| The Hunter-Gathering Storm |
Paleo-censorship and self-interest
For the last 30 or 40 years, the specialists have come to the conclusion that anatomically modern humans
had something to do with the disappearance of the Neanderthals. The great tug of war has been primarily
between cooperation and competition, between love and war. The goal of these lobbyists and crusaders
is not to do Science, but to win the hearts and minds of their colleagues through which they later win the
hearts and minds of the general public. It is by proving their particular theories 'right' and 'correct' that they
get to be considered for participation in NOVA, National Geographic, and BBC documentaries. And this
gets the fame and research funds flowing their way. In this day and age, 'science' has become a popularity
contest with prizes for those who 'win', much like a beauty contest. It is the fame and funds aspect of
contemporary 'science' that has ruined Science. The tools that the establishment uses to preserve its
privileges are the peer review system and, of course, the prizes. Peers and prizes have the effect of
'certifying knowledge' and granting genius status. If your coreligionists vote you a Nobel medal, you can
henceforth prevent anyone from speaking their mind. ...And you become part of the problem...
The war faction: the hawks
Until it was recently overtaken by admixture, the party line was that humans outcompeted, overkilled, or
in some unfriendly way displaced the Neanderthals. The paleontologists simply did not have a theory to
justify the extinction of the Neanderthals that did not involve Man. Even the advocates of climate and the
environment ultimately introduced humans to finish them off. It was just too coincidental in the eyes of
these analysts that humans appeared in Europe at about the time that Neanderthals disappeared, and
they nevertheless had no alternative mechanism to justify not only the disappearance of the Neanderthals,
but of any species that vanished all alone in a background extinction.
The worldly wisdom among the hawks of Paleontology and Anthropology is that humans used their
advanced weapons of mass destruction and their keener intelligence to wipe out the Neanderthals.
Specifically, our forefathers used the spear as a javelin whereas the Neanderthals never managed to go
beyond using them as pikes and bayonets. Our cousins used rodeo clown tactics to distract big game
such as Woolly Mammoths and stabbed their prey at close range. These tactics were outdated. Therefore,
when the two species met it was no contest. It became a war of thrust against throw... and thrust lost
out. Our glorious and smarter armies won by remote control. And this was fortunate for us. Had the
Neanderthals gained the upper hand, we wouldn't be here today. These are the appalling statements made
by professional, university-educated paleontologists today. The experts talk as if our African forefathers
planned the conquest of Europe carefully. The Cro-Magnon generals at North African headquarters
apparently realized that whichever of the two species controlled the Middle East corridor would become
master of two continents.
Is this how the Neanderthals became extinct? Are the scholars saying that if Man had not appeared, the
Neanderthals would have lived forever? And that if Man had not appeared, H. erectus would have also
lived forever? I wonder, then, why H. habilis did not live forever. We weren't even around when they
disappeared 1.4 million years ago!
When it comes to theorizing the paleo-experts are not much brighter than the Neanderthal apes they claim
to descend from. Never has a hunter-gatherer wiped out another one unless there were two of them and
they were both stranded on an island. The lone rabbit does undoubtedly go extinct if placed in a cage with
a fox. Yet, although lions hate, kill and compete against hyenas, leopards, cheetahs, jackals, and wild dogs,
they have yet to evict any of these lighter competitors and enemies from their lands. More fundamental yet,
the worst enemy of a lion is another lion. Likewise, the worst enemy of a Neanderthal was another
Neanderthal. And the worst enemy of a Cro-Magnon was another Cro-Magnon. There was as much
infighting as there was interspecies struggle: every man for himself! Our experts insinuate that humans
banded together and invaded as an army. This is Hollywood fantasy in its entirety! Extinction has
nothing to do with interspecies struggle.
Dating
The grand assumption underlying both love and war theories is that humans and Neanderthals coexisted
in the same region at the same time for at least 5,000 years. It was in this interval where our forefathers
either married or annihilated the Neanderthals. If humans and Neanderthals never met, more than 90% of
the researchers and theorists out there have wasted their professional lives.
The problem in Paleontology is that we have yet to have foolproof dating methods. All methods available
depend on markers referenced to something else, sometimes to things in different geographical zones.
The paleontologist has to make a call based on his best interpretation of the evidence. Although it is not
entirely subjective, an expert cannot tell you what second, minute, hour, day, or even year that something
occurred. Sedimentary rock analysis, Carbon 14, DNA, and other such methods are ballpark techniques.
Their best accuracy is in terms of thousands of years with ranges also hovering in thousands of years.
The most super-duper accurate readings for the last Mousterian Technology (Neanderthal tools and
weapons) is 40,000 years ago. The earliest most accurately dated human skeleton found so far is dated
to 37,000 years ago. So what does a fanatic admixture theorist do? He fudges with the dates. He gives
the specimen a wide enough range of dates to encompass Neanderthal. The report just mentioned states
that the mandible of OASE 1 at Pestera is 37,000 to 42,000 years old. This range is politically correct and
very convenient. It allows the admixture lobby to continue peddling interspecies sex.
These readings actually show how desperate war, competition, and interbreeding theorists are to persuade,
convince, convert, and recruit members of the general public. An objective analyst would at least retain a
healthy dose of doubt and withhold his opinion about such theories. Instead, war, competition, and
interbreeding are sold as proven facts, and gullible people by the thousands buy them as such on the basis
of authority.
Strategy?
But let's concede for the sake of argument that humans started arriving at the boundaries of the
Neanderthal Empire 45,000 years ago, 5,000 years before the Neanderthals apparently went extinct.
The advanced party would not have had the numbers to dislodge the established Neanderthals. Did this
group wait for the rest of the army before planning their attack? Or did they start throwing the missiles
and cutting down the Neanderthal ranks from the start? Keep in mind that the Neanderthals were not
only on their home turf, but had no need for clothes. They were built for snow and ice and Arctic weather
and their bodies almost certainly had hair all over. The Neanderthals looked like gorillas. In contrast, the
humans who drifted into Europe quickly invented clothes and shoes to deal with the harsh climate. These
hunter-gatherers were used to the mild African temperatures in which had evolved. It is difficult to believe
that humans were superior to Neanderthals from a military standpoint when factoring in addition that the
Neanderthals were used to doing teamwork to bring down big game. The lone human spear thrower did
not stand a chance against the mighty bands of stronger pikemen.
Nevertheless, the incursion would have at best been a trickle. The small bands of modern humans seeping
into Neanderthal territory would not have been able to dislodge the existing population of Neanderthals by
force unless the Neanderthal populations were already in remission due to other factors, the factors that
actually brought about their extinction.
The Great Hunter/Gatherer World War 45,000 - 35,000 years ago It was bayonets against javelins. The phalanxes lost! |
Mechanisms
There are three different mechanisms for extinction of the Neanderthals proposed by the weapons 'experts':
- 1. war: One species kills the other outright or drives it off, leaving it to starve in an
unfamiliar environment.
2. competition: The species live side by side as neighbors hunting the same game,
but one gradually drives the other to extinction because it is more efficient.
3. Humans reproduced more often and left more children.
As it stands now the spear experts have not made up their minds. Sometimes they talk about war and
other times about competition for resources. Which is it? Or are they just throwing everything in the pile
to cover all the bases because they have no clue?
In other words, were the spears used to fight or to hunt? Were they used against competitors or against
prey? Are we talking about weapons or tools?
All out war?
A false prophet of paleontology is easily recognizable. A genuine paleontologist never talks about weapons.
He knows better. First, there is no such thing as all out war between wild species of hunter-gatherers,
except maybe in the sets of Universal Studios. There are skirmishes here and there between a pride of
lions and a bunch of hyenas, nothing that would eliminate either species from the face the Earth. Hunter-
gatherers are more concerned about finding food and avoiding injuries than about conquering and building
unmanageable empires. The entire notion of war belongs exclusively to 'civilization', to people that have
watched too much TV. The subject of weapons should not even be raised in a discussion about extinction.
The proponent will just be flaunting his ignorance about the fundamentals of Anthropology and hunter-
gathering. The hunter-gatherer numbers for such undertaking are simply not there. The population density
is too low, and the necessary logistics are beyond their capabilities... not to mention their needs.
Therefore, it is ludicrous for the directors of 'documentaries' to mislead the public by dramatizing how
Cro-Magnons organize for battle. They should learn that a hunter-gatherer is more interested in hunting
the day's supper and avoiding injury than in fighting cavemen. Their advisers, the paleontologists who help
them make such movies, should refuse to participate in such a fraud... unless they actually believe that
that's how things actually happened...
Competition
When paleontologists allude to military struggles between Neanderthals and Man they are truly talking
nonsense, but they are actually trying to say that there was a gradual infiltration of scattered hunter-
gathering groups of Cro-Magnons into the lands that had belonged exclusively to the Neanderthals for
thousands of years...
- "it is likely that Homo sapiens played a critical role in their demise. That
does not mean we chased them down and killed them – an unlikely
scenario given their muscular physiques. However, we may have been
more successful at competing for resources"
It is said that extinction has to do with competition: a better adapted species drives the other one to
extinction.
It would be more like the explosive population of lions encroaching on the lands of the tigers rather than a
deliberate attack by coordinated armies. We are talking about competition for food and not about attacking
the other with the purpose of annihilating them.
However, there are a few problems with competition as a mechanism for extinction. Humans were not so
much more efficient than Neanderthals if at all, and they nevertheless specialized in different game.
Neanderthals typically hunted mammoths, bison, and other large animals in their Golden Age and were
quite good at it judging by the fact that they lived in Europe for 400,000 years. Humans hunted deer and
rabbits and fished in the streams, an activity that the Neanderthals never mastered or cared for.
Cro-Magnons certainly hunted a deer and even Woolly Mammoths, but under no circumstances did they
drive the Neanderthals to extinction by depriving them of game. There was ample game for both species
as shown by the fact that mammoths, deer, and other large prey outlived the Neanderthals. Indeed, the
abundance of game is what drove the Cro-Magnons to migrate to Europe in the first place.
Were the fertile valleys worth fighting for? If agriculture had not been invented yet, was this an issue of
access to game?
Home field advantage
The Neanderthals also had the home field advantage. After thousands of years, they had predictably
become sedentary as all species do that are about to become extinct. In contrast, Cro-Magnon was a
vibrant, relatively new species 200,000 years their juniors venturing into uncharted lands. The unrelated
groups of early humans wandering into Europe consisted of nomadic clans whose populations were
increasing. They were not so much trekking and hiking as they were expanding in numbers. Africa did not
depopulate. New clans were forming north of the continent and all were camping primarily along rivers
around the Mediterranean Sea where water and fish were assured. These clans likely seeped into
Europe following the herds of deer, bison, and similar game.
But if the Cro-Magnons were expanding, the Neanderthals were receding. The Neanderthals had been
declining for 10,000 years before the Cro-Magnon appeared on their horizons. They were undergoing
a population implosion for reasons that had nothing to do with humans. The two species perhaps never
met. The Cro-Magnon occupied empty caves only to find that some weird human-like creature had lived
there before. The only Neanderthals that Cro-Magnon ever saw were dead Neanderthals. The reality is
that humans never saw a Neanderthal other than as a skeleton! By the time Cro-Magnons arrived in
Europe, the Neanderthals were history.
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| The History of Life on Earth |
| O The Paleo Establishment's main theories regarding the extinction of the Neanderthals Love War Climate Volcano Disease Trade How Woolly died |