The first genocide on Earth took place 30,000 years ago
30 thousand years ago, a global catastrophe occurred on our planet. The whole humanity was lost. He was not destroyed by a huge meteorite, not by glaciation, not by disease and not by wild animals. We humans destroyed it. The countdown of the phenomena that we today call the word genocide began exactly 30 thousand years ago. Then homo sapiens faced a completely independent, special and biologically different type of people, and destroyed it in order to make way for himself on the planet.
Paleontology, the science of ancient creatures that once inhabited the earth, has always been a peaceful, academic pursuit. But today truly Shakespearean passions are raging in it. Two groups of researchers are fighting to the death. They cannot in any way write into our past, into the past of the Earth, the strange creatures that have inhabited it for half a million years and have disappeared practically without a trace.
These people are usually called Neanderthals. For hundreds of thousands of years, they inhabited Europe, here they formed, here was their homeland, which they were very reluctant to leave. In their appearance there were features that we even today, out of habit, refer to as primitive: a depressed chin and large brow ridges, very massive jaws. But their head was larger than ours, for it contained a much larger brain. Why they needed him, such a powerful thinking apparatus, we do not know today.
The average height of men was 1.65 m, women were 10 centimeters shorter. But at the same time, Neanderthals were real tough guys. The men weighed about 90 kg, it was a real clot of muscles. Their arms and legs were somewhat differently arranged: their forearms and legs were shorter. The most unusual detail of their appearance was the nose: wide and at the same time with a hump, while upturned. With such a nose, a Neanderthal could safely breathe in the coldest air without fear of a cold. His face should have made a proud and intimidating impression.
Everything we know testifies that Neanderthals were people, humanity in the full sense of the word, who created their own culture that radically distinguished them from the world of other hominids and from the world of animals. They knew fire, made stone tools. Moreover, their stone processing technique did not resemble the one used by our ancestors, representatives of the genus Homo sapiens. This means that we and they drew our skills and knowledge from different sources. Traveling the world, sometimes penetrating from Europe to the Middle East, to Palestine, the Neanderthals did not make tools on the spot, but for hundreds of kilometers they carried stones processed by some craftsmen in their distant homeland.
40 thousand years ago, Neanderthals began to bury their dead. No human predecessors or relatives did this - just us and the Neanderthals. At the same time, they acquired primitive jewelry: pendants made from animal teeth. In the history of the earth, only humans and Neanderthals knew what jewelry was.
Altruism and respect for elders were not alien to them. Among the remains of the Neanderthals, the skeleton of a 50-year-old man was found; by the standards of that time, it was a very old man. He didn't have a single tooth. He could eat only if someone close to him chewed food for him and thus fed a respected and caring member of the tribe.
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It is unknown if they knew how to speak. The structure of their sky is such that it could well allow Neanderthals to master speech.
They were born hunters and hunted in groups together. Their diet was rather monotonous. Apparently they were gathering roots and fruits. But mostly they ate meat. At the sites of the Neanderthals, they find mainly carefully crushed and gnawed bones of various game. And also - in the same way "processed" bones of Cro-Magnons, that is, the ancestors of modern people. And at the sites of the Cro-Magnons, they found the same gnawed bones of the Neanderthals.
Neanderthals and humans began to hunt each other and devour the bodies of defeated enemies about 40 thousand years ago. Then the first representatives of our race appeared in Europe, the fiefdom of the Neanderthals. The coexistence of two types of people on the same territory lasted for 10 thousand years. About 30 thousand years ago, the last representatives of this tribe huddled in the very south of Spain, in the Gibraltar region, in the Pyrenees, and in the mountains of Dalmatia. Then the Neanderthals disappeared without a trace. And we stayed.
For many decades, since 1856, when the remains of these creatures were first found in the Neandertal Valley in Germany, scientists have quite calmly explained the fact of this disappearance. In full accordance with the dogmas of Darwinism, the Neanderthals were declared the closest relatives and predecessors of man. In school textbooks and in museum exhibitions, in a line of hominids who marched victoriously from monkey to man, a hairy massive Neanderthal man with his sunken jaw and a heavy spear on his shoulder was portrayed right behind us, modern people. It was believed that the Neanderthals at some stage smoothly turned into modern humans, and those who did not, just as smoothly disappeared as a result of natural selection and competition between more perfect and primitive species.
In the midst of "politically correct" researchers, it has already been suggested that the Neanderthals were simply absorbed by the ancestors of modern people. These hypotheses were based on the finds of the skulls of Neanderthal children, in which some of the features of modern humans can be seen. The most ardent defender of this point of view is the Portuguese explorer João Zilao, who discovered such skulls in the Lagar Velho cave in Portugal. Similar strange skulls were found in the Saint-Cesar grotto in France, Croatia, and the Middle East.
The bomb exploded after researchers from the University of Munich analyzed the ADN remains of the very first Neanderthal man, found back in 1856, in 1997. The age of the find is 50 thousand years. The study of 328 identified nucleotide chains led paleontologist Svante Paabo to a sensational conclusion: the differences in genes between Neanderthals and modern humans are too great to be considered relatives. These data were backed up in 1999 by similar studies of the remains found in the Caucasus, Georgia. A new sensation came from the University of Zurich. There, the Spaniard Maricia Ponce de Leon and the Swiss Christoph Zollikofer compared the skulls of a two-year-old Neanderthal man and a corresponding little Cro-Magnon man, that is, a modern man. The conclusion was unambiguous:the cranial bones of children of the two species were formed in completely different ways, which indicates a fundamental difference in the gene pool of both races.
Based on these data, a number of researchers in the United States and Europe came to the conclusion that Neanderthals were neither ancestors nor relatives of modern humans. They were two different biological species, descended from different branches of the ancient hominids. According to the specific laws, they could not mix and give common offspring. Neanderthals, therefore, were a special kind of intelligent creatures, born of the evolution of life on Earth. They were a special humanity that independently built their culture and were destroyed by our ancestors in the struggle for a place in the sun.
Those who came to such conclusions also found an explanation for the "explosion" in the civilization of the Neanderthals, which occurred at the moment when they encountered the ancestors of modern people. Both the custom of burying the dead and the possession of jewelry are nothing more than borrowings from the more developed culture of our Cro-Magnon predecessors.
For the supporters of the "politically correct" tradition, it was a shock. Instead of the bright and even Darwinian path of mankind from monkey to man, to the heights of modern civilization, a different picture appeared. Evolution turned out to be able to give birth to several different humanities, Darwinian biological straightforwardness was shattered. The crown of creation, homo sapiens, took possession of the planet not as a result of peaceful absorption of less developed younger brothers, but only through aggression and war, through the destruction of another, also cultured people.
I was able to meet and talk about this problem with one of the supporters of a new approach to the study of Neanderthals. Jean-Jacques Yublain is a professor at the University of Bordeaux and a leading researcher at the Paris Institute of Sians Po, author of famous books on the origins of man.
Why was the idea of another humanity on Earth so shocking to many scientists?
- For many years, it was assumed that the Man with a capital letter is synonymous with the concept of culture. It was the perfect setup. But as a result of excavations, it turned out that the Neanderthals were not at all primitive half-humans, half-beasts. They had their own culture. And at the same moment, various researchers began to try by hook or by crook to include Neanderthals in the Homo sapiens family, by all means to show that this is just a kind of modern man. For me, this testifies to the vitality of the concept, created back in the 30s of the last century by the paleontologist and Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who believed that our humanity was the one and only, the pinnacle of evolution.
- What prevents you from accepting the idea of the existence of another humanity with its own culture, different from ours? Why is the idea of a "second humanity" sometimes called paleo-racist?
- Since the Second World War, anthropologists have been fighting to prove that all people, including Neanderthals, are the same. It seems that they are trying to atone for the sins of those scientists whose teachings about the existence of different races were used by Nazi ideology. The same logic, and even the ugly postcolonial syndrome, forces some experts to deny the existence of cannibalism in Neanderthals and in our ancestors, Cro-Magnons. Such is the kind of myth about the kind savage. The idea that, in the process of evolution, one species, more advanced, destroyed another in order to take possession of the Earth seems to be such a scientist revival of racist concepts.
Today, claims that the culture of the Neanderthals was different from the culture of our ancestors, was more primitive, that they borrowed many technical achievements and skills from the Cro-Magnons, is a real taboo for anthropologists. This is the same as openly recognizing them as underdeveloped creatures. But whether we like it or not, the Neanderthals were different and used a stone processing technique that was completely different from that of the Cro-Magnons.
Some historians even claim that the Neanderthals themselves created a culture similar to the Cro-Magnon. And they did it either shortly before the arrival of our ancestors in Europe, or immediately after the invasion. Meanwhile, for 400 thousand years, both types of people developed completely independently. During this time, the Neanderthals created their own culture, which we call Mousterian, and at the same time, for example, did not know what decoration was. But immediately after the arrival of the Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals suddenly began to use necklaces made of animal teeth, pendants, and engraved objects. Exactly the same as those used by the Cro-Magnons. The most reasonable and natural explanation for this is borrowing.
- What do you think - our ancestors really just exterminated the Neanderthals?
- I guess it was a little more complicated. Archaeological data show that Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals lived side by side in Europe for a long time. Simply, each group occupied its own hunting territory and did not cross foreign borders. But people knew how to eat not only meat and therefore more efficiently used their land. But the Neanderthal hunters, men, in search of game were forced to go far from the camps. When they returned, they found their camps ruined and occupied by newcomers.
- What could have helped our ancestors in the fight against stronger and almost as smart rivals?
- Most likely, people had an advantage in communication. They could negotiate among themselves, coordinate the actions of individual groups against a common enemy. Neanderthals lived more withdrawn and, apparently, reluctant to come into contact with their own kind.
- Do you think that our culture got nothing from the Neanderthals?
- In material terms, there is practically nothing that would leave traces. But who knows if they could say what the Neanderthals, captives or guests, were telling their luckier rivals by the fires? And what is left of this in the beliefs or myths of the present peoples of the Earth?