Monkey Shines

Guest Post by The Zman

For a very long time, science has thought that humans first evolved in sub-Saharan Africa and then spread throughout the world. The main reason for this is that the oldest human-like fossils have been found in Africa. Everywhere else, the oldest fossils are Neanderthal or modern humans. There are exceptions, like homo floresiensis, found in Indonesia. This is the one they called the “hobbit” because it was so small. This is believed to be an archaic human that migrated out of Africa 2 million years ago.

That’s the dominant narrative for how humans came to populate just about every nook and cranny of the earth. Recent genetic studies go a long way toward confirming the flow of humans around the world. It’s not “settled science”, if such a thing could exist, but it is the foundation from which scientists works when examining the fossil record. When a new find turns up, the first instinct is to figure out how it fits into the current model, but that’s not always an easy task.

The history of human evolution has been rewritten after scientists discovered that Europe was the birthplace of mankind, not Africa.

Currently, most experts believe that our human lineage split from apes around seven million years ago in central Africa, where hominids remained for the next five million years before venturing further afield.

But two fossils of an ape-like creature which had human-like teeth have been found in Bulgaria and Greece, dating to 7.2 million years ago.

The discovery of the creature, named Graecopithecus freybergi, and nicknameded ‘El Graeco’ by scientists, proves our ancestors were already starting to evolve in Europe 200,000 years before the earliest African hominid.

An international team of researchers say the findings entirely change the beginning of human history and place the last common ancestor of both chimpanzees and humans – the so-called Missing Link – in the Mediterranean region.

In science, this is what is called a  “big deal.” At the very minimum, it could force a re-evaluation of the timeline for human migration out of Africa. It could also mean that humans moved out of Africa, evolved into what we think of as modern humans and then migrated back to Africa. Later, these early humans then made the trip back out to the rest of the world. At the very minimum, it could lead to a rethinking of the basic narrative, which will set off huge fights within the scientific community for many reasons.

The main reason is the oldest – ego. Many careers have been built around the assumption that modern humans first evolved in Africa and then migrated out to the rest of the world fairly recently. Naturally, when the work of a lifetime is challenged by new evidence, the instinct is to dispute it. Scientists have all the same vices as the rest of us. In fact, smart people tend to be even more petty and envious than most. The most likely result will be an attempt to dismiss these new finds or discredit them in some way.

While all of that is very preliminary, this find does introduce, or re-introduce, an idea that modern science would like to exclude. That is, human evolution not only continued after humans left Africa, but that it accelerated. As humans migrated into new areas, they quickly adapted to those areas, both physically and cognitively. This process continued on just as it does with all species. Put another way, human evolution was copious, local and recent and the result is measurable differences between groups of humans.

That, of course, brings us back to the bogeyman that haunts the dreams of modern intellectuals, which is the bogeyman of race. Just as anthropologists will seek to dismiss data that contradicts the standard model of human migration, modern intellectuals are always on the lookout for anything that contradicts the egalitarian narrative. Most of Western public policy is built on the premise that all people are the same and that any measurable differences are the result of white racism. Nature plays no role.

It is mistakenly assumed that the viciousness with which the Progs attack anyone questioning multiculturalism is purely about power. There’s some of that, but the real driver is belief. How they define the world, and how they define themselves, is based on the bedrock assumptions of the blank slate. If those assumptions are invalidated, not only is their worldview invalid, but they are invalid. Human bio-diversity is the same as telling a devout Muslim that Mohamed was a Jewish comedian and Islam is an elaborate gag.

This discovery will most likely be memory-holed or recast in some way as to not threaten the narrative. The most likely result is everyone just ignores it. But, genetics is making a long march through the human sciences and that’s not something that can be ignored for too much longer. Soon, we reach a Galileo moment when the orthodoxy either shuts down the human sciences or the orthodoxy begins to crumble. That’s ultimately what happened in Christendom. The Church gave way to science in public affairs.

Before anyone gets too excited by the prospect of scientific racism smashing the prevailing orthodoxy, it is important to remember that the Church gave ground to science slowly and violently. The Thirty Years War, for example, left much of central Europe devastated. Towns were depopulated, villages were wiped off the map and people were reduced to cannibalism. The so-called Age of Reason was a bloody mess featuring one more violent war after another. Things tend to end poorly and this will not end well.