Neanderthals Decoded video viewable on YouTube, burnishing the image of the extinct Neanderthals, the other human species, and why
The Ideology-Based Rehabilitated and Burnished Image of the Neanderthals Critiqued & Deglossed
The sophisticated flint-rock blades the Neanderthal used requiring a high level of knowledge and experience to make – that took mere months on the part of a well-educated human researcher of our time to figure out how to make and duplicate – are no marvels of ingenuity within the Homo hominid genus and were their best cutting-tool end product over their circa 250,000 year tenure in Asia and Europe, a cutting tool similar in quality and use to that made by Homo erectus, a much older hominid that also, in its later era, may have used pouncing and thrusting spears to kill prey and combat predators (H. erectus did have spears but with a spear point carved onto the spear top that were believed by anthropologists not to be hunting spears but jabbing spears to fend off predators and used as fighting weapons) like the Neanderthals did with sharp stone spear points or spear heads, neither species of which, nor their weapons and tools, matched the prolific, lofty and constant rapid-pace ingenuity and innovation of Homo sapiens sapiens and their arsenal and inventory of weapons and tools, and the quality of these (a species rightly named, in a technological regard, Homo sapiens sapiens). Furthermore, it is a brazen lie in the video that the Neanderthals’ rock sharpening technology (crafting by skilled chipping of stone) marked the first manufacturing process among hominids when the fossil record unquestionably shows that the much older Homo erectus species left numerous large stockpiles of high-quality sharpened rocks/blade stones as well as piles of discarded, as substandard, blade stones clearly reflecting a compulsive sharp-stone, or cutting/blade-stone, crafting (by skilled chipping) and production process on the part of the Homo erectus species that has long been deemed manufacturing (and primitive industrial production) by paleontologists and anthropologists, much later engaged in, or inherited from the H. erectus species, by later evolved Neanderthals and modern humans (all of whom overlapped in their existence).
(Comparisons of the spear points, spears, cutting and other hand tools of the Neanderthals and those of their invader Homo sapiens sapiens counterparts, of east African ancestry, when both species (true “species” of Homo) coexisted in Europe, and for every other kind of early technology they had at the time, the Homo sapiens sapiens technology is observably and acknowledged indisputably and unanimously to be far more advanced by anthropologists and archaeologists, among experts in other culture and technology science disciplines. Anyone can see the comparisons for themselves in science books on this subject in major public and university libraries. No explicit comparison of the weapons and technologies of these species was made in the YouTube video ‘Neanderthals Decoded.’)
Also, comparisons have been made between the skulls of the Neanderthal, H. erectus and modern human species and the skulls of neither of the two former species look like the skulls of modern human; rather, their skulls resemble very much each others’ with the primary, or salient, difference between them being that the Neanderthal skulls are altogether much larger, with larger facial cavities and other features, than those of the H. erectus skull.
Clearly, Neanderthal skulls have the same design as those of H. erectus, including a low fore-skull and very large protruding brow-bone ridges above the eye socket, but with their cranium, face, eye sockets, nose socket and jaw more elongated, horizontally and vertically, than those of H. erectus, and they had a much longer cranium than both H. erectus and modern humans. However, the upper fore-skull of modern humans differs distinctly from this structure in both of these hominid species and all other great apes in its sloping forward above the eyes, in comparison to all of them, and standing higher and nearly vertically or indeed vertically to the dome level of the front of the cranium and lacking their large brow-bone ridges also present in the skulls of the other great apes and now extinct other hominids, comparatively very small and vestigial in modern human males and altogether absent in almost all modern human females (a bone structure housing the evolutionarily most advanced part of the human brain, or primate brain: the forebrain, devoted to the highest level of intellectual activity of the brain, particularly in the cerebral-cortex, neocortex frontal lobes and pre-frontal lobes thereat). By contrast the forehead of the Neandethals and all of these other species acutely slopes back and is low lying. Also unlike these other species, that all have a low-lying cranial dome at the back, modern humans have a up-sloping, high cranial dome at the back.
It deserves genetic testing for determining whether or not Neanderthals and H. erectus are closely related species, given the similarity of their skulls, tool making, tools, weapons and cooking practices, and whether they interbred, given that their species inhabited Asia simultaneously and were both physically massive in their bodies, although the H. erectus species was much taller and the tallest of the hominids during their existence. Genetic testing should also be done to determine whether or not they are more closely related to chimpanzee, orangutan or gorilla ape species or to the extinct H. erectus hominid species (superficially, from skull appearances and skeletal and bone mass, Neanderthals look like a big-brained pygmy H. erectus physiologically optimally adapted to and functionally specialized for cold weather), or all, than to modern humans. Like them, the Neanderthals were short and stocky, in comparison to above-average-in-height and tall east African modern humans, the out-of-Africa emigrant forebears of the European people, and like chimpanzees they were bow legged and indicatively (based on the ear cavity of their skulls) had chimpanzee-sized, very large ears. Incidentally, chimpanzees range in complexion from pale-skinned to black skinned. If Neanderthals, which certainly were hominids, were hominids that evolutionarily branched from chimpanzees (maybe H. erectus-chimpanzee hybrids), then those with the pale complexions and those able to depigmentize in their skin to a pale complexion soonest, given the effects of the low-frequency sunshine and general coldness of Europe at the time, over generations, probably would have had the functional advantage in highly icy Europe and given rise to an eventually exclusively pale-skinned European Neanderthal population. Neanderthals, like most, if not almost all, living primates (monkey and ape species) other than many modern humans, may have had light colored eyes (irises) and minimally membraned lips (simian lips) and reproductively passed these traits as well as their unique pointed or raised nose (a beak-like nose) onto European modern humans, who predominately have these traits, and also reproductively passed the pointed or raised nose onto other human populations in central and western Asia and the Middle East; however, these traits may be convergent evolution, epigenetically acquired. If there was a hybrid-vigor human product from Neanderthal and modern human reproduction, it is not evidenced with clarity in the biology of human population groups, inasmuch as black Africans, and black pan Africans, have the been found to have the highest bone density among modern humans, meaning that the Europeans and other populations of non-contemporary African heritage, with the highest levels of Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, did not receive Neanderthals’ extraordinarily high bone density and mass nor their superior physical strength over modern humans on the whole. Given a comparably balanced, ample and nutritious diet and healthy environment and healthy upbringing, modern humans of different ethnicities and pheno-races tend to approximate one another in the distribution of heights, weights, muscularity and physical prowess, with the latter two characteristics also being highly dependent on individual and group opportunity (including lack of opportunity versus privilege and abundance of choices), social circumstances, values, training and coaching as well as individual genetics.
This video and all of the current scientific media on Neanderthals report DNA test sampling of the human populations around the world bear out that there is a very small percentage of Neanderthal DNA (possibly DNA overlap) in much of the modern human genome, but genetic researchers differ in their findings of its variable percentage distribution among human populations. The European geneticist interviewed in this video reported a maximum of 4% of Neanderthal DNA is found in modern humans, in the population of Tuscany in Italy, within the range of 3%-plus in Europe and parts of Asia, except for China, with the Chinese population having the least in Asia, with a minimum of (not less than) 2%, and sub-Saharan African people essentially having no Neanderthal DNA in their genomes. They reasonably conclude that this means there must have been some interbreeding between the Neanderthals and modern humans. Yet these scientific findings clash with the empirically observable and genetically testable fact that millions of sub-Saharan non-white, non-Asian people in Zimbabwe and South Africa, alone (where European and pan-European men have interbred with often their choice African females for their centuries of colonization and military and trade engagement with all of Africa and black Africa), called coloreds, who are the product of once illegal race mixing decreed by the hypocritical, once white-racist government in these nations, derive from primarily an informal, unofficial white father, with Neanderthal DNA, and a certified, formal black-African mother, and sometimes a such South-Asian father, with Neanderthal DNA. Western scientific racism is a long-time tradition, is entrenched and always finds a way and place for itself. The bottom-line subtext and propaganda for these people is that white people are genetically different and superior to the black people in their midst and under their sway, whom they have come to best dominate, exploit and divest of their lands, resources and humanity (after the indigenous Americans, indigenous Hawaiians, aboriginal Australians and aboriginal New Zealanders, etc.), without offending and scaring economically and militarily more formidable Asians and the Latins of the Americas, who have largely wrested themselves free of white (European and Pan-European) imperial domination and control.
Given the true ape-like face of the Neanderthals (such faces being romantically and sexually repellent to all but some possibly very rare modern humans, being our species – if the irises of their eyes covered the area of the whites (sclera) of the eyes, as seen in the big-brow-ridge great apes of our time but not in any modern humans, whose males have vestigial brow-bone ridges and whose females almost entirely tend to lack them, the Neanderthals likely would not have been perceived as actual people by any people, however culturally primitive, of the modern human race) and their massive bodies and squat legs, any sex and breeding that took place between them and Homo sapiens sapiens, would likely have been initiated by physically overpowering Neanderthal males capturing or possibly receiving in trade or as gifts Homo sapiens sapiens females. In the unlikely event Neanderthal females did not look like whitish or tan-colored humanzees, humangutans or humillas in their faces and were not covered with comparatively dense or abundant body hair (naturally more present on the bodies of humans of mainland European extraction, predominately adult and adolescent males, and on the legs of such females, commonly shaven away or removed chemically or by laser or electronic hair removal devices – thin hair often appears on the arms, legs and chests of black, Native American and Asian males and on the legs of such female with European mixture), there may have been trade between the two species in females or sex raids and rapes on the camps, villages or communities of these species by males of one or both of these species, a common practice among our species in war in the past but to a infrequent and disappearing extent in our time all about the globe. But when civilization breaks down this latter practice reappears with a vengeance.
After having looked at photos of Neanderthal skulls compared with photos of modern human skulls, I am of the judgment that the artist-conception renderings of the facial and head appearance of the Neanderthals favorably distort their looks into closely resembling the flesh-covered appearance of European modern humans. The early scientists who evaluated the first discovered Neanderthal skulls thought them to have a long, large-volume head with a strongly ape-like but human face, a perception with which I concur. I do not recall having seen a photo comparison of the skulls of Neanderthal with the skulls of the three great apes of chimpanzee, bonobo and gorilla in a lineup with that of a Homo erectus and modern human of any race for an objective assessment as to which species, each in the face and shape of the skull (excluding its known long, and therein large volume, or overall large size, the largest of among the primates), Neanderthal most closely matches in appearance – a modern human or one of the species of a great ape, or even a baboon. There is no doubt that Neanderthals were a hominid.and independent lineage of human, but in tools and weapons they were culturally slightly more evolved than the small-brained Homo erectus hominid species, who first used fire for cooking, made stone tools, largely matching those of the Neanderthals, and made and used spears lacking the highly lethal sharp stone spearheads employed by Neanderthals on their pouncing and thrusting spears for confronting and killing formidable predator animals and slaying animals for food. There is evidence that Neanderthals also made and used animal-skin clothes, fashioned crude huts, in addition to having dwelt in caves, made and wore simple body adornments and applied pigments to their bodies, made simple palm-sized sculptures and made and played flutes and may have danced, being a culture exceeding that of any other hominid except for that of modern humans invading their habitats, but much of which was copied from the more-advanced spearhead and blade-stone technology, handiwork, and arts and crafts of the invader modern humans in the waning era of the Neanderthals – since evidence of these products and artifacts do not appear in the fossil record of the Neanderthals prior to the arrival of modern humans in their habitats, these copycat products and artifacts may have come to them or been made for them initially especially by circa adolescent and young modern human females, sufficiently raised in modern-human culture, they came to own and with whom they interbred. However, Neanderthal culture was very primitive compared to that of the modern human culture of the time, a culture that included a very effective array of hunting and combat throwing, kill spears with the most advanced razor-sharp stone and bone tips, an array of lethal thrusting spears with equivalent tips, clubs, axes, sharpened bone and stone knives, sling shots, poison-tipped blow darts, and probably combat shields and bows and arrows ancestral to Africa; an array of handicrafts, elaborate object engraving, high-quality palm and hand-sized sculptures and sizable wooden sculptures, body-painting, exquisitely crafted body adornments (fancy and colorful bead jewelry came from Africa and is still widely made there) and drawing and picturing-painting art, the precursor to design, engineering, mapping, math and writing; that made and used musical instruments and danced (drums, flutes and maybe stringed instrument consistent with those ancestrally made and used in Africa; made quality huts and possibly tents, in addition to having dwelt in cave living quarters; that fabricated and weaved clothing with sewing needles, as well as made clothes from animal skins; that made rafts and boats and fished and swam (whereas, like chimpanzees, Neanderthals did not fish or swim and avoided bodies of water and waterways, those they are misrepresented in some videos and crudely by hand , where approximately 80% of their diet was from largely game meat and bone marrow and the remainder from wild vegetation, including produce); and so forth and so on.
(A woman of European ancestry commented on a evolutionary science site to an article on the branching quadrupedal-ape, hominid and human evolutionary paths from the “pan-prior” primate species some humans are born with a vestigial tail, a documented fact with photos. I replied: This occurs in European, Eurasian and South Asian human populations on rare occasions and not, of record, among Far Eastern nor African human populations, nor among the other arboreal, quadrupedal ape species, perhaps indicating a derivational trait from the interbreeding of modern-humans and Neanderthals in Europe and Asia. Neanderthals had the bodily bone structure, including the long arms and approximate physical strength, and possibly bodily hair, of the contemporary arboreal, quadrupedal, hairy great apes. They may have been a tailed hominid, from a same initial primate ancestor but from a different evolutionary path than some or the other species of hominid, yet evolutionarily overlapping significantly with them and modern humans in convergent evolution. They also may have had the genetic trait for light irises (the colored part of the eyes surrounding the pupils), where all monkeys and apes have light eyes, but unlike all modern humans the latters’ irises cover the entire visible eye region, with the eye whites not showing unless these species are startled or turn their eyes – it is an unanswered question as to whether or not Neanderthals had a iris configuration like modern humans or like the monkeys and other apes. Hairiness of the body is a high-frequency trait in the European human population as well. Progeny of interbreeding between people of European ancestry and Far Eastern or African ancestry, especially males, tend to have visible chest, arm and leg hair that tends not to be readily perceptible or not present in the less so pheno-racially mixed people of the latter geographies. Of course, the greater body hair on people of European ancestry could be an epigenetically acquired adaptation to the historically colder climate of their ancestral geography.)
The fossil record shows that the prehistoric modern humans who last migrated from Africa departed from northerly east Africa and ultimately colonized the world (displacing all other hominid species) between 70,0000 and 80,000 years ago, although with people of many body types, must have had a high incident of the attractive, gracile body type, heads and faces presently common among their successors in this same region of Africa in Sudan, Ethiopia, Tigre, Eritrea, Dijibouti, Somalia, Kenya.and Tanzania – at the time of this emigration the people populating Egypt, likely included in the emigration, most probably would have been black Africans and of the same body type characteristics. The people of this particular phenotype (gracile and of average to tall height, though, with the exception of Watusis, not too tall), of whatever race in our time are most often regarded, worldwide, as the most physically attractive and dominate as exemplars of beauty in the beauty media and modeling business, based on consumer supply-and-demand and sales criteria, perhaps making lots of young females of these African migrants – then not corrupted in their diets with body-bloating and health-undermining addictive modern junk food from modern-day technologically advanced, no-conscience and fake-conscience capitalist nations – highly attractive to the males of both Homo erectus and the Neanderthals, regardless of their dark or black skin, which may be a trait of intriguing exoticism to some different others (granted, there may be xenophobes in any population as well). Incidentally, prior to the 1900s it was typical for teens to marry at the age of 14 and 15 in the US and pan Europe, and for girls to be essentially sold into marriage, even into slavery, from age 13 and under in much of other parts of the world. It is said in the health profession that the body image of physical fitness, natural athleticism (the perceived survival abilities to run, jump, climb, swim, trek long distances and fight or struggle well and engage in good sex), or high functionality, and good health makes in major part for the image of attractiveness, often being the image of beauty.
The many great achievements of modern human society and civilization (Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Indochina and Japan, Asia Minor, Persia, the Middle East, North Africa, northeastern Africa and black upper and west Africa (ancient Punt, Kemet, ancient Ethiopia, Benin, Yoruba, Great Ghana Empire, Mali Empire, Songhai Empire, etc. — the reference here is made to the kingdom of Kemet, and not Egypt itself, also confusingly referred to as Kemet on the internet, that was ruled by black-African monarchs of the kingdom of Kemet for approximately a century, where one must go to a library to read about the kingdom of Kemet and see photos on the major surviving artifact of this civilization, most of which are held in art collections in Germany, the primary source of the books on the kingdom of Kemet), Eurasia, Greece, Rome, the Americas (most notably but not only the Incas, Mayas and Aztecs), Byzantium, Europe, central Asia, the Muslim and Mongol empires, pan Europe, etc., are ostensibly primarily attributable to the species genome of Homo sapiens sapiens and not Neanderthal. Contrary to the conceptions of so many pan Europeans or diaspora Europeans, especially in the US, who are in large numbers virtual Biblical fundamentalists and scoffers of science, the achievements of their intellectual, technical, nerd and geek class came from 1), their embrace of the intellectual legacy and manuscripts of the Greeks, Romans and science-pioneering, scholarship valuing and promoting advanced Arab societies, that also happened to be Islamic (a correlate and not a cause, as some Muslim Arab and Ottoman Turk rulers approved of and promoted secular philosophical, technical, incipient scientific and general scholarship and literary and artistic endeavor despite Islam and religious objections) – some particularly Arab, Mesopatamian and Ottoman Turk societies came into possession of and gathered large collections of ancient Greek, Roman, Persian and Indian manuscripts during the decline and following the fall of the Roman empire, where Turk and European armies brought down the Eastern Roman Empire and looted its material and intellectual treasures; 2), their (European rulers’ and intellectuals’) furtherance and considerable net reward of and from this legacy, nonstop and at all costs – especially of and from engineering, mathematics and science; and 3), the innovation of mass literacy (formal, informal and self education), most impactfully technical and scientific literacy with Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press (actually a greatly advanced product over a rudimentary printing device long before invented and in existence in China) and the spread of publications and books on a vast, populist scale, as well as the such spread of reading and writing, study and scholarship and the practical, strategic and productive application of knowledge in Europe, leading to the worldwide rise of mass education, especially technical education, and rapid advances in technology and standards of living for now billions of people. Claimed special and racially superior European genetics from the interbreeding of European modern humans with cognitively humble but bigger-brained Neanderthals – creatively, technologically and strategically humble compared to modern humans, however primitive in culture, anywhere on the planet when they co-existed – obviously are not credible and the cause of European technical (with emphasis on engineering, mathematical, invention and innovation) and scientific ascendancy in the world in recent centuries. Europeans need to face this fact and bow down before and embrace ethical science and a social conscience, and not delude themselves into believing that they are God’s or nature’s chosen people and get along with the other people in the world as peers, as some of the latter build nerd classes embracing science and high technology, or they will be surpassed technologically and socially again. And my fellow Africans and pan Africans need to take a lesson as to the power of science and disciplined, critical, logic-based (explanations based on object, structural and mechanical relationships analysis and understanding), empirical and technical reason, or reasoning, from the pan-European nerd class and add conscience to it if we don’t want to share the fate of Neanderthal: extinction and a new maximum of 4% presence in the new human genome.
I have no problem with this puff piece on the Neanderthals – I love all of Earth’s creations and creatures, with the exception of some very terrible human individuals and their sometime terrible monstrous followers. I am enthralled with the Neanderthals and would have liked to have seen and met with them on peaceful terms. If they danced, I would likely have liked to have danced with the Neanderthal damsel, even if she was massively built and squat. I would be sure not to upset her.
Note on skin color mutation from dark to pale: Dark people, most obviously Africans and south Asians, regardless of the darkness of their skin, have individual differences (genetically based) for undergoing skin pigmentation change or mutation to a somewhat lighter complexion, a lighter complexion or a pale complexion (from rapidly, to moderately fast, to slowly) that is based on and effected by the amount of exposure to sunlight and heat, or lack of exposure to sunlight and heat, the coldness of the local climate, the length of occupancy in a low-light and cold-climate habitat (based on ratios of cloudy and downpour days to clear-sky and sunny days as well as cool, cold and freezing days to warm days from year to year and over the centuries or millennia), the age of a individual’s exposure, and reproductively through reproductive mate, or sex, selection, where light complexion becomes a mutual practical and aesthetic preference for some male and female individuals and affords an environmentally, resource-access, and survival, and/or functional, advantage to such individuals and their offspring in the generally cold environment and thereby gains momentum socially into becoming a pairing social ideal on the part of those who thrive, parents rearing children and would-be, or prospective, parents. (Dark skin people also occasionally spontaneously, so to speak, parent albino offspring whose males and females may, as a result of aesthetic discrimination by the dark skinned majority population, have to breed with one another in the majority, yet still in other instances breed with the mainstream dark-skinned population. The genetic mutation for blue-eyes in modern humans has been traced, genetically, to have occurred 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, apparently in Europe, long after the extinction of the Neanderthals). A highly overcast and harshly cold environment and climate, such as in an ice age, will indeed, generally but not absolutely in every case, enable those most able to undergo proactive somatic adaptation to the environment soonest to be most functional and best able to thrive in that new environment over time, and will harm, debilitate, marginalize and kill off those least able to somatically adapt, also over time, or in the short run – the environment will exercise a significant role in selecting and deselecting who thrives and who dies in that environment based on individual biological compatibility with the environment and resistance or resilience to disease, trauma and injury, and will thereby play a significant role in shaping the thriving population phenotypes in that environment. A emigrant species sub-population, on a population scale, can undergo almost any genetically allowable somatic change inducable and dictated by a new environment, by biological compatibility sorting out of individuals, largely based on their environmentally relevant physical traits and susceptibilities, within the new habitat, and by geographic isolation and the intrabreeding, particularly, and inbreeding, of that population, over 15 generations (15,000 to 22,500 years for humans, where east Africans entered into Europe approximately between 40,000 to 60,000 years ago – kinky hair can easily change to straight hair over this time scale, where kinky hair is the result, or product, of the low-density of hair-follicles and straight hair the result, or product, of the high-density of hair follicles). Likewise, pale-skinned European people who tan can mutate to a dark-skinned people under the effect of the same natural factors (or natural forces) in a predominately sunny, high-heat, tropical environment and climate, just as such individuals do temporarily when sunbathing on beaches on sunny, hot days in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, USA and Canada, etc.
