The Only True Human Equality Is That We All Descended From Murderers And Cannibals
You are the latest link in an unbroken chain of survivors
Approximately 430,000 years ago, someone inflicted two blows to the head of a Neanderthal. Either blow would have killed him. “Cranium 17 recovered from the Sima de los Huesos Middle Pleistocene site shows two clear perimortem depression fractures on the frontal bone, interpreted as being produced by two episodes of localized blunt force trauma”, reads a 2015 paper by an archaeological investigation team.
The dead Neanderthal was found in a cave at the bottom of a shaft. He had either been thrown into it or placed there as part of a funeral ritual. Geology and predators have been ruled out as causes of the skull damage. While time and the pressure of soil broke the skull into 52 pieces, the science team was able to reconstruct the skull and determine the “depression fractures” were perimortem, meaning they were inflicted from outside at the time of death and no healing took place afterwards.
Both fractures were inflicted with the same weapon, making them “almost indistinguishable”. This makes it highly unlikely that the injuries were natural, for “any scenario related to the free-fall would require the highly improbable occurrence of the same object striking the skull twice.” The authors conclude that “the most plausible explanation for the perimortem fractures on Cr-17 is as the result of intentional and repeated blows during a lethal act of interpersonal violence” — homicide.
Buried along with 27 others, this Neanderthal “represents the earliest clear case of deliberate, lethal interpersonal aggression in the hominin fossil record, demonstrating that this is an ancient human behavior”, they write. Murder is as old as the hills, however, and Cr-17 merely represents the oldest proven case of homicide. Much earlier evidence is suggestive, but the conditions of the remains make it difficult to be sure.
A new human ancestor, Homo antecessor, was discovered at the Gran Dolina site in Spain during 1995. During an excavation in the 21st century, 170 fossils and more than 800 lithic artifacts were found, all associated with what is believed to be the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. A 2016 paper concludes that the materials “were dragged by debris flow processes from the outside, and introduced into Gran Dolina cave”, which was located on a floodplain. The site is between 1.2 million and 800,000 years old.
About 75 percent of the skeletons in Gran Dolina were pre-adolescent children. They were not buried as part of a ritual. Instead, their flesh was stripped from their bones in “the oldest known case of cannibalism to date”, according to a 2019 paper. The authors calculate that human bodies are more nutrient- and calorie-dense than other prey animals, a finding that is consistent with Optimal Foraging Theory. Gran Dolina is not even the earliest evidence for human cannibalism, anymore.
That would be a shinbone recovered in Kenya and analyzed in 2023. It was found to have cut marks associated with butchering. It is 1,450,000 years old. Put simply, the logic of cannibalism was obvious to our ancestors. So obvious that our ancestors ate each other out of proportion to other animals. And they were our ancestors. Yours, mine, everyone’s.
The story of Cain and Abel mythologizes the collision of lifeways in the distant past, most likely recalling a dim memory of pastoralists in competition with agriculturalists during the Neolithic. Cain survived to marry a woman, the Bible says, and they had a son, Enoch, whose living descendants are supposedly still with us. Abel had no descendants, the Bible says.
None of us can claim a lineage from the innocent victim in the story. Perhaps Cr-17 was the loser in a contest for power with another Neanderthal, or maybe his death was the end of a protean grudge. Whatever the reason for his killing, the killer was left with the potential to survive, thrive, and leave descendants.
Efforts to project modern ideas of pacifistic equality on the past are a form of magical thinking. Everyone alive today is the latest link in an unbroken chain of survivors owing their existence to murder and cannibalism in the deep evolutionary past. No human on earth can claim a special lineage that exempts them from this category of people descended from cannibals and killers. We are all equal. This is the only true human equality.
Rousseau’s fantasy of peaceful, uncorrupted primitives, the ‘noble savage’ myth, is not simply wrong, it is racist. It denies our shared ancestry to some peoples by pretending their ancestors were somehow exempt from the homicide and cannibalism that shaped every human lineage. Such nonsense infantilizes non-Western societies while flattering moderns who want to believe violence is a recent corruption.
Pacifistic interpreters of the past would deny their own birthright as fierce, hungry creatures. It does not make them morally better than the rest of us who acknowledge what we really are. It just makes them tedious and pretentious.