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Notes -
"Ancient Apocalypse" on Netflix has been a break out hit. Some of the reactions have been... interesting.
The Guardian declared it the most dangerous show on Netflix.
Boingboing says Archaeologists reveal the white supremacist nonsense behind Netflix's "Ancient Apocalypse"
So what's behind this?
Hitler famously cherry picked some ideas from archeology / anthropology to push his agenda. Post WW2 academics found that it was easy to push out rivals by claiming their ideas could result in a new Hitler.
As a result anthropology is filled with people who think that they have a vital role as guardians of society.
This mostly results in making historical narratives more dishonest and less cool. The Bell Beaker culture is often referred to as the Corded Ware culture. They claim it was spread as a peaceful diffusion of culture. Genetic testing that showed that as the culture expanded neighbouring Y-DNA haplogroups disappeared. This is dismissed as one of those great mysteries.
When a body is found carrying a spear and multiple hand axes, they are ceremonial trade goods instead of weapons. The arrows in the back of the body were presumably his change from the trading. That joke was stolen from an academic I can't track down.
Ancient Apocalypse is really just fun and harmless, but the reactions point to a deeper problem.
So...what’s supposed to be the problem with AApoc? White supremacy is pretty nonspecific. Is Hitler involved, or is that just a segue?
Also, wiki tells me Bell Beakers were “contemporary with and preceded by” Corded Ware-iors. I didn’t see any claims that it was peaceful, and the “renewed emphasis on migration” section is headed with a bow. A nice touch.
I’d be interested in reading more on the drama of this field, if you have any articles.
This article is a good historiography of thought in archeology and how DNA studies are overturning the post 1960s paradigm in remarkable ways:
“Along with these two papers came several more (Mathieson et al 2015 and Poznik et al 2015) which asserted that the Yamnaya invaders were fair skinned, much larger in stature and were predominantly male.
It is difficult to overstate the distress and anxiety these results caused in the archaeological world - a theoretical bomb had just removed the foundations from underneath the entirety of modern scholarship.”
https://stoneageherbalist.substack.com/p/broken-open
In the same vein as my prior post on Zorro and being shocked that people I hate haven't tried [thing]; I've personally always been astounded that Neanderthal DNA isn't considered the foundational concept for HBDers and Hoteps respectively. It's actually a very neat way of slicing what a lot of HBDers want: 1-2% varied Neanderthal DNA in Asians and Europeans, 0% in sub-saharan Africans.
For modern HBDers, this is the motherlode, a neat way to slice Black people off as inherently different from both whites and Asians. Center the whole idea of civilization on the Neanderthal, whether that is the "higher human instincts" or the whole Atlantic/Lemuria complex of lost civilization ideas. There's the "science" saying exactly what they want it to!
For Hoteps, it's an even better find: white people are literally less pure humans than Black people. My distant European ancestors literally interbred with a dying outmoded pre-human hominid species, and my Nigerian friend can quite frankly state that his did not, that he's a pure human! Yakub vindicated! The white man's own science has found that the white man isn't a real human, but a hybrid chimera!
I've considered writing two giant effortposts on it, from separate accounts, one from each side, just to gage the relative reactions.
The only conclusion I can come to is that the popular marketing of Neanderthals as primitive grunting cavemen has been so successful for so long that it is unrecoverable intellectual property. Neanderthal just has no glitz to it, nothing people want to identify with.
White identitarianism has always relied on obscure historical theories, Aryan was the academic term used for the Proto-Indo-Europeans before Hitler made Aryan too icky*, and PIE was coined primarily as a euphemism to refer to what (until then) was the much catchier Aryan theory.** Before Hitler, Aryanism relied on all kinds of skull measuring and migration theories, from the pseudo-mystical Atlantis to the politically convenient "Maori and Japanese are lost Aryans, Australian Aboriginals and Chinese are not" to the academic study of word origins and linguistic analysis. What's been missing from this soup for a while is a useable marketing terminology. Enter Yamnaya! Yamnaya is catchy enough, and enough of a blank slate, that maybe it will catch on.
*Interestingly outside of Western Europe/America this taboo doesn't really hold. One of my favorite things I've seen over and over is like five Iranian friends have tried to explain at a party to a group of horrified SWPL white people how Persians are the "original Aryans"; understanding not at all why everyone is looking at them like that.
**As an aside, if we're going to do anti-Nazi education, rather than presenting Nazi archeology and history as "boo outgroup" wow look at what those wacky morons believed; we should start by presenting (smart) kids with the actual PIE/Aryan story, with the linguistic and mythological evidence, and present Aryanism as what it was: mythmaking, no different from the way we present the idea that the Lenape or the Greeks heard thunder and got scared and said "There must be a god of Thunder and he is angry!" 19th century Germans were presented with a confusing landscape, a world in which they were discovering these deep linguistic and cultural similarities across continents, and in which Europeans were absurdly dominant over the rest of the world, and in trying to explain it to the best of their abilities they produced myths, no better and no worse than those just-so stories of Ovid. This will help students to actually understand why Nazis believed what they did, and help to educate them to spot real life parallels to the Nazis, which is impossible if you just think Nazi=evil.
Of course, this will never happen, an even mildly sympathetic portrayal of Nazi ideas in education is considered "too dangerous." They fear it might seduce the children if they are exposed and asked to entertain the idea for even a second. I wonder why?
Not actually correct though since Africans have between 9 and 19% DNA admixture from a ghost hominid population.
https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.aax5097
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Perhaps your model of the HBD supporter is just wrong? We've said plenty of times here that we are not motivated by the desire to dehumanize populations that seem to perform worse on average. You'd think many of us not belonging to the top performing groups would have been the more obvious reasons to trust us in this but here you have discovered yet another way that our motivations are better in line with what we say they are than your uncharitable assumption and it seems more confusing than enlightening to you. What would it take to prove to you that we are not motivated by racial hatred?
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Hoteps don’t read genetics studies and the discovery of Denisovan DNA in East Asians and Australo-Melanesians as well as relatively high percentages of archaic ghost DNA that diverged even prior to the split between humans and Neanderthals within African populations muddies the waters significantly.
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