Conspiracy week: white people are Satanic Illuminati Neanderthals!

Here's the all-time winning YouTube video title: "The Satanic Neanderthal Edomite Evolution"


This is one of those weirdo slideshows that is hell-bent on proving a point: in this case, that white people are Edomites, descended from Esau (Jacob's brother in the bible) who had light skin and red hair. Then you connect the dots and realize that the Edomites were Neanderthals! Since they had light skin and hair too, maybe even freckles, and all-non African people today seem probably to have some Neanderthal genes (that much is for reals anyway). The savage Neanderthal genes explain the evil and sadistic behavior of white people in general. Then we get into the Illuminati, Satan, and the NWO! This is so weird, it's totally worth watching. 

This is Black Hebrew Israelite type thinking with extra racism and paranoia thrown in. Undercover Black Man unpacks it pretty well in this article. The formula is pretty familiar however - the white supremacist Christian Identity movement is also interested in the Jacob/Esau story, except that they see the Jews as the evil Edomites, and non-Jewish Europeans as the real Hebrews. Some white supremacist groups are also seizing on the Neanderthal gene findings to "prove" that "race" is real after all. On the other hand, maybe Bob Marley is the real Edomite. It's all so confusing.

These conspiracy theories are funny, you see the same elements repeating themselves over and over again, like there's only a certain number of weird ideas to go around. Take a dash of Illuminati, add some alien interbreeding with humans in antiquity, reference Jacob and Esau or some other Bible story, add a reference to a scientific study or excavation, and you're done! I should make a conspiracy generator.

Not to say there aren't originally freaky theories out there. This guy is my new favorite, he thinks that Silvio Berlusconi is suppressing telepathy and causing unnatural menstruation.

Archaeopop in PORK: The Remix is Old Fashioned

PORK #3 is out on your sophisticated newsstands all over the Best Coast (and select spots on the Beast Coast) of North America. This issue's ARCHAEOPOP column is about the 'Palaeo Diet', the latest diet trend where overeducated westerners are try to get in touch with their inner caveman. Read PORK #3 online here.

In the meantime, here's the ARCHAEOPOP column from Pork #2 (also online here)!

THIS REMIX IS OLD FASHIONED

Since people started filesharing on the internet the media has been parroting this hysteria about ‘stealing’ music. The copyright racketeers want clubs to pay royalties for every song played at an open mic night, and to charge employers for playing CDs at work. In Britain, a woman was sued for singing at the grocery store she worked at without paying royalties for her “performances”. In 2009, ASCAP decided that even ringtones on your phone were a “public performance”! The courts threw it out, because they’re not THAT stupid. And we’ve all heard stories about the battles between the record companies and the entire genres of hiphop and techno over sampling: those fights have been rolling since the 1980s.

Negativeland's ripping parody of U2 and radio personality Kasey Kasem was ruthlessly suppressed by U2 and SST Records in 1992. It was totally unavailable until rescued by YouTube.

Let me lay the archaeo-pop perspective on you, PORK readers. Politicians and record companies would like you to believe that this intellectual “property” trend – which coincidentally makes a lot of money for certain people – is some kind of manifestation of cosmic justice. But that’s bollocks. Copyright didn’t even apply to printed music in America before 1831, and no one thought of charging royalties for performance until the 1880s. Records didn’t hit the mass market until the 1890s. Before then, the idea of a musical performance as a commodity that could be bought and sold was literally unthinkable. It’s been with us barely more than a century.

One century?! Get serious. Pop music has been around as long as people: both us humans and our Neanderthal fuck buddies had flutes by 40-60,000 years ago. (Music could be even older: apes are known to beat rhythms on logs.) In a lot of preliterate traditions, music and stories were shared by travelling bards, whose fame relied on their ability to tell familiar stories in new ways. The stories behind the Odyssey and Iliad were 500 years old by the time they were written down. Before that, bards told the stories in hundreds of different ways, using poetic formulas to make the story familiar but different at the same time. The fame of the bard was in his musical ability – to tell the story well – but also in his ability to innovate based on familiar material: remixing old riffs into something fresh and new. No one thought that someone ‘owned’ the story of Achilles’ rage, or had the exclusive right to sing about how much Nausicäa wanted to get boned by Odysseus.

Music from the bone flute of Divje Babe, Slovenia. Neanderthals weren't ASCAP members, so you can play this flute without paying them.

As soon as we get written history, there’s mention of pop music: as the anecdote goes, a Chinese king once asked the sage Mencius, guiltily, if he was a bad guy for listening to nothing but pop music and ignoring the classics.

On another day, when Mencius was in audience with the King he said, “You told Zhuang Bao that you liked music. Is that really so?” The King blushed. “I’m not capable of appreciating the music of the ancient kings, I just like popular music.” “If Your Majesty loves music deeply, then the state of Chi is not far off! The music of today comes from the music of the past.”

This in the 4^th century BC! Already we get the famous tension between music we SHOULD like and the music we actually DO like. In the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire, the music we DO like was transmitted from town to town by solo artists and groups who travelled a circuit of festivals and and auditoriums, often competing for prizes. These groups weren’t exactly like our pop bands: they could include dance, poetry, and music (in the Greek sense, all the arts were ‘music’, i.e. the things of the Muses). But more importantly, they played both pop music and the classics: what artists brought to the table was their performance skills and their ability to make something innovative out of familiar sounds and stories. They played new tunes, but no one told them they had to pay to play the old ones. Reworking a riff so that it got stuck in the heads of girls from Argentomagus to Alexandria: that was dominance.

Fast forward to our century. All of a sudden, music as a physical thing is irrelevant and impossible to control. Music companies that got bloated and smug during the 1970s heyday of album-oriented rock have been watching their sales go down the toilet and responding with typical baby-boomer petulance. "Computers are never going to get worse at copying things," as Cory Doctorow observed in a recent column in the Guardian. There is NO GOING BACK. The music companies have lost the war to control recordings, and within a generation most of humanity’s recording music will be available for free to everyone online. Cretins like Bono whine that no one will ever pick up a guitar again if he doesn’t get paid every time I whistle ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’. I’d be happy if he followed through and stopped making crappy albums, but the man is an idiot. Music is hardwired into people. The only interesting question is how it’s made and who can make a living at it. I see two implications from our modern trend. If recordings are free, the experience you pay for is the performance: groups with good stage presence have the edge. And, if you can’t control copyright, you can’t control remixing and music gets in touch with history again. Freed from the need to have recording contracts and obey copyright musicians can focus on being good performers and embedding themselves explicitly into the fabric of music that has gone before.

The digital age, then, has basically returned us to historical normality: the trends everyone was shocked by in the last couple decades (Sampling! Remixing! Filesharing!) return us to a situation that is more 400 BC than 1950 AD. Lady Gaga vs. Judas Priest?  Bards respecting their elders by telling the old stories in new ways. Excellence is not: is it all new? but, does it make us happy? As Mencius says, if you enjoy pop music, you get good Chi. In 100 years – no, in 50 – this war to make the world’s music the private property of some cartels in London and Los Angeles is going to be seen for what it is, a sinister and repulsive attack on human culture.

Remixes and Mashups: The new normal, same as the old normal

LISTEN:
Wax Audio - I'm in love with Judas Priest (Lady Gaga vs. Judas Priest)
A Plus D – I Keep Forgettin To Regulate (Warren G. & Nate Dogg vs. Michael McDonald) 

(courtesy recent sessions of the international mashup network Bootie)

WATCH: Jay-Z vs. Alphaville



Watch: Ghostface vs. Tears for Fears

Bert and Ernie in 'Caveman Days'

Look both ways before you cross the street or you will get STOMPED BY A DINOSAUR!

A third archaic human population, and yes - we bonked them

The Denisova cave, Siberia (nsc.ru)

In the wake of recent news that a lot of us carry around Neanderthal genes, there's new evidence that a third species of modern human used to roam Eurasia. A couple small bones found in Russia's Denisova cave have mitochondrial DNA sequences that diverged from Neanderthals 640,000 years ago. Comparison to modern humans shows that Denisova people left a genetic legacy in the Melanesian people of Papua New Guinea - suggesting that they may have been a widespread population.

Where does that leave us? The big picture of recent decades—that modern humans evolved in Africa and spread from there, displacing all other populations—is still largely accurate. But the details are looking much more complex than they were just last year. Those other populations are suddenly seeming a lot more diverse, and they didn't go away without contributing a bit to the genetic diversity of the modern human population (Ars Technica).

That leaves us a recent family tree that looks something like this:

(Via Sciblogs)

The moral of the story? Sex. Modern humans got it on with Neanderthals and whatever other random types of humans they ran into on all those Palaeolithic wanderings across the steppes. Can we finally sweep the last remnants of racialist archaeology out the door now?!

Much more detailed analysis and updates at Discovery's The Loom blog.

Neanderthal lovin'

I never got around to posting this back in may, maybe you saw this (or this) back in May:

Neanderthals, Humans Interbred—First Solid DNA Evidence
Most of us have some Neanderthal genes, study finds.

Ker Than
for National Geographic News
Published May 6,2010

The next time you're tempted to call some oaf a Neanderthal, you might want to take a look in the mirror.

According to a new DNA study, most humans have a little Neanderthal in them—at least 1 to 4 percent of a person's genetic makeup. The study uncovered the first solid genetic evidence that "modern" humans—or Homo sapiens—interbred with their Neanderthal neighbors, who mysteriously died out about 30,000 years ago.

What's more, the Neanderthal-modern human mating apparently took place in the Middle East, shortly after modern humans had left Africa, not in Europe—as has long been suspected. "We can now say that, in all probability, there was gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans," lead study author Ed Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a prepared statement.

It always seemed weird to me that the idea of these two kinds of humans interbreeding was always so taboo. Of course, Neanderthals were discovered in a time (1829) when Europe was in the grip of a deep interest in racial difference and classification, so it's not surprising that they were immediately consigned to absolute difference - and sex between slightly different shades of contemporary human was illegal in a lot of places only a generation ago. It never made sense on a gut level to me, though - Neanderthals were people, they could speak, make tools and jewelry, bury their dead, and lived along side Homo Sapiens Sapiens for millenia. The idea that at least a few of them wouldn't get it on at some point is ridiculous. (There's also an answer to this question here.) I kind of like the idea that I'm part Neanderthal.

Though maybe I just read Clan of the Cave Bear one too many times as a kid.


On the other hand, maybe it was the Neanderthals who were racist against us. Just sayin'.