Every human culture has believed in the existence of other beings, monstrous humanoids, sapient but inhuman. They have gone by different names: boogey

When Orcs were Real - by Tree of Woe - Contemplations on the Tree of Woe

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2021-07-02 07:00:06

Every human culture has believed in the existence of other beings, monstrous humanoids, sapient but inhuman. They have gone by different names: boogeymen, bugbear, cyclopes, giant, jotun, ogre, oni, troll, yeti, and more. But they are always feared, lurkers in the shadows, threats to the clan, tribe, or hearth. Dungeons & Dragons didn’t create these monsters, and (despite ongoing controversies) they don’t represent anything modern. Humanity’s legendary heroes have been fighting these monsters since time immemorial. The real question is why — why does every civilization have similar myths? Why does every culture have legends of monstrous humanoids, and why are they are always depicted as fearsome and dangerous?

That is, at least, the argument offered by Danny Vendramini in his book Them and Us: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans. Vendramini is a heterodox thinker, and his argument is well outside the mainstream view. So before we delve into Vendramini’s book, let’s discuss what that mainstream view is.

Archeologists and geneticists agree that humanity co-evolved and inter-bred with similar species. We nowadays have abundant, essentially irrefutable, archeological and genetic evidence for the existence of multiple human-like species within the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras. These include the Neanderthal, the Denisovan, the Hobbit, and several recently-discovered and uncategorized species such as Nesher Ramla Homo in Israel. New human-like species are being discovered all the time. In fact, as I was writing this essay, Chinese archeologists discovered another one!

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