Ziusudra and the Conquering Refugee Nation, Part IV

Part I Part II Part III Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII

Jared Diamond says, in The Third Chimpanzee, that the likelihood that Neanderthals didn't have the anatomical capability for human speech means that it's doubtful that modern humans would have mated with Neanderthals willingly, so he concluded they hadn't (Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee, 45). At the time he wrote that book, the genomes of Europeans had not yet been decoded to reveal 2% of it being Neanderthal. So clearly mating occurred anyway, but Diamond's reasoning withstands this assault of facts, so perhaps it wasn't consensual sex. (I have found throughout my study of history that even when Jared Diamond is wrong, he's wrong in illuminating and useful ways.)

Modern humans were certainly not above rape, but they may have had a powerful cultural aversion to mating with Neanderthals at all. Neanderthals, however, had no such reverse cultural aversion to modern humans. The final Neanderthal culture archaeologically evident in Europe and the Near East, the Chatelperronian, combines Neanderthal and modern human stone tools, but without the more sophisticated bone tools used by modern humans at the time. Neanderthals, upon being overwhelmed and pushed back from their lands, did like every other people trying to resist a technologically superior invader: they adopted that technology as much as they could, ergo the Chatelperronian culture.

But what if some of that technology is genetic? Speech is an incredibly useful technology. Complicated ideas can be shared. "I love you" can be communicated with grunts and gestures. "Take your archers and sneak up behind those guys and I'll take my spearmen and charge them in a frontal assault, and we'll catch them in a pincer movement" cannot. No wonder the Neanderthals were losing. And no wonder if they stumbled upon the reason why, and what to do about it.

Abducting modern human women and impregnating them would have been the only way to get modern human genetics into a tribe of terrified, hiding Neanderthals. Getting those modern human genetics would have been the only way to get people with speech into the tribe, and therefore the only hope of resisting them. This process may well have been described as the "sons of God" taking human women mentioned in Genesis. The ancient world had its own unique share of morally hideous logic.

The outrages of their mating with human women were either the legitimate outrage at rape, the illegitimate scapegoating of racial minorities and miscegenation for a host of moral evils, or a mix of the two. In either case, they didn't cause the Flood any more than gay marriage caused Hurricane Katrina; the appearance of the two was an unrelated coincidence.

However, just before the mention of the Nephilim in Genesis 6, the text explains that humans had "multiplied on the face of the earth," possibly suggesting the reason for the sudden appearance of the Nephilim: early agricultural humans had overrun their habitat, forcing more encounters between the two hominid lines. If the Neanderthals had been pushed out of any place conducive to forming cities in those material conditions, the Circassian steppe would be the first place to retreat. If they needed to raid cities to get human women, the cities around the ancient coast of the Black Sea would have been the nearest place to do it.

But the Genesis account doesn't just mention that the "sons of God" captured human women, but that their offspring were giants, and apparently therefore wickedness flourished in the earth. The "wickedness" in the textual account could be the acts of rape, it could be racist revulsion about "miscegenation," the text doesn't specify. But if we're to take Genesis 6 as a serious attempt at history, we must instead clamber dangerously further yet up the branch of speculation.

There is still a part of humanity that struggles with the powers of speech. I'm not referring to deaf-mutes, who still have the power of language more broadly via sign language. I am instead referring to autistic people. Many autistic children only speak later in childhood; a few never speak at all. Those who do eventually speak explain an intense frustration at seeing everyone else able to express themselves, yet being unable to do so themselves, and their eventual relief when this changes. It appears that even with genes to create a voice box, autistic genes don't always come with the instructions to use it.

Today, with nearly universal testing for autism and awareness of it in children, 1 in 54 American children are somewhere on the autistic spectrum. This looks remarkably similar in percentage to the 2% of European genes derived from Neanderthal DNA. (Asian-Americans and Native Americans have some Neanderthal DNA too as descendants of modern humans who passed through Neanderthal territory, but not as much as Europeans. Africans have almost none.) Autism, of course, isn't a solely European, or even just a Eurasian and Native American phenomenon. But European colonization of, and trade and intermarriage with the rest of the world just before the diagnosis of autism was promulgated would have introduced it worldwide if this hypothesis is correct.

To my utter surprise on researching this frolicking jaunt through a minefield of an essay, science has speculated along these lines for several years now, even finding tentative evidence for it. Neanderthal mini-brains made with stem cells behave autistically. The genetic code for autism is located in the same area as Neanderthal DNA. And lest anyone take offense at the comparison, I myself am on the autistic spectrum and find this possibility absolutely fascinating.

So let's say, to continue the argument, that the Neanderthals were essentially nonverbally autistic people, modern humans were essentially verbally allistic people, and the offspring of these unions were the first verbal autistic people. Not all of them would have been; they would have had to have the genes to get vocal cords, genes to know how to use those vocal cords, and all this while being raised by people who couldn't model language in their youth. But as more women were abducted, and as the genes of modern humans percolated through these refugee Neanderthal communities, more and more of them would have become verbally autistic.

Autism is treated as a disability in the modern world, but on its high-functioning ends it approaches a superpower. Hyperlogical analysis allows us to outsmart our opponents in any field; the Neanderthal brain was 10% larger than the modern human one. Just because they couldn't speak didn't mean they were idiots; they were quite smart, but unable to coordinate it without the gift of speech.

Continue to Part IV