Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Evolutionary Riddle Solved


In a breakthrough that is rocking the paleo- and politico-anthropological world, Dr. Mitsuko Sakaki from the American Institute of Evolutionary Biology announced today that she and her colleagues have settled the century-long quandary about how Neanderthals fit in the arc of human evolution.

“As it turns out,” said Dr. Sakaki, “Neanderthals were not overlapping precursors to modern humans at all, or even an aberrational coexisting species from some other line of hominids, as some have argued. They were actually a group, or perhaps more accurately a party, of homo sapiens who began retrogradely evolving at a point in human evolutionary history that almost exactly coincides with the dawn of politics.”

Further explained Dr. Sakaki, “A closer look at the fossil human record using new osteo-forensic tools and state of the art anthropological models has revealed that at roughly 30,000 BCE a subpopulation of homo sapiens defined primarily by a blind adherence to a primordial religiousness began thinking with their spleens and gall bladders instead of the right and left hemispheres of the rapidly developing human brain.”

“Very interestingly,” said politico-anthropologist Dr. Divesh Amin from the Sakaki team, “as this phrenic shift is occurring among these primeval reactionaries, we also see creeping into the cave drawings and petroglyphs of these widely polarizing peoples a political messaging pitched at an intelligence level normally associated with Cro-Magnon Man and below.

“It is also at this time that the mass production of roughhewn, solid-rock prototypes of the soap box bursts onto the social scene.

“As early man and woman, but mostly man, began working out humanity’s issues by way of this confrontational new tool called politics, something fundamentally transformational happened to the god-fearers among them.

“Already deeply spooked by their fledgling conception of an all-powerful god, and feeling a little bit more vulnerable than usual thanks to an advancing brain taking them places they weren’t ready to go, these primitive mossbacks almost immediately saw politics as a do or die proposition in which all was fair.

“In the anthropological blink of an eye the heated campaigning and the debating triggered in this new right half of the species the then more highly developed fight half of the fight or flight response. That is, in the compromised mental state caused by the chronic hyperactivity of their sympathetic nervous system they allowed the simple deep-seated Darwinian impulse to be the fittest to warp into an uncompromising need to win any and all debates and elections at any and all costs.”

Said physiognomical anthropologist Dr. Eva Chen, “In very little time, the perpetual game face these political belligerents wore gave them the brutish features we’ve come to associate with the caveman and woman.

“The hallmark beetle brow of the Neanderthal was a function of these people’s constant aggressive furrowing of their brows as they tried with less and less success to make sense of the complex real world their spleens and gall bladders were not really built for processing.”

Said Dr. Amin, “As far as we can tell based on some of the unbelievably boneheaded social and economic choices made by homo sapiens in the years before their devolving cousins died out, these harbingers of the modern day right wing became quite adept at winning politically.

“At surviving, however, not so much.” 

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