Stepping Out Of the Box

24th November 2017

These are Neanderthals, according to the most recent study on what that species might have looked like.

But wait a minute! Neanderthals are the hairy dense knuckle-draggers we were taught about in school, the ones that became extinct because they couldn't keep up with the superior brain of our Homo Sapiens ancestors!
Such is the history that is taught, but this should never have been the conclusion, because any comparison of a human brain with these ancestors of ours (yes, we did interbreed) reveals that they had larger craniums to hold larger brains. Recent DNA sequencing has shown that Neanderthals were likely fair of skin and red of hair. In fact, the percentage of Neanderthal DNA you possess is roughly proportionate to how northern European you look. Put that in your superior pipe and smoke it! In fact, perhaps the only reason Neanderthals ever went extinct had to do with the superior violence of this new upstart race called Sapiens. The trickster.
Because Homo Sapiens had another trick up its sleeve, something called denial.  It's a psychological flaw really, a need by the human mind to bend reality to its own cause.
Here's another trick: The Dark Ages.

Historian Frances Pryor says "Poppycock!" There was never anything of the sort! Archeology shows continuous human development thoughout the ages, with stagnation nowhere in sight. But then, if you want to praise the "Enlightenment," you have to concoct something dark from which it emerged, don't you? If you want to have a renaissance, something had to have died on the limb in order for it to be reborn. As if pagans weren't capable  of  a flourishing of the arts. Dark Ages, dark pagans, dark neanderthal versions of Homo with heavy eyebrow ridges and only half a clue.

It's hard for a species that regards itself with such superiority to watch its paradigms teeter and topple. I am far from guiltless in this: I am sticking with my paleolithic flip phone, my computer that still accepts floppy discs, and I will have nothing to do with Facebook. Paradigm shifts just run against the grain. Gallileo, Copernicus and Einstein were all persecuted for thinking outside the box of scientific status quo. Modern man isn't about to welcome the blood of his Neanderthal ancestors in his veins. He may be inventive, but he doesn't like any rocking of the boat he's trying to sail in. For this he might himself go extinct. Homo Ignoramus.