Thursday, November 09, 2006

Gods must be Neanderthal males!

In one of my previous posts, I tried to understand how the "god" concept developed. You can easily understand the origin of spirit worship because of "ghost experiences". However, god is something beyond comprehension. I do not think a person would suddenly invent god and the rest of his tribe would believe him. People are rationals unless indoctrinated from childhood.

In that post, I speculated that god concept might have been imagined by males when they lost the memory of their ancestral spirits or lost touch with their shamans. Now, I have begun to think that probably just like the spirit worship even the god worship might have been handiwork of females. And that, god must be 37000 years old.

It was Neanderthal male and Sapien female:
A recent population genetics study has found that there was "introgression"(Read the posts at : John Hawks Anthropology Weblog) between Sapiens and Neanderthals. Well, I do not know who mated whom. But I think it must be Neanderthal males and Sapien females.

The events as they unfolded:
When Homo Sapiens(henceforth, New Africans or NA) moved out of Africa, they first colonised Middle East or the present day Arab lands. Neanderthals(henceforth, Old Africans or OA) were already there. When NA moved to Middle East there were no face to face meeting between NA and OA. The OA were the first ones to sense the presence of others. Suspicious and scared of NA, OA moved into regions that could not be detected by NA. Nevertheless, there were few curious OA males.

When NA males went for hunting, one OA male met an NA female who was gathering food alone. Now we know what happened then. But once the process that helped introgression was over the OA male disappeared behind a mountain. This NA female shared her experience with her friend. To her surprise her friend too experienced it. The encounters with mystery men who could be seen alone but disappear behind mountains became regular feature with many females.

In my opinion, the result of these encounters was a new hybrid population along with the paradigm of a creature that is responsible for birth but also mysterious and generally invisible. If you notice most of the old literature talk about male gods themselves being responsible for human children. Probably, these legends were born out of NA female experience with OA males. This person, who they called god, was now created with those encounters and transferred to the next generation by the mothers. I believe, this could be the only way a distant concept like god could be spread in a population.

How did NA males respond?
Obviously, there were morphological differences in hybrid children. But I guess for some reasons all the children were females. If it's correct that female children generally resemble their mothers then probably the doubts/fear over entirely different looking newborns(probably in the case of males) would not have developed. In any case, a generation(both hybrid and NA) ready to accept the god encounters was being created in many families. Therefore, the initial male sceptics were already on their way out.

Why god encounters were cherished?
If this post is any indication then we can fairly guess why. Why for thousands of years men have tried to understand female desires? Probably, the answer lies in those encounters 37000 years ago. I think the experience of introgression is not there in the gene flow.

What about purely Soulistic societies?
I believe the coastal migration clan identified by Y-Haplogroups C and D, might have moved to other regions before any encounters could take place with their females. The regions where Y-Haplogroup C has its presence even today(like South India, Central Asia, and Siberia) might explain the continuity of spirit worship. This also explains why Middle East developed godistic societies before any other civilization.

As I have already stated, the idea that humans were created by gods could be attributed to only those encounters. Otherwise, the idea of creation would find answers in genitals as that had been the case in many societies.

Further reading:
Parva, a novel in Kannada, by S. L. Bhairappa

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Gods were the Guti who appeared in the Middle East. The Romkans called them Goths. They were tall, rugged, people who had red hair and blue eyes. They tattooed themselves. Cain was the leader of the North Pontic Kurgans. He attacked biblical Eden about 3700 B.C. and routed the Elves. The name Abel is cognate with Elf. Adam and Eve (Indo-European names) were the indentured farmer and the brew mistress who had to serve the gods; they were Elves. The sapienized Neanderthals were the dwarfs of Norse mythology. They were Hurrians, related to Sumerians. Midgard is the same place as Eden, it is in Thrace in the Balkans. The name 'God' (Goth) means 'comrade'. The suffix denoting a red-head was -el. Eric the red would have been called Eric-el in earlier times. The Name Allah from Al- Eloah means the red-headed one, ie., a Goth. For all the facts and the proof of those facts, read "The Origin of the Gods" by E. Peter Battey-Pratt. For more info look the book up on Amazon.com

Manju Edangam said...

Thank you very much for those inputs, Peter.

Adam and Eve (Indo-European names)

I believe these are considered Semitic names.

Anonymous said...

Eve is anglicized from Hawwah, which is cognate with 'life', and is indeed the meaning of the name in Hebrew. 3700 B.C. the languages were not as separated as they are now.

I would have to see proof on the Guti-Goth-Geat-God etemology. Likewise with the semetic -il or -el for god as meaning red-headed.

I suspect it isn't so.

Manju Edangam said...

Deleted a comment by some anonymous. It had nothing constructive but only personal attacks against Peter Battey-Pratt. Though I must add here that just like the commenter I'm also dead against imagination.

Anonymous said...

I feel that the 'Gods' are really the heroes of Neanderthal folklore, but find it hard to follow your imaginative reconstruction of men appearing and disappearing from behind mountains.

Firstly, why do we assume that homo sapiens would have viewed neanderthals as a seperate species. They didn't have knowledge of genetics, and would most likely have simply viewed them as another tribe of humans, much in the same way that we accept variances in appearance between people from different places. Neanderthals lived predominately in Europe and survived a number of ice ages, evolving to have fair skin and greater muscle mass, along with larger craniums (which in turn supported greater brain encephalisation). They were more muscular and with bigger brains than homo sapiens and probably descended south, conquering sapiens tribes in the middle east region and enslaving the people - using the men as workers and the women for sex.

We know cross breeding took place and this may well have resulted in the cro-magnon people who evidently shared life with Neanderthals for about 10000 years. Eventually the pure neanderthals were completely replaced by hybrids and homo sapiens still migrating out of
Africa. It has also been shown that homo sapiens women had wider hips and that homo-sapiens had smaller heads allowing for easier birthing, and fewer complications during birth.

I imagine that the Neanderthal leaders (probably determined by strength) who controlled these tribes and along with it vast areas of land and resources probably refused to mate with the sapiens girls so as to maintain a purer bloodline. At some point in history when vast populations of essentially sapiens people, by this time, were ruled by a small number of pure neanderthals (who were more muscular and more intelligent), the folklore of the gods emerged.

Gods like Thor and Wodin, Zeus and Poseidon are always described as muscular, white, blonde, and brainy which pretty accurately describes Neanderthals according to fossil evidence.

Kalki-Om

Manju Edangam said...

Kalki-Om,
Our knowledge of Neanderthals is still at its infancy. Our understanding is limited in terms of;
- their social organization
- their intelligence levels
- their phenotype mechanism (skin colour)

So making them a limiting case of known institutions which themselves are generalizations of events;
- spread over thousands of years of human history
- contradictory in mating habits
- contradictory in the class structure

when not enhance our knowledge also doesn't help us much with its tone of finality.

4mypeople said...

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