And the first European man was really …

(Note: see follow-up to this entry where I comment on the text of the Mail article.)

Talking about scientific hype in service to fashionable liberalism, here, as reported by the Mail, is a British forensic scientist’s reconstruction of the head and face of the first Cro-Magnon European of 35,000 years ago, which he created using fossilized fragments of a skull and jawbone found in a cave. But before you click on the link to see the full entry page where I’ve placed the photo, guess what the first European “really” looked like, just guess.

The first modern European: Forensic artist Richard Neave
reconstructed the face based on skull fragments from 35,000 years ago

Then see the attractive white female anthropologist and BBC presenter Alice Roberts looking with deep satisfaction and self-satisfaction at this consummate creation of politically correct science:

Alice Roberts contemplating the bust of Homo …
europeansis. ‘I look at that face and think “I’m actually looking
at the face of somebody from 40,000 years ago”’, she says

Oh, the joy, the bliss! It’s as good as having a black U.S. president! Give that woman a cigarette.

This is the one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. The sheer shameless obviousness of these liberals, completely unembarrassed to reveal what they’re really about.

—end of initial entry—

Van Wijk writes:

I think they should have discarded all pretense and just produced a portrait of Barack Obama.

So now we have a manufactured ancient Negro to show whites that they are not even the legitimate heirs of their own lands. Real subtle. I hope the left continues to use a rusty battle axe when a scalpel is required.

LA replies:

I want to repeat what Van Wijk said so that it will sink in:

“So now we have a manufactured ancient Negro to show whites that they are not even the legitimate heirs of their own lands.”

Brandon F. writes:

I may be reading too much into this but this seems so typical of modern white intellectuals. Creating a model of the first “European” (from a couple of bone fragments) and he looks strangely African.

Anthony Damato writes:

My first impression when I saw the reconstructed proto-European was that he was clearly African in appearance. Yippie, we’re all the descendants of an African woman!

Then, in reading the article, the forensic craftsman said his impression was that once the face emerged, it surprised him that it did not look African (yea, right), Asian, or European, but a blend of all three (multicultural magnon man). What a crock of horse dung and another cheap shot at Europeans.

LA replies:

That is so typical of liberals! It’s like when they make a movie savaging someone they hate, such as Oliver Stone’s movie “W.,” then congratulate themselves on their restraint and fairness.

Karl D. writes:

The first thing I thought of as I saw the woman gazing with smug self satisfaction at this bust was the many similar photos I have seen of Nazi’s gazing in similar wonderment at busts of the “Common Jew.” All the implications of this bust echo Nazism in reverse.

On a separate note. Look at the top of the page of this link I got from ISP in my mailbox this morning. And especially what it says about Obama. It seems that even if one thinks Obama is destroying our country one should have drank the “Kool Aid” just a little bit.

Shrewbury writes:

Interesting comments at the Daily Mail. The people aren’t buying it. “Utter rubbish!” seems to be a popular response. Except of course for the usual arrogant, sneering, know-it-all MENSA jerks, eternal “sceptics” about everything other than the current party line.

Dennis Mangan writes:

Even if one takes this forensic exercise at face value, in other words, that the scientists reconstructed the face in good faith according to the best evidence, there is no way that they could have known his skin color. That’s what gives the game away.

Stephen T. writes:

Well we know who to blame for the baldness gene now, don’t we? Reading the article, I don’t see a scientific justification for extrapolating from a few bone fragments that the ancestor of all Europeans had dark Negroid skin, which it seems to me could be determined only from the long-departed flesh, not by bone. Methinks someone’s devout wishful thinking may have influenced the reconstruction. Based on the rhapsodic expression on the BBC presenter’s face, she gazes at it as if to say, “I’d always HOPED my ancient ancestors would turn out to be black, not white. What a thrill!”

I’m just wondering why they didn’t also glowingly declare that he was probably an immigrant, too?

LA replies:

Well, of course he was an immigrant, just arrived in Europe from the Near East, and ancestrally (15,000 or 25,000 years earlier) from Africa.

I’m sure the forensic “scientists” (though, as the article indicates, “artist” is more accurate) justified the dark skin on the basis that Cro-Magnon man had just come north from the Near East and so his skin had not yet lost melanin as a result of the reduced sunlight in northern latitudes. The underlying premise is that the proto-humans who branched out from Africa 50,000 or 60,000 years ago and became the ancestors of all non-African humanity were Negro, because all humans prior to the departure from africa were Negro. More likely is it that there was a proto-human stock living in Africa, and that the Negroid, Mongoloid, and Caucasoid races all developed from that proto-human stock after the departure from Africa. In other words, the Negroid race is just as much a specialized adaptation from an earlier human type as are the Mongoloid and Caucasoid races.

But even if were true that all humanity was originally Negroid, by the time the Cro-Magnons arrived in Europe, they would have changed greatly from the original Negro type.

Furthermore, the very prototype of the white race has always been Cro-Magnon man, the first Homo sapiens to arrive in Europe. The spectacular leftist trick being pulled here is that the forensic artist has turned the original and prototypical Caucasians into Negroes. And for the white left, as seen in the rapt expression on Alice Roberts’s face, no turning of the tables could be more fulfilling. Oh, what bliss is it now to be alive!

A reader writes from England:

The third European was surely a mixed race child, assuming the second European was a white woman!

John B. writes:

Because race is the great divide among humans, I personally have found it very odd, over the past several decades, to watch as persons—generally, white persons—behave as if they are unaware of it. The usual form of the avoidance of the divide is obsessive small talk. Whether on talk shows or in multi-racial work places, whites ceaselessly engage non-whites—blacks, really—in chitchat about, oh, I don’t know—salad dressing, usually.

“Really? Thousand Island? I know what you mean—but my husband always says, ‘No—it has to be Russian.’ “

Do you see? We’re all the same. If it weren’t for the fact that some mentally-ill white persons find racial difference conspicuous and are thus unable to talk about trivialities with non-whites, life would be a Never-Ending Festival of the Banal.

Now that racial egalitarianism has infested science and is complicating paleoanthropology, I am troubled to see this same sort of thing in the comment made by Alice Roberts, in the Mail article you’ve linked:

“It’s really quite bizarre,” she told Radio Times. “I’m a scientist and objective but I look at that face and think “Gosh, I’m looking at the face of somebody from 40,000 years ago” and there’s something weirdly moving about that.”

Notice that that’s the exact opposite of the truth. Her genuine reaction would be this:

“I’m a scientist and objective; so if the physical evidence does suggest that this is what the first European looked like, I’ll accept it. Emotionally, on the other hand, I’m troubled to think of this as my ancestor.”

Another manifestation of the confusion that liberalism is sowing in paleoanthropology—or, at least, in the popularization thereof—is the newspaper writer’s blithe reference to Cro-Magnon man and Neanderthal man as “two species of human” who “occupied Europe” in the period to which the bones that are the clay sculpture’s alleged basis have been dated. As I understand it, those are two strikingly-different human types; and the question whether Neanderthals are represented at all in the population of modern Europeans has vexed scientists for decades. In short, the question whether the sculpture is based on Cro-Magnon bones or Neanderthal bones is of the first importance—and is treated by the writer as if it’s not a question at all.

Notice also the salad-dressing talk with which the article opens:

Dressed in a suit, this person would not look out of place in a busy street in a modern city.

Up until about 1980, he certainly would have looked out of place in a busy street in Europe (which, until about that time, is the only place that had “modern cities”)—or hasn’t the writer noticed? Pass the Bleu Cheese.

Joe C. writes:

Who cares what skin color the first human migrants into Europe were? The main point is that our ancestors evolved out of their alleged African-negroidness under the tough and challenging climate of Ice Age Europe, Let the white left have their fantasies. In any event, now we know what happened to the Neaderthals. White flight.

Stewart W. writes:

As long as we’re speculating on the appearance of the first European, based on no evidence whatsoever, I propose the following as a much more likely scenario. Having grown up watching Star Trek, this fits my biases, which are just as valid as any other:

Paul T. writes from Canada:

And the first European man was …

… a dead ringer for my great-uncle, Shlomo Shtetlkind!

I suppose it’s almost too obvious to remark on, but the subtext here seems to be “your ancestors were black, so you shouldn’t mind your descendents being so, too.”

Paul Nachman writes:

Your correspondent Van Wijk writes

So now we have a manufactured ancient Negro to show whites that they are not even the legitimate heirs of their own lands.

No kidding!

May 6

Gintas writes:

It’s not up to the standard of discussion at your site, but that picture of Alice Roberts gazing longingly at the “first European” demands a “Create a Caption” contest somewhere with a lively peanut gallery.

Here is my offering:

Alice Roberts contemplating the bust of Homo … europeansis:

“I look at that face and think, ‘Now which of my lovers does he most look like?’”

LA replies:

Given the expression on Roberts’s face, your comment is appropriate.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 05, 2009 04:00 PM | Send