Colonial Deception in the Legend of Neanderthal Vanishing
Gone, they are. Neanderthals were men of the ancient past and lived on the earth creatively. We have little to go on whether they were thoughtful and wise, but what little we have suggest they may have been, although strong, and stout, built for nomadic life in the very cold. Were the Neanderthals driven into extinction by the first homo sapiens out of Africa? The past at turns is high drama. Tantalizing evidence of things unseen can result in a series of mirrors that reflect wishful thinking, a will to drama, and ingrained bias, as well as an urgent call for recitation of facts over fancy. The psychological history of the human race fails to reassure. The word is pogrom. Fossil records provide a limited field for factual reconstruction, but extinction is not subject to second guessing, our human forebears of the Neanderthal type are gone. In looking over the question of eradication it is important to acknowledge two themes: first, that the result does not prove the means, annihilation is unproved, but second that the potential fits a psychological profile of our species that is not imaginary. If Neanderthals were our victims it was not unprecedented. Thus, playing out the description of Neanderthal extinction occurs in a stubborn arena of other like occurrences not all of which were a result of foul play. The desire to read a crime into the extinction of Neanderthals has the aspect of an ethnic reparation that borders on a margin of political correctness text. My purpose in this paper isn’t to judge the situation that arises, only to define it as a valid search for appropriate historical narrative.
Shirley Williams, archaeological professor at Tacoma Community College says, “genetic evidence shows that the Neanderthals were inbred and in trouble even before modern humans arrived. There was a fair amount of genetic exchange after they did arrive as well. Maybe we wiped them out, maybe we didn’t but there were other things happening.” Which leads us to the paradox of contemplating the as yet unknowable. It is an area that can lead to schism in academics and trouble.
In a review of the complex generated by Martin Bernal’s book Black Athena that focuses on another book: Heresy in the University-The ‘Black Athena’ Controversy and Responsibility of American Intellectuals by Jacques Berlinerbrau, writing for the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Geralyn S. Lederman traces the problem back to Herodotus, who she says admits that he had to choose among first hand reports of things he did not always witness himself. Although there is no book titled, Neanderthal Athena, which might also cause friction among Africologists concerning the idea that Black African, early man annihilated the Neanderthals, it isn’t beneath consideration. Even Native American Matt Remlo, who spoke at TCC in Fall of 2018, uses the Neo-Liberal vocabulary of “imagined community” and “re-imagining” the past to spell out his most precious ideologies. In imagining the Neanderthal past, or possibly re-imagining it as a community, there are points of departure that make it a matter of realism, not charity, to affirm their value and humanity, which ignites a note of concern and remorse concerning their extinction.
Genesis Park’s Ancient Dinosaur Depictions showcases an image from Bernifal Cave in France, drawn by Neanderthal man of a dinosaur fighting a wooly mammoth. The case for craftsmanship, Hieronymus Bosch sense of beauty, inventiveness and brilliance is perfectly obvious, as well as the far-seeing and disturbing strategy for longevity and preservation obvious from the choice of locations. It was as if they meant a postcard to the distant future. Is it fake? Our world is filled with tantalizing losses, from the book burnings in Germany, and Library of Alexandria, to questions about the Permian extinction, but we also live with misrepresentations of the past so pernicious that we have to use terms like cultural genocide to describe them. Were the Neanderthals victims, if not of actual genocide (on which question the case is far from closed) but also or rather cultural genocide at minimum? How far was Cro-Magnon man from fascism towards perceived inferiors? How much marginalization as primitives is apologia and closure for hidden atrocity? None?
Colonial imaginings are often the beginning of deception. It’s tedious to mention Hitler’s Germany, but the dawn of Anthropology could arguably be the arguments against Eugenics and racism formed by the heroic Ken Boas. The mystique of racial mystery found in books like the Fu Manchu series by Sax Rohmer are shrouded by the Poe-like purple curtains of British supremacist fantasy, from bands like Temple of the Golden Dawn. Racial fictions in fact continue to hold sway in power blocs across Western Civilization. This disturbing utopia of deceit has destroyed Native American and African cultures, while largely rendered thoughts of American Good Neighbor Policy a Kennedyesque on exhibition in museums but extinct before the Gods of lost liberalism kowtowing before The Second Amendment and their exports.
Whatever else they must have been very interesting people, whether working to protect community groups and families, or struggling gypsies, like solidary bikers, nomadically enjoying long traipses and adventure in strange lands familiar only to them. Were, among them, noble savages given to wanderlust, poetry and song? So what happened? Were they found to be worshiping the wrong gods? There is reason to suspect they could speak. A Neanderthal fossil found in Israel had the hyoid bone. The degree of productivity and cultural distinction may have led to disputes of an ego-logical nature with their cousins in early human nature. The possibility of the Neanderthal sage becomes a new graven image in the imagined community of the past. Putting that point aside, it may well be that the misuse of Neanderthal as an epithet to mean barbarian or primitive in fact is the opposite of the truth, that is, if you don’t side with the people who measured everybody’s heads but Hitler’s (because he was their ruler).
Yet modern man is twiggy-pop, “”the sole surviving twig”” (Stefoff, p. 30) of hominids who roughed it through an Ice Age enjoying the company of Wooly Mammoths, scouring the zones of Siberia, banged up by fierce rivals and the elements, the elders didn’t reach the age of 50, yet we yearn to know more, and scrutinize the layers of earth when we dig our subway trenches.
Decorations of love from Cro-Magnon man are not unheard of in Neanderthal burials, or at least, if we credit that Neanderthals were not the authors of such craft, which means it is hasty to assume that Neanderthals were universally the object of poachers, rather than friends and lovers in the eyes of the hominids with whom they lived. Perhaps a Conquistador arose to purge them, or they themselves arose and were beaten down. They obviously weren’t the Eloi in the Time Machine by H.G. Wells, but maybe they made sport of the wrong grudge-holder among their betters. We don’t know, but when you think of the way some of us make Nativist claims, and brag of ancestry, you wonder if Neanderthals aren’t a lost nobility in our heritage asking for acclaim. They sure paved our way through a hard passage.
The metamorphic quality of the Neanderthal trope and its utility to nearly lampoon status of identity politics comes through even in fairly serious scholarship like Svante Paabo’s peculiar book in which he wrangles with the discovery of DNA in strange places like China, and creates a narrative grid of dominance and sub-dominance that reads like a tale from the unexpected. “We tend to think that modern humans were dominant over Neanderthals, as Neanderthals eventually disappeared. But our data actually suggested that gene flow had be from Neanderthals into modern humans”. (p. 193).
The author insists on a sub-topic of confusion about his sexual preference. “All this secrecy and double play finally became too much for me,” decrying that, “not only did I have secrets from Mark, I had secrets with Mark.” This double life made Mark Mark reflect the author’s own “father’s double life.” It is a curious mixture of relevance as though flirting with a half-hidden puzzle.
Throughout the mentalplex and hall of mirrors in the publisher’s selected sequence we find to some extent an acquisition by academic media of the hidden National Sport of sex ball, as though the entire carousing of Neanderthal genius for survival and mystery of play, announces its agency as a Cro-Magnon Klukker, emerging from the bushes with a burning spear to shout with fury over a hit and run dalliance of forbidden miscegenation, “Muh Fia~!”
Epilogue: We know that Tive made quite a laugh for himself out of the film’s erroneous title: Krakatoa East of Java, carrying on, “very, very East of Java.” We also know that Dia used the phone number KRAKWYG, so it is testimony that Krakatoa by Rupert Furneaux, indexed to furnace, and the deadly perfume of Blumen-and-Blotter Gabriel, is a lookalike of John Wayne published in 1964 beginning, 1. OPENING SALVO…”The plate slid off the table and crashed to the floor, smashing into a thousand pieces.” Recall, …., etc.
Works Cited
Bryn Mawr Classical Review May 5, 2000. Jacques Berlinerblau, Heresy in the University: The 'Black Athena' Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Reviewed by Geralyn S. Lederman
Ancient Dinosaur Depictions - online DinoDaves.com
Ice Age Neanderthals by Rebecca Stefoff, c2010 Marshall Cavendish.
Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Paabo, Basic Books, 2014.
Class Notes, TCC.
