The legacy evidence suggests that those Eurasian conquerors of Neanderthal, who between them populated Eurasia and the Americas, and conquered the other three major racial homelands, suggests that the act of overcoming Neanderthals somehow improved their adaptability over long Time.
Without a physical advantage in combat, and knowing that a 3 to 1 numerical advantage is militarily minimal for overcoming a foe under cover, and that the Neanderthal advantage favored cover of night and cover of forest and close valleys, where might the ability to exterminate a foe that resisted successfully over previous ages, and to conduct this eradication in only 10 to 15% of the time of total co-existance, have come from?
Part 3 will explain why there was no military advantage to the throwing spear of Cromagnon versus the stabbing spear of the Neanderthal.
This discussion looks at social differences that gave the advantage to the Cromagnon aggressor.
-Desperation was shared by both races as the invaders were driven eastward and into cover by the colder conditions circa 41,000 BP, and the defenders had their backs to the ocean and the ice. Both shared terminal motivation to avoid extinction.
-Language favored the invader, with full verbal articulation granting advantages in:
-Planning
-Reporting
-Coordinating
-Allying with wolves
-Possibly communicating with Neanderthal allies, captives, traitors or hybrids who might themselves be minimally articulate due to throat structure, but able to understand spoken communication.
The mythic record of tales of Titans, Giants, werewolves, monsters, such as Grendel, that owned the night and were of great strength and had a taste for mating with human women are reflected in:
-extant Neanderthal DNA being paternal, not maternal
-extreme Neanderthal robustness, including thumbs flattened from apply such intense pressure to strength tasks
-larger Neanderthal eyes better adapted for low light combat
Based on the historical record of smaller, weaker, civilized, modern invaders employing half-breeds and traitors of the tribes they sought to exterminate, as scouts, beginning with the conquest of The Canary islands and played out across the entirety of North America, I am positing that more adaptable social forms among fully modern humans based on the explosion in language capacity noted by Marvin Harris at about 40,000 BP, enabled Hybrid Vigor to be harnessed in this race war.
The authors of Gilgamesh, The Iliad and the Odyssey extol their heroic forefathers as being alienated souls, so much stronger than the men of “today” that they were as giants. The authors of The Bible speak of an ancient race of giants breeding with human women. Grendel is said to be a Son of Cain, and cursed to haunt the wild lands and the night.
Since the throwing spear not only failed to impart an advantage to Cromagnon, but imparted a disadvantage, which shall be definitively proved in Part 3, why would not a slave girl, be left vulnerable and unprotected from Neanderthal abduction and rape in order to generate a super warrior, or scout? It is well known that without Gomeran scouts, the Spanish would have taken another 200 years to conquer the Canaries, having taken 100 years as it was before engaging the most savage Islanders as scouts. Likewise, Geronimo was only brought to heel because the Apaches in U.S. Army service outnumbered his Apaches.
Note that though both races were terminally desperate, Neanderthals had the home range advantage, being intimate with the battle space that was new to the enemy.
A Neanderthal was no larger than a Cromagnon, was shorter and perhaps lighter, but had four times the strength. Records of chimp attacks on humans in Africa—with chimps being four times as strong as humans—demonstrate the type of injuries inflicted by Grendal upon normal heroes, and upon Grendal by Beowulf. Beowulf is, I suspect, a deep time reflection of Hybrid Vigor, a half-Neanderthal. He was a foundling, an exiled heir, raised by someone other than his father. Indeed, the Nordic legend presented in high art by Poul Anderson in his mythiv novel War of the Gods, posits that the hero god was raised by giants.
Thus, the social dexterity necessary to accept the rape baby of the foe as one of your own, and also as a dedicated weapon against his father’s people on behalf of his mother’s people, as used over hundreds of years of modern expansion into territory held by more formidable defenders, is one possible advantage of the language suite.
A second, and perhaps the most important advantage, would also be related to language, and that was the domestication of the wolf as an ally. It is no accident that the domestication of other large animals can all be traced to the Arуan language group, which had the same exact Near Eastern Caucasian Homeland as the Crogmagnon mammoth hunters who wiped out Neanderthal, and would domesticate the very cattle, the bull, that their foes had hunted as 51% of their diet. Also, the domestication of large canines as hunting and war companions was exclusively Caucasian in origin.
The ethos of close combat, among fully modern humans, as morally superior to all other combat, comes exclusively from Europe, the Neanderthal Homeland, which had to be taken at close quarters. Thus wrestling, the tale of Beowulf, which I suspect out dates all other extant legends, and Gilgamesh, which I suspect is the second oldest story, and features Enkidu as the doomed wild man scout and companion of the hero [who is also part giant], reflect the quest into darkness and wilderness after a fiendish monster of great strength, being Humbaba and Grendal.
The first two illustrations of men in combat, is from Spain, the last front of this ages old war, and are of war with bow and arrow at a distance close enough to touch and of wrestling.
Of interest is the fact that Humbaba is killed by Enkidu and Gilgamesh in the Cedar Forest of Lebanon, which is the place where we have the first record of Neanderthal and modern humans overlapping in habitation—the first front line of the 100,000 year race war. In Europe, the many legends of shorter people, generally hairier, living under cover and emerging to do mischief at night, are endemic and include dwarves, gnomes and goblins. Likewise, the giants were said to reside in remote locations.
Neanderthal were concerned with time, and kept the first callendars, records of lunar cycles on tusks. To a night-hunting and night-fighting culture, the lesser, nocturnal light in heaven would be the more important. In Gilgamesh Sin is a masculine deity and is the moon, the lunar light.
Speaking with hunters, I have been told that predators, when facing men armed with distance weapons, adopt nocturnal cover even as prey adopts close cover by day. Bob, who guided elk hunts in winter conditions routinely at below zero temperatures, only feared one animal, the grizzly bear. He told me that the very best defense against the nocturnal depredations of the grizz, was the dog. These dogs could not kill the bear, but detected him and warned against him and by day could track him.
Now, imagine, if a 60 pound blue heeler can switch the advantage from the 500 pound bear to the 200 pound man, how much more advantage would be gained by using a 120 pound wolf to overcome a 160 pound ape man?
Indeed, that ape man, has been described by one anthropologist as “wolves with knives” for the Neanderthal habit of close combat with large bulls. This would have made Neanderthal and wolf competitors over the same prey, using the same close swarming methods. These two species would hate each other as much as lions and hyenas have a timeless feud in Africa. Indeed, lions accept great risk in taking down prey capable of maiming them, in part to get the kill before the hyenas can challenge for it. Modern man’s language skills would have served to communicate with wolves as we do with dogs, and about wolves, bringing the art of animal domestication to distant fellows and down through the generations.
Symbolic record keeping and religious thinking seem to have been pioneered by Neanderthal. But oral history, poetry and ultimately phonetic written language seem to have taken simple record keeping concerning lunar cycles and granted us down the jagged stairs of Time a glimpse into our most ancient enemies, the methods of their defeat, and the remnants of them within us.
The poets brought us a clear empathy for Humbaba whose murder was punished by the gods, a sorrow for Grendel who skulked alone and friendless beyond the firelight, his life an expression of an ancient curse, of the anger of Poseidon against Odysseus for the killing of the cyclops in his cave.
I posit here, might the one eye of the cyclops, between his brows and above his nose, have been a mythic memory of a “third eye” of an internal dreaming race of people, who spent time dreaming and perhaps even philosophizing or moralizing under cover of darkened cave, while their enemies, weaker beings with more ruthless mechanistic thinking, plotted their demise?
There is a legend from ancient Greece, concerning a giant hero named Polydamas [Manysubduer] who was an actual athletic hero of about 400 BC. Attached to him is a tale of his demise in which an earthquake crushes he and his companions in a cave, though he for a while uses his might to keep the cave from collapsing. Likewise, from ancient Judea, we have the hero Samson, a character of immense strength, who like Polydamas slew a lion with his bare hands, pulling down a palace upon his enemies, having been abducted and blinded by them.
Might Polydamas and Samson, at least the story of their heroic death, echo some portion of the fate of Neanderthal?
Certainly, the persistent legends of The Beauty and the Beast coming from Europe, and reworked in numerous King Kong movies, focused on a nocturnal ape lusting after a woman, as well as our cultural fascination with Sasquatch and Yeti, in which empathy for the ape man is a key part, may at least echo an ancient experiment with hybrid vigor as a terminal tool in a great race war.
“Both the girl and the youth were perfect specimens of the great Cro-Magnon race which came from no man knows where and announced and enforced their supremacy over beast and beast-man.”
This is one of my favorite REH lines.
I can’t remember if I came to this site for the violence and stayed for the Howard criticism, or if it was the other way around, but this is perfect, archetypal Lafond material, a great project, very powerful.
Only a madman like you could do this justice. Hell, only madman like you would try.
And there are no madmen like you!
Thank you for your blazing, visionary insanity. May it light the way for our people in the dark times ahead…