There is an interesting and silly racial row over the origins of white people. You can tell it’s silly because the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) has become interested in it.
It began when Nhlamulo “Nota” Baloyi made the following remarks about white people: “They are inferior species (compared) to us. We’re Homo Sapiens; they have got Neanderthal blood in them. This is the science. This science was not done by black people, it was done by them”.
The first remark is too vague to be contentious (I shall discuss it below). The following three remarks are perfectly true. White people are a mixture of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal; black people are pure Homo sapiens. Asians, Native Americans and Native Australians are also pure Homo sapiens. This shows up clearly in DNA studies. The DNA of white people is about 95% Homo sapiens and 5% Neanderthal. The DNA of blacks and Asians is 100% Homo sapiens. (The racial classifications and DNA proportions in this paragraph are rather vague. I could give more precise ones but that’s for another day. For now, I just want to say that Mr Baloyi is basically correct.)
When I tell white people they are partly Neanderthal, the response is unvarying. They laugh. It seems not only to amuse them but also to please them. Almost more than anything else, we all want to be interesting, and white people seem to feel more interesting as a species when they learn about their Neanderthal ancestry. I feel the same. So it is absurd for the SAHRC to charge Mr Baloyi for hate speech over this, but that is what it is intending to do.
I must confess I did not know who Mr Baloyi was, so I looked him up. I see he is a highly successful musical executive and entrepreneur, a well-known rapper, and a pioneer in hip-hop, an art form on which my ignorance is total. But I do know a bit about the origins of humans.
Homo sapiens and Neanderthals first met in Europe about 40,000 years ago. (All of these dates are disputed and constantly being revised.) They could mate with each other and produce fertile offspring, which according to me means that they were of the same species. But not according to some anthropologists. Neanderthals were a bit shorter than Homo sapiens, sturdier, stronger, with more fast-twitch muscle fibre and bigger brains. A Neanderthal would beat a Homo sapiens in a fight and run faster over short distances. I don’t know about long distances. Only in one respect is Homo sapiens physically superior to most other animals: we are very good at long distance running. Very few animals can beat humans over the marathon distance (42.2 km), although a few can make them look stupid. The human record for the marathon is just over two hours; an ostrich can run it in 45 minutes. I don’t know if Neanderthals were cleverer than Homo sapiens but they might have been. They were almost certainly gentler than we are, or, to put it more crudely, not quite as unlovable as us. We’re a pretty horrible species, although a very close cousin is even more horrible. More below.
A quick review of human evolution, all of which happened in Africa. Humans are apes (not monkeys). To be more specific, humans are chimpanzees. There are three types of chimps: the Common Chimpanzee, which dominates Africa; Bonobos, a small group living north of the Congo River; and hominids – us. Hominids parted from chimps about eight million years ago. The history and evolution of hominids is exceedingly complicated and constantly being revised, but only one species of hominid survives – ourselves, again. It seems Neanderthals evolved about 450,000 years ago, and a small group travelled to Europe through Suez (the only land crossing from Africa to Europe and Asia). Homo sapiens evolved about 300,000 years ago, and a small group crossed Suez about 50,000 years ago and then radiated all around the world. The fact that Asians, Indians, Arabs, Australians, Americans and Europeans are all so closely related genetically is because of this. By contrast, there is enormous genetic variety among Africans.
Most of the contacts between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens happened in Western Europe. (The skeletons of the former were first found in the Neanderthal Valley in Germany.) There is much speculation about the nature of the contacts. They certainly bred together. Otherwise, were they enemies or allies? Both, I suppose. There are suggestions that they were more peaceful than we were, or at any rate less warlike. We are very warlike but our close cousin, the common chimpanzee, is much worse. As percentages of their populations, more chimps are killed in their tribal wars than were humans in the two world wars. I love chimps a lot, but they are very dangerous animals and much stronger than humans. One of the most terrible photographs I’ve ever seen is of a young woman after she had been attacked by a chimp.
If we were more aggressive and violent than Neanderthals, perhaps this is why we prevailed over them, and they became extinct as a separate species about 40,000 years ago. But there could have been many other reasons. Their hunting methods seemed less efficient than ours, and they seemed less able to protect themselves against the big predators, especially lions. Maybe we just bred them into extinction, swamped them with our greater numbers until the joint existing species of Europeans was 95% Homo sapiens and only 5% Neanderthal. But I’ve got another theory, which I’ve seldom heard articulated: trade.
Modern humans are the only animals ever to trade among themselves. Other animals co-operate across species in amazing ways, and there is even mutual co-operation between animals and plants, but no other animal trades within its own species. This led to specialisation and division of labour, and a massive increase in human brain power, simply because many humans combined their brain power. This is probably why we conquered the whole world. It seems that Neanderthals did not trade, so even if a single Neanderthal was cleverer than a single Homo sapiens, a single Neanderthal brain working on its own could not match the combined brain power of a group of Homo sapiens. (This thought comes from Matt Ridley, the English scientist and author.)
Nhlamulo “Nota” Baloyi says that whites are inferior to blacks because blacks are pure Homo sapiens and whites are a hybrid. By what criteria are they inferior? He seems to think Neanderthals were inferior to Homo sapiens. Again, by what criteria? The fact the Homo sapiens eventually prevailed over Neanderthals – conquered them, if you like – does not prove superiority. The Romans conquered the Greeks, but nobody suggests that Roman civilisation was superior to Greek. The Roman ruling families did not think so; they had Greek tutors for their children. In the past Europeans have conquered Africans. That did not make them superior.
One of the characteristics of Neanderthal DNA is body hair. Europeans are hairier than Africans and Asians. Whether having a hairy body is something to be proud of or embarrassed about is a matter of opinion and fashion. In my youth, a macho white man, to prove his high male value, would have his shirt unbuttoned to just above the waist with a silver medallion hanging from a chain in the middle of his hairy chest. I felt a wimp because I have no hairs on my chest – although I do have a strong black beard and fairly hairy legs. (Does that make up for it, chaps?) Why do white women go to such lengths to remove the hair on their legs? Some white men have hairy backs, and in my youth a common racist insult that the Rooineks used to throw at the Boers was “Hairyback” (along with rather mysterious terms such as “Crunchy” and “Rock Spider”). Perhaps Baloyi thinks that long beards and hairy chests make white men inferior.
If you look at track events at Olympic games, you’d say that blacks are superior to whites; if you look at swimming, you’d say whites are superior to blacks. USA basketball is dominated by blacks, who are a small percentage of the population. And so it goes on. Chinese have higher IQs than Europeans, Europeans higher than Africans. What does this mean? I don’t know. In the 19th Century, Europeans conquered and ruled over the Chinese, so their lower IQ didn’t seem to matter much.
In most ways, humans are not equal; and in most ways, some humans are inferior or superior to other humans. But in one way all humans are equal: they are of equal worth, and should all be treated in the same way. Baloyi’s remarks about whites being inferior to black are meaningless unless he is saying that whites have less worth than blacks. I don’t think he is. And when he says whites are “inhuman”, he is just being silly and should just be laughed off.
I do think that the SAHRC should have nothing to do with this absurd but thoroughly interesting and rather amusing affair.
[image: Neanderthal/University of Rochester]
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