Did Homo Sapiens Wipe Out the Neanderthals?
by John Lawrence, October 13, 2019
We will never know for sure. But Neanderthals flourished in Europe and Asia for about 360,000 years - from circa 400,000 until 40,000 years ago. Modern humans spread across Europe about 40,000 years ago. What a coincidence that the Neanderthals disappeared from Europe at about the same time that modern humans, homo sapiens, entered Europe.Since our species, homo sapiens, is known for its predilection for war and genocide, it's likely that modern humans committed species-cide on the Neandethals. Genocide comes from the Greek word, genos, meaning "race, kind". There have certainly been many examples historically of genocide, Hitler's attempted elimination of the Jews being the most well known example. But there have been others. In the past 150 years, tens of millions of men, women and children have lost their lives in genocide or mass atrocities. Millions have been tortured, raped or forced from their homes.
The Turko-Mongol conqueror Tamerlane was known for his extreme brutality and his conquests were accompanied by genocidal massacres. William Rubinstein wrote: "In Assyria (1393–4)—Tamerlane ... killed all the Christians he could find, including everyone in the, then, Christian city of Tikrit, thus virtually destroying Assyrian Church of the East. Impartially, however, Tamerlane also slaughtered Shi'ite Muslims, Jews and heathens." Christianity in Mesopotamia was hitherto largely confined to those Assyrian communities in the north who had survived the massacres. Tamerlane also conducted large-scale massacres of Georgian and Armenian Christians, as well as of Arabs, Persians and Turks.
From the earliest years of colonialism, conquistadores like Vasco Núñez de Balboa would brazenly advocate genocide against the native population. In the 1700s, British militia like William Trent and Simeon Ecuyer gave smallpox-exposed blankets to Native American emissaries as gifts at Fort Pitt, "to Convey the Smallpox to the Indians", in one of the most famously documented cases of germ warfare. While it is uncertain how successful such attempts were against the target population, historians have noted that, "history records numerous instances of the French, the Spanish, the British, and later on the American, using smallpox as an ignoble means to an end. For smallpox was more feared by the Indian than the bullet: he could be exterminated and subjugated more easily and quickly by the death-bringing virus than by the weapons of the white man."
From 1885 to 1908, the Congo Free State in central Africa was privately controlled by Leopold II of Belgium, who extracted a fortune from the land by the use of forced labor of natives. Under his regime, there were 2 to 15 million deaths among the Congolese people.
Beginning in 1915, ethnic Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were rounded up, deported and executed on orders of the government. The combination of massacres, forced deportation marches and deaths due to disease in concentration camps is estimated to have killed more than 1 million ethnic Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks between 1915 and 1923.
In the four years after the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia in 1975, between 1.7 and 2 million Cambodians died in the Khmer Rouge’s "Killing Fields."
In 1994 in Rwanda approximately 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates were slaughtered in a carefully organized program of genocide over 100 days, making history as the quickest killing spree the world has ever seen.
In 1992 the Serbs targeted Bosniak and Croatian civilians in areas under their control in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The war in Bosnia claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 people.
There are many other examples so the probability is that modern humans exterminated the "subhuman species" of Neanderthals when they entered Europe about 40,000 years ago.
According to Canadian scholar Adam Jones, if a dominant group of people has little in common with a marginalized group of people, it is easy for the dominant group to define the other as subhuman. In the eyes of homo sapiens the Neanderthals were probably seen as subhuman because they actually were subhuman or at least extrahuman, other than human. Hypotheses which suggest that genocidal violence may have caused the extinction of the Neanderthals have been offered by several authors, including Jared Diamond and Ronald Wright. However, several scholars have formed alternative theories as to why the Neanderthals died off, which means there is no clear consensus as to what caused their extinction within the scientific community.
At the present time Homo Sapiens is in the process of wiping out every species on earth including itself because of its addiction to fossil fuels and the resultant global warming that is producing. Oh well, it's been a noble experiment in part.
