The article has a few caveats to the idea as well, it's not as certain as the title suggests. I'd suggest that this may hold up as well as the idea that the Toba eruption created an extinction-level bottleneck in our history. Later findings threw doubt on that initial conclusion too. We know of various other species that have definitely gone through severe genetic bottlenecks of their own, and the results are a lot clearly. The cheetah is a prime example.
Violence is baked into nature. Packs of animals will defend each other in a fight. However, some animals in a pack will kill off weaker members of the same pack just for breeding rights. Nature is brutal and it’s the most efficient killers that may win out. (That isn’t always true, of course.)
The article does try and make a connection with violence and the types of weapons used, though. (Humans had bows and neanderthals had spears.)
My point is that violence was likely part of the problem, but not the entire one.
As in: Did I describe a problem or solution? I don’t view nature as a problem, so I have no solution.
What I described is, what is. I can’t justify violence, but I also know it may be unavoidable. Honestly, the only solution I know of to the human problem is just be cool to one another. (I need to follow my own advice more, TBH.)
I personally have mixed views on the nature of humanity, but that is a conversation for another day.
Edit: Oh, I meant that humans having bows made them more efficient killers. That problem being how neanderthals might have been eliminated by violence.
This is really cool. I know so little about the history of other Homo species. Learning more is always so fascinating. I wonder why they never created civilizations of the sort we did? They left Africa hundreds of thousands of years before us? Does anyone have any good resources to learn about the history of other Homo species?
ALL power-minorities, women, Indigenous, battered people, homeless people, autistics, the same is true.
Power-majority is self-centered, aka narcissistic.
That is the default.
“majority RULE” means minority over-ruled/bullied, inherently.
Look at how a story in the Abrahamic religions scripture, on how women ate “the fruit of the knowledge of Good & Evil” which means they ate Morality … got turned, by the power-majority into hating-on women for their “sin”.
Women ( mothering ) ate of morality & shared it with men.
Period.
Researchers studying wasps in the Americas discovered that altruism is generalized-mothering, Buddhism perceived the same underlying-principle 25 consecutive centuries ago, the correct reading of that story in Genesis stated so, but the male-supremacism deformed the meaning until bullying women became religious-law for … millenia…
Many years ago, in the 1990’s, there were the Internet FAQs.
The Feminism FAQ of that time identified that there was a category-difference between early White feminists & early Black feminists:
White feminists wanted to be included in the White privilege that males had. They wanted their half of White entitlement.
Black feminists, being bullied both for being women & for being Black, wanted something completely different: they wanted the abuse to be forced to unexist.
That is evidence ( my life corroborates it ) that our unconscious, when bullied in 1 dimension, wants to be included in the power-majority group, but when bullied in 2+ dimensions ( each individual may have a different threshold ), then the underlying problem with bullying-itself is understood by one’s unconscious, and it becomes removing bullying’s rule that one’s unconscious understands to be the problem.
It isn’t leaving women, Indiginous people, homeless people, etc, fucked-over, while fixing it for 1 subgroup, that is going to make humankind viable, it is dismantling abuse-archy for all that can.
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