OAHSPE, BOOK OF DIVINITY 15:8
RACIAL DIVERSITY AND SKIN COLOR
Since the ancestors of man were almost certainly tropical . . . they may have been black-skinned.
ASHLEY MONTAGU, MAN: HIS FIRST TWO MILLION YEARS
Man came forth in the tropics and he was naturally of rich complexion. Nahsu was the Egyptian name for the dark races: N + ahsu? Now some have said it is insensitive to represent our remote ancestors as dark skinned. The editors of National Geographic replied (June 1997) to such a charge by saying: “Since early humans originated in Africa, it is speculated that they displayed a dark skin adaptation to tropical climate.”
Certainly in the animal kingdom, the peculiar colors of many species closely resemble the soil or foliage of their habitat, concealment giving them a better chance at survival. The skins of mortals were also “colored according to their surroundings, some light, some dark, and some red, or yellow, or copper-colored.”40
Hooton described our earliest forebears as of brown-yellow skin tone, which accords with their tropical beginnings. Past eras on our planet, as I have argued, were warmer and wetter. With little difference in climate zones, all places on Earth were warm. Until the mid-Pleistocene, all humans lived in warm or mild climates,41 layers below the Aurignacian exhibiting tropical fauna (rhino, elephant, hippo). There were hippos and crocodiles in Europe in the third interglacial period; hippos and rhinos in North America as well, the giant size of many fossils indicating the tropical temperature that once prevailed even at today’s temperate latitudes.
And “the skin of afarensis [Au] was dark.”42 The pithecanthropines, after them, also had “heavily pigmented skin,”43 indeed the ground people were brown and black.44 Dixon’s proto-Australoid and proto-Negroid types were people of tropical origin with deeply pigmented skin. “According to their respective places and the light upon semu, so quickened I them in their color, adapted to their dwelling places.”45
Oahspe scholar and archivist Reverend Joan Greer, who has been studying deep genealogy, says that according to DNA studies, some black people have a higher percentage of Caucasian genes than some people with white skin. Says Greer: “Skin color would seem to have little to do with our genetic makeup.” The point is, for racial classification, coloring is only one of many factors. In fact, Carleton Coon discarded the term Negroid as useless, as the dark skin it implies is found at equatorial latitudes all around the globe, not just Africa. Caucasian he defined not by skin color but by skull measurements, nasal index, and other criteria.
Accordingly, Caucasian sometimes includes dark-complected people, as in India, Southern Arabia, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Australian Aborigines and prehistoric Americans also show various Caucasoid features. In his autobiography, Adventures and Discoveries, Coon pointed out that “skin color was not uniquely racial. . . . Australoids and Negroids [are both] black. Nor did it [color] go with skulls and body skeletons necessarily. Thus the Somalis could be Caucasoid in face and build and Negroid in pigmentation. . . . Some Somalis . . . trim, erect, and elegant . . . were quite European looking.”
When I bring a new world into the time of semu, My presence quickens the substance into life; and according to the locality and the surroundings [e.a.] I bring forth the different species.
OAHSPE, BOOK OF JEHOVIH 5:13
Racial features appear to have been set in their mold from the time of quickening, which is to say, in the beginning—rather than as last-minute revisions, which evolutionists, particularly of the out-of-Africa school, maintain. Adam, in Mohammedan legend, being the first man, was created when God sent his angels to fetch handfuls of earth from different depths and of different colors; hence mankind were of different hues—from the beginning. The story is almost identical among the Hopi Indians: Spider Grandmother gathered four colors of mud—black, white, red, and yellow—with which she created the four races of man, each with its own language.
Darwin’s version of racial differences was determined by sexual selection: the races slowly differentiated themselves from their neighbors, influenced by slightly different standards of beauty. Thus, by a process of sexual selection, the characteristics of tribe and race came to be fixed. Wallace, however, was inclined toward the polygenist position, whereby the various races became differentiated before the time of Homo sapiens. As noted elsewhere, it is generally believed that culture (which is virtually synonymous with H. sapiens) brings a halt to physical evolution. As Gertrude Himmelfarb phrased it: “The ascendancy of mind, by putting an end to the evolution of man’s physical structure, fixed the different races in their different and permanent features.”46
Now this is exactly the opposite of both (1) Brace’s view that “changes in the cultural adaptive mechanism . . . [were] responsible for changes in face form and skin color,” and (2) Sherwood Washburn’s position that “the great antiquity of races is supported neither by the record nor by evolutionary theory.”47 Mexican Indians and Mongolians, according to this setup, share a common descent; but since crossing Beringia, “the Indians have evolved into a separate race.”48 It was also Hooton’s position that the races of man were established late, in the H. sapiens stage (ending ca 20 kya), by means of isolation, inbreeding, and mutation. Le Gros Clark also argued that the different races came about only after H. sapiens was established.
Nothing of the kind happened, according to the polygenists. The French school of protohistorians, for example, attribute separate origin to the races—black, white, yellow, red—which arose on different continents. Coon and Weidenreich and today’s multiregionalists also see distinctive racial traits expressed early on in the different H. erectus groups in different places: each of the four major evolutionary centers, in this view (and my own), was also a racial center. Evidence from Upper Cave Choukoutien, as Weidenreich saw it, indicated that differentiation of races had taken place long before the Upper Paleolithic. Coon, looking at the same cave specimens, saw Sinanthropus as the ancestor of all Mongoloids, while each of the other races evolved independently on their own turf, from an early type. Coon was able to demonstrate resemblances between pre–H. sapiens hominids and some of the living people of the same region, thus allowing racial characteristics to predate the appearance of modern man.
But under the strained theory of monogenism, which posits a single origin for all human beings, there should be no such resemblance. Coon, in this regard, challenged the monogenistic idea that in a short 20 or 30 or even 40 thousand years, the different races of H. sapiens could have taken shape. To him, the races of man were far older than H. sapiens and could not possibly descend (monogenetically) from a single regional stock. Neither can the highly respected, more recent, work of Vincent Sarich and Allan Wilson (on genetic distance) assign the formation of different human races to the skimpy span of 30 or 40 kyr, an implausibly short run of time for natural selection to do its work. The recency of races is also debatable on the basis of developmental locking and the end of the semuan phase 80 kya, as discussed above.
Yet out-of-Africa’s monogenism (single cradle of man) requires the races to be formed later in time. But I think the polygenists are right; men were cast in their mold (Negroid, Mongoloid, and so on) from the beginning, for each was raised up in their own division of Earth. It is monogenism’s spurious common ancestor that forces us to adopt “racial separation from a single root.” But the races never separated; in fact, they did the opposite—they came together!
Let’s look at this supposed ancestral tree: Do all living things really descend from a single entity that floated around in the primordial soup some 3 or 4 bya? The “wonderful unity in all living things” does not necessarily imply a common ancestor, but it is interpreted nonetheless as if it did, thus endorsing Darwinism “with a thundering voice for the validity of evolution theory.”49
Scientists, finding that our cerebral cortex is similar to the neurons inside the head of the ragworm (a lowly marine creature), then jump to the conclusion that “they were too similar to
be of independent origin . . . [and] we must share a common ancestor.”50
Yes, DNA does confirm the basic biochemical identity of organisms, from bacteria to man. Fine. But these happen to be the same chemical elements throughout the cosmos, according to Harold Urey, Nobel Prize winner. Molecular unity does not prove we all come from one common ancestor, simply that this is how life is built. The fact that all life-forms have similar DNA patterns does not mean or even suggest we are all derived from the same batch. All we can conclude with certainty is that the blueprint is a mutual one.
On page 73 of his book, The Neck of the Giraffe, Francis Hitching makes a discovery. Based on the inviolacy of DNA’s germ plasm, “biology is forced into a precarious assumption: the first living creature must have had within itself the entire genetic potential to grow into—to create—every one of the trillions of plants and creatures that have lived since.” A bit of a stretch, don’t you think?
So now it is time to reevaluate the myth of the common ancestor. Ultimately this doctrine is the only way to banish the Creator’s hand from the web of life—even though we are reduced to the absurdity of postulating that all life evolved from one single common ancestor, say, bacteria, fungi, or the single-cell eukaryotic forms. Fred Hoyle rebuts this daring claim: “No evolutionary connection has ever existed . . . between so-called prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, between bacteria and yeast cells. . . . Evolution from a common stock? . . . We doubt that a terrestrial evolutionary connection ever existed between the plant and animal kingdom. . . . There is no reason why some of the categories [taxa, i.e., different species] . . . should not always have been separate.”51
Whenever it has been impossible to demonstrate a phyletic link (biological sequence in time) from one hominid to the next, the problem (which is really a death blow to Darwinism) vanishes simply by invoking a common ancestor! In the context of race origins, the imagined common ancestor (a dark African of the modern type, as discussed in chapter 11) simply branched out to whites on the one hand, yellows on the other, and so on. And the same falsehood posits an unknown common ancestor, even farther back in time, a creature that led to apes on one branch and to humans on another. The mythical common ancestor has become the understudy for the still missing link, but it remains promiscuous guesswork and intellectual jugglery.
Did Glasgow grow from a seed yielded by Edinburgh?
JOSEPH PRIESTLEY, LETTERS TO A PHILOSOPHICAL UNBELIEVER
Despite certain perfunctory merits of a “tree” (or bush) representing the ascent of man, such diagrams take for granted the evolution of all living things from one all-purpose progenitor, a single taproot. With man, however, we need always to look for (at least) two ancestors, for we are all hybrids!
The concept of a common ancestor is actually a relic of eighteenth century thinking, entertained by Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus and his, Erasmus’s, contemporaries Diderot, Buffon, and Lamarck. Not only does this simple-minded model have all hominids branching off an ultimate anonymous ancestor, but the same setup is proposed for the Order of Primates: somewhere in the deep dark past, man and ape shared a common ancestor, then went their separate ways. As we’ve noted, that ancestor has never been found, despite an ambitious search. Nor have the required intermediates turned up.
Figure 10.11. Ancestral tree devised by Ernst Haeckel in 1899. In the 1970s Norman Macbeth wrote about these supposed ancestors of ours, which are however, as Norman Macbeth points out in Darwin Retried, “still present, although their former siblings are said to have worked up to human status. Thus one and the same ancient stock split into one group with astonishing plasticity, and another group with almost total rigidity. This is very hard to swallow.”
This much-pampered school of anthropogenesis, Darwin’s community of descent, has students of the problem forever searching for (but not finding): a common ancestor for Au and H. erectus; a common ancestor for Neanderthal and H. sapiens; a common ancestor shared by Neanderthals, mods, and Denisova, and so on down the line.
According to this scheme, time and evolution inexorably carry us further away from the body type of our shared ancestor. Darwin the monogenist believed in a common ancestry of the black and white races; Keith, along the same lines, thought “the extent of the differences between black and white indicates that the racial separation of the modern type of man must be placed far back in time.” He argued that the farther back we trace European and Negro, “the more the white and black ancestral forms should come to resemble each other. . . . There is good reason to think [the different races] have descended from a common ancestor. Yet this ancestor may show no sign or trace of the new feature. [Isn’t that odd?] We have in such cases to suppose that an evolutionary bias may be latent in . . . the ancestral stock. . . . We cannot explain the facts unless we accept [this] principle.”52
Principle? What kind of sorcery is this, planting a “bias or tendency” in our nonexistent, phantom progenitor? And isn’t this bias or tendency so like the Platonic essentialism, vitalism, or teleology that evolutionists laugh to scorn?
There is no coherent way to demonstrate that all the racial diversity among human beings came from a single ersatz ancestor who changed color like a chameleon. The races cannot honestly be traced back to, and did not differentiate from, a common stock; each race has its very own history. Negritos and Australians, for instance, “do not share a common ancestry but merely interbred.”53 And this is indeed what Dixon taught: “The existing varieties of man are to be explained not as . . . from a single ancestral form, but as developed by amalgamation . . . of several quite discrete types.”54 As for Coon, one researcher has written: “The only scholar who tried to offer us a coherent alternative [to Darwinian monogenism and single origin] is Professor Carleton Coon. . . . [in whose] monumental Origin of Races he tells us that the human race does not descend from a single ancestor but represents various types of Homo erectus. . . . which evolved independently of one another . . . in different parts of the world.”55
The bogus common ancestor Eve—the subject of the next chapter—is allegedly everyone’s mother, at least according to DNA spokespersons. Microbes, however, tend to “swap sections of DNA. . . . Cells have picked up chunks of DNA from completely different species to form new, hybrid genomes. Thus the idealized view of an unbroken branching history of DNA evolution from parent to daughter is invalid. There is no single common ancestor.”56
11
NOT OUT OF AFRICA
The Many Gardens of Eden
The fads have risen and fallen around me.
CARLETON COON, ADVENTURES AND DISCOVERIES
THE LONGEST HIKE
We are all Africans.
DOUGLAS PALMER, ORIGINS
Hotfooting to Africa since Louis Leakey’s day, the bone people have evolved a new urban legend: we are all ultimately Africans. This out-of-Africa genesis, OOA for short, conceived for all the wrong reasons and built on a pyramid of supposition, is, as we speak, circling the drain.
Let us begin by finding out what this improbable but fashionable and politically motivated theory (already elevated to fact, if only by force of repetition) tells us about our forebears and their wanderlust: It is in two parts, actually. Part one: Early man, Homo erectus, departed Africa, oh, about 1.6 mya. But wait, the race of H. erectus was previously thought to be no more than 500 kyr,*132 Arthur Keith, in 1929, having shelved Pithecanthropus no earlier than 220 kya! Now he is eight times older! How did that happen?
Whenever it was, or imagined to be, the early hominids known as H. erectus (Druks) allegedly emigrated en masse from Africa, all the way to China and Indonesia—where they were eventually replaced or died out, becoming an irrelevant dead end as far as evolution is concerned (with the possible exception of the European ones, who may have evolved into Neanderthals).
The problems begin at once. Put on your thinking cap; this is tough. For starters: How did H. erectus manage to evolve to mods in Africa, while Asian H. erectus did nothing of the sort, contin
uing on largely unchanged? I wonder why they didn’t evolve into mods in Asia as well.
The trouble—the theoretical strain of it—only deepens with Asian H. erectus being more primitive in some respects than African ones. Why are some Javanese H. erectus older than African ones? Richard Leakey’s African Skull 3733 (at 900 cc), or OH 9 (at 1,050 cc), should have the same size or smaller brain than the (younger) H. erectus of Java, whose size is 850 cc and who had a much more apelike forehead than Africa’s 3733. (Peking Man’s forehead is also more primitive than Africa’s 3733). Being the ancestor, 3733 should be the more primitive, but appears actually to be more advanced, lacking Asian H. erectus’s long and lowslung cranial structure, thick skull bones, and robust face. African H. erectus is the more progressive.
Explanation? Incredibly, the African version is now certified the more primitive, on the bogus plea that it is generalized, as opposed to specialized, even though the African skulls are higher domed and thinner walled than their East Asian counterparts! They are also less massive in face and brow, which the OOA wizards make bold to call “more primitive or less specialized.”1 Here we catch Afrocentrists daringly, counterintuitively, calling H. erectus’s massive brow a more advanced feature because specialized—despite this “advance” being away from the modern human form! Confusion and humbug! A shameless feint of jargon, intellectual sleight of hand.
Farther down the rabbit hole, anthropologists cannot agree whether African and Asian H. erectus are even of the same lineage; some claim they are entirely different groups, with different skull dimensions. Tattersall and Schwartz see H. erectus of Africa and Java as completely different types. In fact, the morphological distinctness of Asian H. erectus led to doubts about the existence of any H. erectus from African sites! As a solution to this little problem, they renamed the African one Homo ergaster. But H. ergaster still has a larger brain—up to 900 cc—than his Javanese “descendant.” Indeed, Kenya’s Turkana Boy (though primitive in head) was tall, well-proportioned, and slender, hardly a forerunner of rugged squat bulky Java or Peking Man.
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 35