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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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Still not sure why people are going back to a half assed comment.

Well, I can't speak for @Crowstep, of course (perhaps he uses the "Comments" feed and saw my post?), but in my case it was that I did a search for "stop at the neck" since I wanted to find an old post I'd written that used the phrase, and happened across yours on the way since it was more recent.

I'm always surprised that Neanderthals have gotten such bad marketing, when it would be fairly easy to play them as the lost super race, scientifically.

Well, the thing is that that interpretation only really became coherent in 2010, when it was proven that whites and Asians are Neanderthal in significant part but not whole. Neanderthals were first thought to be our full ancestors (and thus no particular master race, plausibly less intelligent than modern descendants due to intervening selection), and then thought to have been yet another dead branch (and thus the same sort of thing as Australopithecus/Paranthropus robustus, who absolutely deserve the reputation of pop-culture Neanderthals). And, well, to state the obvious, by 2010 "whites and Asians are, as a whole, intellectually superior to sub-Saharan Africans because they have Neanderthal blood; Neanderthals were the real 'Numenoreans'" - which is the claim we're talking about, stated plainly - was something that mainstream journalism and big-budget fiction wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.

(To be clear, I'm agnostic on that claim; there aren't any obvious reasons it can't be true, but the well of research on the topic has been so badly poisoned by both sides that it would be foolish to be confident in almost any claim in the area without having done the research oneself. I'm merely stating, descriptively, why it is not part of the pop-culture understanding of Neanderthals.)

You're probably correct. I'm just surprised by the lack of Neanderthal as Atlanteans, and the inverse lack of "only blacks are pure humans."