Tag Archives: history

Light-skinned Neanderthal Europe was conquered by dark-skinned modern humans 40,000 years ago

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When fossilized Neanderthals (or “Neandertals” if you prefer) were discovered in caves in Europe back in the mid-1800s, it was assumed that they were stupid, ape-like brutes. Indeed, they did possess compact, muscular bodies with short legs.

We’ve learned in the past few decades that our stereotype of Neanderthals was wrong. These were fully human creatures who hunted with spears, created art, made boats, fished, ceremonially buried their dead, and almost certainly spoke to one another. They were as advanced as any other hominid of the time period.

They were the related to, but not direct descendants of, Homo Erectus, which had migrated out of Africa and into Eurasia over a million years ago. By the time they got to Europe, they had evolved.

Neanderthals, alone, owned Europe for nearly half a million years, through the course of multiple ice ages.

The living wasn’t easy. Much of their diet was the resident megafauna of mammoths, bison, elk, and mastodons, and whatever other protein they could kill and eat. Their stone-age existence was probably not much different than the pre-Columbian existence of the plains Indians in North America.

“Modern” humans finally arrived in Europe around 45,000 years ago. For about 5,000 years thereafter, or more, the two subspecies shared Europe and shared their cultures.

And shared body fluids. Neanderthal DNA accounts for about 1-2% of today’s human DNA outside Africa.

Neanderthals finally died out. Another way of looking at it, however, is that the newcomers overwhelmed the Neanderthals with their sheer numbers. If a population of, say, 20,000 Neanderthals is absorbed into a population of one million modern humans, the Neanderthal DNA will account for only 2% of the resulting population – without any Neanderthals being harmed in the process.

What actually happened is probably somewhere in the middle. To some extent, Neanderthals were simply absorbed. And to some extent, they were out-competed and even killed.

The visual appearance of Neanderthals is debated. Some scientists contend that they could be dressed in a suit and stroll down Madison Avenue without getting a second look (other than looks from people wondering why anyone would wear a suit these days). Other scientists contend that their heavy brow ridges and musculature would surely merit a second look, regardless of their garb.

But giving a person a second look for his appearance is not the same as shrieking “Yikes, a caveman!” Many modern humans have an appearance that is outside the normal range.

Here’s something interesting about Neanderthals’ appearance that we do know. We know from DNA analysis of their remains that they were light-skinned and probably had blond or red hair.

This should be no surprise. Human skin uses sunshine to manufacture vitamin D. In the northern latitudes, such as Europe, the reduced sunshine results in less manufactured vitamin D. Light skin is a natural adaptation, because it permits more sunshine to penetrate the skin.

Here’s another skin pigmentation fact that did come as a surprise, at least to me. While Neanderthals had light skin for hundreds of thousands of years from living in northern latitudes, light skin in modern humans did not develop until much more recently.

Light skin is a complex phenotype for which no single gene is responsible, but the general view is that the various genes did not produce light skin in modern humans until about 10-30,000 years ago – sometime after the migration of modern humans out of Africa.

That more recent time – 10,000 years ago – barely puts it prior to the advent of agriculture and cities in the Levant.

Moreover, both the recent time of 10,000 years ago for the development of light skin in modern humans and the more distant time of 30,000 years ago put it after modern humans migrated into Europe, the domain of the Neanderthals.

The upshot is this. The meeting between the original Europeans – the Neanderthals – and modern humans was a meeting between light-skinned European Neanderthals and migrating dark-skinned modern humans.

It’s tempting to conclude that the source of the light-skin genes in modern humans was the Neanderthals with whom they interbred after arriving in Europe. But paleo-geneticists say that’s not the case. The genes for light skin are different between Neanderthals and modern humans, which suggests that the two lines of humans developed light skin independently – but for the same reason of optimizing vitamin D synthesis in northern latitudes.

What’s all this have to do with immigration along the southern border, conservative wins in the German election, and The Aspen Beat? Nothing, but I thought it was interesting.

Elites rediscover the power of religion – to control you

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Pseudo-intellectual elites like to talk about the “arc of history.” Barack Obama loved that phrase almost as much as he loved the word “existential.” Things in Barack’s rhetorical world didn’t just exist. They were in the state of “existential” and forever bending along the “arc of history.”

The elites assured that this “arc of history” will take us inevitably to a world of equity, inclusion and diversity – a utopian world the elites have always imagined. They even have a theme song for the journey:

“Imagine there’s no heaven, above us only sky,
Blah, blah, blah, blahhhh . . .”

Of course, the people in charge of this utopia of the elites will be the ones with the prescience to anticipate it, the skill to guide us to it, and the power to run it – namely, those elites.

Moses brought his people to the Promised Land but never entered it. Modern elites won’t make his mistake again. They’ll lead us there, herd us in, lock the gates, and run the show.

And in a notable exception to the abolition of merit (it’s sooo dystopian that some people get more just because they merit more!) these meritorious elites will be well compensated. Very well. In the precise amount they deem just.

But detours have recently frustrated the elites in their arc-y journey toward their utopianistic place. Moses detoured 40 years in the desert; today’s elites find themselves detoured four years into a similar wasteland – for the second time in the last decade.

And now their people (note the possessive plural pronoun) in this wasteland are sinning again. Golden calves, bitcoins, ungratefulness, orange hair, cutting taxes. You know – all the usual sins.

With alarm, the elites see that their people are getting beyond their command. What’s needed, they figure, is some of that old time religion.

That’s why a utilitarian epiphany of the elites is in the works.

Let me be clear. Religion is not a bad thing; it’s a good thing. Religion tends to discourage socially destructive behaviors. Nearly all religions have rules against murder and theft, for example.

But those rules are not what the elites like about religion. In fact, they’re a little skittish about those particular rules because the penalties for violating them tend to be imposed disproportionately on people they enjoy viewing as oppressed, blameless, and childlike.

Moreover, the elites historically saw religion as competition for power. The allegiance of the people was divided between the secular elites and the Church elites. The secular elites had the power of money, but the Church elites also had money – and God, too.

Eventually, the secular elites won the competition for power by running the table on money. But they remained at odds with religion until recently. They reasoned that a power like religion that inspires people willingly to burn themselves and others at the stake is one always to be wary of.

But it’s been a long time since religion burned anyone at the stake. Religion has dwindled to the status of a sheep in wolves’ clothing. Elites began to think of religion as a simple superstition that bitter, stupid people cling to – that they depend on – as comfort when things goes bump in the night.

Today, the elites still think that, but now they see religious dependency as a feature, not a flaw. On their road to Damascus, and Davos, they’ve envisioned and embraced Karl Marx’s observation that religion is “the opiate of the masses.”

How convenient. The elites have coincidentally decided that the people inhabiting the land recently laid waste, again, who are rebelling against their authority and inattentively and hyperactively sinning against them, need something opium-ish. And they deserve it, good and hard. For that, the elites have concluded, religion is at least as good as Adderall, and cheaper.

Religion no longer threatens the elites, much. Today, the mild threat that religion poses to secular power is more than offset by its usefulness in securing that power by sedating the masses. In particular, the elites like the rules of religion that call for deference to authority – “authority” being them, of course.

Honor they father, honor thy mother, honor thy priest, honor thy Environmental Protection Agency, honor thy right to choose, honor thy elites, and so on.

Never mind that Scripture doesn’t explicitly spell out every single one of those honor/submission rules. The elites contend that, like abortion, they’re implied in the penumbra.

And so, we have an Episcopal Bishop in gilded robe with bejeweled scepter scolding the man newly elected by the people to lead them, whom she spots worshipping respectfully in her congregation.

She thereupon transfigures the worship service into a public damning of that one man. Complying with his Constitutional duty to enforce the duly enacted Federal immigration laws is sinful, she warns, and honoring the God-created genders is immoral.

She would have the President and us believe that a kid struggling emotionally with sex issues doesn’t need help, he needs surgery. He is the victim of God’s mistake where He accidentally put a female soul into a male body. She proclaims that she’s the one to make that decision, by God, and the President is merely the one to enforce her decision by correcting what she has decided is God’s mistake.

Just don’t get carried away, Mr. President, and start enforcing the immigration laws decided by Congress, too. Who does Congress think they are anyway? Episcopal Bishops?

Elites’ new love for religion has all the passion of an old-style revival meeting. It lacks only one thing: God.

Here’s my advice, for what it’s worth. Don’t believe in religion because it’s a good thing for society – even though it often is, as even the elites are starting to realize.

Rather, believe in it because it’s the truth, and the truth will set you free.

But don’t take my word for it. Really, please don’t. This is a truth that each person must find in, and on, his own way.

God never existed in Barack’s world. But he wants him in yours. He wants you to hallow the elites; he wants you in their kingdom; he wants you to beg forgiveness.

For the Baracks of the world, God is a useful fiction. But they may someday be startled at what they’ve stirred.

Jimmy Carter playing God paved the road for radical Islamists playing Satan

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Jimmy Carter informed us back in 1976 that he had “looked on many women with lust” and “committed adultery many times in my heart.”

The fact that a man’s heart or other organs have lusted after many women is not exactly news. The reason men don’t go around broadcasting their lust is because it’s obvious. It would be like saying, I get horny on days that end in a “y.”

But Carter did tell us about his lust – in a formal interview with Playboy, perhaps fittingly. He evidently thought that a man’s lust was newsworthy, if the man was him.

It reminds me of the devil’s temptation of Christ, a story told in three of the four Gospels. The devil failed in his temptation of Christ, but the fact that it happened was Good News-worthy two millennia ago.

Carter was a born-again Christian. (Full disclosure: I am too.) In fact, Carter was a Sunday School teacher. In teaching the temptation of Christ on Sundays and advertising “the temptation of Carter” on Saturdays, he was aware of the parallel he was drawing.

Mind you, I don’t judge a person’s brand of Christianity. That’s beyond my paygrade.

But I do judge their politics. Carter seemed to believe that a New Testament approach could work in international affairs – as in forgiveness and love thy enemy – with the likes of Leonid Brezhnev and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Ah, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

When Carter was elected in 1976, the country of Iran was run by a Shah – roughly the equivalent to a Western monarch. The Shah was hostile to communism and generally friendly to the West. Many Iranian students went to Western universities. Women’s rights and human rights steadily improved over the decades of rule by the Shah and his predecessor father.

Carter’s limited experience as the former governor of Georgia and his black and white view of good and evil left him unprepared for the nuances of international geopolitics. In his simplistic syllogism, democracy was good; monarchs were anti-democratic; the Shah was a monarch; and, therefore, the Shah was bad.

In contrast to pragmatists such as Henry Kissinger (whom he despised), Carter was uncomfortable with the notion of the lesser of evils.

And so, when the Shah was threatened, Carter did little to save him. The resulting revolution led to a bloody theocratic state called The Islamic Republic of Iran. Like the Shah’s regime, it was a monarchy except in name, and this time it was led by a monarch – the Ayatollah – who claimed a hotline to Allah (and actually had one to Brezhnev) together with a divine right to rule.  

The Islamic theocrats naturally hated America. They taunted us by holding 53 hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran for 444 days until the day of the inauguration of the man who defeated Carter’s bid for a second term, Ronald Reagan. (Funny, that coincidence.)

Carter’s sanctimonious forgiveness and love failed to free any hostages. (To his credit, he did attempt a rescue, but it never got off the ground.)

Since the time of the Iranian hostage crisis, Iran has shuffled along in their seventh-century oxcart. They throw gay men off tall buildings, they chop off the hands of shoplifters, and they stone prostitutes to death. They threaten to annihilate Israel, and they are just weeks away from having a nuclear bomb with which to do so.

In this odd world of ours, I sometimes see a bumper sticker reading “What would Jesus do?” I’ve always assumed that the owners of the cars to which those stickers are stuck have no interest in Jesus. They’re instead just trolling Christians. They’re trying to contrast the typically conservative political leanings of Christians with what they regard (unburdened by any actual knowledge) as the liberal leanings of Jesus.

But some Christians are actually guided in their geopolitics by that bumper sticker question – What would Jesus do? Never mind that Jesus spent his entire life in a place without iPhones which could be walked in the long direction in a few weeks and the short direction in a day. These particular Christians believe that Christ taught not just the tools for a relationship with God, but also for a relationship with Taylor Swift, John Maynard Keynes, and the Ayatollahs.

The teachings of Christ are probably harmless in dealing with Taylor Swift. (I know nothing of Swift’s beliefs, and I don’t mean to pick on her.)

However, the teachings of Christ are probably less helpful in dealing with John Maynard Keynes. Can we honestly suppose that Christ had insights into economic questions like how to obtain the greatest good for the greatest number, and what the capital gains tax should be, and that those insights are revealed if only we read between the lines of, say, Corinthians?

As for the Ayatollahs, the teachings of Christ are wholly unhelpful in dealing with them. Or in dealing with their jihadi foot soldiers who seek to conquer, enslave, rape, take hostage, behead and eliminate people they regard as infidels by means of suicide bomb vests, airplanes in skyscrapers, and pickup trucks on sidewalks.

The what-would-Jesus-do Christians seem unaware that we already know the answer to their bumper sticker question, “What would Jesus do?”

What Jesus would do is what he did do. He taught love, forgiveness and pacifism. He surrendered and sacrificed himself. He was excruciatingly tortured – naked and humiliated on the cross – that he might rise again to show us The Way.

The madmen of Islam would very much like us, now, to try doing with them what Jesus did with his enemies two thousand years ago. The last Western leader to try that was Jimmy Carter. And here we are.

Why do American Jews vote against Israel?

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For a hundred years, American Jews have overwhelmingly voted for the Democrat candidate. Franklin Roosevelt received about 80% of the Jewish vote each time. This dramatic tilt toward the Democrats continued up through the turn of the century, when they gave Al Gore about 79%. They gave Obama 78% in his first election, and even gave him 69% in his second – after Obama’s antipathy toward Israel became impossible to overlook.

Some of this Jewish support for Democrats is understandable. Like most immigrants, the Jews suffered discrimination at the hands of silk-stocking Republicans. American intellectuals in the early- to mid-20th century took their cue from Europe, where antisemitism was rampant (and still is). Two generations ago in America, there were still Jewish country clubs because the ordinary Republican-dominated ones denied admittance to Jews.

All of that is shameful, and, I’m glad to say, nearly all of that is now behind us.

In this century, it’s the Democrats who exhibit an antisemitic undercurrent. It was evident in Barack Obama’s support for Iran – a Jew-hating terrorism state that denies there was a Holocaust in the past while openly urging one in the future.

Obama was willing to let Iran get nukes, ostensibly not for the purpose of making good on their Holocaust threat (wink, wink). He even sent them billions that they used to fund their nuke program.

In the Biden administration, the Democrats’ anti-Israel stance grew. They begged the Iranians to rejoin the one-sided deal that Obama gave them (and Trump revoked) and also stopped enforcing international sanctions. That allowed them to resume lucrative oil exports to fund their nukes again – and to fund terrorists attacking Israel.

After the October 7 pogrom, many Democrats equated Israel’s effort to defend itself, on the one hand, with Hamas’ invasion, rapes, beheadings, torture, random rocket attacks, and kidnapping and murder of men, women and children, on the other hand.

I assumed that these last four years of Democrat hostility toward Israel would finally tilt the Jewish vote toward Republicans in 2024.

I was wrong. Jews voted 68% for the Democrat in 2020, and this year they still voted somewhere between 66% and 79% for the Democrat (it’s difficult for exit polls to get a fix on the number). And this was for a Democrat who openly pandered to Muslim radicals.

So, what’s up with American Jews?

I have a theory.

But first, let me admit the ignorant and the speculative nature of my theory. I grew up in the wilds of Colorado, and literally had never met a Jew (at least not knowingly) until I went away to college. My current Jewish friends tend to be strong Israel supporters and, likewise, strong Republicans; my generalizations therefore do not apply to them specifically. I now have tremendous respect for both Judaism and Jewish culture (and have often written about it) but cannot claim any real expertise in the subject.

Subject to all that, here goes.

Somewhere around seven million Jews live in America – nearly as many as in Israel. Together, those two countries comprise 80% of the world’s Jewish population.

Israeli Jews are different than American Jews. Israeli Jews are mostly first- or second-generation immigrants to Israel. Jews who immigrate to the Jewish state of Israel tend to be practicing Jews, unsurprisingly. A disproportionate number are Orthodox Jews. They believe deeply in Judaism and they believe deeply in Israel. 

American Jews, not so much. While many are devout, at least a third are not observant of their religion at all. (This is not intended as a criticism. Most self-identifying Christians are not observant of their religion either.) Deeply religious Orthodox Jews are relatively rare in America.

The result is that American Jews are less invested emotionally in the Land of Abraham.

That’s hard to dispute. But I submit that it goes beyond that.

Many American Jews have not just failed to embrace Judaism, but have casually or consciously rejected it. People who reject long-standing family and religious traditions tend to feel some guilt and need some rationalizations. Rejection of one’s heritage typically morphs into hostility toward that heritage.  

In the case of the many non-observant American Jews, it’s possible that their ambivalence toward Israel – which seems to manifest in outright opposition every four years at election time – is rooted in a rejection of their ancestral faith which naturally morphs into hostility toward it.

In agnosticism, as in religion, there’s no zealot like a convert.

In the land of Anne Frank, they’re chasing and beating the Jews

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Anne Frank famously kept a diary describing her life as a Jewish girl during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. She and her family lived in a concealed room behind a bookcase for two years.

The Nazis eventually discovered the family and sent them to concentration camps including Auschwitz. She died in Bergen-Belsen at age 15.

Anne’s father, Otto, was the only one of the family to survive the Holocaust. He was instrumental in publishing his daughter’s diary after the war.

The rest is history. 

Key to Anne’s survival for those two years were the efforts of Otto’s secretary, a Catholic woman named Miep Gies. She risked imprisonment and even death in buying food for the family and secretly bringing it to their hiding place.

Gies devised elaborate ruses, such as obtaining illicit food ration cards, avoiding large purchases from any single grocer, and bringing the food to the hiding place at hours that would not attract suspicion.

After the war, Gies was dismissive of the personal risk to herself: “Over two million Holland people helped hide Jewish people in the Second World War, I am just doing what I can to help.”

Now, 80 years later, history reverberates in the Netherlands. Nazis of the 21st century are openly chasing and beating the Jews on the streets of Amsterdam.

Lacking the courage of Miep Gies, the police response is unenergetic, and the governmental response is lackadaisical.

“Shame on them” does not even begin to reflect my sentiments.

The Colorado Christian baker wins again – but his tormenters will be back

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The left has hounded artistic Colorado baker Jack Phillips for over a decade. It started back in 2012 when a gay couple demanded that he create a “gay wedding cake” with two figurine husbands on top.

Of course, the gay couple could have gotten their gay cake created by many other bakers. They seem to have chosen Phillips not despite, but because, creating such a object was contrary to his religious beliefs.

Phillips politely said he would happily bake a cake for them, but not a gay cake. That’s an important point. Phillips did not simply refuse to serve the couple on the grounds that they were gay. Rather, he refused to create a special “gay cake” for them.

Phillips thus refused to create an artistic expression that was contrary to his religious beliefs.

The gay couple were something like a couple seeking out a Kosher restaurant, demanding that the Jewish chef cook up an elaborate pork dish, and then contending that they’d been discriminated against when told that pork is not on the menu.

It’s actually worse than that. The gay couple thought Phillips’ beliefs were not just discriminatory, but should be illegal. So, they schemed to establish that as a legal matter.  

First, they brought an action against Phillips before the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and won. The case then went to a Colorado appellate court, and they won there too.

Phillips finally filed for review in the Colorado Supreme Court, where all seven Justices are Democrat appointees. Those Colorado Justices refused to even hear the case on the grounds there was zero merit to Phillips’ appeal.

Then Phillips filed for an appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s the court of last resort in America, and they accept only a few percent of the appeals lodged there.

To everyone’s surprise, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Phillips’ case was worth hearing. Not only that, but after hearing the case they reversed the Colorado decision. They decided that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had exhibited an unfair antipathy toward Phillips’ religious-based actions.

Let that sink in. The U.S. Supreme Court – the highest court in the land – found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and state courts had shown six years of unfair antipathy toward Phillips’ ordinary Christian religious beliefs.

At least they didn’t feed him to the lions. But what happened next was almost as bad, as anyone who’s been a defendant in a lawsuit will tell you.

On the very day the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in favor of Phillips, a self-described “devil worshipper” demanded by email that Phillips bake a cake celebrating the devil’s birthday – complete with a dildo on top. (It’s not clear what is bedeviling about dildos.)

As before, Phillips politely explained that he could not bake such a cake because it was contrary to his religious beliefs.

Before then, on the very day that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’ appeal of the “gay cake” case, someone came into Phillips’ bakery and demanded that he create a “transgender cake” depicting transgender stuff.

You can see the pattern.

As before, Phillips refused to create the “transgender cake.” As before, the transgender person brought an action before the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. As before, he/she won. And as before, the case eventually went up to the Colorado Supreme Court.

This time, the Colorado Supreme Court took the case (perhaps feeling stung by the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of the Colorado decisions the earlier time).

But the Colorado Supreme Court dodged a decision on the merits. Instead, they dismissed the case on a technicality.

It was a win for Phillips, but it didn’t establish any precedent for other Christian bakers or anyone else who wants protection for his religious beliefs.

Pity the Colorado Supreme Court. They were faced with either (1) defying the earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision by ruling against Phillips, or (2) defying their woke principles by ruling in his favor.

Ah, they were torn between the law of the land and the law of the woke. They found a clever way to choose neither.

But trust me, they’ll be back. The devil-worshipping transexuals, the kangaroo state courts and “civil rights” commissions stacked with Democrat appointees, and the rest of the totalitarian wokerati – they’ll all be back, lawless as ever.

They want to outlaw religious beliefs that they don’t believe in, and that’s almost all of them.