Re: Modern Neanderthals?

Yousuf Khan (ykhan@achilles.net)
Sun, 13 Oct 1996 18:28:08 GMT

On Fri, 11 Oct 1996 18:10:19 -0700, "Aurelius M." <cicero9@ix.netcom.com>
wrote:

>I have seen many people that have "Neanderthal Features". Modern
>day humans will have sex with most anything. That they would
>not have sex with Neanderthal's is absurd. Neanderthals were
>probably killed off by modern Homo Sapiens, yet as none PC as
>it is to say........The women were probably raped and thus
>the Neanderthal line continues. Remember we are the same
>"Animal" that exterminated millions of Jewish People. Would
>we have been more civilized 30,000 years ago. I think not!!!

There is no evidence that there was ever a genocide. In fact, genocide is
too easy an answer that people throw about when they really have no idea
what went on.

It's the same sort of thing with extinctions of ancient animal species,
like Mammoths: it's assumed that it was humans who killed them off, because
why else would they die off? But there is no evidence that humans hunted
Mammoths for food, any more than there is any evidence that humans hunt
Elephants for food today. And even if they did hunt Mammoths, one Mammoth
would be enough to feed a colony of humans for weeks if not months. But
it's more likely that Mammoths simply became obsolete when the ice age
retreated. We place too much importance on our own perceived skills as
killers, that we think that we were singlehandedly responsible for
extinctions of many other species. In my opinion that's arrogant and
ethnocentric in a way.

We see a reduction of Neanderthal features, like musculature, and we assume
that we killed off those people through genocide because of our skill as
hunters. In all reality all that may have happened is that like the woolly
mammoth the features simply are no longer needed and are therefore
obsolete. The obsoletion may have resulted in a whole specied dying off, or
it may have simply meant that that species now looks different than what it
did back then; Neanderthals may be what we call Caucasians nowadays. I
personally think that Neanderthals still walk among us, and that they look
like us; in fact, I assume that I am modern Neanderthal myself because I am
from the Caucasian race.

Yousuf Khan

--
Yousuf J. Khan
ykhan@achilles.net
Ottawa, Ont, Canada
Nation's capital