The authors of these anthropology articles should really stop using pictures of Prince Harry’s wife to represent Neanderthals. It’s unnecessarily mean.

I don’t really know that I believe any of this at all.

But it’s a funny story.

The Guardian:

It took three separate waves of modern humans to colonise Europe between 54,000 and 42,000 years ago. That is the key conclusion of scientists who have been studying caves in the Rhone valley where they have discovered evidence that Homo sapiens had to make a trio of determined attempts to head westwards and northwards from western Asia before they could establish themselves in the continent.

“The first two of these waves failed but the third succeeded around 42,000 years ago,” said Ludovic Slimak of the University of Toulouse, who is leading the excavations in France. “After that, modern humans took over in Europe. The Neanderthals, who had evolved on the continent, died out.”

…

Slimak has also argued, in previous papers, that modern humans, who first emerged from Africa around 60,000 years ago, may have been armed with bows and arrows to judge from the tiny 54,000-year-old pointed stone tools – which look very like arrowheads – that have been found in the Grotte Mandrin cave in the Rhône Valley. This technology – which allows hunters to kill at a distance without endangering themselves – would have given the incomers a vital advantage over local Neanderthals.

The Grotte Mandrin in France’s Rhone Valley

However, after a period of around 40 years, this first group of modern human incomers disappeared from the fossil record and the site was subsequently re-occupied by Neanderthals. If our ancestors were better equipped, why did this first intrusion into Europe end this way? Similarly, why did the second wave – which probably occurred around 44-46,000 years ago – also end in failure?

One answer is straightforward, says Slimak. Those early waves of humans simply lacked numbers. He believes there were up to 100 men, women and children in the Grotte Mandrin settlement. “That may not have been sufficient to maintain their biological strength and perhaps they could not exchange genes with local Neanderthals because the fertility between them was poor,” he added.

However, he rejected the idea that relations between Neanderthals and modern humans were poor. In fact, every indication suggests that the two groups were on good terms.

Then came the third wave, and this time it seems that our ancestors did have the numbers, Slimak added. “The third time they came in, modern humans did so with a really huge wave of people and began to build social networks, not with Neanderthals but with individual small separate groups of Homo sapiens in order to build a huge network throughout Europe. And in the end, that is what started the decline of the Neanderthals in Europe.”

Well.

I mean.

A lot of people might read something like this and start drawing comparisons, I think.

You know?

When @Riley_Gaines_ asked University of Pittsburgh professor Gabby Yearwood if an archeologist could differentiate between two sets of bones as male and female, Professor Yearwood. who calls himself the “expert in the room,” answers “no” to which the entire audience laughed. pic.twitter.com/Ecxs1NMDTr

— Independent Women’s Forum (@IWF) March 30, 2023

When the self-proclaimed “expert in the room” is offended that his assertion that males & females don’t have distinct skeletal differences is laughable, one might wonder what students studying anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh are being taught by their professors? pic.twitter.com/5NtFLn4P9p

— Independent Women’s Forum (@IWF) March 30, 2023

We’ve been saying it for a while now, and it really should have been obvious to everyone: university professors are just going to start outright lying to students.

They are going to rewrite the textbooks in order to have them say things that are known to be totally factually incorrect, on a basic level.

You see: when they do historical revisionism in television dramas, when they make characters in Shakespeare black, they are doing that as a dry run for rewriting supposedly non-fiction materials.

This process of simply lying to students about things that are not even controversial has already begun.

New York Post:

A “woke” University of Pittsburgh anthropology professor denied there’s a difference in male and female bone structure during a discussion about gender, sparking disbelief and outrage.

“If you were to dig up a human — two humans — a hundred years from now, both a man and a woman, could you tell the difference strictly off of bones?” Riley Gaines is shown in footage asking during the lecture.

“No,” professor Gabby Yearwood replies, according to footage posted on Twitter.

The response sparked appalled laughter from students, including Gaines, who describes herself on Twitter as a former University of Kentucky swimmer who believes there are “only two sexes.”

Yearwood then insists that he’s the “expert in the room,” according to FOX News.

“Have any of you been to anthropological sites? Have any of you studied biological anthropology? I’m just saying, I’ve got over 150 years of data, I’m just curious as to why I’m being laughed at,” he said before later declaring, “I have a PhD!”

Gabby Yearwood, owner of a PhD.

But his “woke” and “unscientific” claim drew heated skepticism on social media Friday.

“This is how far removed the Left is from reality that they must deny basic scientific facts,” tweeted the Independent Women’s Forum, a non-profit focused on economic policy issues.

“When the self-proclaimed “expert in the room” is offended that his assertion that males & females don’t have distinct skeletal differences is laughable, one might wonder what students studying anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh are being taught by their professors,” the group added.

This is a world of lies, because America is a satanic country literally run by the Jews.

It’s never been clear why people assumed that science was going to be objective.

They told you that that deadly vax they forced on everyone was “The Science.” That’s what they think of scientific facts. They do not respect anything that gets in the way of their anal agenda, including basic facts that were totally agreed upon by everyone last Thursday.

As a @PittTweet alum, I’m glad @Riley_Gaines_ asked her question and the students gave the appropriate response—laughter—to the professor’s answer. His appeal to authority and credentials is a tell-tale sign of a weak argument. https://t.co/Zt47pkEPlo

— Delano Squires (@DelanoSquires) March 30, 2023

The face of pure evil is square

Most people who have stronger political beliefs than average often tend to interpret books, movies and other entertainment based on those views.

That being said, I’m pretty sure this is the stupidest take I’ve ever heard of.

Campus Reform:

A university professor deemed the beloved cartoon “SpongeBob Squarepants” “violent,” “racist,” and “insidious” in a scholarly article.

University of Washington professor Holly Barker published her musings on the yellow sponge cartoon character and his deep-sea pals in an academic journal called The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs, which features “readable” articles focused on “social, economic, political, ecological, and cultural topics.”

Holly Barker is an “anthropologist.”

I put the word in commas because anthropology, the real kind, does not exist anymore, because Jews – especially this Jew – have destroyed it to the point where it’s a dead science, and nobody who has a degree in it or teaches it deserves any kind of attention (unless they say something really stupid that I can write an article about).

In her article titled “Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom,” Barker’s chief complaint hinges on her perception that the show’s fictional setting of the town of Bikini Bottom is based on the nonfictional Bikini Atoll, a coral reef in the Marshall Islands used by the U.S. military for nuclear testing during the Cold War.

The indigenous people of the area were relocated during the testing, which eventually rendered the area uninhabitable due to residual radiation. Barker finds it unjust that SpongeBob and his pals be allowed to “occupy” the area when the nonfictional indigenous people of the area do not have the option to return to their homeland.

I’m reasonably certain that whoever made SpongeBob was thinking about something else entirely when he named the place Bikini Bottom.

I mean really, how many of you had even heard of these particular savages until you read this?

As an “American character,” SpongeBob supposedly has the “privilege” of “not caring about the detonation of nuclear bombs.” In order to demonstrate this, the professor quotes one of the show’s writers, who said that the main character is “a guy who could get super-excited about a napkin but wouldn’t care if there was an explosion outside.”

“The detonations do not cause concern for the characters, as they did for the Bikinians, nor do they compromise SpongeBob’s frequent activities, like visiting hamburger joints or the beach with friends,” writes Barker.

Bikinians…

Those guys really should change their name, it sounds really goofy.

SpongeBob and his friends supposedly perpetuate the past injustices against the indigenous people of Bikini Atoll through “SpongeBob’s occupation and reclaiming” of the nonfictional location’s lagoon. The setting of the show, Barker says, is “symbolic violence.”

“Although the U.S. government removed the people of Bikini from the atoll above the surface, this does not give license to SpongeBob or anyone else, fictitious or otherwise, to occupy Bikini,” insists Barker.

“SpongeBob’s presence on Bikini Bottom continues the violent and racist expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands (and in this case their cosmos) that enables U.S. hegemonic powers to extend their military and colonial interests in the postwar era,” she added.

Imagine spending 4 years of your life listening to this inane gibberish and thinking you’re actually learning something.

Who does that?

Barker also attempts to dissect and problematize the cartoon’s theme song with academic phrasing.

“The first act of the song is to have children identify who resides in the pineapple house,” she explains. “The children’s response, repeated extensively throughout the song, affirms that the house and Bikini Bottom are the domain of SpongeBob.”

“The song’s directives, ensconced in humor, provide the viewer with an active role in defining Bikini Bottom as a place of nonsense, as the audience is instructed ‘If nautical nonsense be something you wish…drop on the deck and flop like a fish.’”

By participating in the theme song sing-a-long, Barker says “the viewer becomes an unwitting participant in the co-opting of Bikini’s story and the exclusion of the Bikinian people.”

So all I have to do to genocide these coconut niggers is watch the show and sing along?

This is really making me reconsider my anime-only policy…

While Barker admits that the show’s creators likely did not have “U.S. colonialism” in mind while developing the cartoon, she calls it “disturbing” that they did not realize that “Bikini Bottom and Bikini Atoll were not theirs for the taking.” Consequently, Barker suggests that “millions of children” have “become acculturated to an ideology that includes the US character SpongeBob residing on another people’s homeland.”

In this way, colonialism is supposedly “produced, reproduced, and normalized” through the cartoon.

As if fictionally “occupying” nonfictional land were not enough, Barker also accuses the cartoon of being biased against women.

The professor complains that “all of the main characters on the show are male,” except for Sandy Cheeks the squirrel, whom she suggests was only created in order to boost the gender diversity of the show.

“The name ‘Bob’ represents the everyday man, a common American male, much like a ‘Joe,'” Barker observes, concluding that “our gaze into the world of Bikini Bottom, as well as the surface of Bikini, is thus filtered through the activities of men.”

Imagine how easy it is to be a woman in academia.

You just point a finger randomly at something, make shit up about how evil and Nazi it is, and make more money than most people who actually work for a living.

And the bonus is that anyone who points out what a useless retard you are is also an evil Nazi.

You goyim happy with this?

Surprisingly race is real.

Shocking, I know.

Ah well

You could share this with normies to teach them about the fact that these two are not the same species:

“White Racial preservation is green.”

Given the popularity of my Who Opened the Borders? post, I’ve decided that I will be writing a Culture of Critique series for you goys. It will be the meat and potatoes of pertinent information from the book. I still highly recommend you read the work of Kevin MacDonald for the fuller picture.

Two of the biggest lies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are that human beings are born as a blank slate, where our behaviors are merely a product of our social environment, and that race doesn’t exist. It is because of these lies that we have had to deal with a variety of issues, i.e. Third-World immigration, desegregation, interracial violence, racial disparities, etc. The propagation of these lies can be traced back to the decline of Darwinism and the rise of Boasian anthropology. Join me, goyim, as we take a trip into the echoey past of American anthropology.

First, why would Jewish intellectuals in particular be interested in downplaying the biological realities of race/ethnicity? One of the motivations cited by many of the anthropologists discussed in Culture of Critique is their desire to combat racism and anti-Semitism. By downplaying the biological realities of race and ethnicity, people would be less likely to view Jews as an ethnic group, and more likely to view them merely as a religious group.

Franz Boas

Franz Boas is often regarded as the grandfather of modern anthropology. He was an ardent anti-Darwinist and dedicated his entire career to assaulting the idea that race was a primary source of the differences found in mental or social capabilities of human groups. Boas developed the concept of culture which would expunge race from the literature of social science.

Boas was raised in a liberal Jewish household. He married within his ethnic group. He was deeply concerned about anti-Semitism growing up. He often felt alienated from and hostile towards Gentile culture. Needless to say, Boas’s strong Jewish identity certainly played an influential role in his work in the field of anthropology. He served as an anthropology professor at Columbia University.

Boas is most notably known for his 1912 study that claimed to show that the skull shapes (“cranial forms”) of the descendants of European immigrants to the United States altered from those of the original immigrants. Boas offered no explanation for why the changes took place, but if they were real, his finding pretty much wiped out the idea that different racial and ethnic types differ in fixed physical characteristics. Nicholas Wade of the New York Times reported that two anthropologists had reexamined Boas’s data and found that Boas had made some “errors.” Samuel Francis over at VDARE correctly noted that Boas did not simply err but had purposely lied.

Boas’s views conflicted with the prevalent theory of civilizational development, which was strongly associated with race, with European Gentile civilization being the highest level. Boas’s theories were meant to counter racialist theories like those of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Madison Grant. Grant also believed that Jews were engaged in a campaign to discredit racial research:

“It is well-nigh impossible to publish in the American newspapers any reflection upon certain religions or races which are hysterically sensitive even when mentioned by name. . . . Abroad, conditions are fully as bad, and we have the authority of one of the most eminent anthropologists in France that the collection of anthropological measurements and data among French recruits at the outbreak of the Great War was pre-vented by Jewish influence, which aimed to suppress any suggestion of racial differentiation in France.”

An important technique of the Boasian school was to cast doubt on general theories of human evolution by emphasizing the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human behavior, as well as the relativity of standards of cultural evaluation. Boas also opposed research on human genetics.

Boas and his students were concerned with pushing their ideological agenda within the American anthropological profession. They succeeded in doing so. In 1902, Franz Boas founded the American Anthropological Association (AAA). By 1915, Boasians controlled the AAA and held a two-thirds majority on its Executive Board. In 1919, Boas proudly stated that “most of the anthropological work done at the present time in the United States” was done by his students at Columbia. By 1926, every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas’s students, the majority of whom were Jewish (quelle surprise!). By the mid-1930s the Boasian view of cultural determination of human behavior had strong influence on social scientists.

Boas’s most influential students were Ruth Benedict, Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, Leslie Spier, Ashley Montagu, Alexander Lesser, Ruth Bunzel, Gene Weltfish, Esther Schiff Goldfrank, and Ruth Landes. With the exceptions of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Alfred Kroeber, all were Jewish. It is interesting to note that his best-renowned students were Gentiles, Mead and Benedict. As in many other intellectual movements, Gentiles became publicly visible in movements dominated by Jews. Boas recruited Gentiles into his movement out of concern “that his Jewishness would make his science appear partisan and thus compromised.”

Cultural criticism was a central feature of the two most prominent Boasian works, Coming of Age in Samoa by Mead and Patterns of Culture by Benedict. Both works depicted primitive cultures as being free of war, homicide, and concern with wealth accumulation. Children were not disciplined. Sex was casual, there was little concern with virginity, sexual possessiveness, or paternity confidence. Western societies, then, were the exact opposite of these idyllic paradises. This perpetuated the myth of the noble savage. Benedict suggested that we should study such cultures in order “to pass judgment on the dominant traits of our own civilization.” Both works were subjected to devastating criticisms. Other works have come out disproving their findings.

Beyond Boas

Jewish influence in the social sciences extended far beyond Boas.

By 1968, Jews constituted 20% of the faculty of elite American universities and constituted 30% of the “most liberal” faculty. They also constituted 25% of the social science faculty at elite universities (Rothman & Lichter 1982). At this time, Jews were less than 3% of the US population.

Stephen Jay Gould is another prominent Jewish intellectual in the field of anthropology who pushed the Boasian worldview. Gould was a vocal opponent of evolutionary approaches to human behavior. In 1981, Gould authored The Mismeasure of Man where claimed that craniometry and psychological (IQ) testing were “unfounded” theories developed from the belief in biological determinism. In 1996, Gould released a second edition of his book wherein he challenged the methodology of Herrnstein & Murray’s The Bell Curve. Throughout his career, Gould often failed to rebut arguments against his claims or simply ignored them.

Leon Kamin is another Jewish Boasian anthropologist. Kamin has long been an opponent of the idea of heritability of personal traits. In the book Not in Our Genes, which he co-authored with fellow heebs Richard Lewontin and Steven Rose, they heavily criticized sociobiology, genetic determinism, and evolutionary psychology. The book, which is informed by Marxism, is often criticized for purposely misrepresenting the views of E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins. Kamin also argued that there was zero heritability of IQ.

Another heeb, psychologist Richard Lerner, also rejected the idea of biological determinism in his work Final Solutions: Biology, Predjudice, and Genocide (foreword by Lewtonin from above). Not only does he reject biological determinism, but he rejects environmental determinism as well. This is surely wrong as it would mean that human beings could essentially be programmed to accept any manner of exploitation, including slavery.

Here’s a bonus for all you goys still with me. This little tidbit is not found in Culture of Critique. Jared Diamond (and yes, it echoes), in his book Guns, Germs and Steel, makes the Boasian case against biological determinism, and in favor of environmental determinism, to explain why Eurasian cultures have been so successful while other cultures (African, Amerindian, etc) have not. One of his claims is that these cultures lacked animal species that could be domesticated in order to carry out agriculture. Methinks Jared might be lying.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, Jewish intellectuals have been extremely influential in anthropology. Their works have been the intellectual foundation for race being considered an arbitrary social construct and for humans being born as blank slates. These intellectuals tend to work in an echo chamber, only citing each other’s research and working together to promote their agenda. When rebuttals are made against their claims, they often ignore them, misrepresent their opponent’s arguments, or lay down extremely rigorous standards for their opponents in order to disqualify their works.

This is still an ongoing battle. We have seen recent growth in the new field of human biodiversity (HBD). Many great thinkers are destroying these false narratives, like Stephen Pinker (who echoes as well, to be fair), Richard Dawkins, Nicholas Wade, Henry Harpending, and Greg Cochran. As advancements in genomics are made, we will have even more information available to us in order to crush these egalitarian narratives.

Sources

MacDonald, Kevin. 1998. The Boasian School of Anthropology and the Decline of Darwinism in the Social Sciences.
MacDonald, Kevin. 1998. Culture of Critique.

Also published on Fanghorn Forest

Austen Layard
Occidental Observer
February 3, 2014

What happens when a forensic anthropologist is asked to identify the race of skeletal remains in a politically-charged climate where “race is a social construct”?  A classic case of doublethink: simultaneously accepting two contradictory beliefs as correct.  An article titled Forensic Identification of “Race” published in the journal Current Anthropology states:

The identification of the “race” of human remains by forensic anthropologists in New Zealand provides Maori with a service that is both helpful and contentious…Doing so is ethically paradoxical because the estimation of “race” implies that races exist, a concept that has been questioned and rejected by most anthropologists. (Cox et al. 2006)

The Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand who share a similar history with Native Americans in that they were largely displaced by colonial Europeans and have since earned their valued non-Western victimhood status which is currently being used for political redress in lieu of historical grievances.

When human remains are found in New Zealand, the Maori request forensic analysis to determine whether the bones are their own ancestors or instead of European descent.  This process is guided by a set of codes adopted in the New Zealand government which protect the rights of Maori to have their traditions and beliefs respected.  These codes acknowledge the special significance of Maori human remains because of the Maori view that human remains retain the spirit of the deceased after death.

So anthropologists in New Zealand are in a tough spot: being asked to fulfil the wishes of a protected indigenous population by identifying the race of human remains, while at the same time their own scholarly discipline purports that race is only skin deep.

It has even been suggested that forensic anthropologists who continue to identify individuals by “race,” while meaning no harm in doing so, may be nothing more than “kind racists” simply by helping to legitimize the race concept. (Ibid)

What to do, what to do???…the scientists want to make up for historical grievances by honouring the Maori request to identify their ancestors, but by doing so they’re complicit in blemishing anthropology’s sacred doctrine of race denial.

From this it might be concluded that forensic anthropologists have an ethical obligation to decline to identify the race of physical remains, thereby educating the general public about the myth of the existence of races. (Ibid)

Thus the article moves straight past cognitive dissonance into the loony land of doublethink.  In other words: “Yes, forensic anthropologists can identify the race of human bones, but we would rather educate the masses with our wonderful theory that race is a myth.”  To educate is to provide with information.  This statement advocates the opposite: it promotes the spreading of misinformation. This is apparently lost on the authors, who perceive no conflict in retaining in their minds two contradictory beliefs at the same time: that race is a biological reality, and that race does not exist.

Here’s another example from the same article:

The general public believes that the race concept is a biological fact rather than a cultural construct. To argue against the existence of races is to argue against the perception of the characteristics that allow discrimination among individuals. However scientifically flawed this reasoning, it is inappropriate to enter into the debate with police and family during a forensic investigation. (Ibid; italics not in original)

To clarify, these scholars are saying (presumably with a straight face) that it is scientifically flawed reasoning to accept that race is a biological fact…while simultaneously using biological facts to identify race in human bones.  As if that weren’t bad enough, they are implying that the general public is too uneducated and bigoted to grasp such doublethink, but that enlightened scholars shouldn’t embarrass the poor fools by pointing out their ignorance during a time of family crisis.

The only mental conflict perceived by these scholars is the possibility that they are being insensitive to the Maori. Never mind that they just implied that the general (White) public of New Zealand are a bunch of unenlightened hayseeds.

However, because skeletal remains retain spiritual importance for Maori despite having been separated from them, in some cases, for hundreds of years, forensic anthropologists who refuse to identify “race” could be seen to be placing their own beliefs over those of an indigenous group. (Ibid)

God forbid Whites are ever perceived as putting their own interests above any other group.

The forensic anthropologist clearly has an ethical and moral responsibility to make the attempt, because to do otherwise ignores the wishes of Maori to be recognized as culturally distinct. (Ibid)

So the wishes of minority groups with victimhood status trump all other moral imperatives.  How did we find ourselves in a situation where an article with so many blatant contradictions and condescending drivel is published in one of anthropology’s most prestigious peer-reviewed journals, without a shred of commentary pointing out its obvious flaws?  Hopefully the sane anthropologists are just keeping their heads down, trying to weather the storm of Cultural Marxism until its political, anti-scientific dogma works its way through the system.  The question is whether the discipline of anthropology can survive, or will just simply continue to degrade into meaningless post-modern banter.

Reference:

Cox, K., N. Tayles, and H. Buckley

2006    Forensic Identification of “Race”: The Issues in New Zealand. Current Anthropology 47(5):869-874.

When did humans first become human?  The answer is far from simple, because the question assumes that sometime in the past, humans achieved modernity and were locked within an evolutionary loophole where natural selection no longer applies.  Despite the absurdity of this scenario, and in stark contrast to empirical data, it is widely believed that humans have not changed physically or mentally for the past 50,000 years or so.

After the discipline of anthropology was hijacked by Cultural Marxism and it became crimethink to observe average group differences, a preoccupation with tracing everything back to Africa developed.  Africa does have an outstanding archaeological record revealing many firsts: the first bipedal hominids, the first stone tools, and the first anatomically modern humans that looked roughly like we do today (a vertical forehead, round skull, flat face, and prominent chin).  But largely due to the anti-racist politicization of anthropology, the currently accepted evolutionary paradigm is that Africa was the source of an intellectual watershed event sometime between 100,000 to 50,000 years ago, and that it was only a matter of time before this new breed of clever Africans spread out and replaced all the dim-witted archaic human populations in the rest of the world, such as Neanderthals.  (As used here, the term ‘racist’ refers to views that race and racial differences are a legitimate variable in research on humans, with none of the usual negative connotations found  in the popular and scientific literature.) The concept of behavioral modernity as it has been applied to the Paleolithic seemingly arose out of the Cultural Marxist obsession with proving that Africans are just as good as, and even better than the evil racist nineteenth-century White scientists who dared to rank societies and point out that advanced civilization never developed in certain areas of the world, such as south of the Sahara.

The problem with this paradigm is that, using the same set of criteria proposed by those scholars pushing for an African origin for modern behavior, it seems to have originally appeared in Europe instead, when modern humans first arrived there and replaced Neanderthals.  Furthermore, the so-called modern behavior in the African Stone Age is not qualitatively different from that of Neanderthals, who were supposedly replaced by cognitively-advanced modern humans.

Why all the confusion and intellectual gymnastics to argue for an African origin for modern human behavior?  The reason can be traced back to the early twentieth century, when an anti-racist political agenda was injected into anthropological scholarship, which eventually was influenced and transformed by critical theory of the Frankfurt School, with its overtones of anti-establishment and anti-Western sentiment aimed at the Marxist goal of liberating oppressed groups.  It has been debated elsewhere whether such anti-racist sentiments were sincere, or in contrast were used as a means to advance ethnic Jewish group interests while simultaneously de-ethnicizing non-Jewish elites [1].  Regardless, this Cultural Marxist ideology has served as a hindrance to scientific inquiry and has resulted in unfortunate situations where data are simply ignored when they do not follow the accepted paradigm, which evokes the exclusionary tactics used by the Boasian intellectual movement against dissenters.

The Anti-Racist Crusade in Anthropology

At the turn of the twentieth century, a spark was lit in the academic world of anthropology that would drastically change its course and politicize the discipline to serve as a mouthpiece for the far left.  This spark, lit by Franz Boas, the “Father of American Anthropology,” introduced the concept of cultural relativism and involved the heavy use of an anti-racist political ideology.  The Boasian tradition would later dovetail with critical theory, created by Cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School, in that dominant (Western) societies and their supporting ideologies were seen as the primary obstacle to human liberation.  Thus, critical theory is inherently anti-Western because the dominant ideologies at that time were Western in origin.

This freedom fighter mentality against traditional Western ideals and society has been a mainstay in anthropology since it was introduced at the turn of the twentieth century, and has arguably metastasized into a political-philosophical juggernaut that crushes all dissent and has resulted in the railroading of the discipline into meaningless postmodern, unscientific pursuits of self-interest, such as the field of feminist archaeology (which is so 1980s and has since been eclipsed by black feminist archaeology).

Many of today’s anthropologists are infused with Cultural Marxist cultural relativism and the desire to be a freedom fighter railing against mainstream thought.  The irony of course is that Cultural Marxism is the mainstream, completely dominating all aspects of Western academia and media.

Despite major scientific advances in various aspects of anthropology such as radiometric dating and genomic studies, Cultural Marxism remains at the helm, firmly keeping the discipline on the straight and narrow path of anti-racism and disingenuous cultural relativism that overemphasizes the virtues of non-Western societies while simultaneously de-emphasizing the positive aspects of Western civilization.

The Legacy of Franz Boas

The person most responsible for saturating anthropology with Cultural Marxism was Franz Boas, a German-Jewish émigré who found his academic home at Columbia University in 1896, where he stayed until his retirement in 1936.  Boas had a profound impact on the field of anthropology, and was unashamedly political in his orientation, placing great emphasis on fighting scientific racism.  Boas’s anti-racist enthusiasm was shared by other Jewish intellectuals of the Frankfurt School, which relocated from Germany to Columbia University in New York City in 1934.

Shortly after establishing the department of anthropology at Columbia, Boas turned his attention to “the race problem,” and part of this effort involved nurturing Africa-centric studies in the social sciences.  Contrary to the common view at that time that sub-Saharan Africa was a cultural backwater, Boas claimed that “the Negro race had contributed its liberal share” of cultural inventions and civilized accomplishments [2, p. 313].  Boas claimed that African cultural inventions in agriculture and iron smelting were crucial to “the advancement of the human race.”  Subsequent research has shown that neither agriculture nor iron smelting was an African invention, despite decades of intensive investigation within Africa that was influenced by this idea originated by Boaz.  Boaz was also the first to advocate for an African Institute and Museum, and the adoption of a Black studies curriculum at universities [3].

Anthropology becomes a Cog in the Wheel of the Radical Left

I went to the University of Chicago for a while after the Second World War. I was a student in the Department of Anthropology. At that time they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still. (Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, Ch. 1)
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

They sure are.  Little has changed since Vonnegut’s wry observation.

Beginning in the 1950’s, a new crop of scholars attempted to change the course of anthropology to a more rigidly scientific discipline, sometimes viewing Boas’s ideas as old-fashioned. A few scholars, however, exacted more searing criticism of Boas, claiming that his politicization of anthropology was primarily self-serving in that it supported primarily ethnic Jewish group interests. Boas was accused of nepotism by being principally receptive to Jewish students and prejudiced against American gentile scholarship [4].  It was also contended that Boas’s political leanings served two primary purposes: to combat anti-Semitism and to ensure that Boas and other European Jews achieved domination of anthropology in the United States [5, p. 139].  The same scholar concluded that Boas, in all of his talk of emancipating blacks and other minorities from perceived oppression, was essentially using Africans and other dark-skinned people as pawns in a game against non-Jewish scholars to obtain Jewish hegemony in the discipline of anthropology [5, p. 139].

But most criticisms of Boas were primarily methodological.  The core tenants of Cultural Marxism stuck like glue in the field of anthropology: radical egalitarianism, cultural relativism, etc.  Even Boas’s most vocal opponents were dyed-in-the-wool socialists, one of whom was under investigation by the FBI after his gushing praise of the Soviet Union during a 1929 speech at the American Association for the Advancement of Science was published in Pravda.  Boas and his academic brood remain profoundly influential in anthropological research even today.  The urge to debunk evolutionist claims of outmoded (largely non-Jewish) scientists has carried on through the twentieth century, perhaps culminating in Steven Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man (originally published in 1981), a highly influential book that was assigned reading in nearly every college course dealing with human evolution.  Gould’s book is still read as gospel in many college courses, despite the fact that scholars have since debunked some of Gould’s own research.

Completing his graduate work at Columbia University in 1967, Gould became a part of the Jewish intellectual movement at that institution spearheaded by Boas.  Among his litany of attacks against early racialist scientists in Mismeasure of Man, Gould claimed that nineteenth century physical anthropologist Samuel George Morton had manipulated the brain volumes of human skulls to favor a bias that Europeans had larger brains and Africans smaller ones.  In a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, a group of scholars recently re-measured the original sample of Morton’s skulls, revealing that Morton’s data were correct, and that Gould was the one who was guilty of manipulating data and making bogus claims to push his political agenda [6].  In the chapter claiming to debunk Morton, Gould wrote with much condescension and moral triumphalism:

Liars, if discovered, are excommunicated; scientists declare that their profession has properly policed itself, and they return to work, mythology unimpaired, and objectively vindicated. The prevalence of unconscious finagling, on the other hand, suggests a general conclusion about the social context of science. For if scientists can be honestly self-deluded to Morton’s extent, then prior prejudice may be found anywhere, even in the basics of measuring bones and toting (sic) sums. [7, pp. 87–88]

Now that Morton’s research has been exonerated, and after Gould’s own blundering mismeasurements have been exposed, one wonders how Gould would have judged himself: as a liar deserving of scientific excommunication, or simply as a self-deluded ideologue to be pitied and ignored?

The Evolution of Modern Humans

Has anthropology’s love affair with Africa produced anything other than an outlet for fashion-challenged celebrities to show that they care about ending poverty? In fact, African prehistoric archaeology has been very productive.  Archaeologists have made several outstanding discoveries here during the latter half of the twentieth century.  But, poignantly, despite Boas’s goal of revealing Africa’s cultural contributions to civilization and simultaneously minimizing biological-evolutionary inquiry, the best discoveries in sub-Saharan Africa are fossilized hominid remains that have revealed a great deal about human evolution and nothing at all about early civilization.

Current evidence suggests that anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa — that is, humans of our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens.  The oldest candidates are a few fragmentary skulls and postcranial bones found in East Africa and South Africa dating to between ca. 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.  It is important to note that these earlier anatomically modern skulls are quite robust, and it is only after ca. 35,000 years ago that skeletons show fully modern morphology [8].  But this hasn’t stopped the idea, perpetuated by Cultural Marxist creed, that once we evolved into modern humans, somehow our brains have miraculously been unaffected by any subsequent evolution and that all human achievements after were built with the same brain.

It should come as no surprise that finding the first modern humans in Africa was very welcome news to the politically correct community, which has relentlessly glommed onto the idea that “we’re all out of Africa.”   National Geographic even has a lesson plan on its website aimed at teaching high school students how we’re “all Africans under the skin”.  Never mind that forensic scientists regularly identify the race of human skeletal remains, or that with a sample of your saliva, several genetic testing companies can provide a highly-detailed breakdown of your racial composition.

Behavioral Modernity

One thing eluded the pro-Africa, anti-Western crusaders in the realm of human evolution: pinning ‘behavioral modernity’ squarely inside Africa.  The problem is that anatomically modernity (as it is currently loosely defined) does not correlate with behavioral modernity.  Those anatomically modern humans that evolved in Africa, as far as we can tell, acted the same as Neanderthals and other archaic modern human groups for over 100,000 years.  In other words, there is no appreciable behavioral difference between early modern humans and archaic humans for more than half of the time that we have existed as a species.

That didn’t stop scholars from trying really hard to locate the origins of behavioral modernity in Africa.  Decades of research in South Africa resulted in the claim that a series of sites along the coast were the fountainhead of modern human cognition.  Realizing the power of these statements, the media, politicians, and funding agencies have accepted these claims uncritically.

What’s the big deal about these South African sites?  Scholars in the Africa-first camp claim that modern human culture arose here for three reasons: (1) new, more advanced stone tool technology; (2) more advanced subsistence strategies (exploiting more nutritious foods, etc.); and (3) most importantly, symbolic artifacts (artistic depictions).

The evidence they are using for these claims comes primarily from two sites in South Africa: Blombos Cave and Klasies River Mouth.  By about 80,000 years ago, the occupants at these locations were manufacturing perforated shells that were used as decorative beads, and they were making engraved designs on small pieces of ochre, a mineral often used as a red pigment.  It is argued that the incised lines on two pieces of ochre at Blombos Cave and on ostrich egg shells, including a hatched band motif, are symbolic in nature and thus support the emergence of modern human behavior here.

Why so much emphasis on these lumps of incised ochre?  For one, it has been revealed that Neanderthals made shell beads in Europe.  Also, the discovery of anatomically modern humans in the Levant (in modern-day Israel) at 100,000 years ago, together with perforated shell beads and lumps of scratched-up ochre threatened to usurp coveted prize of earliest behavioral modernity.  So the Africa-centric scholars claimed that the scratches on the lump of ochre in the Near East at 100,000 years ago were not as purposeful and intricate as those in Africa at 80,000 years ago.  Even more unsettling to the Africa-first model is the fact that Neanderthals occupied the same region of the Levant after anatomically modern humans lived there, indicating that modern humans here did not replace Neanderthals, as was the case later in Europe.  So if the beaded, ochre-loving modern humans in Israel were so cognitively advanced, why did they give up their prized real estate to the supposedly cognitively inferior Neanderthals for over 50,000 years?  Furthermore, the Near Eastern modern humans had the exact same stone tool technology as contemporaneous Neanderthals, and the same subsistence strategies so far as we can tell.  So the three indications for behavioral modernity proposed by the Africa-first crowd (nice tools, advanced hunting skills, and art) were not really telling us anything.  Were there really any qualitative differences between these groups of early modern humans and Neanderthals?

The obvious answer is no, and that incised hatch designs and perforated shells are not unambiguous evidence for fully modern behavior.  One would expect the blossoming of other types of modern behavior shortly afterwards if indeed this was the genesis of modernity.  But there were no new artistic or symbolic advancements in sub-Saharan Africa for approximately 55,000 years after the beads and ochre pieces.  The first painted art in Africa is found at a cave in Namibia and dates to approximately 25,000 years ago.  These early African paintings are predated by about 10,000 years by cave paintings in Western Europe, which were drawn with much more sophistication and aestheticism than the African paintings (e.g., use of shading and highlighting to emphasize three dimensionality and dynamism; detailing of eyes, hair, musculature, etc.).

The Artistic Explosion in Paleolithic Europe

Investigations in Europe over the past decade have revealed rich archaeological remains attributed to early modern humans as they migrated into an area inhabited by Neanderthals about 40,000 years ago.  Artifacts found at sites in Germany include a spectacular array of personal ornaments, artwork, and musical instruments unparalleled in sophistication and aesthetic quality anywhere else in the world for tens of thousands of years.  These skillful artists manufactured naturalistic and mythical images in three dimensions with exquisite attention to detail and perspective, together with sophisticated personal ornamentation and musical instruments: flutes carved from animal bone capable of producing a remarkably wide range of tones and harmonies.  Not to mention the exquisite cave paintings appearing only 5,000 years later in France and Spain.

Without a doubt, these early Europeans were far ahead of their time and attained an astonishing aptitude for creativity and invention.  The timeline figure below provides a direct comparison of Paleolithic art across the world.  It is immediately apparent that, if there ever was a source of behavioral modernity during the Paleolithic, that it occurred in Europe and nowhere else.

Paleolithic art in Europe is far advanced in several ways:

1. Figurative art (representing actual things such as humans and animals, rather than abstract designs)
2. Mastery of three-dimensional sculpting
3. Paintings displaying a mastery of three dimensional perspective and dynamism (such as providing a sense of movement)
4. Musical instruments
5. Depictions of mythical imagery (imaginary beings such as the half-lion, half-man sculpture shown in timeline figure)
6. Degree of aestheticism and the successful transfer of an appreciation of beauty to the artistic form

The items shown in the timeline are only a small sample of the rich artwork created in Europe during the Paleolithic.  For example, the prehistoric flutes are not isolated occurrences.  A total of eight flutes have been found in Germany alone at sites dating back to 40,000 years ago.  One nearly complete specimen is made from the radius bone of a griffon vulture and measures 21.8 centimeters in length (8.5 inches), has five finger holes and a V-shaped notch at one end serving as the mouthpiece.  Others are made from the bones of swans and mammoth ivory.  Although flutes were used throughout the remainder of the Paleolithic in Europe, there is no definitive evidence for musical instruments of any kind anywhere else in the world for more than 30,000 years after their use in Europe.

In terms of artistic representation, nothing else compares to Europe for tens of thousands of years, and some societies never accomplished this level of sophistication in their material culture.  But you wouldn’t know this from listening to The Narrative, which relentlessly claims that the seeds of advanced human cognition were first sown in Black Africa.  Never mind the obvious creative explosion during the European Upper Paleolithic.  And never mind that European Neanderthals were producing the same types of objects heralded as ‘modern’ in South Africa.

The evidence for significant cultural advancements in Europe earlier than anywhere else in the world is largely ignored by scholars and the public alike, because it does not fit the politically-motivated idea that humanity was an African invention and that the human brain was born there, after which it has remained fixed and resistant to all effects of evolution.  If cultural modernity first arose in Europe, after anatomically modern humans spread out of Africa, then the possibility arises that populations who remained in Africa may have been left behind on the brain train.  Obviously, this won’t do in a discipline steeped in Boasian cultural relativism.

But if you were to objectively consider all sources of empirical data, then such a possibility becomes a very plausible hypothesis.  Not only does the archaeology suggest that something special happened in the brains of Europeans 40,000 years ago, but genetic studies also corroborate this idea.

In 2006, scholars at the University of Chicago published research suggesting that mating between ancient humans and Neanderthals in Europe may have introduced a gene variant into the human population that enhanced human brain function.  Analyzing the DNA sequence structure of the gene microcephalin, which regulates brain size in humans, indicated that all modern copies of the D alleles in this gene arose from a single progenitor copy around 40,000 years ago [9].  This allele must have provided a strong fitness advantage, because it then spread rapidly and is now present in about 70 percent of the world’s population.   Further, the researchers found that the D alleles are much more prevalent today in Eurasia and less common in sub-Saharan Africa, which is consistent with the scenario that it originated in Neanderthals and was passed on to modern humans in Europe.

To review: a genetic mutation for enhanced brain function evolves at the same time when there is an explosion in creative artistic representation in Europe (and advancements of similar magnitude in hunting technologies).  This gene is found more commonly in European and Asian populations and less commonly in African populations.  It doesn’t take many D alleles to connect the dots.  But in the spirit of Cultural Marxist suppression of dissent, the University of Chicago study was relegated to the shadowy sidelines of scientific literature, not because its findings were refuted, but simply because it was called “manifestly racist” [10].  Dropping their initial enthusiasm of the study’s findings like a sack of potatoes, the University of Chicago abandoned its patent application for DNA-based intelligence testing, and the lead researcher moved onto other research because “it’s getting too controversial”.

For all of the lip service paid to Occam’s razor, scholars today would rather construct elaborate and implausible scenarios that either muddy the issue, or directly mislead the public.  If they value their job, they will avoid this controversial topic all together.

Ignorance is Bliss

Africa-first scholars with a Cultural Marxist orientation have argued themselves into a corner.  By supporting a concept such as “behavioral modernity,” they have implicitly approved the hierarchical ranking of humans into groups who were mentally advanced and those who were not, despite the tireless inculcation of the anthropological discipline with Boasian cultural relativism for the past century.

This was no doubt a compromise to allow some ranking of prehistoric groups, just so long as it was clear that all modern humans are exactly the same, all derived from the same source population, and that all of the dummies are extinct populations who became Darwinian zeros after succumbing to African superiority.  Without some sort of ranking of our deep past onto a scale from primitive to advanced, paleoanthropology is rendered meaningless.  To say that there is no difference between humans today and the earliest hominids some four million years ago is to deny human uniqueness.  This is too much for even the most politically correct crowds to accept, so a line had to be drawn between modern humans and everything else.

Much to the chagrin of scholars seeking an African origin to fully modern human behavior, there is simply too much evidence to the contrary.  It was fine to say that the seeds of human greatness arose in Africa and that these chosen people then spread out and replaced all other humans through their cultural and biological superiority.  But by constructing a testable hypothetical scenario, they left the door open for the discovery of contradictory evidence. To the horror of politically correct academics, by their own definition of modernity, contradictory evidence indicates that Europeans were the first to reach this mental milestone, and that by comparison populations in sub-Saharan Africa and Australia did not catch up, even into modern times.

Over the past few years, the concept of behavioral modernity has become rather unfashionable within the inner-circle of prehistorian scholars.  It is probably no coincidence that this concept lost steam after the political implications of behavioral modernity arising in Europe first were realized.  Recently, an academic symposium was held to deconstruct the notion that behavioral modernity arose first in one place, or that it can be recognized archaeologically at all (“Alternative Pathways to Complexity: Evolutionary Trajectories in the Middle Paleolithic and Middle Stone Age,” Current Anthropology, 54, No. S8, Dec. 2013).  A new framework was developed which essentially claims that after we evolved as a species, behavioral changes were circumstantial, and that different groups were simply reacting to diverse environmental, demographic, and cultural influences.

Frankly, the concept of behavioral modernity was always dubious, and arguably only ever gained popularity as a political tool for the “we’re all the same under the hood” crowd.  It was claimed that behavioral modernity was the tipping point when culture took over natural selection and the human brain was locked into its current state.  For example, Neanderthals are thought to have used thrusting spears and necessarily relied more heavily on their brute strength than the more gracile modern humans who had developed a spear throwing technology that required less strength and put them in less danger while hunting.

Advancements in human genomic studies have shown that such a concept is manifestly untrue.  To believe that the modern human brain has somehow been magically spared from the effects of natural selection is no less an act of faith than to believe that the world was created on October 23, 4004 B.C.

Although we are all different culturally and genetically from the first modern humans entering Europe some 40,000 years ago, it is clear that something special did happen there at that time.  This phenomenon is worthy of attention, particularly when combined with advancements in genetic research such as the University of Chicago study revealing mutations that enhanced brain function around the same time as the artistic explosion.  But the suppression of this study indicates that political correctness trumps empiricism and scientific advancement.  To the Cultural Marxists, it’s time to put the nail in the coffin of yet another idea that could potentially provide meaning to the archaeological record with their usual techniques: “by emphasizing the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human behavior” [1, p. 24], thus obfuscating the data before it can be exploited within a theoretical framework of any consequence.

Bibliography