[ExI] The ugly Neanderthal

Rafal Smigrodzki rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com
Wed Dec 9 07:19:32 UTC 2020


There are some voices claiming that Neanderthals were nice, peaceful people
who lived in harmony with nature, the big-brained, strong silent types who
unfortunately got slaughtered by those despicable H.sapiens, greedy,
capitalist and unnatural.

"The Goodness Paradox" by Richard Wrangham offers the opposite perspective
- Neanderthals were untamed, violent, reckless and dangerous. We know that
because their skulls do not show signs of the domestication syndrome. There
is a consistent pattern of changes that diverse animals undergo during
domestication - they become juvenilized, or neotenic. Whenever an animal is
under selective pressure to reduce aggression and fear, this syndrome is
observed, sometimes within a few generations. It is easy to see why -
individual maturation is under the control of just a few genes, immature
individuals are less aggressive than adults and less fearful, so grossly
turning the dials on the maturation mechanism for reduced aggression is,
evolutionarily speaking, the low-hanging fruit - the kind of adaptation
that is likely to happen relatively quickly compared to other more precise
adaptations.

Humans domesticated each other when the beta males learned how to use
gossip to plot assassinations of alpha males, and how to do it very safely.
Chimps kill each other too - but they tend to do it in hot action, in a
flurry of blows and teeth, with some risk of injury to participants. Humans
plan murder while maintaining deniability, gauging reliability of allies,
they kill with ranged weapons and in ambush, essentially immune from the
victim's retaliation. Just watch The Godfather for tips on how to do it
right. To engage in safe intragroup coalitional violence you have to be
socially savvy, or else it's you who will end up like a pincushion, not the
other guy. Once humans started killing each other in cold blood, there was
a strong selective pressure to be less aggressive, since it's the
aggressive guys who everybody hated that ended up getting killed first. And
there was selective pressure to develop social cognition, including a very
strong fear of being left out of the gossip, since it's the odd guys who
nobody cared about that ended up being killed next.

It's strange to think that the better angels of our nature were born in
cold-blooded slaughter but then the ways of evolution are mysterious,
indeed.

Rafal
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