The theme of the great battle with others runs through the entire collective mythological history of mankind as a leitmotif. Starting from the ancient Greek gods and heroes, through the Scandinavian and Germanic mythologies, Celtic legends and further, up to modern fantasy with orcs, goblins, trolls and other evil spirits.
Considering that myths are often echoes of real events, it becomes very interesting: with whom exactly could our distant ancestors have fought in the times that are usually called prehistoric?
Anthropomorphic enemies
Moreover, the enemy is always not only strong, ferocious, cunning and prone to genocide, but also, as a rule, anthropomorphic. Involuntarily, one recalls an old thesis from the evolutionary theory that seems to be not quite appropriate in the context of mythology that the most severe struggle is between closely related and, accordingly, very similar species for common sources of food and pleasure.
And it is followed by the obvious "seditious" thought about the possible factual basis of ancient legendary legends.
Modern paleoarcheology has nevertheless changed the harmonious and linear picture of the smooth evolution of the human race (Pithecanthropus - Homo erectus - Neanderthal - Cro-Magnon - modern man) for extremely intricate "bush-like" constructions, according to which three, four, and maybe maybe even more hominid species.
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And not a million years before our era, but “just yesterday” - several tens of thousands of years ago, when the fully formed but still naive Homo sapiens left his native Africa, and bloodthirsty European Neanderthals, gloomy Altai Denisovans were waiting for him, grinning carnivore and small, but no less vicious dwarf people from the island of Flores, unofficially nicknamed hobbits by archaeologists.
Dates of ancient battles
The battles were certainly in full swing. At least, at the sites of both Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, gnawed bones of confidants and even necklaces from each other's teeth are found. And 3-5% of the genome that we inherited from the Neanderthals convincingly shows that the conflicting parties did not disdain on occasion and the simple joys of insatiable victors.
But the deadline for these battles, so to speak, a psychologically important milestone, which paleoarchaeologists still agree on, is 40,000 years ago and not a minute later. Could an ancient man carry the ancestral memory of them through at least 2,000 generations, in order to later translate them into myths?
In fact, the question of dating the era of coexistence between humans and other hominid species is frozen today in a situation of unstable equilibrium. By and large, a single archaeological find is enough, and the entire ancient history of the human race will turn upside down.
Moreover, there are some finds! And the remains of a Neanderthal girl in a cave in the Caucasus, whose approximate age is 20,000 years, and the Neanderthal site in the Pyrenees, dating back to the 100 century BC, and quite incredible reports of the finds of Neanderthal bones in Scythian mounds somewhere in the Ukrainian steppes. But so far they are all subject to serious doubts about the accuracy of the dates, and some even about the sanity of the authors.
And what about the classics?
But if we nevertheless try to admit (however, we are not the first) that rivalry and fierce competition between the ancient man and his closest relatives occurred much later than it follows today from the data of paleoarcheology, and even reflected (albeit in a very exaggerated form) in mythological legends, it makes sense to look for some confirmation of this from ancient historians and geographers.
For example, Strabo, describing the same Caucasus, asserted that “some troglodytes also live here, because of the cold weather they live in animal dens; but even they have a lot of barley bread. Among other classics, we find mentions of these troglodytes when describing Ethiopia, Turkey and the Caucasus.
In general, the conviction of their existence in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages was so obvious that Karl Linnaeus, based on the testimonies of ancient authors and the stories of travelers, even singled them out as a separate subspecies of humans (Homo troglodites), characterized by a human appearance, abundant hairiness and undeveloped speech.
Of course, the temptation to associate these troglodytes with, say, Neanderthals is quite obvious, and such attempts have been made repeatedly. The consolidated answer of anthropologists was expected: there can be no question of any Neanderthals, they died out 40,000 years ago, and Strabo and others like him simply described ordinary people who returned to life in caves. The further substantive dispute has so far been suspended due to the complete absence of new arguments.
The Bible, and not only it
Recently, the tradition has once again returned in particularly difficult issues to appeal to the authority of the Holy Scriptures. Not everything is clear to the notes either. There are actually two stories about the creation of man in Genesis.
According to the first, the Lord created man and woman at the same time, blessed them and commanded to be fruitful and multiply. The second is a much more famous story about Adam and Eve. And how is this to be understood? It all depends on the approach used to interpret the Old Testament texts. Basically, there are three of them.
The first approaches the Bible as a kind of set of moral and ethical parables, slightly connected for greater persuasiveness by a common plot, and we do not consider it.
The second approach, united in the so-called critical school of studying the Old Testament, in no way encroaching on the general sacredness of the narrative itself, proceeds from the premise that in the course of repeated rewriting of sacred texts, numerous errors inevitably had to creep into them.
According to this school, the Old Testament we know is a compilation of three sources, designated as "Elohist", "Yahvist" and "Priestly Code". And the two cited versions of the history of the creation of man are connected with the fact that the first of them got into the Bible from the "Priestly Code" and is a brief summary of the subsequent history of the creation of man.
Finally, the third approach rejects the very idea of possible scribal errors as sacrilege. Each is not just a word, but even each letter of Scripture has its own great meaning, and if the history of the creation of man is presented there in two different editions, it means that for some reason it is necessary. This approach is also called kabbalistic, which, in general, is justified. After all, you see, looking for hidden alphanumeric interactions in an arbitrary compilation of someone's incorrect retellings is not only stupid, but also extremely offensive.
In general, on the basis of this approach, the doctrine of the Pre-Adamites was formulated - mysterious people with an unclear destiny, created before Adam and Eve. Moreover, it even explained some biblical paradoxes, such as the “paradox of Cain's wife” (indeed, he married someone after being expelled from his own family), but did not receive any further development.
But if the idea of the possible existence of these Pre-Adamites from the Old Testament can only be deduced through rather bold assumptions, then Muslim legends not only assert the fact of their existence, but also give the names of the pre-Adamite princes who ruled this sinful world even before the appearance of Adam.
Moreover, the idea of the Pre-Adamites is far from the only way to somehow reconcile the Holy Scriptures with evolutionary theory. There are theological concepts according to which the Neanderthals are the descendants of Cain, and the Cro-Magnons are the descendants of Seth. And external differences between ancient people are interpreted as God's curse of the Cainites, who have lost the beauty of the primordial Adam.
Here, by the way, we come close to another very interesting question about the possible appearance of different subspecies of hominids, the limits of plasticity of the genotype of the genus Homo and a certain arbitrariness in restoring the appearance from several accidentally found bones. But this topic is already another article.
In the meantime, we can maintain the hope that the same elves, orcs and gnomes may be not only the fruit of the noble fantasy of Tolkien and his colleagues, but also quite real characters in the ancient history of mankind.
Nikolay DUBROVIN, geneticist
