and came face to face. For a moment, as they shared a cigarette and posed for photos, the virulent great divide evaporated and they saw the awful truth—we are all humans. There is no them and us. It’s all an illusion. There is only us.
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References for this book can be found at the publisher’s website: http://www.themandus.org
Or follow this direct link:
http://www.themandus.org/References-them+us.pdf