Friday, January 31, 2014

Austen Layard: Anthropology’s Obsession with African Origins - "The evidence for significant cultural advancements in Europe earlier than anywhere else in the world is largely ignored by scholars and the public alike, because it does not fit the politically-motivated idea that humanity was an African invention and that the human brain was born there, after which it has remained fixed and resistant to all effects of evolution."

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Anthropology’s Obsession with African Origins

When did humans first become human?  The answer is far from simple, because the question assumes that sometime in the past, humans achieved modernity and were locked within an evolutionary loophole where natural selection no longer applies.  Despite the absurdity of this scenario, and in stark contrast to empirical data, it is widely believed that humans have not changed physically or mentally for the past 50,000 years or so.
After the discipline of anthropology was hijacked by Cultural Marxism and it became crimethink to observe average group differences, a preoccupation with tracing everything back to Africa developed.  Africa does have an outstanding archaeological record revealing many firsts: the first bipedal hominids, the first stone tools, and the first anatomically modern humans that looked roughly like we do today (a vertical forehead, round skull, flat face, and prominent chin).  But largely due to the anti-racist politicization of anthropology, the currently accepted evolutionary paradigm is that Africa was the source of an intellectual watershed event sometime between 100,000 to 50,000 years ago, and that it was only a matter of time before this new breed of clever Africans spread out and replaced all the dim-witted archaic human populations in the rest of the world, such as Neanderthals.  (As used here, the term ‘racist’ refers to views that race and racial differences are a legitimate variable in research on humans, with none of the usual negative connotations found  in the popular and scientific literature.) The concept of behavioral modernity as it has been applied to the Paleolithic seemingly arose out of the Cultural Marxist obsession with proving that Africans are just as good as, and even better than the evil racist nineteenth-century White scientists who dared to rank societies and point out that advanced civilization never developed in certain areas of the world, such as south of the Sahara. . . .