Tea at Trianon: Studying Neanderthals

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

Monday, February 12, 2024

Studying Neanderthals

The existence of Neanderthals actually is not contrary to Scripture. From Live Science:

Since the late 1800s, we've known that other types of humans once roamed our planet. At that time, scientists recognized that fossils unearthed in caves across Europe belonged to archaic humans now known as Neanderthals. Over that time, our understanding of Homo neanderthalensis has undergone dramatic upheavals. In the early 1900s, scientists conceived of Neanderthals as apelike and almost bestial. But in the past few decades, unambiguous evidence has indicated that our closest human relatives mated with us at multiple points in time. Artifacts found at several sites suggest Neanderthals may even have had aesthetic projects.

Ludovic Slimak, an explorer and archaeologist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France, has been fascinated by archaeology since he was 5 and has spent more than 30 years hunting for our closest human relatives in caves on nearly every continent. He spoke with Live Science about his new book, "The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature" (Pegasus Books, 2024), about why Neanderthals are not simply another version of Homo sapiens, what their mating with modern humans tells us about our first and last encounters with them, and what they reveal about our own human nature. (Read more.)