Brutish Origins of Humanity?

Marcellin Boule's vision of Neanderthal (1909)

Nothing of his [Aghoo's] face was visible but a mouth bordered by raw flesh and a pair of murderous eyes. His squat stature exaggerated the length of his arms and the enormous width of his shoulders. His whole being expressed a brutal strength, tireless and without pity.

J. H. Rosny-Aine, La Guerre du Feu (1911)

Hairy or grisly, with a big face like a mask, great brow ridges and no forehead, clutching an enormous flint, and running like a baboon with his head forward and not, like a man, with his head up, he must have been a fearsome creature for our forefathers to come upon. . .

There was the grisly thing again. It was running across an open space, running almost on all fours, in joltering leaps. It was hunchbacked and very big and low, a grey hairy wolf-like monster. At times its long arms nearly touched the ground.

H. G. Wells, "The Grisly Folk" (1921)

The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with the early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices. . .and with the worldwide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilating, and necrophiliac practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust. . .

Raymond Dart, Australian anatomist (1893-1988)

Man is man, and not a chimpanzee, because for millions upon millions of years we killed for a living.

Robert Ardrey (1908-1980), The Hunting Hypothesis (1976)

[Lok] was a strange creature, smallish and bowed. The legs and thighs were bent and there was a whole thatch of curls on the outside of the legs and arms. The back was high, and covered over the shoulders with curly hair. . . The mouth was wide and soft and above the curls of the upper lip the great nostrils flared like wings. There was no bridge to the nose and the moon-shadow of the jutting brow lay just above the tip.

William Golding, The Inheritors(1955)

Neanderthal male (a modern reconstruction)

Place him in a landscape of tall, waving grass, with the sun shining down and the bubbling music of summer in the air. Who is this man? He is an evolutionary bridge, just shy of fully modern status. He is a true human our ancestor. We should regard him with honour, because almost everything that we are springs directly from him.

George Constable, The Neanderthals (1973)

Franz Weidenreich (d. 1948)

-each region --> local lines of human evolution
-each line--> evolved at different rates
-deep-seated racial characteristics divided world's people

Carleton Coon (d. 1981)

-The Origin of Races(1962)
- 'If Africa was the cradle of mankind, it was only an indifferent kindergarten. Europe and Asia were our principal schools.'
-Homo erectus evolved separately 5X --> Homo sapiens

Modern man first appeared in precisely the region of the world where culture- according to Europeans -later reached its zenith. Prehistory foreshadowed history. The only issue to sort out was whether the Cro-Magnons had entered the continent from somewhere else, or whether the Neanderthals had evolved into them.

In these last few years, new fossils, new techniques, and new approaches have completely obliterated this once-comfortable hypothesis. The most damaging blows have come from Africa and the Middle East, where it now appears that fully modern human anatomy . . . had already emerged as early as 100,000 years ago. According to the "Out of Africa" hypothesis, these earliest modern humans eventually spread out to take over the territory of all other existing hominids . . . .

The Neandertha Enigma (1995)