Quote of the Day
26th December 2014
‘We have heard charmingly goofy criticisms of the idea that Neanderthals were competitively inferior to modern humans. It has been suggested that such a position is racist. Somehow, saying that a population that split off from modern humans half a million years ago (one generally considered a separate species) had some kind of biological disadvantage is beyond the pale, even though we’re here and Neanderthals are not. For that matter, we’ve seen people argue that the idea that some genes were picked up from archaic humans is racist, while others have argued that the idea that humans didn’t pick up Neanderthal genes is racist.’
— Cochran & Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion, p. 28