There once lived a race of men classified by modern scientists as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis – otherwise known as Neanderthals. The bones of this prehistoric race have been found in Europe and Asia. It is believed they died out between 30,000 and 24,000 years ago. They used stone tools, probably knew how to make fire, and they were far stronger than modern humans. The great drawback of Neanderthal man was that he needed about 4,000 calories per day to remain healthy, and he was almost exclusively carnivorous (feeding from the top of the food chain). There is evidence Neanderthals practiced cannibalism when faced with starvation.
In trying to imagine these people, whose bones have been found and studied across Europe and parts of Asia, we are left to meditate on the struggle for survival in the days before civilization. There were probably never more than 15,000 Neanderthals on the earth at any one time because they lived as hunter-gatherers who didn’t grow their own food. One might say they were living in the Garden of Eden, but only in the sense that they didn’t possess the developed self-consciousness of modern civilized man. Over many thousands of years primitive humans struggled to survive without science or mathematics. Men struggled against the hardships of nature. They survived in the face of hunger and the elements with nothing but stone tools. They used whatever they could pick up off the ground. They found food and begat children century after century, millennia after millennia. They did what most of us could not imagine doing, under extreme circumstances of deprivation and hardship. There were no hospitals or doctors, no stores or malls, no entertainment industry. If the scientists are roughly correct in their dating, this hunter-gathering existence was the lot of Homo sapiens for at least 195,000 years. Whatever the truth may be, mankind lived in the Stone Age far longer than he has lived in civilization. And even then, man’s worst enemy may have been his fellow man.
One theory of Neanderthal extinction says that modern humans eventually overcame them in an extended war of extermination. Modern humans were lighter, smaller, with the ability to strike and retreat. Modern humans required less food than Neanderthal. Though he was strong, in some ways superior, the Neanderthal could not compete. It is curious that political liberals, who believe in modern doctrines calling for global peace and the welfare state, tend to favor the notion that humans developed through a process of “natural selection” (i.e., Darwinian evolution). They do not consider the political implications of their theory. The extermination of man by man, in prehistoric times, took place without the use of nuclear weapons, with supposed beneficial effects on the gene pool. We know for a fact, from sifting pre-historical human remains, that men hunted and killed one another. They even ate each other using stone implements so that one tribe could “be fruitful and multiply,” while another tribe would perish.
Communism (i.e. Marxism-Leninism) teaches that Stone Age man was a communist, that original sin occurred with the development of agriculture and the division of land into “property” thereby instituting the categories “rich” and “poor.” In a Soviet textbook we read, “Private property and its result, the exploitation of man by man, were unknown to primitive society. The earlier tools of primitive people, especially during their initial social development made for an extremely low productivity of labor. These tools could only be used effectively in collective tasks [like hunting in groups].” Therefore man, in his original state, was a collectivist and won’t return to himself until he returns to collectivism through the process of the “final” revolution – involving the elimination of the bourgeoisie along with the eradication of capitalism.
The term “apex predator” (a.k.a. alpha predator) refers to predators that are not preyed upon by other animals. In the case of mankind, the greatest threat has always come from other humans. The creature that bashed in his neighbor’s head with a stone axe now builds thermonuclear weapons. He devises ideologies that focus hatred against targeted groups (i.e., Jews, capitalists, infidels, etc.). Modern man justifies killing with fine-tuned arguments and elaborate propaganda. He uses science and engineering to refine his homicidal means. “Scientific revolutions are … the most important,” wrote the scientist Gustave Le Bon. “Although they attract but little attention, they often are frought with remote consequences such as are not engendered by political revolutions….”
Modern man has developed nuclear weapons. But even more devastating, he has developed birth control pills and television. He has created tools that have cut the birth rate of the most advanced countries. He has made entertainment the center of modern society’s attention. He has created doctrines of entitlement and freedom, offering food stamps and free medicine for the masses. And now the relationship between the advanced countries and the “developing world” can be described in the words of Louis Veuillot: “When I am the weaker, I ask for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle.” Here is the predator at work, even in the midst of civilization (in the overturning of civilization).
It seems there is a law of history at work. Whenever something good is achieved, a force is formed in diametrical opposition to it. Whenever progress is made, a force emerges that wants to take us back – whether it is Nazis who want to replay the survival game of tribe versus tribe, or Communists who want to return us to our Communist roots as hunter-gatherers. Whenever civilization emerges, the romance of the barbarian wells up to swallow it. The noble savage, the praiseworthy primitive, is set before us as a model. And as we look around at the pathologies produced by our civilization, we wonder whether civilization can survive at all.
If scientists really do know how to date old bones, and if mankind wondered in the wilderness of hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of civilization, then the story of the Garden of Eden is remarkably shrewd in its depiction of man’s transition to intellectual awareness – to a godlike understanding of “good” and “evil.” A creature that lives by nature, within nature, suddenly finds that he can choose his own destiny. What chance is there, over the long haul, that he will make the right choices? Primitive man had only one choice, only one path. It may be argued that man still has only one choice – but the tribes of the earth do not agree on what that path is. So the tribes have begun to arm themselves with weapons of mass destruction. American liberals think this process can be reversed, but there is no evidence – historical or psychological – that any reversal is possible.
What happened long ago in the Stone Age will probably be repeated in the Nuclear Age.
