Contemplating Homo neanderthalensis: The Collapse of Armstrongist Racial Theory

 

Neanderthal: Probably One of Your Ancestors (fair use)

Contemplating Homo neanderthalensis

                                           The Collapse of Armstrongist Racial Theory

                                                                                                By Scout       

      

So a good rendering of Genesis 6:9 is that Noah was the only “just” man (in spiritual character), and also “unblemished” (in his genetic heritage) among his contemporaries. – Herbert W. Armstong, Mystery of the Ages, p. 147.

 

If Neanderthal is anything, he is a disruptor of Armstrongist racial theory. Of course, Neanderthal could never have foreseen the dust he would flap up with a small Millerite sect 40,000 years after he went extinct.  One of the Armstrongists beliefs that Neanderthal disrupts is the pedigree of Herbert W. Armstrong (HWA).  Evangelist Gerald Waterhouse commonly asserted that Herbert W. Armstrong, like Noah, was also racially pure.  Back in those days, the adulation of HWA’s racial purity was an internal support for the Armstrongist position against racial intermarriage and favoring segregation. Racial purity was the Armstrongist ideal and HWA symbolized that.  There are many reasons why Armstrongist racial theory of the past and maybe the present is not valid.  This essay deals with one of the most salient – HWA’s pedigree.   

HWA’s purity meant that there had to be a line of racially pure people who ran from Noah down to Herbert W. Armstrong.  Enter the science of genetics.  Genetics carries with it some embarrassment for all people who trade in racial purity. There is no exception for those who assert HWA’s pristine pedigree.  I will start with a look at Europe, whence HWA and many North Americans trace their ancestry. 

The European Mixing Vat

Europe is geographically connected to other land masses such as Asia.  If you had the time, interest and good pair of shoes, you could walk from western Portugal to eastern Siberia.  Migrations have been frequent.  In fact, the people who live in western Europe now are descended in part from people who lived in Central Asia and migrated westward about 5,000 years ago.  The Armstrongist idea that God created geographic barriers to contain various races seems to be sophistic.  On average the people in southern Europe carry genetic influences from various peoples in Africa despite the barrier of the Mediterranean Sea.

So, as one might expect, many different peoples down through history and prehistory migrated into Europe and made their mark.  And this is written in the genomes of the European people.  You can set aside all the ancient, hoary histories and read the biology directly. Which is more trustworthy – something dubious that Tacitus wrote or your own genetic structure?  And what this tells us is that the idea that the people in some isolated Scottish village in the fastness of the Highlands are racially pure is false.  The Scots are a mix of three strains of people just like everyone else in Europe: Western Hunter-Gathers, Anatolian Farmers and Steppe Pastoralists (plus whatever racially diverse Roman legionnaires brought with them). One of the Highland Clans is principally y chromosome haplogroup E which originated in Africa.  And, finally, mixed into the mélange is a small dose of Neanderthal of uncertain speciation.  The One Drop Theory of the American South wreaks havoc on Scottish genetics. 

Some may argue that these waves of ancient migrants who came to Europe were all White people but that is not the case.  Genetic research also tells us that most of the population groups of Homo sapiens that migrated to Europe, beginning with the Aurignacians who interbred with Neanderthals, were originally dark-skinned. Light skin reached its heyday in Europe only around 3,000 years ago.  Archaeologists began to find the genes (primarily SLC24A5 and SLC45A2) for light skin in increased frequency in excavated remains dating to that period.  This is a brief profile of the base population that HWA came from. 

The Neanderthals and Armstrongism

 Neanderthal heritage is written on our genomes.  This is something established by the science of genetics. What genetics means is that the Armstrongist model of the origin of races collapses profoundly.  The Armstrongist model was that God is a racially White, Adam was racially White, Noah was racially White, as people were intended to be, and non-White races arose as a result of mutation (read “as an anomaly”).  There is a kernel of truth here.  Genetic analysis of our genomes indicates that the different varieties of Homo sapiens arose from mutation.  But it also indicates that the original human stock was Black and that Whites and Browns mutated from these Black forefathers. Somehow I feel that if Herman Hoeh had understood this and taught it back in the Fifties and Sixties, a totally different group of people with a different mindset would have been attracted to Armstrongism.  I always ran into people in the Worldwide Church of God who seemed like they came out of some kind of Neo-Confederacy. 

A Final Note

I feel I need to add this in anticipation of the donnybrook.  Armstrongists trade in conspiracy theory, ulterior motives and sometimes paranoid tendencies when it comes to history and sociology.  It’s all that fantasy stuff in the Hoeh Legendarium.  So, let me state explicitly that I do not advocate racial intermarriage but I also just as firmly do not believe it is a sin.  That any marriage would be a success is a long shot.   So, marrying as close as you can to your own background is good conventional wisdom.

Conclusion

So, was HWA pure in his generations like Gerald Waterhouse asserted? Of course not.  He was part Neanderthal just like other Europeans.  Neanderthals are not only a separate race; they are another species (some scientists argue that they are a separate sub-species.  In either case, they are more distant than a separate race). While HWA is deceased and cannot be tested directly without excavation, we can know his genetic condition from the general population from which he originated.  As Google AI states, “All modern Europeans carry Neanderthal DNA, typically making up about 1% to 2% of their genome.”  So, asserting the ideal of a racially pure HWA as an important support of the Armstrongist policy on race is simply flogging a dead horse.