Human origins: I don’t know much about genetics or the history of archaic man—but I have some observations about how the subject is tackled. In the first place, I accept the Darwinian account is true in its own terms—but those Christian fundamentalists who say “it’s just a theory” are correct in some regards. Now, even quite sophisticated people, like the philosopher David Stove, will say things like “there’s no way to experimentally validate evolution by natural selection due to the timeframe involved”—except there is, you can take short-lived species like fruit flies and subject them to different pressures and watch the results.
However, what is true is that when it comes to the history of man—and other species—we don’t have a complete fossil record to work with; so it is the case that a great many steps are “assumed” or “hypothesised”, so that, while the process itself might be real in scientific terms, in man we don’t have the evidence we have with fruit flies. And that means a lot of what is said about human pre-history is theoretical. It involves working with isolated examples and generalising from them—and that’s a difficult process, it’s very speculative; it’s almost an imaginative process (even with help from DNA).
Further, this field is heavily politicised. For example, I took a look at what is written about the pre-historic population of Britain—about the pre-Celts, the people who built Stonehenge. The academic summation: “The sad but inevitable conclusion of this must be that Britain has little role to play in any understanding of long-term human evolution and its cultural history is largely a broken record dependent on external introductions and insular developments that ultimately lead nowhere. Britain, therefore, was an island of the living dead.” This is a blatant leftist description of current Britain—it’s the official doctrine, it’s why the National Theatre put on a play called Death of England. “The living dead”.
It’s about how the country “depends on external introductions” (i.e. immigration)—there’s nothing great about “Great Britain”, even when the population under discussion isn’t English. And academia is filled with this tendentious material—which is easily inserted into pre-history because we basically know nothing about it. Worse, with DNA research these highly tendentious positions can be given the gloss of “high-tech science”—as we saw with the notorious Cheddar Man fake, where speculative reconstruction was used to make “the first Briton” a “black man” (though the reconstruction in question had nothing to do with sub-Saharan Africa).
The belief-based statements are obvious to any alert person who knows what our belief system is and what it fixates upon. The “out-of-Africa” hypothesis is another case in point—it’s where science and mythology meet, because the hypothesis is designed to support the official belief “our wise black elders—ultimately, we are all black and should love blacks in particular”. Aside from any empirical considerations, the ideology behind this could be easily pierced if you responded, “And we’ve evolved beyond that—it’s only because we’ve left Africa behind we’ve got anywhere at all.”
Yet that is just rhetoric. In truth, I doubt out-of-Africa is real either; just like the Kurgan hypothesis, it’s too convenient—it fits too neatly with the approved belief system (and other people, by no means Hitlerites, like Carlton Coon, held that mankind emerged in many different places). Again, once you know that post-war all academia has been subordinated to political considerations and once you know what those political considerations are, then it’s easy to see where the belief system has been inserted in fields you know nothing about in particular.
Our own system is only too quick to speak about “pseudo-science” or about “the wacky human origins mythology of Himmler” or “Saddam’s WEIRD Arab origin theory”—and yet our own “scientific mythology” is no more or less wacky. “You mean that wacky idea people used to believe that we’re all descended from sub-Saharan Africans, and that blacks, black women in particular, are uniquely special and important?”. Nowhere, in my experience, is this intersection between mythology and science more apparent than as regards “human origins”—“our validated scientific account” versus “their wacky self-aggrandising mythology”, yet it’s all hopelessly mixed together on all sides.
So far as I can tell, the actuality is that nobody knows where humans came from—and to say “Africa” is akin to people who say “Big Bang” in regard to the origin of the universe (“Big Bang” should also be suspected because it’s an alliterative catchphrase, which means someone really wants you to believe it—for some “reason”). The fact is that theories of human origin are spun from pretty thin gruel—from sparse humanoid fossil remains that could mean almost anything (and could be interpreted in multiple ways).
As Coon himself observed, there is no scientific agreement as to what a “species” is—as to what constitutes the unit upon which natural selection acts. In other words, it’s intuitive or experiential at best—or based on your beliefs and prejudices at worst. There are many places where art intersects with science like that—not least with the notion of what “life” itself is, along with “a human”. It’s why positivism is an inadequate framework to grasp the world—because the foundations of the scientific method, even when it brings useful results, rest on things that cannot be tested by science itself and are pre-rational.
“I don’t know what a species is, but I know it when I see it”—the same can be applied to other areas like pornography, race, sex, and, once again, “the human race” itself. Hence we should be very dubious in our current era about theories about the origins of humanity and the origins of Europeans (who, per the belief system, are not a race—though they had a collective origin). We know that academia is politically directed, and, in a sense, always has been. So don’t trust them—and especially don’t trust the media.