For months, now, I’ve been scouring the web in search of frank conversation regarding the news of the fact of our hybrid ancestry. It isn’t necessarily hard to find discussion, but it is very hard to find intelligent discussion. In fact, the mainstream online media streams have been inundated by amateur videos made by armchair philosophers and fanatical Christian and/or white-supremacy groups. In addition to this swill, there are Afro-centric groups who have similarly mangled and twisted the implications of hybridization into bizarre and unique pseudo-ethnographic caricatures. And, of course, Neanderthals are somehow involved in the UFO-NWO-Illuminati-Rockefeller-Ninja- Space Opera. In all cases, the valid scientific information has been co-opted by those who have no intention to use it responsibly or to serve any legitimate purpose. They are an irritant to me, and I am compelled to cough up a little rant like some kind of fringe-culture oyster making a hate-pearl.
The majority of it is of little importance, belonging to the “lost in the moment” realm of human attention, where the meaning of words is equivalent to how much currency they can bring in the context of “ratings” within a marginal peer group. However, there are things to be said – shocking things – about hybrid heritage and what it means. There are things which will hurt other people when they are said; objective, reliable, and consistently verifiable ramifications which deserve our attention if for no other reason than because they are true. And by “true”, I mean factual, and not some kind of metaphysical sense of the word which is more comfortable because it doesn’t demand that you accept it. Facts are to be accepted, or else you must cash in your chips. If your currency isn’t facts and knowledge, then it can only be politics and coercion, because if you don’t have the truth on your side, then you must invest in denial, and if that fails, in silencing the truth with normative social pressures and, if that fails, threat and coercion.
I’ve never been diagnosed as being on the Autism spectrum, but then again, I’ve never been diagnosed by any kind of mental health practitioner for any reason. I know that I’m unconventional, care little for the company (or approval) of others, and take perverse enjoyment in splitting the hairs which grow on the membrane separating how the world really works versus the socially sanctioned and approved narratives. It’s a permeable membrane, but not permeable enough to relieve the growing pressure of knowledge versus the cherished narratives which sustained generations of humans through hardship and travails. Put simply, the marketplace of ideas within our culture is not adequate to the task of distributing self-knowledge and understanding about the world as quickly as that knowledge is being developed. In short, the surface area of ignorance is growing faster than the surface area of understanding because our culture has arranged itself in such a way that throttles knowledge by emphasizing escapism as a viable cognitive strategy. It’s a strategy so deeply embedded into our collective consciousness that we don’t even recognize it as such – or that we even have a choice. This is particularly true here in the United States. People like to say “An armed society is a polite society, ” but few really stop to question the premise. What does it mean? It means that you never have to explain your thinking as long as you’re armed. And that, my friends, is called a crutch. When you can’t answer for your thoughts, you simply change the subject to who is better armed. So, we have the “appeal to the stick” informal logical fallacy encoded into our national character, and this is only too obvious. In the preamble to the Constitution of the United States we find it explicitly stated that we are endowed by a creator with the right to life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately, it looks like the pursuit of happiness doesn’t include the pursuit of knowledge or understanding about the human mind itself, and thus can never actually lead to a lasting happiness – only an ephemeral, immaterial dream of the product or status you don’t yet possess.
Maybe I’m just too hard on my fellow human beings, but you know I’ve seen well-educated and well-fed people who do not know want who still could not bring themselves to suffer the pains of awareness and cravenly sought refuge in ideology and fairy tales. “Just let me live my life and believe in unicorn-powered UFOs, the moral correctness of Free Market Capitalism, and Monday Night Football!” they plead pathetically. No. No. I require more than this from my fellow human beings. Think, you mongrels.
Your title is misleading, but you’re correct.
From Brain development after birth differs between Neanderthals and modern humans 2010, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology:
“The development of cognitive abilities during individual growth is linked to the maturation of the underlying neural circuitry: in humans, major internal brain reorganization has been documented until adolescence, and even subtle alterations of pre- and perinatal brain development have been linked to changes of the neural wiring pattern that affect behavior and cognition [9]. The uniquely modern human pattern of early brain development is particularly interesting in the light of the recent breakthroughs in the Neanderthal genome project [10], which identified genes relevant to cognition that are derived in living humans. We speculate that a shift away from the ancestral pattern of brain development occurring in early Homo sapiens underlies brain reorganization and that the associated cognitive differences made this growth pattern a target for positive selection in modern humans.”
From “A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome” (DOI: 10.1126/science.1188021):
“Mutations in CADPS2 have been implicated in autism (67), as have mutations in AUTS2 (68).
…
Our results also point to a number of genomic regions and genes as candidates for positive selection early in modern human history, for example, those involved in cognitive abilities and cranial morphology. We expect that further analyses of the Neandertal genome as well as the genomes of other archaic hominins will generate additional hypotheses and provide further insights into the origins and early history of present-day humans.”