Yes, I understand Neanderthals had short arms…
When I played football for Trinity Middle School, in Washington, PA, as as a not-so-tight end, I had two guys I hit a lot, as soon as I dealt with the fat dude in front of me: the pretty quarterback, who was white, and Timmy Lipscomb, probably the nicest guy in school, a black kid, all muscle. As a virulent race traitor I loved hitting Pretty Boy and felt guilty about hurting Timmy. Once, in a mid-December scrimmage, I hit Timmy so hard I thought he was dead. But the dude never, ever gave up the ball. He was laying on the ground shivering, his arms apparently frozen around the ball in about 10 degrees. Rick and I picked him up and he did not bend, but tilted upright like a fencepost—that’s when we noticed he was a gray white color, his skin splitting and chaffing into white flakes—I having hit Timmy so hard he turned white!
In any case, I stopped following Neanderthal research in 2013, and the jury is a long way—if ever—from coming in on the mapping of their genome. Bone analysis of their diet though is remarkably thorough. There is also the issue of regional variation. What makes us think that every Neanderthal from France, to Palestine, to Siberia was one color? In paleoanthropology each generation—and now each team—of researchers seems to offer an overarching all or nothing, monolithic theory for this or that. We can spend a lifetime with these geeks via the link below.
Since the post Jockstrap, Seer Of The Palefaces I have received some interesting facts and opinions, links and e-mails, and am thrilled—and do not worry, as a true crackpot I will bend whatever contrary information you send to my single-minded purpose!
Some—maybe all—Neanderthals were dark-skinned, you say?
So was Timmy until he got hit by that polar bear. Besides, I am not hung up on genetics, but on the human spirit, the spun fabric of ideas that forms the collective and divisive mind.
They committed genocide?
Amen, Brother, amen!
Genocide is underrated. If you don't think so, consider, when was the last time a Canaanite or a Tasmanian broke into your car?
If we only have paternal genetic markers from Neanderthals, than that is all the better—we domesticated moderns having quite enough bitch in us already—and bolsters my contention that the Neanderthal mind was the font of modern human spirituality.
That Neanderthals were cannibals—at least some of the time—has been clear for decades. So were the Aztecs, one of the most spiritually obsessed people in history. Catholicism is predicated on the metaphoric devouring of the body and blood of Christ—and for the duration of the high Middle Ages it was thought that the holy wafers and wine were actually the body and blood of Christ! Jewish bakers were routinely killed for molesting the wafers! In Moby Dick, the most spiritual Character is Queequeg the cannibal. My favorite Retro-Neanderthal, Liver-Eating Johnson, was a renowned cannibal.
Even if there is no link between myself and the Neanderthals other than the fact that their ancestral lands were mine in another age, and that they dreamed of something other than the mechanics of fueling and pleasuring the human body, in contrast to the majority of humanity today and of the modern homo sapiens who wiped them out, that is enough for me.
Of my uncles the two I treasure the most as guiding lights are Uncle Robert [a genius crackpot quadroon] and Uncle Herb, who also married into the family, and discussed literature with me, lending me the books he read while working as an engineer in the Merchant Marine. The men that mated with my aunts were better men than the ones related to my parents through blood.
Even if the Neanderthals, who I like to think were my distance partial ancestors, merely inspired me to deal with our current Spiritual Ice Age as they did with their physical one, than I’m still Jockstrap, Seer of the Palefaces [and that I am], and Feral Neanderthal.
Please, keep your information and opinions coming on this subject, which has fascinated me since childhood, and which got me kicked out of history class for arguing with the teacher over the Bearing Land Bridge theory, which I always thought was stupid, as the Native Americans probably used skin boats rather than trek across ice melt mires recently scraped to the bone by retreating glaciers. I am looking forward to the Neanderthal Resistance discussion being a learning experience for me.
I’m feeling cavemanish this evening, still pumped up from putting down a prime buck stick-fighter and also disarming him once—and thankfully unable to recall the five rounds I got smoked in, because my head is still ringing—or is that the moon calling down to me in the murky mist of night with her sweet song?
Hmmm - the Bering straight crossing ...
At the time the sea level was about 135 feet lower than it was nowadays. I doubt the people that crossed into America trekked across the bare rock that was left by the glaciers or across the ice.
If you follow the coast, you have access to shellfish and the sea which is a consistent "environment" for you so there is no need to adapt to a new hunting/fishing/foraging situation. You can trek along the coast and if you carry light skin boats then you can carry on your usual food gathering activities without disruption. Living off the shellfish and crustaceans in that environment is a low risk strategy. Twice a day, the tide goes out and you are lest with a smörgåsbord of food.
If you are looking for archaeological evidence on the present landscape, you are not likely to find it. Try somewhere at the 135 foot depth or lower and you are more likely to find the remains of camp fires, middens and other archaeological evidence to support this hypothesis.
As Humans, have little "fur" and no real fear of water or swimming from a very early age, this seems to indicate that the adaptation to the aquatic environment happened at an early stage of evolution.
Did I miss something or don't Catholics still believe that?
I'm not recent on how this has been tiptoed around in catholic literature, but when I refused confirmation as a catholic, I was told that the wine and wafer were just symbolic of the flesh and blood. Still, though, the idea bothered me, that I would symbolically eat and drink of this ancient Hebrew nailed to a Roman stake.