Wednesday 27 May 2009

BBC: The Incredible Human Journey

I didn’t see the first two episodes, Out of Africa and Asia, but tuned in to see the one about the journey to us, Europe.





Two points.

I couldn’t help being amused by Alice Roberts’s struggle to find the right words to describe the reconstructed face of the ‘first European’. In the context of the ‘Human Journey’ she was forced to acknowledge the obvious: we Europeans clearly don’t look like that nowadays. But if modern Europeans can so easily be distinguished from the reconstructed model, can’t we just as easily be distinguished from present-day people who look quite like the model, or otherwise look quite unlike Europeans? Of course we can, but this simple fact sits uneasily with the BBC’s usual racedoesnotexist line. How would the lovely doctor avoid seeming to take sides in the conflict between fact and politicised pseudoscience - essential if she hopes to keep on fronting BBC documentaries?

She came up with a clever dodge: “this face doesn’t look like we may think of modern Europeans as looking.”

A tortuous verbal formula that seemed to acknowledge the obvious but forbidden truth, so could move the narrative along its inevitable course, but that didn’t directly confront establishment lies. “We may think -- but maybe our eyes are lying.’’ Sure. A free person would simply have said “we don’t like that today,” what a shame Alice Roberts didn’t feel free to say that.

***

Second point, illustrating again the tension between honest science and prevailing dogmas. The theory is proposed that a ‘shared identity’ and ‘distinct culture’ was our ancestors’ decisive advantage over the relatively individualistic Neanderthals. In other words, one human group displaced another - to the point of its extinction - mainly by virtue of the incoming group’s higher levels of solidarity and co-operation.

The parallels between 40,000 B.C. and today, between the long-settled European populations and funny looking Afro-Asian colonists of both periods, must have occurred to many viewers even though Roberts never made the connection explicitly; the phrases ‘distinct culture’ and ‘shared identity’ are familiar from discussions about mass immigration and multiculturalism.

But could the same dynamic arise between rival sapiens sapiens groups - and with a similar outcome? Well, in Darwin’s famous words:

“A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit
of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage and sympathy, were always ready to
aid each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good would be
victorious over most other tribes.”


Common sense, really, but the establishment persists in telling us the only thing to fear is our own ‘racism’ - by which they mean our will to survive. We should welcome immigrants; respect but not emulate their high degree of group cohesion and mobilisation; we should not be alarmed at the rapid demographic changes we see; and we certainly shouldn’t vote BNP who advocate the kind of policies that appeal only to "Neanderthals"! History and science, though, tell us the opposite.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We are often reminded by the correct-thinking that we are all descended from Africans - the out of Africa theory - so who is this 'we' whitey, we are all Africans.

However in popular culture pre-historic men are always shown as white. Is this a sub-conscious admission that our ancestors should look that way? Or a PC fear of showing blacks as primitive?

Whatever, its certainly another example of befuddled liberalism.