THE FOUR “F”S OF EVOLUTIONARY SURVIVAL AND THE TRIUNE BRAIN
If you set aside the supernatural qualities of zombies—the idea that the dead can be undead—fictional zombie and real serial-killer behavior originates physiologically and biogenetically from the same anatomical place: a small knot at the base of the brain called the basal ganglia (or basal nuclei), also known as the R-complex or the “reptilian brain.”
Like an archeological site, our brains consist of temporal layers, three separate brains from different eras of our evolutionary past, stacked and wired together in parallel loops, each layer more ancient and primitive than the next. The resulting whole is called the triune brain.6
The reptilian R-complex is the oldest and most primitive part of our brain. Found in animals from lizards and birds to cats and dogs to apes and humans, the primordial R-complex drives a set of instinctual self- and species-preserving behaviors: running away, killing, eating and reproducing, or more crudely put, the “four Fs” of evolutionary survival: Fleeing, Fighting, Feeding and Fucking. If any one of these instincts malfunctions in a species, the species will eventually become extinct.
Until relatively recently in evolution, humans were driven to perform these functions instinctually, in the same way other animals do. Yale University neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean described the functioning of the R-complex as a “primitive interplay of oral, aggressive and sexual behavior.”7
Since no species can survive without the functioning of these instincts, they are very deeply hardwired into the core of our brain, our psychology, our mind and personality—into our “soul,” if you like—driving us like a coiled spring to be constantly choosing between fleeing in fear, fighting and killing in rage, biting and eating in hunger, and mating and reproducing in lust.
And for the longest time humans did nothing else: we did not draw on cave walls, sing songs, tell stories, build shelters, domesticate animals or plant food. We just spent all our waking time running away from danger or killing it, gathering food or killing it and eating it, and having sex anytime the strongest males among us demanded it. Life was horribly simple.
When food was scarce in the Stone Age, we sometimes combined what we killed in fear and anger with what we killed for food, and sometimes even with what we had sex with; in times of distress, combat, conquest or famine, our species easily slipped into a mindless, instinctual cocktail of sexualized aggression, cannibalism and necrophilia.
Today our still-functioning R-complex reptilian brain interacts with a second, newer, more evolved paleomammalian complex, or limbic system, a part of the brain that hosts a variety of emotions, long-term memories and sensory and motor functions. It is the part of our brain that sees, hears, tastes, smells and recognizes things, and recalls associated emotional states and motivational behaviors.
This newer limbic system is wired down to our more primitive R-complex and sends it sensory and emotional signals that trigger in the reptilian cells of a healthy human brain the appropriate “four F” survival response to the situation—“appropriate” being the operative term.
What actually makes humans different from other animals is the level of evolution of a third layer of our brain, the more recent neomammalian complex, or neocortex. It is present in mammals but not in other animals. In humans it is highly developed and overrides and moderates the interface between the R-complex and the limbic system. Our ultrahigh intellectual abilities, like language, logic, reasoning, the artistic and creative impulse, abstract thinking, rationalization, imagination and fantasy, are all rooted in the neocortex.
The highly complex neocortex frames our impulses and actions in philosophical-spiritual, cultural, linguistic, expressive and psychological contexts; it is why we have a concept of good and evil, which is nonexistent in the animal world, and why, when we behave like animals, we can become serial killers. (Although it can be argued that animals rarely kill for recreation in the way some humans do.)
Until about forty thousand years ago, prehistoric humans, like other animals, were motivated mostly by pure fear, aggression, and feeding and mating instincts, without much imagination or philosophy or self-awareness or remorse or any of the “neuroses” that the “human animal” is endowed with today. The very recent capacity of the human neocortex to reason, deduce, abstract, moralize, project, imagine and fantasize creates a layer of conceptual, rational (or sick, irrational) modulators of limbic-system functions—our impulses, desires and memories—and determines how they might be interpreted or neurotransmitted to the reptilian brain.
Our three brain layers are constantly inputting and outputting, triggering reptilian instincts while also analyzing and controlling them through the conceptual capacity of the neocortex.
Not all neuroscientists agree on the concept of the triune brain,8 but for those who do, it is obvious that a lot can go wrong when you have three cerebral systems working with one another, each more archaic than the last. One short circuit, and the whole thing can go spinning homicidally out of control, with the primitive, reptilian brain doing what it has no business doing: taking control of the limbic system.
As Johns Hopkins University psychologist Dr. John Money wrote,
The limbic region of the brain is responsible . . . for predation and attack in defense of both the self and the species. In the disease of sexual sadism, the brain becomes pathologically activated to transmit messages of attack simultaneously with messages of sexual arousal and mating behavior.9
Another psychologist sums it up more simply:
The predatory serial killer is literally a limbically kindled “engine of destruction.” He won’t stop and he doesn’t want to because nothing in life could possibly replace the thrill of dominating and destroying. . . .10
FROM REPTILIAN RAPIST CANNIBALS TO CIVILIZED CITIZEN SERIAL KILLERS: THE BIG HISTORY OF HUMANS
Big History is a relatively new formal field of history that considers humans from the perspective of the natural history of the earth, its biosphere and even the evolution of our universe. It strips down human behavior, including serial killing, to its essential biological and anthropological models. Big History integrates the history of humans into the overall history of everything. Let’s remove serial killing from its context of social, legal and psychological norms, and look at it as part of the history of nature on the planet.
To grasp the scale of human life on earth it can be helpful to think of years as dollars. For example, the universe is 13.8 billion years old, planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old, dinosaurs lived and vanished between 230 and 65 million years ago and cavemen appeared around three million years ago, but written human history goes back only about 5,500 years (to 3500 BC) before it fades into the dark of mythology and prehistoric times. Compare the buying power of 13.8 billion dollars with that of 5,500 dollars and you get some sense of the scale of human civilization versus the age of the universe and our planet. Human civilization isn’t petty cash, but it’s not an impressive sum either.
Hominids, or apelike mammals, emerged about fifteen to twenty-five million years ago, and the humanlike subspecies Homo habilis (tool-making man) and Homo erectus (upright-walking man) emerged as distinct species about three million years ago, followed by the more advanced Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) species.
We Homo sapiens—modern “thinking man”—emerged on the African continent relatively recently, perhaps as early as 1.8 million years ago or as late as 200 thousand years ago. About 60 to 100 thousand years ago Homo sapiens invaded Europe and Asia and began to war with the Neanderthal species, which was dominant there. As both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens were skilled at making edged weapons from stone, this was artificially armed war, unlike the conflicts between other animals.
This total-war death clash between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens ended about thirty to forty thousand years ago with the victorious Homo sapiens the only humanoid species left standing on earth. I gu
ess that is the good news. The bad news, according to many anthropologists, biologists, Big Historians and other scientists, is that we serially killed, raped and ate our way to the top of the food chain in an evolutionary process just like that of any other predatory species.11 Just as Mother Nature intended. The only difference is that we did it with stone weapons against a prey armed with the same.12 What does this reveal to us about serial killers today?
THE OLDEST COLD CASE: THE SERIAL KILLING OF THE NEANDERTHALS
Just as serial-homicide studies are beginning to lose sight of a continually moving horizon in their attempts to determine why there are serial killers, anthropological sciences likewise are in a state of upheaval today. Every year there are new anthropological and archeological discoveries, with skeletal remains submitted to constantly improving techniques of DNA, and genome analysis and carbon testing of artifacts, continuously changing our understanding of the chronology of the development of human life on planet Earth and what it means to be a human, let alone a human serial killer.
Like cold-case crime scenes but hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years old, newly discovered prehistoric caves, campsites, villages, graves, dump sites and even prehistoric latrines with fossilized feces are revealing more and more about the diet, behavior, intelligence and psychopathology of early humans.
Entirely new branches of science have emerged, like paleogenomics, which reconstructs our prehistoric past through DNA analysis of fossilized human remains. Paleogenomics led to a startling discovery in the mid-2000s that some humans today have up to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA in their own genome.13 This suggests that Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals.14 Most likely, that took place through genocidal conquest and rape, because that’s what we humans routinely did and still do when we go to war.15 While nominally punishable in the modern era under national criminal and military codes of the countries whose soldiers are perpetrating the offenses, their enforcement and prosecution in wartime are sporadic. Rape historically was such a ubiquitous and ordinary behavior of male humans at war that it was not explicitly outlawed in international conventions governing the laws and customs of war until 1996, and only in 2008 did the United Nations finally declare wartime rape as a category of “war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide.”16
It’s been argued by some scholars and critics that the biblical account of Cain’s murder of his brother, Abel, in the book of Genesis is an allegory of the genocide of the Neanderthals echoing from our primordial evolutionary memories which still rattle around in our collective subconsciousness like fragments of long-forgotten nightmares—a form of prehistoric collective trauma. During the Stone Age when the two hominid species clashed, the Neanderthals were mostly nomadic herdsmen like Abel, while the Homo sapiens were on the brink of emerging as settled farmers like Cain. In that context, all humans might be the sons of Cain, carrying his homicidal “mark,” and especially so, the serial killers among us.17
Forty thousand years ago, humans emerged victorious over Neanderthals, but the price of that victory was that for a span of thousands of years we had to systematically destroy everybody and anybody who was not like us. Our brains had to be hardwired to sustain that kind of constant homicidal aggression toward “others” through countless generations. Rather than temporarily condition ourselves for war or train to become warriors for a few months or even a few years, as we do today, in the Stone Age we had to kill and kill constantly, for tens of thousands of years, as a way of life, until we emerged as an unchallenged (serial-killing) species.
NECROPHOBIA AND DEVIANT “VAMPIRE GRAVES”
What happened to the aggressive, serial-killing Homo sapiens personality over the last forty thousand years that today makes us universally condemn serial killing as aberrant? Having risen to the top through unbridled conquest, humans as a killer species now had to be inhibited from turning on one another with those deadly stone tools. In fact, one of the theories as to why Neanderthals were defeated despite being physically larger and more powerful than Homo sapiens, and equally adept at making spears and stone-edged weapons, is that Neanderthals had no inhibitions against killing and eating one another.18 They helped us Homo sapiens to kill them off.
Why did Homo sapiens not slaughter and eat themselves into extinction even though we were capable of systematic cannibalism in times of famine just as the Neanderthals were?19 What was that one thing that nature (or God, if you prefer) endowed the human species with that the Neanderthals and other extinct hominid species lacked?
Primitive humans developed a neurosis, an irrational or imaginary fear, one not caused by an actual threat: necrophobia—a fear of the dead.*
According to Big Historian and psychologist Akop Nazaretyan:
The Georgian philosopher Mamardashvili [1990] wrote that the human species began when one individual mourned the death of another. Unfortunately, empirical data from archeology and ethnography force us to reformulate this elegant aphorism. The reformulated version does not sound that romantic: the (proto-)humans began with the fear of the dead20 [emphasis in the original].
Necrophobia apparently begins to emerge in humans around the time that we were killing off the last of the Neanderthals, in the late stages of the Middle Paleolithic Age (Middle Stone Age) about thirty thousand to forty thousand years ago.
We know about necrophobia from the archeological evidence from prehistoric deviant burial sites (defined as burials that do not conform to previous norms of burial), sometimes described in popular media as “vampire graves,” which incorporated unique features that were intended to keep the dead from rising, presumably to exact vengeance on the living.21
Archeologists have cataloged numerous prehistoric (and ancient-modern) deviant burial sites around the world indicating “evidence for practices, which indicate fear of the dead (necrophobia). These practices usually include methods for the restriction of the dead in the grave by weighing down the body with large rocks, decapitation or the use of nails, wedges and rivets.”22
There are such burial sites everywhere in the world, from the Zhoukoudian (“Peking Man”) site in China, where the positions of the tibias of two Paleolithic skeletons indicate that their legs had been tied after death23; to Khirokitia, Cyprus, where heavy millstones were placed on the head or torso24 of Neolithic bodies from 4500 BC; to bound Egyptian mummies; to the Australian aboriginals’ piercing of the neck of the dead with a spear to fix it to a hollow wood coffin and the Tasmanians’ tying of the body’s hands and legs and the placement of a heavy stone over it; to the beheading of corpses in Italy25; pinning the dead under a heavy stone in the Mediterranean and Balkan regions26; and the ancient Spanish practice of nailing the corpse to the wood of the coffin.27 Observers in the nineteenth century had already concluded that the tradition of cemetery headstones was a popularization of eons of the necrophobic immobilization of the dead under heavy stones or mill wheels.28 (While there are some academics who claim that Neanderthals also practiced ritual burials, their findings to date are inconclusive and represent a minority.)29
When we look at serial killers today, we immediately recognize that a necrophobic instinct that the majority of us have is lacking in them. Serial killers fearlessly “make” corpses, interact with them, handle and dismember them, transport them and worse: some serial killers manifest an impulse on the extreme opposite pole to necrophobia, a fetishistic sexual desire for the dead—necrophilia. Sometimes accompanying serial murder, rape and cannibalism, necrophilia can also include erotic cannibalism, drinking of blood (vampirism) and other bodily fluids or the harvesting of body parts as totems or trophies to be eaten.
The term “necrophilia” is derived from the Greek “nekros” (“dead”) and “philia” (“love for”). It was coined relatively recently, in the 1850s, to describe a French serial necrophile, François Bertrand, the “Vampire of Montparnasse” (see chapter seven). The exact frequency of necrophilia i
n serial-murder cases is somewhat controversial. On the high end, the Sexual Homicide study by the FBI in the 1980s concluded that “a sexual act” was committed after a victim’s death in 42 percent of 92 victims they studied.30 Among the low-end estimates, statistics in 2014 from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit indicate that “postmortem sexual activity” was present in 11.2 percent of the 480 cases of sexual serial murder involving 92 male offenders in the study.31
If forty thousand years ago we were routinely killing and raping our Neanderthal enemies as a way of life, and if we were sometimes feeding on them too, then using their corpses in acts of necrophilia to satisfy an instinctual sexual urge prior to eating them was not something remote from primitive evolutionary hedonistic feasting-fornicating homicidal behavior of early humans. And yes, necrophilia, as we have recently discovered, is not exclusively a human behavioral trait. Mallard ducks have been observed engaging in homosexual necrophilic sex, evidence that there is some sort of deep-seated natural biological impulse at work in necrophilia (and homosexuality), not just human psychology.32
If we approach necrophilia from its opposite pole of necrophobia, the fear of the dead and its evolutionary function as argued by Big Historians, we might scratch at the roots of what this sexual attraction for the dead in serial killers might entail on a macro level of human evolutionary behavior and why we feel so powerful a revulsion to it today. Even Sigmund Freud, who had no problems venturing into bizarre psychological concepts such as penis envy, anal-expulsive personality development and the Oedipus complex, said he could not deal with necrophilic acts or lust murder because he found them a “kind of horror” too “far removed from the normal.”33
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