A voice from the mass grave? Crimes against Neaderthality? (complete with hyper-interesting links!)

Long have I laboured under the notion that Homo Sapiens wiped out our Neanderthal cousins. Through violence, and competition, we put their asses into the geological record, and our asses into the soft leather chairs of global dominance.

You see, humans are two things, if I may reduce our species to an absurd level. We are highly aggressive, and highly fertile. These two drives mixed with other qualities we possess (like cognition, socialization, and symbolic thought) make for the most lethal, as well as among the most successful, creature(s) ever to roam this hapless planet.

How we became this way is less obvious, and certainly more difficult to prove. I also have a negative view of humanity, because everywhere I look, I see reasons why we probably deserve to go extinct. Here is a prime example (In biology this is known as parasitism). I won’t site cases of genocide, because as awful as these instances are, they are neither as rare as we would like to think, nor are they of any particular interest to the rest of the species who also happen to live on this planet. That is to say, so what if millions of people were slaughtered when there are billions of us, and we destroy everything in our path? The human love affair with its self needs to come to an end. I guarantee you Snow Leopards don’t give a shit about Shakespeare, Confucius, or mother fucking Animal Collectives amazing new Album Merriweather Post Pavilion (in stores now!). Could they comprehend the meaning, they would likely pray for a 100,000 more Rwanda/Auschwitz/Darfur/Cambodia/Siberia/Hiroshima’s. I don’t side with them, I just recognize the injustice of our anthro-centric policies.

My point was, I believe humans are the way they are because during our history we very nearly went extinct our selves. Read this (if you like). Now, who the fuck do you think survives these kind of events? Nice people? Civically minded broadly altruistic individuals out for the good of the species? Fuck no. The biggest assholes, that’s who. Nice guys finish last isn’t some bromide of the romantic universe, it is a cold hard fact about all life. If you’re not me, then fuck you. If you don’t benefit me, then fuck you.

Now, you mix an asshole with fecundity, and you get a population of nearly 7 billion human beings all guaranteed their right to reproduce, consume, and pollute. Richard Dawkins, in his paradigm shattering works The Selfish Gene (1975), and The Extended Phenotype (1982), talks about how there is competition between species of animal and plant, which is obvious, but his point is how there is also fierce competition between genes within our DNA, which has only very recently been discovered. This is because sexual reproduction between to individual organisms means that each organism contribute half of the blueprint which manufactures the new organism (but only after some sweet porno music, and post-coital awkwardness ensues). If you think those 23 chromosomes just line up on either end of the metaphorical playing field and harmoniously come together then your world view is, at best, a complete fucking embarrassment to all of your ancestors who struggled and suffered so that they could, one day, produce a fucking idiot like you. That probably came off a little harsh.

Let me put it another way. You’re here because your ancestors were throat cutting, back-stabbing, cooperating only when it suited their purposes, genocidal, homicidal, farm burning down, nation invading, women raping, men lynching, midget slapping cunts who out-murdered and out-fucked every other cunt who is no longer with us. PERIOD. That is the story of you, me, and every other bitch on this piece who thinks they have a right to be here, be happy, and have a seat on the god damn train when they go to work. Oh, and just to make this shit contemporary, we can add the right to having a job to the list too.

Well, social theory aside, those individuals who "got'er done" we re the ones whose genes spread far and wide. And here the fuck we are.

I’m not at all embarrassed by that. How could I be? What an ingrate I would be to question anything my ancestors did to get me here. Why, you’d have to be a pretty low son of a bitch to gainsay your ancestry, because that would either mean that you don’t understand linear progression, or that your just very insincere. So, if for instance, humans happened to wipe out ALL of the Neanderthals, could we really be surprised? Shit, we do it all the time to other homo sapiens for even the most trivial of genetic variations. We do it when they don’t have the same beliefs as we do. Why, we even go as far as to shoot men in Reno, just to watch them die.

But big bad humanity has got it’s come-uppins in the mail as we speak. You look around, and you can see there simply must be another culling on the horizon, either man made or otherwise. Will you be a nice guy/gal? I fucking won’t, I think. But who can tell? The ones who get tested don’t talk so much about what they’ve seen and done. We have learned a thing or two in our brief time on Earth, so it's not beyond the realm of possibility that sinking into a road warrior-esque nightmare won't erase those hard learned lessons after all. But that would mean defending a library with a sawed off shotgun, or an axe, or a piece of something off the ground. Would you be willing to do that? Or is your survival more important? Axe yourself that.