Flaming Neandertals and Future Humans
Posted by: Loren Coleman on October 27th, 2007
It’s been quite a week in fossil hominid news. Gives you some pause about what might be around the corner, so to speak.
Neandertals are now said to have been freckled and flame-haired, but then red-haired Neandertals were theorized earlier in Stan Gooch’s The Neanderthal Question (1977). Some of Gooch’s material is seen as fringe, but insights like this have been remarkable.
Years before Gooch, anthropologist Carleton Coon (The Origin of the Races, 1962, and in his lectures) had been saying related things but no one listened. Instead, critics indicated in the 1970s he was a racist for some of his theories. The book is now out-of-print due to political correctness in publishing. Too bad. Carleton was a great thinker. In his Story of Man, he freely discusses the reports of Yeti issuing from the Himalayas, and how they might fit into the scheme of things.
For more on the new red-haired Neandertal finding, see here.
Moving from the prehistoric, now comes breaking news that in the near future, well, 100,000 years into the future, sexual selection could mean that two distinct breeds of human will develop.
The human race will one day split into two separate species (see top image), an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist….The alarming prediction comes from evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry from the London School of Economics, who says that the human race will have reached its physical peak by the year 3000. These humans will be between 6ft and 7ft tall and they will live up to 120 years….Men will have symmetrical facial features, deeper voices and bigger penises…Women will all have glossy hair, smooth hairless skin, large eyes and pert breasts…Racial differences will be a thing of the past as interbreeding produces a single coffee-coloured skin tone.
For more on the theory of two species of human, read here.
So tales about those Morlocks in The Time Machine weren’t too far off the mark, humm?
- Similar Phenomena:
The idea that Neandertals were blond and light-skinned has been around for a while: they had, after all, been evolving for a long time in the part of the world now inhabited by people of that coloration, so if pigment has anything to do with amount of sunlight…
Bjorn Kurten (Swedish Finnish paleontologist: I think some of his books, like “The Age of Mammals,” may still be available, and if you can find it his “The Cave Bear Story,” with each chapter describing a new way of using the fossil evidence to try to answer a different question, is a really great introduction to why paleontology is a science and not just “stamp-collecting”) wrote two novels about Neandertal/Cro-Magon interaction: “Dance of the Tiger” and a sequle, “Singletusk.” (In corporating ideas he thought were plausible, but maybe too speculative to try to publish in a journal…) One think that I’m sure he enjoyed immensely was having the Neandertals and the ancestors of modern Europeans call each other “blacks” and “whites.” Fun books.
With that description, is it any wonder that several aspects of Curry’s thinking sound so much like Philippe Rushton on steroids? We should be less worried about the selection of phenotypes, and more worried about the prevlance of idiots in the world who are reproducing at an unprecedented rate — most of them in the “elite” to which this article from the Daily Mail (a paper which I would not grace with the floor of my parakeet cage) refers.
Just my two cents.
The Neandertal coloration in Europeans (who were central north Asians previously) isn’t found in all northern peoples - such as the Saami, Samoyeds, Innuit, Dorset and so forth. I suspected that our coloring came from the Neandertals, however this new finding is of a different mutation in the same gene, producing the same result (has an adequate survey been done of all fair-haired and blue and green eyed people to rule out any connection? Or is the absolute conclusion product over the continuing debate over whether the Neandertals, with bigger brains, sewing tools, bone flutes and burial rituals were more human or more animal?)
Allan, I’m more inclined to think that it was “trolls” and “elves” rather than blacks and whites.
My only problem with this is that the author of the study references “plastic surgery” and “body modification” giving us a homogenous appearance. If this is the case, then aside from economic factors which may make modification preventive, people with genetically “ugly” features will continue to pass those features to their children and, as always, those “beautiful” people from the less wealthy classes will continue to comingle their genes with genetically “ugly”, but body modified, elites for many, many years. What happens in that supposed ten thousand years needed for this break to happen, then, would seem to have as much to do with our sociological development over that time as it does with our physical development (i.e. if plastic surgery becomes cheap and common enough for anyone to engage in body modification, the whole theory goes out the window).
It would probably be appropriate in this connection to remember that futurists of the ’60s saw computers ushering in a totally paperless society and a thirty-hour work week.