immortalclarareborn

“In 2018, the Natural History Museum of London collaborated with the broadcaster Channel 4 on a documentary titled “The First Brit: Secrets of the 10,000-Year-Old Man,” which examined a human skeleton discovered in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset in 1903.[51] Approximately 10,000 years old, Cheddar Man is the oldest and most nearly complete human skeleton yet discovered in Britain – hence the moniker, “the First Brit.” As the documentary explained, Cheddar Man had several genetic markers that suggested that he had dark skin and light eyes – similar to results derived from studies of many other European Ice Age human remains, and in stark contradiction to what certain members of the British public seem to have imagined the “first Brit” should look like. In short, if skin color and hair color are broadly understood as the primary markers of race in contemporary Western society, genetic studies into prehistoric humans and ancestral hominins that specifically seek to identify those characteristics will end up generating a discourse around race. A perusal of the Reddit discussion threads on r/23andme (the informal replacement for the now vanished 23andMe discussion boards) shows that this is indeed the case. As Geroulanos describes, well-respected anthropologists have also embraced narratives of Neanderthal disappearance that are nearly indistinguishable to popular far right narratives about contemporary imagined “white genocide” and “white replacement” theories.[52] The disappearance of the Neanderthal becomes an extinction narrative, where autochthonous Europeans are out-competed and then wiped out by new arrivals from the Middle East and North Africa – contemporary fears about immigration and multiculturalism projected backwards tens of thousands of years as the distinction between general ancestry and deep genetic ancestry is collapsed. At the same time, however, certain discussion threads on Neanderthal ancestry and identity surveyed over the last ten years show a secondary racist narrative cropping up – one that is not anti-Black, but anti-Asian. In multiple instances, a discussion thread about Neanderthal pride was followed by a series of comments from participants reminding the rest of the thread that Asian populations, not European ones, “actually” have the highest amount of Neanderthal heritage and “are the most Neanderthal today lol.”[53] This shift from anti-Black to anti-Asian racism highlights the dynamic nature of racial hierarchies and their entanglement with contemporary geo-politics and social questions, as well as the fact that Neanderthals are conceptually flexible and capable of being deployed in support of any number of prejudices and re-creations of racial hierarchy. Neanderthals are white, except when they’re not.”

tell us more about the cheddar man, wise one