Tea at Trianon: Cannibalism and the Extinction of the Neandertals

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, January 13, 2022

Cannibalism and the Extinction of the Neandertals

From Psychology Today:

About 800,000 years ago, Homo heidelbergensis, living in Europe and Africa, gave rise to a number of future human types, including Homo sapiens (us), Neandertals, Denisovans, and others. Geneticists claim that the lineages of Homo sapiens and Neandertals had a common ancestor until about 588,000 years ago, when these two kinds of humans became isolated from one another and proceeded to evolve separately.

Homo sapiens continued to evolve in Africa, mostly likely East Africa. Homo sapiens skeletons have been described as gracile—and in the language of anthropologists, this means tall, thin, and built for heat dissipation and running. Neandertal skeletons are described as robust: short, stocky, and built for heat retention. Neandertals continued to evolve and thrive mostly alone in Western Europe and Asia until they went extinct about 30,000 years ago. The proposed reasons for their extinction range from pure chance to climate change to demographics (group size) to war with Homo sapiens.
Much has also been made of the coupling of Neandertal extinction with the entry of anatomically modern Homo sapiens into Europe at the beginning of the Neandertal extinction. Some anthropologists believe it is a mere coincidence, primarily because there is little or no evidence for war or direct competition between these two human types. These “twist of fate” anthropologists further argue that Neandertal brains and behavior were the absolute equivalents of modern Homo sapiens (I will call them Neandertal apologists).

However, many anthropologists believe that it was a competition for resources, and not direct conflict, that led to Neandertals’ extinction. Some argue that small but significant cognitive differences between these two human cousins were the reason that Homo sapiens could extract greater resources from the same environments (Wynn, Overmann, & Coolidge, 2016). (Read more.)