Culture and ethnic groups

From Neanderthal Theory

Generalist versus specialist species

Humans are a generalist species that can live on a variety of foods and in a variety of environments. To become a generalist species, you have to have diverse alleles. Diverse alleles can only be acquired by not wasting any opportunity to acquire all possible alleles from closely related species. As a side effect, there is frequently also only one species at any given time, since all other would be absorbed by hybridization.

This of course fits very well into the human nature. Most humans are very strict with mating behaviors, and will not mate with someone who doesn't show the right behavior. This is the species-conservation part. There also is a minority who will mate with anybody / anything they find interesting and compelling. This group will handle the task of assimilation with other populations to maintain the large diversity in the genome.

If you also add the fact that mammal species barriers are not genetic, but behavioral, this of course means that cro-magnon would not waste the opportunity to hybridize with Neanderthals nor would their ancestors had wasted that golden opportunity to increase diversity.

The only difference between later assimilations that perhaps took hundreds of years was the time scale. The larger the behavioral and physical differences, the lesser chance that someone in one population would find someone in the other population compelling. Successful hybridization of course also relies on the offspring being accepted and getting a mate. For this reason Neanderthal assimilation took tens of thousands years instead of hundreds.

The long hybridization time means that hybridization was unusual, and all hybrids were back-bred into one of the populations. Forming separate hybrid-populations wasn't possible, since it was very unlikely one hybrid would meet another. For this reason, researchers will never find any populations which are morphological mixes.. After 3-4 generations, a back-bred hybrid offspring will become indistinguishable from other people.


The hybridization zone

Europe and the Middle-East formed the primary hybridization zone. From there both culture and genetic material spread to Far-East Asia, Australia and America. The genetic material did not significantly get back into Africa though, and this provides a means to verify that this is an correct assumption. The exception to this is the emigration from Europe at the end of the ice-age, the Arabic emigration from Middle East, and the colonization. Cro-magnon had a high degree of inbreeding, and this is still reflected in a small variation in neutral alleles and mitochondria DNA. This is falsely seen as evidence that Neanderthals and cro-magnon did not mate and produce fertile offspring. The other result of hybridization, larger variation in selective-positive alleles is also seen. Most importantly, many alleles are local, and many of those alleles does not occur in Africa. Another effect of this hybridization is rapid development of technology and art seen in Middle-East and Europe. Later on, the most advanced cultures evolved in the hybridization zone.


Development of today's culture

The original hybrids kept their nomadic ways of life. As time passed, more and more people took on the Neanderthals way of life, and became territorial. They started to experiment and cultivate grains, and thus the next phase could start. Without the hybridization they would continue to be mobile, just like the African population have remained until recent times. The reason for this is the large difference between the social organization of mobile and territorial primate species. Thus a species cannot easily switch from a mobile to a territorial strategy without great problems.

After some time big empires started to form and monuments are built. There are several thousands of years between those cultures. They start in Sumeria, spread to Middle East and Egypt, then move to Central and East Asia, and the last ones are found in America, and this can easily be explained by the fact that the genetic material and right conditions took longer to reach the Maya-Indians in Central America than to Sumeria, where the East-European population settled after the glacial maximum.

In fact, to build large monuments like the pyramids, there needed to be a change in cultural and religious beliefs from those found in traditional African culture. This involve changing from being nomadic to territorial and changing from beliefs in ancestors and the group to beliefs in heroes and kings. A big king which is almost regarded as god himself, is against the traditional African religion, but it's essential for the construction of advanced cultures and especially those who were able to create large monuments like the pyramids.

So here we have a reason why the change in genetic material didn't make any change in culture. The traditional culture didn't change although some people had a genetic build-up that didn't fit into this culture. It took long time for any change to take place, but ultimately it occurred, and then occurred at the same time at various places, except in Africa, where there were no need to change cultural beliefs. In Africa, this change didn't happen until they were colonized.


Music and dancing

In Africa, music and dancing is mostly tied to rites, that are performed in certain social contexts, and they are exclusively aimed at social activities. This is also evident in black music in America, where social relations are the main theme, while complex music and instruments are typical of non-African music. In Africa, the main instruments are drums and the human voice, while outside of Africa, there is a variety of complex instruments, dances and music, that are more aimed at entertainment, creativity and perfection.�

90,000 - 100,000 years ago Neanderthals had phalange whistles. 41of them have been found in Prolom II in the Crimea. 70,000 - 80,000 years ago there is a flute in Haua Fteah, Libya, which has been found together with Neanderthal mandibles. Finally, 40,000 years ago there is another flute in Divje Babe.

Interestingly, both the phalange whistles and flutes seems to have been evolving gradually up until recent times. This seems to indicate they originated in Neanderthals, and where taken over by AMH or hybrids.

It's probable that Neanderthals primary use of musical instruments wasn't for entertainment or music, rather as a way to herd animals. This tradition is still seen in today's herding societies.


Cave art

A popular theory for the origin of cave art is hunting. The problem is that majority of the animals in cave art are not depicted in hunting settings. It looks much more like someone is trying to impress with how many (domestic) animals they have in their possession, and thus it's a kind of status display. Pastoralism thus seems like a more reasonable motivation behind cave art. A hunter wanting to depict his hunting skills would naturally want to paint animals in hunting settings, and would focus on dangerous animals like bears. The animals depicted in cave art are instead mostly horse, bison and cows, which are now domestic. Predators are infrequent.


Feeling of belong together

Relations between people with AS / ADHD works a lot better than relations with normals. Many feel they belong to another population. AS is sometimes referred to as a wrong planet syndrome.

Retrieved from "http://www.rdos.net/wiki/index.php/Culture_and_ethnic_groups"