Sapiens, pages 16-19: The "Unsetting and Perhaps Thrilling" End of Chapter 1

Page 17

But what you can do is imagine, along with Harari, what it might be like to step out of your DeLorean 50,000 years ago and f*ck a Neanderthal or vice versa.  If you’d prefer to do this with only the unsettling part and none of the thrilling part, then read Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear (for much unwanted sex between a Neanderthal and a Sapiens). But if you brave your way through that, then be sure to read the follow up, The Valley of the Horses, which has ALL of the thrilling and none of the unsettling (and is sex between two Sapiens).

Time out for a sec….

Imagine how unsettling, and perhaps thrilling this is for the tortoise and the pug witnesses.

What we’re not getting in this “rare occasions” envisage of hominin sexual behavior between what scholars and scientists have categorized as separate species based on slight anatomical variations is this: We do not have the ancient DNA of hominins prior to the very recent era in which Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Sapiens overlapped. Who’s to say their intermixing was rare? Let alone that anything prior to it was rare??? These are tricky enough questions to even attempt to ask the genomes, and people are trying, but even then, so much is modeled and so much is unknowable! 

Somehow and it’s amazing… somehow, despite the evidence that we are descendants of, not separate from, Neanderthals, peoples’ minds don’t change. They keep the Replacement model and refuse the Multiregional model. Still. And I don’t know why I should be surprised. When we’re dealing with theories that are so heavily reliant on taxonomy which is human-constructed, not the facts found in nature, and when we’re also dealing in theories of things that we cannot entirely observe or verify or falsify, then we can go on believing what we want, even when the evidence changes. 

Harari’s preference for the Replacement narrative (which is the mainstream popular one, I think still today) keeps Sapiens separate from everyone else as a way to hold our species as such and to explain with a number of possible reasons falling under one powerful triumphant theme: Sapiens are better and worse than all the rest.

So, only within Harari’s narrative, within the Replacement model, could we even ask the question that’s rampant in discussions of human evolution: WHY ARE WE THE ONLY ONES LEFT? 

1. “Homo sapiens drove [the other hominins] to extinction” by being better at surviving and reproducing and multiplying and spreading compared to less resourceful Neanderthals who eventually died out.

Page 18

2. Competition for resources “flared up into violence and genocide. Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark.” Oh. It gets worse: “It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.” Wow. You know why you’ve never heard a serious scientist say that? Because there is zero evidence for this and it would take omniscience to actually know if it’s true. It’s entirely science-fiction and so it cannot be a serious perspective contributing to an intellectual formulation of human nature and should not contribute to the evolutionary psycho-analysis of our species. (And whether anything should contribute to such a project is a question that I find myself answering always with ‘no’.)

About 1 or 2,  Harari says, “Whichever way it happened…” Well well well… he forgot the option where it happened neither way. He forgot a 3rd. Like, something to do with the fact that we are descended from various hominins of the Upper Pleistocene, Neanderthals included and we could think of them all as Sapiens, but who cares what they’re called because it’s possible to narrate them as never going extinct because they live on in us. 

But outcompeting them or killing them off is a better story. Is an actual story. Existence existing is no story and is not acceptable book fodder. And so…we are asked… instead to wonder… 

“Had the Neanderthals survived, would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart?” 

How confusing. Harari just led us to believe that science leads to the conclusion that we are a creature apart, not our imaginations.  Now he is subtly acknowledging the arbitrariness of taxonomy and how it is based in bias and then goes on to biases our perspective. Right? Is that what he’s doing? Ugh. Good? But too subtle. Any goodness here is canceled immediately out by the next sentence…

“Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped o ut the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.”

I can’t read any irony into that. If irony or presenting a point of view was the aim here, rather than asserting his point of view or science’s, then it failed. 

By the bottom of the page we’re into the final summary grafs of the chapter…

“Whether Sapiens are to blame or not, no sooner had they arrived a new location than the native population became extinct. The last remains of [later erectus] are dated to about 50,000 years ago [ which is incorrect and may be based on an old paper? It's a little over 100,000, which is very different.]“ 

Page 19

And he says the Denisovans and Neanderthals disappeared shortly after, by 30,000 years ago. Except of course that they didn’t actually disappear any more than any of our ancestors did, because they survive in us. 

And he nods to the “hobbits” on Flores, again who are now known to have a deeper date of around 50,000 years ago (not 12,000 like we originally believed at the time of his writing). 

“What was the Sapiens’ secret of success?”

See. If we’re not the last surviving ones, then there is no triumphant tale to tell and, apparently, one must be told. It’s the hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell told us that not only is it universal but it’s human nature, not just to tell it but that it is told universally because it IS human nature. In her 1990 book Narratives of Human Evolution, Misia Landau showed us that the forefathers of human evolutionary theory all narrated human evolution like a hero’s journey. So many tests to overcome on the way to triumph…

“How did we manage to settle so rapidly in so many distant and ecologically different habitats? How did we push all other human species into oblivion [sheeeeesh]? Why couldn’t even the strong, brainy, cold-proof Neanderthals survive our onslaught [ffffffffffff]?”

The debate over the reason for our triumph “continues to rage”, he says. And he says the “most likely answer is the very thing that makes the debate possible.” It’s clever stuff like this that taps into the numinous is these sorts of books, isn’t it? I love that feeling. Too bad it’s followed by the next sentence!

“Homo sapiens conquered the world [C'MON] thanks above all to its unique language.”

I am the last person to diminish how magnificent humans are. Humans are MY FAVORITE ANIMAL. 

I’m just not a fan of storytelling as if it’s science. In fact, I’ve been radicalized against storytelling as if it’s science. I’m approaching 50. I’ve seen enough to know what is storytelling and, more importantly, why it’s bad for science and why that, in turn, is bad for the world. 

I love novels. I love fiction. Keep it up artists!!! Everyone else, keep up the reading!!! There are so many reasons. For people who do science, literature fills the creative well, opens the creative mind to possibilities a person cannot conceive of on their own. Other people make us brilliant and that’s especially helpful through novels and fiction. Yes. But I do not love when fiction masquerades as science and that’s what we mostly found in Chapter 1 of Sapiens. 

Chapter 2 is next. To be continued…