Erectus Walks Amongst Us [Paperback]

This debate is a very old one. I first came across it nearly a half century ago when I read Carlton Coon's first book on race. Coon pointed out that his theory was actually closely derived from that of Hans Weidenreich. Weidenreeich was before my time - about 1935.

The Widenreich theory is that the races predate the species. That is to say there were differences between East Asians and Europeans before the species Homo sapiens sapiens emerged. Widenreich and Coon believed that a Neanderthal had features that modern Europeans have - thin faces, protruding noses, etc. And that early East Asians had features that modern asians have - flat faces and shoveled teeth. Both people crossed the boundary to become modern people and kept those distinguishing characteristics.

More recently this view has been championed by Wolpoff. But about twenty years ago the multiple thread theory has been eclipsed by the Out of Africa theory. This theory traces all modern humans to a woman called Mitochrondrial Eve who lived in Africa about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.

This theory has always had plausibility problems. One of the biggest problems is the shovelled teeth issue of asians. Out of Africa claims that about 100,000 years ago (or so) the modern africans eliminated all previous peoples in Asia and Europe. In asia the older peoples (Homo erectus) had long had shovelled teeth. OoA theory claimed that everyone of those older asians was eliminated and replaced by a modern african who then evolved shovelled teeth. Wolpoff has long argued that this and the similar issue of the european Neanderthals is too implausible to be taken seriously.

The Out of Africa hypothesis was put forth in 1987. It was the major second "genetic clock" theory to capture the public's imagination. The first had been Sarich's theory that claimed that chimps and people diverged only about half as long ago as had been previously thought. That seems to have been true so when the theory of "Mitochrondrial Eve" was presented scientists and the public were predisposed to listen.

It now seems clear that the theory of Eve in Africa was wrong. It has been shown that the computer algorithm was faulty and its original creators have disclaimed it.

Fuerle steps forward and presents an alternative theory now that the Out of Africa theory no longer can be seriously maintained by scientists or the informed public. Is he right? Who knows?

The Florensis (Hobbit) skull was found only a few years ago. No one predicted such a discovery. Ten years ago we had Kennewick Man(the one who looks like Patrick Stewart). New excavations will undoubtedly turn up more surprises.

This book is the first book I have ever read which routinely cites Wikipedia and YouTube. Is this going to be a trend? It may tend to discredit his scholarship. His gratuitous (and often funny) criticisms of black people also tend to bring his serious thinking in to disrepute. For example in a discussion of prognathism he cites Mike Tyson biting a piece out of Evander Holyfield's ear. LOL.

Fuerle is a bit of a crank. The version of Out of Africa that he attacks is is also an extreme crank theory. Responsible scientists like Cavalli-Sforza don't actually believe that all modern attributes evolved in Africa. Fuerle attacks essentially a straw man.

Main stream anthropology currently believes that there was a migration out of Africa about one or two million years ago. This first migration is not controversial. The Out of Africa theory does not refer to this migration of Home Erectus but to a more recent second migration of Homo Sapiens that took place about 100,000 years ago. That there was some sort of migration of Africans or at least African genes is also not controversial because modern humans have gracile (tropical) bodies. Neanderthals had much more robust bodies. Almost everyone attributes the long legs and light skeletons that we have today to an infusion of genes from tropical Africa around 50,000 to 150,000 years ago.

However most main stream aanthropologists recognize that the tropical body of 100,000 years ago did not bring about a modern mind. Cavalli-Sforza refers to an another event of about 50,000 years ago in the Middle East when the true modern mind emerged. Cultural artifacts suddenly arose that were clearly different from any created before in either Europe or Africa. This is the mainstream viewpoint. Fuerle misrepresents current thinking. He creates a strawman that he can demolish.

Fuerle cites many studies and presents many theories. Most of the time he is correct but at least some of the time he is flat out wrong. His discussion of Toba and ice ages is very wrong. Even Al Gore has a better grip on paleoclimate than Fuerle.

Finally Fuerle is an anti-semite. To me this is evidence of a man who is consumed by political agendas not a man who is objective. He finishes his book with a number of virtually unreadable political chapters. Far from being sensible and well reasoned ideas that proceed logically from the material in the early chapters he virtually froths at the mouth.

Know what you're getting into!

IN this book Fuerle remarks, in passing, that "Where you end up depends on where you started." Although honest science does its best to avoid such circularity, ideological tracts revel in it.

As a senior anthropologist who teaches and reads about human evolution on a daily basis, I found this book intriguing at first glance--but then it began to sink in that there was something odd about it. Hoping to find out more, I searched in vain for reviews in reputable journals or web sites, but I found it enthusiastically touted in Neo-Nazi and white supremacist sites, including some that raged about "ni--ers," and one with a poll to vote on whether Blacks should be defined as an inferior species! Hmmm. But not to prejudge it by association, I decided it was part of my professional responsibility to read the book and comment on as objectively as possible it in this review forum.

There are some understandable reasons why, putting aside its frankly racist arguments, some readers might be drawn to this book. Evolutionary anthropology is an inherently fascinating field and Fuerle, though lacking in scientific training or credentials, offers fairly accessible explanations of some of the basics one might encounter in an introductory anthropology course. He has searched far and wide in the literature for things that could be made to fit his hypothesis, and he has carefully selected, trimmed, remolded and arranged them into what might seem, to the uninitiated, like a persuasive and original argument.

Essentially, Fuerle's thesis is that (contrary to the prevailing "Out of Africa" scenario) the evolution from premodern humans to fully modern Homo sapiens sapiens occurred somewhere in Eurasia after our earliest ancestors left Africa, and that modern Africans (along with Australians and various others) represent an earlier stage of evolution, not to be confused with the more fully evolved people of Europe and Asia. Along the way, Fuerle develops the concept of "ethnies," a mashup of cultural and racial groupings, and claims that some ethnies are natural "predators" while others are "parasitic." When "host" ethnies become aware that they are being exploited by such shiftless, unproductive parasites, they will overthrow them and as a result will experience a "boom" in prosperity, as (he claims) Germany did when it freed itself from the grip of parasitic Jewry in the 1930's. African-Americans, he makes clear, are worthless, criminal parasites on American society.

While Fuerle often strives to adopt the tone of dispassionate science, the gloves come off in the final chapters, where he very frankly argues for racial separatism and eugenics, and suggests that the "anti-racism" of establishment scientists is a "form of mental illness." The notion that we should apply the same ethical standards in our treatment of the racial/cultural "other" as we do within our own group is denounced as a "corrupt" doctrine wielded by the ubiquitous "equality police."

Some readers might initially be impressed by Fuerle's extensive footnoting, but a closer look reveals serious problems in his use of sources. Since he dismisses virtually all contemporary anthropologists as misguided "Afrocentrists," Fuerle is obliged to cast his net very broadly. The rich and ever-changing body of relevant recent research is almost entirely ignored, and what little does appear is carefully selected and often misrepresented. If one follows the footnotes documenting some his most bizarre claims, the trail often goes cold. For example, the footnote to his assertion that Africans are genetically closer than Eureopeans to the apes leads only to a further reflection in which the author invites the reader to subjectively compare photographs of apes, Europeans, and Africans! The footnote documenting the claim that challenges to the computer modeling have invalidated the "African Eve" hypothesis seem to be missing in my Kindle edition of the book, but the challenge to which he evidently refers is one that was debated in the early 1990's and has long since been resolved.

The only living anthropologist whom Fuerle regularly cites in support of his ideas is Phillipe Rushton, who is--to put it as delicately as I can--outside the mainstream, and he has to go back another fifty years to find the next sympathetic anthropologist, Carleton S. Coon. Fuerle is particularly fond of "sources" on the mental and physical comparison of Europeans and Africans that go back a hundred years or more (some as early as the 1830's), and he is unashamed even to cite sources that would have been considered amateurish at the time, including European colonists' views of "natives" or an 1890's edition of the "People's Commonsense Medical Advisor."

Given Fuerle's adeptness in finding (and molding) scattered factoids to support his thesis, it's almost certain that he has come across some of the increasingly detailed evidence of physically and behaviorally modern humans in Africa long before they appeared in Europe or even Asia. None of this evidence, however, will turn up in this book.

For the reader who is strongly wedded to Fuerle's conclusions, none of this will matter. Those genuinely interested in the marvelous advance of objective knowledge about the human past should, however, look elsewhere.

If you have ever had doubts about "Out of Africa", this is the book for you.

I read this book from cover-to-cover over a period of three weeks, and although it is quite dense in the early chapters, the reader will not regret sticking it out. An absolutely fascinating (if somewhat confusing at first) narrative of human origins and the origins of the races is proposed, and it rings true. Everything in the book is backed up by recent published findings and is unfettered by the Political Correctness that stifles most of Academia.

A fascinating book, from which I deduct one star because of the writing style. Fuerle is technically-oriented and so his prose tends towards the textbook-ish more than necessary. Textbookish or not, this is the kind of book that gets you thinking about the fate of mankind on this planet, a quasi-spiritual experience for which I am grateful.

I should also note that the entire text is online for free at www.erectuswalksamongst.us ... The goal here is to simply present these theories to the world. Pure pursuit of truth.