The Tower Museum in London is always full of people. But most of the visitors crowd around the armor of Richard the Lionheart. Surprise is noticeable on people's faces. However, it is understandable, because the armor of the king is so small that no modern man can wear them. The valiant knight, whose fame survived for centuries, was short by our standards - only 150 cm!
Is Darwin right?
And what's so surprising? - educated citizens will ask. This just proves that Darwin was absolutely right in stating that in the process of evolution, any type of earthly life is capable of gradual improvement over millions of years. And a person is no exception, he grows from year to year …
However, if you think a little, then you can doubt that the example with the gallant King Richard works so much for the theory of evolution. Let's make some simple calculations. Richard lived in the XII century, the Englishmen of the XXI century tried to try on his armor, the average height of which is 180 cm. For eight centuries, an inhabitant of England has grown by 30 cm, that is, by about 4 cm in a hundred years. It is clear that the mechanisms of evolution were not included in the XII century, but worked before that. Then it can be assumed that eight centuries before Richard, the inhabitants of the British Isles were 120 cm tall, and four centuries earlier, at the time of the conquest of Britain by the Romans, the Britons were even less - a meter with a cap. But Latin authors nowhere note such a "British anomaly", although not too tall Romans should have looked like real giants next to them.
One can, of course, assume that the acceleration took place only in the last century, and before that the growth of the British did not change significantly. And you know what? We agree with this! Because the extrapolation - the transfer of acceleration into the past - we have done only in order to reveal the absurdity of the theory of the constant improvement of species. Moreover, we ourselves will remember this fact: excavations of burials of various cultures dating back to the times of King Richard often show that the average height of people belonging to these cultures was very impressive, up to the same 180 cm that the British flaunt today.
So the proof of the Darwinian postulate of the steady improvement of existing life forms using arguments such as knightly armor may be considered inconclusive.
The fossil record reports numerous examples of the death of entire species, or even classes, which once represented very common forms of terrestrial life. And all of them died out in the course of environmental disasters - not a very new and tested way of renewing the planet's biosphere. And although today the human individual exists and even thrives, in the process of its existence people also died out. And not at all because of natural disasters, such as a giant meteorite, tectonic shifts or a global flood that killed the dinosaurs and mammoths. Man died out for other reasons.
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Oil painting
According to Darwin, those individuals who have "superior physical characteristics", and therefore larger ones, have the greatest chances of continuation of the species. However, when it comes to a person, then it is worth turning to the data of archeology, and the picture will be painted completely different.
Let's look at an example of one ecological niche. It is huge, stretching from west to east from modern Krasnoyarsk to the border of Khakassia with Tuva. Here, during two thousand years (from the 3rd millennium BC to the 1st millennium BC), four civilizations were replaced. Sequentially, at intervals of five hundred years, one by one died out. Moreover, each of them represented a distinctive culture and an anthropologically distinct type. They had only one thing in common: the Afanasyevskaya, Okunevskaya, Andronovskaya and Karasuk civilizations (named after the settlements near which the material remains of their culture were first discovered) died out when the average growth of their representatives reached 180 cm. And there is no evidence that that they had moved somewhere. It was just that civilization was disappearingand the vacated ecological niche was occupied by a genetically younger and undersized population (pygmies). So much for your "superlative physique"! Pygmies, as a rule, inherited the language of the leaving people (since it did not disappear overnight), but at the same time they formed their own ideas about God and created a new religion.
So the Scythians, a people who once inhabited the Black Sea region and also reached a very impressive growth by the time of their disappearance, did not become. And the late Spartans. And the late Inca and Maya. The point is not at all about the Spanish conquests, the conquistadors destroyed their states, killed many, but they did not completely destroy the people: people died out, and they were replaced by the current Indian peoples. The same thing happened with the later Mongols. And this list can be continued for a long time.
Mercy, you object, but the Mongols, thank God, are not extinct, they live and flourish in their Mongolia and have not yet reached the fatal 180 cm! The thing is that the current Mongols are already other Mongols who have adopted the name and language. But they are already the next population, and they still grow and grow up to 180 cm.
Now archaeologists and anthropologists have examined a sufficient number of burials of the Batu campaign era to come to the conclusion: basically strong, hardy people 172-175 cm tall (taller than the current Mongols) are buried there. The population of Russia at that time was much lower: the growth of those buried in the graves of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, dated by the same years, was about 150 cm, and this was the elite of the nation. Judging by the size of the shrine of Sergius of Radonezh in the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, the height of the monk did not exceed the same 150 cm.
Oddly enough, Alexander Nevsky was of the same height. However, by the time of liberation from the yoke, the Russians had made progress in their development, and the Mongols began a phase of extinction.
Critical mark
Today we know many species of the organic world that have reached a mass of one, or even tens of tons in their pursuit of gigantism.
So why can't a person overcome the relatively low mark of 80-90 kg and 180 cm without prejudice to himself? (Of course, archeology knows the bone remains of a gigantopithecus with a height of 250 cm. But this is, rather, an exception to the rule. Moreover, this species of hominid did not use the sound method of communication, therefore, it cannot be considered 100% human.)
There is no definite, unambiguous answer to this question. It's just that archaeologists and paleontologists state that the human population dies out when the average height of its representatives reaches a critical point of 180 cm. The resource of human genetic plasticity is exhausted.
Darwinism formed the belief in people that if hominids have existed for more than two million years, then nothing terrible will happen to man as a species in the next thousand years. However, today the situation is unique and, one might say, threatening, this was not the case in the entire previous history of mankind. The fact is that a fairly large part of humanity - and these are the inhabitants of the European continent: Russians, Germans, French, British, Poles, Czechs, as well as Americans and Australians - are genetically the same age peoples, whose average height is close to 180 cm, and a global process called extinction has already begun and is gaining momentum. In the entire history of the Earth, such a number of ethnic groups were never going to leave the scene at the same time. If in the past, each case of filling the vacant niche occurred locally and individually,now it can happen almost on the entire planet at once. What kind of cataclysms this may be accompanied by, one can only guess.
Sergey BORODIN