The Nu Slide and Anthropology

The discovery that our species is an outshoot of the so-called "Cro-Magnon Expansion" has prompted many creationists to shout that "Darwin was Wrong".

In reality, given the fact that the expansion was a very small episode in a succession of similar events, and left no direct proof on planet, the question that arises is "why no incongruences were spotted before".

It is a powerful  interrogative, and the answer to this may be every bit as incompatible with the creation myth as the view of the evolutive process of our species that was accepted by science, before the flood of new data available on the galactic net forced its revision.

In reality, the classical view of humans as the last offspring of a long but quite linear evolutive process had already been abandoned by most anthropologist way before the "Beautiful Alien" image was ever decoded, to be replaced by a more realistic vision of a ramified tree of inter-related species, many of whom really diverged from our evolutive line to disappear and one - the Neanderthals - folded back into our line, as proved by the presence of Neanderthal genes in the European pool.

This itself had been an unhappy realization, for many Europeans, and thus had been a much contested one - as the 2% of the genetic variability proper to the continent ascending to the Neanderthals being the only notable difference between its inhabitants and the rest of the planet, many saw it as a proof of the continent's ancestors lack of moral fibre, having indulged in ante-litteram miscegenation,.

In reality, it is now believed that the Neanderthals were simply descendants of a previous expansive wave of humans, that had reached our planets about 200000 years ago. It is extremely probable that they were the descendants of a research vessel from the so-called Mesoican Culture, that stranded on our planet and chose a France region to settle because, at the time, the most comfortable. Unfortunately, the Mesoican had a tendency to underestimate radiation effects in their ships designs, and to keep crews at a bare minimum. The combination of genetic instability ad reduced variability in the initial population may account for the Neanderthals greater-than-usual deviation from the humanities average.

It is now believed that, for a combination of factors that kept it an interesting planet, our Earth has been touched by many waves of galactic drifters - the "Cro-Magnon" being just the last ones - that kept succeeding on the tempo of what is now suspected to be a cyclical variation in the entanglement rate between our space and the first-band hyperspace.  

The so-called "Nu-slide" would thus be not an isolated fact - about every 100000 years the entanglement aspect changes, with trivial effects on most biological and physical processes, but powerful ones on FTL travel and on some very subtle details of how human intelligence works.

Not only can the change enable or disable cheap FTL travel, it is virtually proven that some of the inner mechanics of the human mind are contiguous to that same space-hyperspace interface, which was also used - again, implicitly, and without a conscious design choice on the part f our ancestors - by the Cro-Magnon Artificial Minds to boost their capabilities way beyond the limits of their 3D hardware.

When the connection is more favourable, part of the human mind takes residence in the hyperspace, boosting creativity and sheer, brute intelligence.

Telepathy becomes more common, and almost everybody naturally contributes to the whole species baggage of ideas, concepts and solutions - contributes to, and gains from.

Humans becomes more creative, and much more effective in their pursue of solutions to problems. More ideas flow and are developed faster and better.

In these phases, not only the access to hyperspace - and FTL - is simpler, but the humanities and their Artificial Minds are more powerful, so an age of galactic travel ensue... and someone reaches our Earth.

When the access becomes more difficult - like in the last transition - the disappearance of FTL travel is NOT its most dramatic effect, nor is it the sudden incapacity of Artificial Minds to function correctly. Both occurrences would be terrible on their own, but what makes them nearly insurmountable is the fact that the human mind, too, loses most of its abilities, as well as its direct access to most of the culture created up to that moment.

Without hyperspace, there is no more telepathy, nor galaxy-wide concept sharing, and every human is left with just the tiny shards that it can retain in its conscious mind. Unless the planet has a very numerous and enormously varied population and economy, this usually means that only a tiny and very insufficient fraction of the original culture is maintained, with effects that can be easily imagined.

About 90% of the human settlements that were stranded by the last Nu slide went extinct in one or two generations, and virtually every one of the remaining regressed to Palaeolithic  levels of technology, the exceptions being enumerable on the fingers of one hand.

Hellish as it may look to the modern reader, ancient Earth was not, in facts, the worse offender when it comes to exterminate human groups stranded on its surface. It is now postulated that what kept Earth an interesting planet was the very possibility of observing variants of humanity, descended from past humans and sometimes hybridized with local species who themselves derived from even more ancient drifters - like the Neanderthal.

In other words, up until the current cycle and its reversion to a more common path of technological development and genocide of the human variants competing for space , for about two million years Earth has been an anthropologist heaven.

Unfortunately, given the aggressivity with which our branch of modern humans has adsorbed or exterminated its cousins, and the corrosiveness of globalization against tribal cultures, we can assume this to be a glory of the past.

Currently,our Earth is a run-of-the-mill human settlement, with a set of cultures that is constantly being reduced to a planetary, single one, though differences will always persist - the geographic nature of an area does have some effects on the "mood" of its inhabitants and their art, values, and beliefs.

Even if a new "change" re-established the favourable situation present at the end of the Cro-Magnon expansion, with the reappearance of cheap system-to-system shuttle services, it is unlikely that our world would get much attention, as there are no more Australopitechus or Neanderthals to motivate interstellar study expeditions, and the planet otherwise lacks any interest whatsoever as far as industrial resources go (it is estimated that the Anipos robot mining operations in the asteroids belts surpassed Earth mining outoput by a factor four, during the build-up leading to the war - that was the product of a whopping one thousand initial machines, commanded by just a hundred technicians, and moderate self-replication).

This will probably show up in the next few million years as a discontinuity in the fossil documentation.

If this cycle will end, and the current galactic civilization network will crumble too soon (in the past, the effect on human intelligence have led to galaxy-wide collapses even before widespread FTL and pan-systemic travel had managed to unify the human sphere), there will be a visible missing link between our current, Cro-Magnon derived phenotype and the one from the next colonization wave.   

Currently, no such an egregious void can be found, because Earth has always been host to humans derived from a series of precedent waves, as well as visitors from the then-current one, that intermingled in the aftermaths of each "slide" episode.

This produced intermediate individuals or, even, new species, which is the reason why our  extra-world origin had to be discarded until recent years  - the documentation did not support what seemed an illogic ad-hoc explanation.

More relevantly, the influx of alien mutations has a great importance in the use of genetic drift to characterize human rests antiquity.

In fact, the parameters used for that operation must be thoroughly revised, as they currently tend to overstate the antiquity of most human rests.

Unfortunately, studies on how to correct these biases are in their infancy, and no clear answer can be given, beyond what can be found in surviving data from the "great centres"
that managed to whether the last slide (like the Anipos "Supreme Computer Farm").

This information would have us believe, for example,  that Homo Erectus (called "The Mono-Tonal Men", for their limited vocal range ) was still inhabiting the planet, at the time of Homo Neanderthal, more than half a million years after its supposed extinction.

Its reliability, of course, is anybody's guess (adult Anipos may be pretentiously serious, but adolescent Anipos are every bit as mischievous as those of any other human species, and not above the kind of elaborated practical joke that would be adding spurious material to an ancient database) but opens the possibility for an extensive, and intriguing, re-write of our species history.

It is a good time to be an anthropologist.

Our field has never been more open to new discoveries, and seldom the importance of them has ever been so felt, inside and outside the scientific community.

It is of these days the news that the North American Evangelical Churches association has asked the Kansas Board of education to discard both creationism and the "Panspermic Theory" from their textbook, after it was revealed that most of the Genesys is likely  a plagiarism from  a set of 30.000  years old erotic novels for young adults (something the late FTL-era Chro-Magnons were apparently fond).

In the  words of Rev. Cynthia Loudberg,

"Darwinism is pure science - it leaves the believer free to believe an ineffable God be the prime mover of the universe, hiding his hand for the sake of allowing free faith. With these revelations, the Genesys becomes the proof that we are the product of a bunch of horny teenager straying out of adult supervision at the wrong moment. God operates in mysterious ways, but I don't think it would use so embarrassing ones."