On Archaic Human Interbreeding

Photo credit: Neanderthal Museum (Mettmann, Germany)

www.neanderthalmuseum.info

As regular readers of this blog will know, torpedo the ark means (amongst other things) destroying the inbred and incestuous ideal of purity and celebrating the enhanced effects of diversity, deviance and hybrid vigour.

Thus I'm always interested to read studies that lend support to the possibility of sexual shenanigans (and thus genetic exchange) between different archaic human populations; i.e. of homo sapiens copping off with Neanderthals, Denisovans, and who knows who (or what) else in the promiscuous, prehistorical past. It's rather nice to think that the modern human genome carries a small percentage of DNA from now extinct species that were pretty much but not quite human in the same way as us.

Of course, I'm aware that some researchers like to argue that observable genetic affinities between archaic and modern human populations are in fact explainable in terms of common ancestral polymorphisms - and not admixture - but even they cannot rule out the possibility of introgressive hybridization due to some degree of fucking around and that thought makes me smile. 

However, just to be clear, I'm not saying that all passionate encounters with strangers make happy or that heterosis always makes healthy. It's now thought, for example, that modern man's proneness to allergies is due to the presence of three genes picked up from Neanderthal lovers - that hay fever is a sign not so much of our own hypersensitivity, but of the brute in us!

But inbreeding is far more likely to end in depression and reduced biological fitness than mixing things up a little; even the three genes mentioned above that cause some of us to itch and sneeze every summer, must also have conferred some evolutionary advantage (probably boosting the immune system, since they are involved in the body's defence system against pathogens).

So, to conclude: we should be grateful to our ancient ancestors who took the risk of loving those outside their own family, tribe, race, or species. Without such pioneers in perversity, we wouldn't be where we are today ...


This post was suggested to me by Dr Andrew Greenfield, to whom I am very grateful.

Heterosis

Luma Grothe: the lovely face of fashion 

and Irma Grese: the ugly face of fascism

Nazis are obsessed with blood: both spilling the blood of others deemed racial inferiors and preserving the purity of their own blood, which is thought to possess superior qualities and derive from a divine origin. For the Nazis, therefore, the most dreadful thing in the world is the prospect of interracial sexual relations between people of Nordic stock and those who are of non-Aryan descent. They described this as a form of Rassenschande - an infringement upon the laws of Nature which Nazi policies of racial hygiene were designed to vigorously uphold and enforce.

German girls were warned that should they commit blood treason and choose to fuck with racial inferiors, not only would they be forever lost to their own people, but any unfortunate child that resulted from the illicit union would be a lamentable creature, fit only for extermination. Such irresponsible actions also had a far wider consequence: Hitler identified miscegenation as the sole cause of cultural destruction; "for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is contained only in pure blood."

Despite the pseudo-biology used to provide a scientific basis for these beliefs, they are, of course, little more than pernicious fantasies. The fact is many mixed race individuals exhibit not only extraordinary beauty - as in the case of Luma Grothe, pictured above - but what is known as hybrid vigour. In other words, certain traits are enhanced as a result of the dissimilarity in the gametes by whose union the organism was formed.

Now, this is not to say that all such unions produce supermodels. But, by and large, it’s inbreeding that’s genetically problematic rather than outcrossing. For it’s the latter practice that increases diversity and promises heterotic wonders, such as Miss Grothe, born under sunny South American skies to a German mother and a father of Japanese and African descent.

Ultimately, if given the choice between the above and Irma Grese - the blonde, blue-eyed Beast of Belsen - I know whom I’d choose to share a world with ...

Note: The line quoted from Hitler can be found in Vol. 1, Chapter 11, of Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim, (Hutchinson, 1969), p. 269.