History is told from a decisively human perspective, for the benefit of humanity in its entirety, of course. History unfolds as we seek to progress infinitely without obstruction, but why? Why do we have this appetite for progression? It’s certainly not entirely intrinsic.
In the foremost shadows of human history lurk two beasts.
The first is evil. Homo sapiens is programmed to attempt to understand before looking for a fight, and we were a neutral species before evil got the better of us. It’s important to note that evil was certainly something that was instituted in due course. For Christians, this development is encapsulated when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and God punishes them by banishing them from the Garden of Eden. Some Christians believe that all people inherited the tendency to sin from Adam and Eve’s error. The emergence of evil in its purest form is indeed represented in this story, in the form of an inappropriate attempt to poach an almighty resource for frivolous selfish gain, a resource whose use was generally necessarily forbidden in order to maintain an essential equilibrium of justice in God’s universe. Evil is at its most intense always when it is just totally avoidable and unnecessary, because it’s actually not natural to us over cooperation and harmony. The original sin didn’t destroy the universe, but it could have if God didn’t seek his revenge. All for a tasty bite of one fruit, and now we supposedly have this thing called sin. Evil surely wasn’t there among us all from the beginning, but in time it has grown intertwined with our advancement. So enormous is its scope that evil is often personified to help people make sense of it, for quite sound reason. Like I said, humans are instinctively cooperative and harmonious, yet the slippery fingers of evil are always just a mistaken breath away from wreaking havoc in the world… evil • /ˈiːv(ə)l,ˈiːvɪl/ • profound immorality and wickedness … doesn’t do bad boy justice, so he gets superimposed personality
The second beast was the Neanderthals. Homo neanderthalensis went extinct an estimated 40,000 years ago. They traversed the world alongside Homo sapiens in Eurasia for a huge chunk of our history, once we had made it out of Africa where Neanderthals never ventured. We interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. East Asians have been found to have the most Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, while Blockfuls* have the most Denisovan DNA.
*The Blockfuls were a major race, the first to leave Africa. They would go on to settle mainly in Southeast Asia and Oceania, giving rise to the Aboriginal Australian ethnicity most notably. The race has largely been overwhelmingly diluted, but Blockful-derived languages are still spoken by Aboriginal Australians, Papua New Guineans, Dravidian Indians & Sri Lankans, the Thai, Viets, and more. I thus have proposed the existence of the Blockful primary language family of the world, the Contrastive/Contrarian/Idiosyncratic Tongues.
Neanderthals were obsessed with us. They adored us, and doted on chosen ones. They gave everything they had to give, and we thanked them with genocide and extermination…! Regardless, they were alternatively mindless brutes who pestered us incessantly for undue companionship. For them it was like being allowed access to heaven. That abhorrent discrepancy -between our irritated slumping and their inane privilege- was what ultimately wore us thin. That said, much of the union between human and Neanderthal was very much voluntary and willing, mainly as individuals sought solace in the arms of the mighty Neanderthal – they were stronger than us. I have said it before and I shall say it again: prehistoric Neanderthal involvement bleeds into everything in some way, as with any prominent strand of history. Neanderthal involvement is a dark flipside in our history – darker than evil, because we stooped lower for the Neanderthals than for the concept of /ˈiːvɪl/. We learnt a lot from them, too, though. Like the importance of rectitude and organisation.
The people who loved us most? They weren’t human.
The Buzz-Concept Project 