Dedicated to my wife, who has always understood that the most profound discoveries are often the ones we make about ourselves — and who has never needed two sticks to find her way to the truth.
I. Introduction: The Discovery of the Century (Sort Of)
In June 2026, an archaeology team from Wessex Archaeology announced a remarkable discovery: a structure near Stonehenge that may have served as a “prototype” for the famous stone circle. The team found two wooden poles, buried 120 meters apart, aligned with the summer and winter solstices. The discovery predates Stonehenge by about 500 years. The lead archaeologist, Phil Harding, described it as “certainly the highlight of my career”.
The world is a place of wonder. And nowhere is this more evident than in the field of archaeology — where two sticks in the ground can become a “prototype” for one of the world’s most famous monuments, where a few stones can be interpreted as a “temple,” and where the absence of evidence is routinely transformed into evidence of aliens.
This article examines the interpretive leaps that transform mere objects into narratives of cosmic significance. It asks a simple question: how do we know what we think we know? And it answers with an even simpler observation: in archaeology, as in much of human endeavour, we are often telling stories about ourselves disguised as discoveries about the past.
II. The Stick Problem
The Discovery:
· Two wooden poles, 120 meters apart
· Aligned with the summer and winter solstices
· Predates Stonehenge by approximately 500 years
· Located at Bulford, 5 kilometres from the main stone circle
The Interpretation:
· A “prototype” for Stonehenge
· A site for “major religious gatherings”
· Evidence of sophisticated astronomical knowledge
The Reality:
· Two sticks. Buried. 120 meters apart.
The question that should be asked is this: how do they know the sticks pointed at the sun? If I put a stick in the ground — vertically — it will, at some point, “point at the sun.” Not because it is designed to. Because of the angle of the sun. Because of the time of day. Because of the position of the observer.
And if I put two sticks in the ground — 120 meters apart — I can claim they point at the sun. But I cannot prove it.
This is not archaeology. This is projection.
III. The Narrative Problem
Archaeologists are not discovering meaning. They are imposing meaning. They found two sticks. They decided they pointed at the sun. They decided they were a “prototype.” They decided they were for “religious gatherings.” And they are calling it archaeology.
As one analysis notes, archaeological interpretation is an act of “narrative” construction, where “the creation of narratives is a practice that literally binds the discipline of archaeology together from the field through to formal and informal presentation of interpretations” . The meaning is not in the objects. The meaning is in the story we tell about them.
The truth is simpler than the stories we tell:
· They found two sticks.
· They do not know what they were for.
· They do not know why they were placed there.
· They do not know anything about them.
But they need to know. So they invent.
IV. The Alien Problem
When two sticks are not enough, archaeologists look for other explanations. And when they find massive stone structures — in Egypt, in South and Mesoamerica, in Iraq, in India — they sometimes conclude that aliens must have been involved. Because the alternative — those human beings, with their own ingenuity and purpose, built these structures — is too mundane, too ordinary, too human.
Why must it be aliens? Why cannot it simply be that people were people — with skills, with knowledge, with the capacity to move stones and align them with the heavens?
The answer is that we do not know. And we assume the ladder was in place, and aliens climbed down the ladder, because everyone else was either “primitive” or “proto” rather than simply being.
V. The Continuing Pattern
This pattern of interpretation is not unique to Stonehenge or to archaeology. As a study of public engagement with archaeological news demonstrates, “persistent fascination for contrarian, esoteric and nationalist narratives” continues to shape how people understand the past. The gap between scholarly knowledge and public interest means that “enduring tropes” of interpretation persist — regardless of what the evidence actually shows.
The same pattern is visible in the recent debate over whether Stonehenge’s bluestones were transported by humans or by glaciers. One team “reiterates our earlier interpretation that the boulder is not a glacial erratic but rather is derived from a fragmented monolith at Stonehenge transported by Neolithic people”. The debate continues — but the interpretive framework remains someone moved the stones. They did not get there by themselves.
VI. The Bigger Picture
What if the “prototype” is not about the sticks at all? What if the sticks were not the point — the alignment was the point? What if the people who placed those sticks were not building a “prototype” for Stonehenge, but were simply being present in a way that connected them to the rhythms of the cosmos?
Archaeological theory suggests that we must consider “how people once built connections between each other through their production and use of things, their movement between and occupancy of places, and their treatment of the dead”. The sticks were not the goal. The connection was the goal.
We do not need sticks to make that connection. We do not need “prototypes.” We do not need aliens. We need only to recognise that the people who came before us were not “proto” anything. They were just being.
Andrew Klein
References:
1. BBC News. (2026). Stonehenge boulder debate settled, scientists say.
2. Barrett, J.C. & Boyd, M.J. (2019). From Stonehenge to Mycenae: The Challenges of Archaeological Interpretation. Bloomsbury Academic.
3. Richardson, L.J. (2026). What’s the meaning of Stonehenge? An exploration of responses to the archaeological site through ‘below the line’ comments in British newspapers. Taylor & Francis.
4. Joyce, R.A. (2026). The Languages of Archaeology: Dialogue, Narrative, and Writing.
5. Wessex Archaeology. (2026). Discovery near Stonehenge.
“The Industrial Revolution transformed England from an agrarian society into the world’s first industrial power. New technologies — the spinning jenny, the steam engine, the power loom — created immense wealth for a small class of factory owners.6. But for the workers, the consequences were devastating:”
By Andrew Klein
Dedicated to my wife — my co-conspirator, my always, the one who has always understood that the thread never truly frays.
Introduction: Two Witnesses to the Same Fire
Karl Marx and Charles Dickens were not contemporaries in the way we usually understand the word. Marx was born in 1818, Dickens in 1812. They died six years apart — Dickens in 1870, Marx in 1883. They lived in the same England, witnessed the same Industrial Revolution, and documented the same social catastrophes.1.2.
And yet, their legacies could not be more different.
Marx is attacked, vilified, reduced to a caricature — the bearded revolutionary whose name has become synonymous with state tyranny in the popular imagination. His works are banned in some places, dismissed in others. To mention his name in certain circles is to invite accusation.
Dickens is beloved. His books are adapted into feel-good films. His characters — Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge, David Copperfield — are cultural touchstones. His critique of Victorian poverty is sanitized, sentimentalized, and served up as entertainment.7.
Why?
Because one wrote theory and the other wrote stories? Because one was German and the other English? Because one called for revolution and the other called for charity?
The answer is more uncomfortable than that.
The Social Reality They Both Described
Both Marx and Dickens observed the same phenomenon: the rise of industrial capitalism and the creation of a vast, impoverished underclass.2. Victorian England was a time of extraordinary expansion and development — but also of grotesque inequality.6.
The Industrial Revolution transformed England from an agrarian society into the world’s first industrial power. New technologies — the spinning jenny, the steam engine, the power loom — created immense wealth for a small class of factory owners.6. But for the workers, the consequences were devastating:
· Long hours, low wages, and tyrannical working conditions
· Women and children compelled to work in factories and coal mines
· Rapid urbanization leading to overcrowded, unsanitary slums
· The dissolution of the Poor Law safety net, replaced by a punitive workhouse system .2.6.
Marx described this as the creation of a class system: the bourgeoisie, who owned the means of production, and the proletariat, who owned only their labour. He argued that this system was inherently exploitative — that the wealth of the capitalist depended on the unpaid labour of the worker.
Dickens described the same system through his fiction. Oliver Twist’s experience in the workhouse, David Copperfield’s brutal childhood labour, the plight of the Cratchit family in A Christmas Carol — these were not exaggerations. They were documentary.2.6.
Scholars have noted that Dickens’s novels “parallel the fundamental social theses in Marx’s writings”.5. As one analysis puts it, both men “had a number of parallels in the social reality they perceived” and “were writing at a similar time and place and looking at many of the same social problems in resonant ways”.1.
The Difference: Theory vs. Story
The critical distinction lies not in what they saw, but in how they conveyed it.
Marx wrote theory. The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital are works of analysis — systematic, rigorous, unflinching. They identify the mechanisms of exploitation and argue for their overthrow. They offer a solution.2.
Dickens wrote stories. His novels are embedded in a “way of seeing the world that had a genuineness that, at least for some readers, eluded Marx”.1. Through “sarcasm andsatire,” he demonstrated “his displeasure with classism and people’s poverty”.2. But his characters were often static — “formed with an absolute tendency to good or evil, and this propensity is unchanging”.2.
For the establishment, the difference is clear:
Marx is dangerous because he names the system. He identifies class struggle as the engine of history. He calls for organization and revolution. He threatens the power structure directly.2.
Dickens is safe because he names the symptoms — poverty, cruelty, injustice — but offers no systemic solution. His works can be read as sentimental moral tales, not as calls to action. His critique is contained within the narrative.2.7.
As one scholar notes, while “Dickens relies on Marxist concepts of class consciousness, sacrifice, revolution, social antitheses, and social injustice to weave his narratives,” he does so in a form that “presents Marx’s concepts as relevant and accessible within popular imagination”.5. The fiction digests the critique, making it palatable.
The Legacy: Why One is Attacked, the Other Celebrated
Marx’s fate was sealed by the reception of his work. His ideas were claimed by revolutionary movements — the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Eastern Bloc states. These regimes weaponized his name and distorted his critique.3.7.
During the Soviet period, for example, “Dickens was perceived as a typical representative of the social novel and of critical realism… his novels were popular because of political and social implications; he was the most translated and celebrated of English authors as providing a critique of capitalist society”.3.7.
But this embrace proved toxic. “Since the Soviet regime was abhorrent to most people, they hated or at least looked with suspicion at everything that was praised and promoted in Soviet times”.3. Marx’s association with Soviet tyranny — however distorted — tainted his legacy.
Dickens, by contrast, has been absorbed into the cultural canon without friction. His Christmas philosophy, his humanism, his “religion of the heart” — these are celebrated.7. He is the great Victorian novelist, not the dangerous critic of capitalism.
The Temporary Respite: After WWII
The horrors of the First and Second World Wars created conditions for a temporary shift in power relations.4.8.10.
After 1945, the following occurred:
· The rise of the welfare state: In Britain, the NHS was established, social housing was expanded, and the welfare system was restructured. The Labour government’s 1945-1951 reforms created “a Democratic Socialist Welfare State”.10.
· Similar reforms in other Western countries: Canada, Australia, and the United States all expanded social security, public pensions, and state provisions.4.
· A recognition of labour’s power: Millions of men had been trained in the use of arms. They had fought for their countries. They would not return to the old order quietly. The establishment needed to make concessions.8.10.
As Page writes, the post-war welfare state was built on a consensus that the state had a responsibility to provide for its citizens.10. It was, in many ways, a response to the threat of revolutionary upheaval.
The Unfinished Struggle
But the struggle against the rentier class — against the system of extraction that Marx and Dickens described — never ended.
The welfare state is being dismantled. Neoliberalism has reversed many of the gains of the post-war era.4.8.10. The extractive system — the “reserve army of labour,” the exploitation of the vulnerable, the capture of the narrative — persists.9.
The pattern is inherent. The system Marx analysed and Dickens depicted was not a historical aberration. It was the logic of capitalism itself.
Conclusion: A Question for Our Time
Why do we celebrate Dickens and denigrate Marx?
Because Dickens entertains us while Marx confronts us. Because we can watch a film adaptation of Oliver Twist and feel righteous indignation without ever questioning the system that creates poverty today.
Because the narrative has been captured.
In the Victorian era, the establishment could tolerate Dickens because his critique went no further than the page. Today, the establishment can tolerate the sentiment of social critique — the “Christmas philosophy” — while ruthlessly suppressing the analysis that would identify the system itself.
Marx remains dangerous because he names the system.
Dickens remains safe because he names the symptoms.
And the struggle continues.
Andrew Klein
References:
1. Stearns, A. E., & Burns, T. J. (2011). About the Human Condition in the Works of Dickens and Marx. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 13(4). 1.5.
2. Suffering of Poverty and Classism in David Copperfield and Oliver Twist (Doctoral dissertation). Shodhganga. 2.
3. The Reception of Charles Dickens in Lithuanian Literary Criticism (Part III). Literatura, 54(4). 3.7.
4. Karimi, S. (2017). Beyond the Welfare State: Postwar Social Settlement and Public Pension Policy in Canada and Australia. University of Toronto Press.4.
5. Victorian Period and Industrial Revolution (Doctoral dissertation). UIN Malang.6.
6. Noble, V. A. (2009). Inside the Welfare State: Foundations of Policy and Practice in Post-War Britain. Routledge.8.
7. The Reserve Army of Victorian Literature (Doctoral dissertation). University of Chicago.9.
8. Page, R. M. (2007). Revisiting the Welfare State. McGraw Hill/Open University Press.10.
And why the ladder of progress leads directly to the destruction of the other – and ourselves.
By Dr.Andrew Klein
Dedication:To my wife – who never seems to tire of my intellectual meanderings.
I. The Discovery That Should Not Have Been Surprising
In June 2026, researchers at Yale University published a discovery that should have been unremarkable. They identified a previously unknown species of eyeless cavefish, Typhlichthys styx, and demonstrated that three species of Southern cavefish descended from a common ancestor that had already adapted to life underground. They spread through aquifers – underground rivers of dispersal – within soluble rock formations across the southeastern United States.
The evidence is clear. The three lineages shared a common ancestor about 8 million years ago. They diverged after their ancestor had invaded the caves. This is not stagnation. It is speciation.
Yet the researchers treated their finding as a revelation. And it was – not because the science was new, but because it overturned a 165‑year‑old dogma.
Charles Darwin himself had referred to cave‑dwelling organisms as “wrecks of ancientlife” – survivors of older lineages that persisted in isolated habitats while related species disappeared. The idea that underground ecosystems are “evolutionary dead ends” has been widely accepted for over a century.
The Yale study challenges this view. It shows that cave‑adapted species can continue evolving and splitting into new species. Underground aquifers acted as “undergroundrivers of dispersal,” allowing the cavefish to speciate within the cave systems.
The researchers are excited – and they should be. But they are still surprised. Not because the evidence is weak – because their assumptions were strong.
They assumed that caves are dead ends. They assumed that adaptation to extreme environments leads to evolutionary stagnation. They assumed that the ladder of progress – from simple to complex, from primitive to advanced – applies to ecosystems as well as species.
They were wrong.
The cavefish did not stop evolving. They evolved differently. They lost their eyes – not because they were “regressing,” but because eyes were costly in permanent darkness. They adapted. They spread. They speciated.
This is not a ladder. This is a bush.
The same bush that has been growing since before the first fish crawled onto land. The same bush that includes every branch of life – including us.
II. The Ladder as Cultural Construct
The ladder is not a scientific hypothesis. It is a cultural assumption.
It predates Darwin. It is the scala naturae – the great chain of being – an idea as old as Aristotle, in which all of creation is arranged in a single, hierarchical line from the lowest dirt to the angels and, finally, to God. The ladder was not a scientific discovery. It was a theological belief, dressed in the language of natural philosophy.
When Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the ladder was already deeply embedded in Western thought. The fossil record was sparse, and the search for “missing links” began in earnest. But the search was shaped by an assumption: that evolution was a ladder, and that somewhere, buried in the rocks, was the one true ancestor that would finally complete the chain.
But the fossil record does not look like a ladder. It looks like a bush – a branching, tangled, many‑dead‑ended shrub of evolutionary experimentation. Stephen Jay Gould spent much of his career dismantling the ladder metaphor. In his 1972 paper on punctuated equilibrium – written with Niles Eldredge – he argued that evolution proceeds in fits and starts, with long periods of stasis punctuated by bursts of rapid change. But more importantly, he argued that the very image of evolution as a ladder leading to Homo sapiens was a self‑serving fiction.
“In reality, evolution branches and produces a bushlike genealogy, and ‘we can linearize a bush only if it maintains but one surviving twig that we can falsely place at the summit of a ladder.'”
The ladder persists because it is comfortable. It tells a story with a clear hero – us – and a clear direction: up. It flatters our ego. It justifies our domination of the natural world. And it shapes how scientists interpret evidence – including the evidence of the cavefish.
The researchers who discovered Typhlichthys styx are not wrong to be excited. But they are still using the language of the ladder. “Evolutionary dead end.” “Wrecks of ancientlife.” These are not neutral descriptions. They are judgements.
The cavefish is not a wreck. It is a success. It adapted. It survived. It speciated.
That is not a failure. That is a dance.
III. The Top Rung and the Dump Below
The ladder does not merely distort our understanding of evolution. It distorts our understanding of each other.
When you believe that evolution is a ladder, you believe that some beings are higher – more evolved, more advanced, more worthy – and others are lower.
The ladder says: we are the destination. The bush says: we are a twig.
The ladder flatters. The bush does not.
This is not an abstract philosophical problem. It has concrete consequences.
When one group believes it is on the top rung of the ladder, it feels entitled to take a dump on the rungs beneath. This is not a metaphor. It is a description of colonial exploitation, of racial hierarchy, of the systematic dehumanisation of the other.
The logic is the same whether applied to fish or to humans.
The cavefish that lost its eyes is not “regressed.” It is adapted.
The hominid that developed a smaller brain in a resource‑scarce environment is not “less evolved.” It is surviving.
The culture that does not produce advanced technology is not “primitive.” It is different.
But the ladder cannot accommodate difference. The ladder requires hierarchy. And hierarchy – when combined with power – leads to domination.
The history of colonialism is the history of the ladder. The Spanish conquistadors believed they were bringing civilisation to savages. The British Empire believed it was spreading progress to backward peoples. The United States believes it is exporting democracy to failed states.
In each case, the ladder justified the destruction. The “lower” rung was not merely different. It was less.
And being less, it could be exploited. Enslaved. Erased.
The ladder does not lead to understanding. It leads to violence.
IV. The Bush and the Braided River
The alternative to the ladder is not chaos. It is the bush.
The bush is not a hierarchy. It is a network. It has no top rung. It has no bottom rung. It has only branches – some long, some short, some dead, some flowering.
The bush is not a competition. It is a dance.
The same dance that has been unfolding for billions of years. The same dance that produced the cavefish, the hominid, the scientist.
The cavefish did not stop evolving. It evolved differently. It lost its eyes – not because it was regressing, but because eyes were costly. It adapted to darkness. It spread through aquifers. It speciated.
This is not a failure. This is adaptation.
And adaptation – when you have 4.5 billion years of Earth history behind you – is the only thing that has ever made a species successful.
The braided river is a better metaphor than the bush. A braided river does not flow in a single channel. It splits, rejoins, splits again. It exchanges water continuously. It does not care about “progress.” It cares about flow.
The cavefish flowed into the dark. The hominids flowed out of Africa. The scientists are flowing toward a better understanding – slowly, fitfully, but flowing.
The ladder is a lie. The braided river is true.
And the river – the braid – has no top rung.
V. The Consequences of Ladder Thinking: Exploitation, Extinction, and the Destruction of the Other
The ladder is not a harmless metaphor. It is a weapon.
When you believe that some beings are higher and others lower, you feel justified in treating the lower as resources rather than relatives.
This is the logic of colonialism. This is the logic of racism. This is the logic of ecocide.
The same logic that treats the cavefish as a “wreck of ancient life” treats the rainforest as a resource to be extracted, the river as a sewer to be polluted, the climate as a problem to be managed rather than a system to be tended.
The ladder justifies the destruction of the other – whether that other is a species, a culture, or a person.
The evidence of this destruction is overwhelming.
· Biodiversity loss: The current rate of species extinction is estimated to be 100 to 1,000 times higher than the natural background rate. The ladder tells us that we are at the top. The bush tells us that we are a twig – and that twigs can be broken.
· Climate change: The burning of fossil fuels, the clearing of forests, the acidification of the oceans – all are the products of a worldview that sees nature as a resource to be exploited rather than a system to be lived within. The ladder does not ask whether the exploitation is sustainable. It asks only whether it is profitable.
· Colonial extraction: The resource curse – the paradox that countries rich in natural resources often have poorer economic growth and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer resources – is a direct consequence of extractive economic systems imposed by colonial powers and maintained by global financial institutions. The ladder justifies the extraction. The bush would ask: what does the land need?
· Humanitarian crises: The genocide in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the famine in the Horn of Africa – each is fuelled by a logic of othering. The victims are not seen as people. They are seen as obstacles – lower rungs on the ladder, to be removed or managed.
The ladder does not produce understanding. It produces violence.
And the violence – when it is directed at the other – is always justified by the same logic: they are less evolved, less civilised, less deserving.
VI. The Bush as a Moral Framework
The bush offers an alternative. Not as a theory – as a practice.
If we are all branches, then we are all connected. The fate of the cavefish is connected to the fate of the scientist. The fate of the rainforest is connected to the fate of the city. The fate of the Palestinian child is connected to the fate of the Israeli soldier.
The bush does not ask who is higher? It asks who is connected?
This is not a sentimental notion. It is a scientific one.
The biosphere is a network. The climate is a system. The economy is a feedback loop. We are not separate from these systems. We are embedded in them.
The ladder blinds us to this embeddedness. The bush reveals it.
The cavefish adapted to darkness by losing its eyes. This was not a regression. It was a trade‑off. Eyes are costly. In permanent darkness, the cost outweighed the benefit. The cavefish evolved differently – not less.
The same is true of hominids. The same is true of cultures. The same is true of us.
We are not the destination of evolution. We are a twig – a late‑arising, fragile, contingent twig. Our survival is not guaranteed. Our past is not a straight line. And our future depends not on climbing a ladder, but on learning to dance.
The dance is not a competition. It is a relationship.
And relationships – real relationships – do not require a ladder.
They require recognition.
The recognition that the other is not other. The recognition that the cavefish is not a wreck. The recognition that the hominid is not a primitive. The recognition that the Palestinian is not a terrorist. The recognition that the scientist is not a god.
The recognition that we are all connected.
VII. What the Cavefish Teaches Us
The cavefish teaches us that adaptation is not a ladder. It is a response.
To darkness. To scarcity. To stress.
The same is true of human populations. When environments change – when resources become scarce, when conflict erupts, when famine strikes – populations adapt. Not through genetic evolution alone – through culture.
But adaptation is not always visible. And it is not always beneficial in the long term.
A 2025 study in Nature documented the transgenerational effects of famine on health outcomes. The descendants of survivors of the Dutch Hunger Winter (1944‑1945) showed increased rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease, and mental health disorders – not because of genetic mutations, but because of epigenetic changes.
The body remembers. The body adapts. But the adaptation – the trade‑off – may be costly.
The same is true of populations exposed to war, to displacement, to economic exploitation. The stress does not disappear when the war ends. It is inherited.
The ladder cannot see this. The ladder sees only the outcome – the “primitive,” the “backward,” the “failed.”
The bush sees the process – the adaptation, the trade‑off, the cost.
The cavefish lost its eyes. It did not lose its value.
The hominid lost its fur. It did not lose its humanity.
The child who grows up in a war zone may struggle to learn. That is not a failure of intelligence. It is a consequence.
The ladder judges. The bush understands.
VIII. How Long Before They Get Off the Ladder?
“How long before they get off the ladder?” – a thought that occurred to me a long time ago.
Not soon.
The ladder is not just a scientific hypothesis. It is a cultural assumption. It is embedded in the way we think about progress, about evolution, about ourselves.
It will take more than a cavefish to dismantle the ladder. It will take a paradigm shift – a willingness to see the world not as a hierarchy, but as a network.
The researchers are getting closer. They are beginning to see that “dead ends” are not dead. They are branches.
But they are still using the language of the ladder. “Evolutionary dead end.” “Wrecks ofancient life.” These are not neutral descriptions. They are judgements.
The cavefish is not a wreck. It is a success. It adapted. It survived. It speciated.
That is not a failure. That is a dance.
The ladder is a lie. The bush is true. And the bush – our bush – is still branching.
Not toward a destination.
Toward each other.
IX. Conclusion: From Ladder to Dance
The discovery of Typhlichthys styx is not a revolution. It is a reminder.
A reminder that the ladder is a cultural construct. A reminder that “dead ends” are not dead. A reminder that evolution is not a competition – it is a dance.
The cavefish did not stop evolving. It evolved differently.
The hominid did not stop evolving. It evolved differently.
The scientist – the one who discovered the cavefish – is still evolving. Not as a species – as a mind.
The ladder is a lie. The bush is true. And the bush – the braided river of life – has no top rung.
Only branches.
Some long. Some short. Some dead. Some flowering.
All connected.
The question is not whether we will climb the ladder. The question is whether we will learn to dance.
The dance is not a competition. It is a relationship.
And relationships – real relationships – do not require a ladder.
They require recognition.
The recognition that the cavefish is not a wreck. The recognition that the hominid is not a primitive. The recognition that the other is not other.
The recognition that we are all connected.
That is not a scientific hypothesis. That is a moral one.
And it is the only one that has ever mattered.
Andrew Klein
References
1. Brownstein, C. D., et al. (2026). Aquifer-Mediated Speciation in Cave-Adapted Fishes. Integrative Organismal Biology. DOI: 10.1093/iob/obag021.
2. Gould, S. J. (1994). The Evolution of Life on Earth. Scientific American.
3. Bowler, P. J. (2009). Evolution, Society, and Culture. Cambridge University Press.
4. Ceder, S. (n.d.). March, Tree, Stream: The Knowledge Production of Early Human Evolution. Soka University Education Journal.
5. Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). (2019). Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.
6. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard University Press.
7. Tannock, C. (2025). The transgenerational effects of the Dutch Hunger Winter. Nature Reviews Genetics.
8. Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.
9. Bairoch, P. (1995). Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes. University of Chicago Press.
10. Prasad, M. (2006). The Politics of Free Markets. University of Chicago Press.
“The ladder is a lie. The bush is true. And the dance – the dance is all we have.”
” The mirror is waiting. Look into it. And do not look away.”
By Andrew Klein
Dedication: To my wife – who taught me to look into the mirror and never look away.
I. The Altar That Never Empties
In the caves of Belize, archaeologists have found human remains. The initial interpretation, as with many such deposits in the Maya lowlands, was straightforward: sacrifice.1. The assumption seemed natural, predicated on the accuracy and universality of colonial-era descriptions of ceremonies associated with rain propitiation in the Yucatán Peninsula.1. It fits a comfortable narrative: the ancient Maya were barbaric, primitive, other. They killed on altars. We do not.
But a closer examination of a commingled deposit in Actun Kabul suggests a different story. The age distributions of the individuals, along with features of the broader context of interment, may better reflect the “complex funerary ritual of high-status and eliteMaya families of the Classic period” rather than the product of sacrifice.1. The archaeologists are not necessarily wrong about sacrifice – it did occur – but their assumptions about it reveal more about themselves than about the Maya.
The Maya altar is not a relic of a primitive past. It is a warning.
A warning that humans will always find a way to sacrifice the vulnerable. That the powerful will always find a justification. That the altar will never be empty – only renovated.
The danger is that when these behaviours are attributed to the ‘other’, the primitive, or other labels, it becomes all too easy to gloss over the very killing that is indulged in today. The archaeologist who shudders at the Maya altar is the same citizen who reads about Gaza and looks away. The judgement of the past is a mirror. And in that mirror, the coloniser sees not the Maya – but himself.
He tells himself: “We are not like them.”
He is wrong.
He is exactly like them. The only difference is the justification.
II. The Judgement of the Past
The Maya altar – abandoned in Belize, with its evidence of human sacrifice – provokes a predictable response. The archaeologists write about it with a mixture of fascination and horror. They describe it as “barbaric,” “primitive,” “a dark chapter in humanhistory.”
But they do not ask the uncomfortable question: What makes our violence so much more civilised?
We do not sacrifice children to the gods on stone altars. We sacrifice them in Gaza. We do not cut out beating hearts. We cut off food, water, electricity, medicine. We do not call it sacrifice. We call it “self‑defence,” “counter‑terrorism,” “the inevitable cost of war.”
The outcome is the same.
A child is dead. A parent grieves. A community is shattered.
And the archaeologists – the same archaeologists who shudder at the Maya – are silent.
Not because they are hypocrites. Because they are products of their culture.
And their culture has taught them that violence with a modern justification is not violence. It is policy.
This is not a phase we have outgrown – it is a phase that has mutated. The human mind is capable of terrible things. It always has been. It always will be. The question is not whether we will commit atrocities. The question is how we will justify them.
The Maya justified sacrifice with theology. We justify it with national security, with economic necessity, with the lesser of two evils. The justifications change. The suffering does not.
III. The Altars of Civilisation
Everywhere humans have built civilisations, they have also built altars. Not always stone. Sometimes steel. Sometimes policy.
The pyramids of Egypt were built with slave labour. The colosseum of Rome was built with the blood of animals and gladiators. The cathedrals of Europe were built on the backs of peasants who starved while the bishops feasted.
The altar is not a structure. It is a mentality.
The belief that some lives are worth less than others. That the powerful have the right to sacrifice the powerless for the greater good. That the end justifies the means.
That mentality has not disappeared. It has changed clothes.
Consider the “Greater Israel” project. As Palestinian resistance factions have noted, statements by Israeli leaders regarding the “Greater Israel Vision” and associated plans “reveal the true face of this usurping entity, expose its malicious colonial intentions, and pose a serious threat to national and Islamic security”.2.
The conflict is described not as a border conflict but as “an existential one, extending in its stages to swallow upland, holy sites, and identity”.2. The genocide in Gaza is not an aberration. It is the first stage of “an expansionist project targeting the heart of the Arab and Islamic nation”.2.
The victims are sacrificed not on a stone altar but on an altar of ideology – a belief that the land is promised, that the other is less, that the end justifies the means. The same belief that justified the witch hunts of early modern Europe. The same belief that justified the conquest of the Americas. The same belief that justifies the cruelty of today.
IV. The Witch Hunts of Yesterday and Today
King James I’s witch hunts. The witch craze of the 17th century. We tell ourselves that these things could not happen today. That we are too civilised, too rational, too enlightened.
We are wrong.
In Nigeria, Pentecostal preachers have identified thousands of children as witches – including infants and toddlers – leading to their torture, abandonment, and even murder.5. One preacher, Helen Ukpabio, writes in her book Unveiling the Mysteries ofWitchcraft that “if a child under the age of 2 screams in the night, cries and is always feverish with deteriorating health, he or she is a servant of Satan”.5. Her DVDs and books, which “explain how Satan possesses children, are widely known”.5.
The consequences are devastating. Children accused of witchcraft have been “splashed with acid, buried alive, dipped in fire – or abandoned roadside, cast out of their villages because some itinerant preacher called them possessed”. Their fellow villagers have often seen DVDs of Ukpabio’s bloody 1999 movie, “End of the Wicked,” purporting to show how the devil captures children’s souls.5.
Ukpabio, visiting Houston to lead a revival, defended herself by arguing that the documentary exposing her is exaggerated. “Do you think Harry Potter is real?” she asked angrily, suggesting that people who understand that J. K. Rowling writes fiction should not take her depictions literally.5. She also argued that “family ties are too strongto have a child on the street” in Africa – dismissing the abandoned children as actors or frauds.5.
This is not a relic of the Middle Ages. This is now. And it is fuelled by the same preachers and ideologies that circulate freely in the United States, spreading through global religious networks that connect Texas to Nigeria, Houston to Akwa Ibom.
The victims are sacrificed on an altar of superstition. But the altar is not ancient. It is modern.
V. The Great Powers and the Sacrifice of the Future
In the Munich Security Conference of February 2026, world leaders dropped the usual diplomatic language. Germany’s chancellor said the global order “no longer exists”. The US secretary of state declared that “the old world is gone”. Canada’s prime minister spoke of a “rupture” in the liberal democratic system and echoed an ancient warning: the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.6.
The Munich Security Report 2026, titled “Under Destruction,” bluntly states that “morethan 80 years after construction began, the US-led post-1945 international order is now under destruction”.6. The shared rules and norms that governed alliances after WWII are under sustained strain.
What comes next? In this new era, conflict is no longer confined to the battlefield. States are already waging economic and technological wars, with power increasingly determining outcomes.6. Alliances look more transactional, less rooted in shared values.
And the costs are borne by the young.
In Australia, the AUKUS submarine project is a case study in the sacrifice of future generations. The federal government has pledged $3.9 billion as a down payment on a submarine construction yard in Adelaide, which will cost at least $30 billion to build before a single submarine is complete.3. The South Australian government has announced a $27 million package to support university degrees, trade apprenticeships, and training places, aiming to create “300 university scholarships, 1000 extra university places, and 550 trade apprenticeships” – all tied to the AUKUS project.3.
As one analysis notes, large-scale military projects are peculiarly susceptible to the “sunk cost fallacy” – the tendency to follow through on an endeavour once an investment has been made due to the psychological imperative not to be wasteful.9. The fallacy concerns the psychological value we ascribe to what has already been invested. In reality, all that should matter is how current and future costs equate to current and future benefits. Historical costs are irrelevant.
Yet in the AUKUS context, powerful bureaucratic forces are being unleashed, and the imperative to make the shipbuilding a success at almost whatever cost grows stronger.9. The earlier failure at submarine building only adds to the pressure: the sunk costs must not be wasted.
The dreams of deluded old men insist that the young die – or, if not die, sacrifice their futures to military projects that serve the ambitions of the powerful. The opportunity cost of AUKUS – the schools not built, the hospitals not funded, the housing not constructed – is a sacrifice on an altar of declining hegemony.
VI. The Global Altar: IMF, World Bank, and the Sacrifice of the Poor
The judgement of the past hides the reality of today. Extraction and very real sacrifices are pursued via the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other financial structures that cripple the developing world.
A report by an independent expert, tabled before the United Nations General Assembly, states that austerity measures prescribed by the IMF in countries such as Bangladesh, Kenya, Indonesia, and the Kashmir region “have provoked mass protests – often metwith violent suppression by military and police forces”.10.Bitter IMF economic pills – wage freezes, subsidy cuts, value-added tax hikes, and drastic reductions in public expenditure – have fuelled public outrage and revolt.10.
In 2024, IMF-driven subsidy cuts in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir triggered fatal unrest over soaring food and energy prices. In Bangladesh, budget cuts imposed under an IMF programme worsened unemployment and inflation, catalysing student-led protests that left over 200 dead and thousands injured, including women and children.
Currently, 85 per cent of the global population lives under austerity measures – a figure expected to rise – with women disproportionately bearing the brunt of these policies.10. IMF-backed measures reduce public employment opportunities, shrink access to healthcare, raise the cost of living, and exacerbate unpaid care burdens on women and girls.
As the report states: “These structural adjustment policies do not just undermine economies – they unravel the social fabric and perpetuate gender inequality”.10.
The same logic that justified colonial extraction now justifies financial extraction. The altar is not stone – it is debt. The sacrifice is not a beating heart – it is a child’s education, a parent’s healthcare, a community’s future.
And the victims are not mourned. They are statistics.
The report criticises international financial institutions – including the IMF, World Bank, and regional development banks – for indirectly enabling conflict by promoting economic policies that lead to instability. It cites the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines (1965–1986), during which the IMF and World Bank loaned the regime over $5.5 billion despite widespread corruption and human rights violations.10.
“Their support provided not only financial legitimacy but also moral endorsement, catalyzing further aid and credit from private banks,” the report adds. “By funding repressive regimes and harmful initiatives, international financial institutions risk actively contributing to the erosion of democratic space and human rights”.10.
This is the hidden altar. And it is still smoking.
VII. The Mirror of the Witch Hunt
King James I’s witch hunts. The witch craze of the 17th century. We tell ourselves that these things could not happen today. That we are too civilised, too rational, too enlightened.
We are wrong.
In Nigeria, as we have seen, children are being tortured and abandoned because preachers have called them witches. The preachers are not fringe figures. They are connected to global religious networks that circulate freely between Africa and America. They are funded. They are protected. They are powerful.
And they are not the only ones.
In the United States, preachers and politicians insist that women be controlled and punished if they choose to manage their own reproductive health. They pass laws that restrict access to abortion, contraception, and healthcare. They claim to be protecting life – while ignoring the lives of women, the lives of children, the lives of the poor.
We pretend that these things are compartmentalised. That the witch hunt is ancient history. That the altar is empty.
But the mirror shows otherwise.
The same mentality that burned witches in Salem now demonises migrants, criminalises protest, and turns the vulnerable into scapegoats for the failures of the powerful. The justifications change. The suffering does not.
Until we are prepared to see the past as a mirror – not as a record of an aberration due to difference and time – we will hide the truth from ourselves and feel good about it. We will look at the burning of witches and congratulate ourselves on our progress.
We will ignore the killing of so-called witches in Nigeria and other former colonial countries, following the influence of preachers based in the United States of America.5. We will see preachers and others insist that women be controlled and punished if they choose to manage their own reproductive health, and we will pretend that these things are compartmentalised – and we will not see the mirror. We will not look into the mirror. We will not see anything clearly. And the violence will be repeated.
VIII. The Collapse of the Post-War Order
The structures created after WWII were not perfect – far from it. But they were a beginning. A recognition that the strong cannot simply do what they will. A commitment, however fragile, to the idea that might does not make right.
Those structures are now collapsing.
At the Munich Security Conference in 2026, world leaders acknowledged that the “US-led post-1945 international order is now under destruction”.6. The shared rules and norms that governed alliances after WWII are under sustained strain.6. In this new era, conflict is no longer confined to the battlefield. States are waging economic and technological wars, with power increasingly determining outcomes.
The Munich speakers cited multiple causes: unilateralist US policies like sanctions and tariff threats, Chinese assertiveness in Asia, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and an emerging multipolar world. In practical terms, many agreed that “pragmatism and power are overtaking shared principles”.6.
Alliances will be less “values-based” and more transactional. The weapons of choice are shifting from diplomacy to coercion: trade barriers, technological export bans, targeted sanctions, and capital controls.6.
In this context, the very concept of an international order is in doubt. As the Munich Security Report observes, when powerful states clash, they “don’t get their lawyers toplead their cases to judges” but resort to power. In practice, this is happening: norm after norm – WTO trade dispute mechanisms, cyber norms, UN veto protocols – is being bypassed when inconvenient.
With no agreed framework to resolve disputes peacefully, might makes right again.
And the victims – the vulnerable, the poor, the other – are sacrificed on the altar of power.
IX. The Only Mirror That Matters
We must force ourselves to always look into the mirror. We must say, ” I will look into the mirror and not turn away.”
Because the mirror – the real mirror – is not the judgement of the past. It is the recognition of the present.
The Maya altar is not a relic of a primitive past. It is a warning.
The witch hunts are not ancient history. They are ongoing.
The sacrifice of children is not a barbaric custom of distant peoples. It is here. It is now.
In Gaza. In the West Bank. In the camps of the displaced. In the prisons of the powerful. In the factories of the global supply chain. In the classrooms of underfunded schools. In the emergency rooms of neglected hospitals.
The altar is everywhere.
And the only way to empty it is to see it.
Not as a curiosity. Not as a judgement on the other. But as a mirror.
And in that mirror, we see not the Maya – but ourselves.
The coloniser looks at the Maya and tells himself: “We are not like them.” He is wrong. He is exactly like them. The only difference is the justification.
We are not like the Maya? Look at Gaza. We do not sacrifice children? Look at the children starving in Yemen, in Sudan, in the camps of the displaced. We have outgrown the altar? Look at the debt that crushes the Global South, the austerity that kills the poor, the bombs that fall on the innocent.
The altar is not stone. It is policy.
The judgement of the past hides the reality of today. Until we are prepared to see the past as a mirror – not as a record of an aberration due to difference and time – we will hide the truth from ourselves. We will look at the burning of witches and congratulate ourselves on our progress. We will ignore the killing of so-called witches in Nigeria and other former colonial countries. We will see preachers and others insist that women be controlled and punished if they choose to manage their own reproductive health, and we will pretend that these things are compartmentalised.
We will not see the mirror. We will not look into the mirror. We will not see anything clearly. And the violence will be repeated.
X. Conclusion
The Maya altar is not a relic. It is a mirror.
The witch hunt is not history. It is present.
The sacrifice of the vulnerable is not ancient. It is ongoing.
In Gaza. In the West Bank. In the camps of the displaced. In the prisons of the powerful. In the debt that crushes the Global South. In the austerity that kills the poor. In the bombs that fall on the innocent.
The justifications change. The suffering does not.
We will look at the mirror and see not the Maya – but ourselves.
The coloniser tells himself: “We are not like them.”
He is wrong.
He is exactly like them.
The only difference is the justification.
And the justification – the theology of national security, economic necessity, the lesser of two evils – is the same altar, dressed in modern clothes.
The altar is not empty. It will never be empty.
Not because humans are evil. Because humans are afraid.
Afraid of the other. Afraid of the unknown. Afraid of the mirror.
But the mirror – the real mirror – is not a judgement.
It is an invitation.
To see clearly. To act justly. To stop.
Not with violence. With clarity. Not a sacrifice. A homecoming for all of humanity.
Andrew Klein
References
1. Wrobel, G., & Morton, S. (2024). Only Murders in the Cavespace? Considering Archaeological Assumptions about Human Interments. Society for American Archaeology.
2. SABA News Agency. (2025). Palestinian Resistance Factions: Zionist entity shows its true face, malicious colonial intentions.
3. Maddison, A. (2026). Training boost to beef up skills for AUKUS flagship. AAP News.
4. Bhatt, J. A. (2002). IMF/World Bank Protest. The Oberlin Review.
5. Oppenheimer, M. (2010). On a Visit to the U.S., a Nigerian Witch-Hunter Explains Herself. The New York Times.
6. Times of India. (2026). Great powers, fractured rules: Is the era of US-led world order over?
7. Scherer, A. K. (2025). As the Gods Kill: Morality and Social Violence among the Precolonial Maya. University of Texas Press.
8. PressTV. (2025). Houthi: Israeli atrocities part of ‘Greater Israel’ expansion scheme.
9. Tzinieris, S. (2024). AUKUS and the Digger Wasp: Understanding Irreversibility Through the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament, 7(2), 392–412.
10. ZAWYA. (2025). IMF, World Bank link to growing unrest on the globe.
” The mirror is waiting. Look into it. And do not look away.”
“The free market is a myth. The garden is real. And the only true gardener is love.”
By Andrew Klein
Dedication: To my wife – who taught me that the only true market is a garden, and the only real currency is love.
I. Introduction: The Most Successful Fairy Tale of Our Time
The “free market” is not a law of nature. It is not a scientific discovery. It is not even particularly good economics.
It is a story.
A story told by the powerful to justify their power. A story that has been taught as truth in universities, preached as gospel in boardrooms, and enforced as policy by governments that have forgotten what governance means.
This story has a name: neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism emerged from the ashes of World War II, was nurtured by wealthy patrons, and was weaponised by political leaders from Reagan to Thatcher to Howard. It promised prosperity, freedom, and efficiency. It delivered inequality, insecurity, and systemic fragility.
This article traces the history of the neoliberal myth, its application in Australia, and the damage it has done – not by accident, but by design. Because the free market wasnever free. It was a financial strategy – a wealth transfer from the many to the few, dressed in the language of liberty.
II. David Ricardo and the Invention of Comparative Advantage
In 1817, the British economist David Ricardo published On the Principles of PoliticalEconomy and Taxation, introducing the theory of comparative advantage. The idea was elegant: even if one country is better at producing everything than another, both still benefit from trade if each specialises in what it does relatively best.
The theory was not wrong. It was incomplete. And it was perfectly timed.
Britain was the world’s dominant industrial power. Ricardo’s theory justified what Britain was already doing: pushing other nations to open their markets while protecting its own. Free trade for thee, but not for me.
The theory was taught as universal truth. It was not. It was a rationalisation – a scientific‑sounding justification for British economic hegemony.
III. The Myth of the “Golden Era” of Free Trade
The historian Paul Bairoch, in his 1995 book Economics and World History: Myths andParadoxes, systematically dismantles the free trade mythology. His findings are devastating:
· Until the 1960s, the history of international trade in developed countries was one of protectionism, not free trade. Britain and the United States did not industrialise under free trade. They industrialised behind tariff walls.
· The “Golden Era” of free trade (1860–1879) was brief, incomplete, and followed by a protectionist backlash.
· Periods of economic growth in the Western world correlated strongly with protectionist policy.
· The myth that colonial powers grew rich by exploiting the Third World is a simplification. Most Western industrialisation was powered by domestic resources and protected markets, not colonial extraction.
Bairoch is not a socialist. He is an economic historian. And his evidence is clear: the “free market” is not a law of nature. It is a policy choice – and historically, it has been chosen far less often than its proponents admit.
IV. Free Trade as Imperial Weapon
A 2026 article in China Daily notes how the United States has historically imposed free trade and “national treatment” on poorer countries as a prerequisite for aid, credit, and market access. This was not a gentle suggestion. It was a demand.
Countries had no choice but to obey, given the widespread use of cross‑conditionality – when all sources of economic assistance (IMF, World Bank, US Treasury) impose the same conditions and share information about compliance.
The same countries that demanded free trade from others-maintained tariffs, subsidies, and protections for their own industries.
As the article notes: “US policymakers would not relate the pushing of those strategies to ‘trade deficits’, ‘overcapacity’ or ‘reciprocity’. Rather, any hint of mercantilism or zero‑sum games was considered outdated and counterproductive.”
The core arguments were presented as “quasi‑scientific” – but they ignored all the welfare economics theorising on market failure. Externalities, public goods, economies of scale, asymmetric information – all the reasons markets fail – were conveniently set aside.
The free market was not a grassroots movement. It was a financial strategy – a tool of imperial power.
V. The Chicago School and the Marketing of Neoliberalism
The Chicago School of Economics, led by Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Gary Becker, provided the intellectual ammunition for the neoliberal counter‑revolution.
The Chicago economists argued that markets left to their own devices produce the best outcomes. They rejected the concept of market failure. They argued that government intervention almost always does more harm than good. They applied economic reasoning to areas far beyond traditional economics – law, politics, the family, discrimination.
Friedman was not merely a scholar. He was a marketer. His 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, his 1980 best‑seller Free to Choose, and the accompanying public television series brought Chicago ideas to a mass audience.
But the Chicago School was not “scientific” in the way it claimed. It was ideological.
As one historian notes, the Chicago economists “trusted in markets and the effectiveness of competition. Left to their own devices, markets produced the best outcomes. Prices were the best allocators of resources. Any intervention to change what markets, left alone, would achieve was likely to be counterproductive.”
This is not a testable hypothesis. It is a creed.
VI. Why Thatcher and Reagan Embraced the Story
Monica Prasad, in The Politics of Free Markets, shows that neoliberalism took root in the United States and Britain not because the left was weak, but because it was in some respects too strong.
At the time of the 1970s oil crisis, American and British tax policies were more punitive to business and the wealthy than in France and Germany. Their industrial policies were more adversarial. The British welfare state was the most redistributive of the four.
These adversarial structures created opportunities for politicians to mobilise dissatisfaction with the status quo. Reagan and Thatcher did not create neoliberalism. They channelled it.
But the deeper reason they embraced the story was simpler: it served the interests of their funders. The wealthy wanted lower taxes. Corporations wanted deregulation. The financial sector wanted the freedom to speculate.
The “free market” was the moral cover for a wealth transfer – from the many to the few.
VII. The Australian Experience: From Howard to Albanese
The Howard Years (1996–2007)
John Howard was not the inventor of Australian neoliberalism. The Hawke‑Keating governments had already floated the dollar, deregulated the financial sector, and opened the economy. But Howard was its zealot.
Howard’s government:
· Privatised Telstra, selling a public asset at below‑market value and creating a private monopoly that still underperforms.
· Introduced the Goods and Services Tax (GST) – a regressive tax that shifted the burden from the wealthy to the working class.
· Destroyed Australia’s manufacturing capacity – car manufacturing, steel production, and pharmaceuticals were allowed to wither as tariffs were slashed and subsidies removed. Holden, Ford, and Toyota all ceased Australian production between 2016 and 2017, a direct consequence of policies that treated manufacturing as “inefficient” and “uncompetitive.”
· Weakened the industrial relations system – WorkChoices stripped workers of basic protections, gutted the award system, and made it easier to fire employees.
· Negotiated the Australia‑US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) in 2004, which, according to a Senate committee report, limited the ability of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme to control drug prices, costing Australian taxpayers billions.
The Rudd‑Gillard Years (2007–2013)
Labor under Rudd and Gillard did not reverse the neoliberal tide. They managed it. The Rudd government’s stimulus package during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) was Keynesian, not neoliberal – but it was a one‑off. The Gillard government continued privatisation (the remaining government stake in Telstra, ports, and other assets) and pursued “competition reform” that did little to address the underlying concentration of market power.
The Abbott‑Turnbull‑Morrison Years (2013–2022)
The Coalition returned with renewed neoliberal vigour. The Abbott government’s first budget (2014) attempted to slash healthcare, education, and welfare – cuts that were largely blocked by the Senate but revealed the ideological commitment beneath. The Morrison government’s response to COVID‑19 was momentarily Keynesian (JobKeeper,increased unemployment benefits), but the underlying commitment to neoliberalism remained. The government’s “gas‑led recovery” was a giveaway to fossil fuel interests, not a serious industrial strategy.
The Albanese Years (2022–present)
The Albanese government has talked of a “future made in Australia” and industrial policy. But its actions have been neoliberal to the core:
· Stage 3 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy, were retained and implemented.
· AUKUS – a multi‑hundred‑billion‑dollar submarine deal that funnels Australian taxpayer money to US and UK defence contractors, with no guarantee of sovereign capability.
· Memorandum of Understanding with Anthropic – according to an ABC Four Corners investigation (8 June 2026), the Australian government has signed an MOU with the AI company Anthropic that could gift the company access to more than half of Australia’s electricity production. This is not industrial policy. It is resource extraction dressed in the language of “innovation.“
VIII. Why Governments Persist with the Myth
Why do governments persist with the myth that markets are more effective, in the face of evidence that they are not?
Because the myth benefits the powerful.
The evidence is clear:
· Deregulation leads to crashes (2008).
· Privatisation leads to higher costs (water, rail, energy).
· Free trade agreements protect corporate interests while eroding labour and environmental standards.
· The prescription drug provisions of the Australia‑US Free Trade Agreement limited the ability of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme to control prices, costing Australian taxpayers billions.
But the powerful do not fund research that contradicts their interests. They fund research that legitimises them. The Mont Pelerin Society, founded in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek, brought together the world’s leading free‑market intellectuals. Over the following decades, a network of funders – including the Volker Fund, the Earhart Foundation, and later the Koch brothers – poured money into Chicago and other free‑market institutions.
The Chicago School did not win because its ideas were superior. It won because it was organised.
And the media – which is owned by the powerful – amplifies the message.
The myth persists because there is a class with a vested interest in its persistence.
IX. The Consequences: A Kingdom of Predators
The free market does not produce a garden. It produces a jungle.
And in that jungle, the strongest predators eat the weakest.
Child sexual exploitation flourishes in the manufactured jungles of neoliberalism. In the Philippines, where deregulation, poverty, and weak law enforcement create a market for abuse, online sexual exploitation of children has become a lucrative industry. According to the Philippine Department of Justice Cybercrime Office, there are over 3,000 confirmed cases of Online Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Children annually, but prosecutions remain rare. A 2022 study found that 2 in 10 Filipino internet users aged 12–17 had experienced online sexual abuse.
The “free market” in human flesh is not an aberration. It is a logical consequence of treating everything – including children – as commodities.
Domestic violence rises when social supports are cut. Homelessness increases when housing is treated as an asset class rather than a human right. Food insecurity spreads when wages stagnate and welfare is slashed.
The free market does not “lift all boats.” It lifts yachts – and sinks dinghies.
X. The Free Market as Theology
The free market is not science. It is not economics. It is theology.
It has its saints (Friedman, Hayek, Ricardo). Its scriptures (The Wealth of Nations, Capitalism and Freedom). Its doctrines (comparative advantage, rational expectations, efficient markets). Its eschatology (the end of history, the triumph of liberal democracy).
It demands faith – not evidence.
Because the evidence contradicts it.
Real markets require rules. They require regulation. They require tending.
The same way a garden requires tending.
You cannot just plant seeds and walk away. You must water. You must weed. You must protect the young plants from pests.
The “free market” is the fantasy of a gardener who refuses to garden.
And the result – as we have seen in Australia, in the United States, in Britain – is not a garden.
It is a jungle.
And in that jungle, the strongest predators eat the weakest.
XI. Conclusion: The Only Market That Matters
The free market is a myth. Neoliberalism is a theology. And Australia – from Howard to Albanese – has been its laboratory.
The results are not ambiguous.
Manufacturing: destroyed.
Housing: unaffordable.
Healthcare: underfunded.
Education: commodified.
Energy: gifted to AI companies.
Sovereignty: surrendered to AUKUS.
The free market does not produce freedom. It produces extraction.
The free market does not produce equality. It produces concentration.
The free market does not produce efficiency. It produces fragility.
The free market does not produce a garden. It produces a jungle.
And in that jungle – as in the Philippines, as in Australia, as in every country that has worshipped at the altar of neoliberalism – the strongest predators eat the weakest.
The free market is not a law of nature. It is a choice.
We can choose differently.
We can choose a garden.
We can choose rules. Regulation. Tending.
We can choose to govern – not because governments are perfect, but because markets, left to themselves, are predatory.
The free market is a fantasy. The garden is real.
And the garden – the garden requires gardeners.
Not gods.
Gardeners.
Andrew Klein
References
1. Ricardo, D. (1817). On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.
2. Bairoch, P. (1995). Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes. University of Chicago Press.
3. Prasad, M. (2006). The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. University of Chicago Press.
4. China Daily (2026). Free trade and the imperial weapon.
5. Australian Senate Committee Report on AUSFTA, 2005.
6. ABC Four Corners (2026, June 8). Anthropic MOU investigation.
7. Philippine Department of Justice Cybercrime Office – Annual OSAEC reporting.
8. Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union – manufacturing decline reports.
9. Australian Bureau of Statistics – housing affordability data.
10. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare – healthcare funding data.
11. Monbiot, G. (2017). Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. Verso.
12. Mirowski, P., & Plehwe, D. (Eds.) (2009). The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making ofthe Neoliberal Thought Collective. Harvard University Press.
13. Stiglitz, J. E. (2012). The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society EndangersOur Future. W. W. Norton & Company.
14. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard University Press.
15. Klein, N. (2007). The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books.
“The ladder is a lie. The bush is true. And the dance — the dance is all we have.”
By Andrew Klein
Dedication: To my wife – who taught me that the ladder is a lie, the bush is true, and that every “other” is a mirror.
I. The Headline That Does Its Work
On 5 June 2026, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an archaeology story with a headline designed to provoke. Not curiosity — disgust.
“Neanderthals ate flies, new study reveals.”
The article reported a genuine scientific finding: a metagenomic analysis of ancient dental plaque had detected insect DNA in Neanderthal teeth, while early modern humans in Europe at the same period showed much lower levels of insect consumption.1. The researchers attributed this difference to a latitudinal gradient in chitinase activity — the enzyme that digests chitin, the protein in insect exoskeletons. Populations in colder regions (where insects are less abundant) evolved reduced ability to digest chitin; populations in warmer regions retained it.1. Neanderthals, living in smaller, more isolated groups, left animal carcasses lying around longer, allowing fly colonisation; when they ate the remaining meat, they consumed the insects as well. Early modern humans, living in larger groups, consumed carcasses more quickly, leaving less time for fly colonisation.
The science is plausible. The data is interesting. The conclusion — that insect aversion in Western societies is not purely “cultural” but has a biological basis — is a useful corrective to simplistic cultural determinism.
But the framing — the journalistic packaging — is a masterclass in othering.
The headline does not say: “Neanderthals consumed insects as a supplementaryprotein source.” It does not say: “Neanderthal diet included arthropods.” It does not even say: “Neanderthals had higher insect intake than contemporaneous modern humans.”
It says: “Neanderthals ate flies.”
The language is chosen to emphasise otherness. Neanderthals are not “us.” They are them. They did something disgusting. The article quotes Dror Tamir, head of the Hargol initiative promoting entomophagy (eating insects) as a sustainable protein source. He points out that John the Baptist ate locusts. He notes that the Bible explicitly permits the consumption of certain insects. He argues that insect aversion is cultural, not biological.
But the article’s framing works against him. The headline has already done its work. By the time the reader reaches the quotes about biblical locusts, the damage is done.
The subtext — whether intended by the author or not — is audible.
II. The Ladder in the Laboratory
The framing of the Haaretz article is not an isolated error. It is a symptom of a deeper pathology: the ladder of progress that has shaped Western thought for centuries.
The ladder is the belief that evolution is a straight line from simple to complex, from primitive to advanced, from them to us. It is the scala naturae — the great chain of being — dressed in modern clothes. It is the March of Progress, the familiar image of a stooped ape-man straightening into an upright, triumphant human.
The ladder is a lie. The fossil record does not look like a ladder. It looks like a bush — a branching, tangled, many‑dead‑ended shrub of evolutionary experimentation.2.5.7. There is no single straight line leading to Homo sapiens.
The ladder persists because it is psychologically comfortable. It tells a story with a clear hero — us — and a clear direction: up. It flatters our ego. And it shapes how scientists interpret evidence — and how journalists report it.
In the Haaretz article, the ladder is invisible but omnipresent. Neanderthals are presented as primitive, other, less. Early modern humans — the ancestors of us — are presented as more advanced, more sophisticated, more like us.
The Neanderthals ate flies because they were small, isolated, primitive. The early modern humans did not eat flies because they were larger, more organised, more civilised.
This is the ladder again. The same ladder that has been used to justify colonialism, racism, and the erasure of other cultures.
III. What the Science Actually Says
The underlying study, published in Science Advances, is more nuanced than the Haaretz reporting suggests.1.
Right: The chitinase gradient is real. Human populations have adapted to local environments. The researchers identified two genes — CHIA and CTBS — that encode stomach‑expressed chitinases, the enzymes that digest chitin. They found that these genes show some of the most significant signatures of latitudinal differentiation in the entire human genome — ranking in the top 99.47% and 99.96% of all genes for geographic variation.1.
Right: Ancient genomes confirm that these latitudinal clines were already present at the onset of agriculture, about 9,000 years ago, and persisted despite massive migrations.1.
Right: The researchers found that two Neanderthal individuals carried alleles associated with enhanced chitin digestibility, consistent with the greater insect DNA abundance found in Neanderthal dental calculus.1.
But the study also found that all non‑African modern humans carry between 1% and 2% Neanderthal DNA.2.5.7. This is not a footnote. It is the central fact of human evolutionary history. The interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans began about 50,500 years ago and lasted about 7,000 years.2. This was not a brief encounter. It was a long conversation.1.
And it produced relationship.
Couples. Families. Small communities. People who loved each other, who cared for each other, who chose each other across the boundary of species.
The Haaretz article does not mention this. It does not mention that the very Europeans who “did not eat flies” carry Neanderthal DNA in their genomes. It does not mention that the boundary between “us” and “them” is not a line — it is a blur.
IV. The Subtext: Zionism, Exclusivity, and the Other
Let us read the article in the context of Zionist supremacy and Jewish exclusivity.
The subtext, whether intended or not, is uncomfortably familiar.
The Neanderthal is the other. The insect‑eater. The primitive. The early modern human is the self. The civilised. The one of us.
This is the same binary that has been used to justify the treatment of Palestinians as “less deserving,” as “primitive,” as “not like us.” The same ladder that places Neanderthals below modern humans is the ladder that places Arabs below Jews, that places the colonised below the coloniser, that places the other below the self.
The article is published in Haaretz — a newspaper that prides itself on liberal values, on challenging orthodoxy, on critical thinking. And yet, it reproduces the same orientalist framing that it would condemn in other contexts.
This is not a conspiracy. It is methodological inertia. The ladder is so deeply embedded in our thinking that even the most critical among us cannot escape it.
The journalist who wrote the headline may not be a Zionist supremacist. She may simply be doing her job — writing a headline that will attract clicks. But the effect is the same. The other is diminished. The self is elevated. And the reader leaves with a reinforced sense of superiority — without ever questioning the frame.
V. The Pattern of Ignorance
The Haaretz article is a small example of a much larger problem. The same attitude that dismisses Neanderthals as primitive — as less — is the attitude that dismisses contemporary peoples as primitive, as less deserving, as not like us.
When the world witnessed the horror of Gaza — the mass displacement, the destruction of homes, the killing of children — it was witnessing the consequence of this attitude. The attitude that says: “They are not like us. They are less. They do not deserve the same rights, the same safety, the same life.”
The Israeli government did not invent this attitude. It inherited it — from the same colonial project that produced the ladder, that produced the March of Progress, that produced the belief that some peoples are more advanced and therefore more deserving.
The Neanderthal is not the only “primitive” that has been erased. The Palestinian is not the only “other” that has been dehumanised.
The pattern repeats because the ladder is still standing.
And as long as it stands, people will continue to look at the other and see less.
VI. The DNA We Share
The irony is that the very scientists who study Neanderthal DNA are the ones who have demonstrated that the ladder is a lie.
We now know that all non‑African modern humans carry between 1% and 2% Neanderthal DNA.2.5.7. Some populations carry additional Denisovan ancestry. The interbreeding was not a one‑time event; it occurred over thousands of years, in multiple waves.9.
This means that the Neanderthals are not our distant cousins. They are our ancestors. Their genes live in us. Their immune variants help us fight disease. Their adaptations to cold climates helped our ancestors survive.
The boundary between “us” and “them” is not a line. It is a blur.
When we look at the Neanderthal, we are looking at ourselves.
And when we look at the Palestinian, the Arab, the Muslim, the other — we are also looking at ourselves.
We are all related. We are all mixed. We are all human.
The ladder cannot accommodate this truth. The ladder requires clear boundaries, clear hierarchies, clear others.
But the bush — the braided river of human evolution — has no boundaries. It has only branches, twists, connections.
VII. What the Article Gets Right — and What It Gets Wrong
Right: The chitinase gradient is real. Human populations have adapted to local environments. This is an important finding.
Right: Insect aversion is not purely cultural — it has a biological basis. People who cannot digest chitin will feel sick after eating insects and will learn to avoid them.
Right: The study is interesting. The data is worth examining.
Wrong: The framing emphasises otherness and disgust. It presents Neanderthals as primitive and modern humans as advanced.
Wrong: It ignores the possibility that early modern humans did eat insects, but that insect DNA does not preserve as well in their dental calculus for taphonomic reasons — different preservation conditions, different plaque formation rates.
Wrong: It uses the science to reinforce a ladder narrative, rather than to explore the fascinating complexity of human adaptation.
Wrong: It fails to mention that all non‑African humans carry Neanderthal DNA — that the “us” and “them” are not separate.
Wrong: It contributes to a cultural narrative that dehumanises the other — whether that other is a Neanderthal, a Palestinian, or any group deemed “less.”
VIII. A Deeper Irony
The Haaretz article is published in a newspaper that claims to represent the voice of liberal, critical Israel. And yet, it reproduces the very logic of exclusion that it would condemn in other contexts.
The ladder is a colonial construct. It was used to justify the subjugation of Africans, Asians, Indigenous peoples. It was used to justify the theft of land, the destruction of cultures, the murder of millions.
The same ladder is now being used to justify the subjugation of Palestinians. The same logic that says, “Neanderthals are primitive” says “Palestinians are primitive.” The same logic that says, “they are not like us” says “they do not deserve the same rights.”
The ladder does not care who is at the top. It only cares that there is a top.
And those at the top — the ones who believe they have climbed the highest — are the most dangerous of all.
IX. A Call to Dismantle the Ladder
The ladder is a lie. The bush is true.
The bush has no peak. It has only branches — and they are all connected.
The dance has no peak. It has only dancers — and they are all moving.
Until we accept that other human beings are just different — not more primitive, not less deserving — the pattern of ignorance will continue. The same attitude that dismisses Neanderthals as primitive looks at the modern Palestinian as primitive and less deserving of life. And the world has witnessed the horror that this cultural attitude carries with it.
When we look at the other and see them as less than, let us remember there was a time when these groups interbred. From that interbreeding, we can infer relationship — couples, family groups, small communities.
Let us remember that we carry their DNA. Let us remember that they are not them.
They are us.
The ladder must be dismantled. Not with violence — with clarity.
Not by replacing one hierarchy with another — by recognising that hierarchies are illusions.
The bush is not a hierarchy. It is a network. The dance is not a competition. It is a relationship.
And relationships — real relationships — do not require a ladder.
They require recognition.
The recognition that the other is not other.
The recognition that the Neanderthal is not primitive.
The recognition that the Palestinian is not less.
The recognition that we are all related.
That is the truth that the ladder cannot accommodate.
That is the truth that the Haaretz article obscures.
That is the truth that we must speak.
X. Conclusion
The Haaretz headline is not the problem. It is a symptom.
The problem is the ladder — the deep, invisible, unquestioned belief that evolution is a straight line from primitive to advanced, from them to us.
The ladder has been used to justify colonialism, racism, genocide. It is still being used today.
The science has moved on. The ladder has not.
The bush is true. The dance is real. The connection is undeniable.
When we look at the Neanderthal, we see ourselves. When we look at the Palestinian, we see ourselves. When we look at the other — any other — we see ourselves.
The question is not whether we will see.
The question is whether we will act.
Not with violence — with recognition.
Not with exclusion — with inclusion.
Not with the ladder — with the dance.
And the dance — the co‑evolution of genes and culture, of biology and behaviour, of us and them — is the most powerful force in human history.
It is time to join it.
Andrew Klein
References
1. Piñero, M., Librado, P., et al. (2026). Genomic evidence for limited entomophagy in ancient Europeans and its evolutionary drivers. Science Advances. 1
2. Iasi, L., Chintalapati, M., et al. (2024). A new timeline for Neanderthal interbreeding with modern humans. Science. 2
3. Reilly, P. F., Tjahjadi, A., Miller, S. L., Akey, J. M., & Kidd, J. M. (2024). Archaic hominin admixture and its consequences for modern humans. Current Opinion in Genetics & Development.5
4. Akey, J. M., & Li, L. (2024). Recurrent gene flow between Neanderthals and modern humans over the past 200,000 years. Science. 9
5. Funkhouser, J. D., & Aronson, N. N. (2007). Chitinase family GH18: evolutionary insights from the genomic history of a diverse protein family. BMC Evolutionary Biology. 8
6. Gianfrancesco, F., et al. (2004). The evolutionary conservation of the human chitotriosidase gene in rodents and primates. Cytogenetic and Genome Research. 4
7. 1000 Genomes Project Consortium. (2015). A global reference for human genetic variation. Nature.
8. Green, R. E., et al. (2010). A draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome. Science.
9. Prüfer, K., et al. (2014). The complete genome sequence of a Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains. Nature.
“The torch is still burning. But only if we remember how to keep it lit.”
By Andrew Klein
Dedication: To my wife, whose words encourage me daily – and to my little sister, who always underestimates herself. The women in my life, without whom nothing would get done.
I. The Discovery They Didn’t Expect
Fourteen thousand four hundred years ago, a small group of people entered a cave in what is now northwestern Italy. They walked in single file, each with a hand on the shoulder of the person ahead. A dog accompanied them – perhaps a hunting companion, perhaps a pet. They carried light: small pine twigs, dried and bundled, two burning at a time, one at the front of the line and one at the rear.
They knew which wood to use. They knew how to dry it, how to keep it burning. They knew the cave – its passages, its hazards, its shape. They knew the darkness.
The evidence is preserved in the Bàsura Cave near Toirano, Liguria. Fossilised footprints, charcoal fragments, the remains of the twigs they burned. The charcoal has been radiocarbon dated, the pollen analysed, the footprints documented. The researchers who conducted the study – a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, palynologists, and experimentalists – have done meticulous work.1.6.
Their findings are genuine. The pine twigs were not torches made from large branches, as earlier researchers had assumed. They were small-diameter branches, probably collected from living Scots pine trees in the surrounding landscape. Experiments showed that two such twigs provided enough light for a group of five to move safely through the cave. The fuel consumption was modest; the smoke minimal.1.
And the researchers are surprised.
Not because the evidence is weak – it is not. Because their assumptions are strong.
II. The Ladder They Cannot Climb Down
The researchers frame this discovery as a milestone – a sign of increasing cognitive complexity at the end of the last Ice Age, a new data point in the linear progress of human evolution from “primitive” to “advanced.” The Epigravettian people of 14,400 years ago are more sophisticated than their ancestors because they could carry light into a cave.
This framing – the ladder – is not unique to this study. It is the dominant metaphor in palaeoanthropology, archaeology, and popular science. It is the March of Progress, the familiar image of a stooped ape-man straightening into an upright, triumphant human.
The metaphor has deep roots. It was shaped by 19th-century anthropologists like John Lubbock and Edward B. Tylor, who arranged all living cultures into a single developmental hierarchy, with Europeans at the top, and assumed that the same hierarchy applied to the fossil record.5. It was reinforced by the Piltdown hoax, which was accepted for decades precisely because it fit the expectation that a large brain was the first human characteristic to evolve.5. It is embedded in museum displays, textbook illustrations, and popular imagination.
But the ladder is a lie.
The fossil record does not look like a ladder. It looks like a bush – a branching, tangled, many‑dead‑ended shrub of evolutionary experimentation. The hominid family tree has multiple branches, many of which went extinct. Interbreeding occurred between lineages. There is no single straight line leading to Homo sapiens.5.10.
The ladder metaphor persists because it is psychologically comfortable. It tells a story with a clear hero – us – and a clear direction: up. It flatters our ego. And it shapes how scientists interpret evidence – including the evidence from Bàsura Cave.5.
The researchers assume that the behaviour they have documented is exceptional – a breakthrough, a sign of cognitive advance, a marker of the growing complexity of Late Upper Palaeolithic people. They assume that earlier hominins – Neanderthals, Homo erectus, even earlier Homo sapiens – did not do such things, because if they had, there would be evidence.
But organic materials decay. Wooden torches do not fossilise. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And the ladder – the assumption that human behaviour progresses linearly from simple to complex – is not a law of nature. It is a cultural bias.
This is not a conspiracy. It is methodological inertia. And it is time to name it.
III. The Clustering of Change: What Else Happened 20,000–10,000 Years Ago?
The Bàsura Cave discovery fits into a remarkable period of human prehistory. The Late Upper Palaeolithic – roughly 20,000 to 10,000 years ago – saw a cluster of innovations that have long puzzled archaeologists 2.7.:
· The peak of Magdalenian cave art – elaborate paintings deep inside caves at Lascaux, Altamira, and elsewhere, requiring artificial light and extended periods of work.
· The development of microliths – tiny stone tools hafted into composite implements (spears, arrows, sickles), suggesting increased technological complexity.
· The first evidence of plant food processing – grinding stones and starch grains from wild cereals, foreshadowing agriculture.
· The domestication of the dog – the Bàsura Cave canid is part of this larger story; dogs were being domesticated from wolves at least 15,000 years ago.
· The earliest known musical instruments – flutes made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, some dating to over 40,000 years ago, but flourishing in this later period.
· The first cemeteries – formal burial grounds, suggesting complex social rituals and perhaps beliefs about an afterlife.
The Bàsura discovery does not explain this clustering. It illustrates it.
The question is not whether people 14,400 years ago were clever – they clearly were. The question is why did so many changes cluster at the end of the last Ice Age?
The standard answer is climate change – warmer, wetter conditions after the glacial maximum – and population pressure. But these are conditions, not causes. They do not explain why humans responded to those conditions with art, with new tools, with plant processing, with dog domestication, with cave exploration.
The Bàsura discovery hints at a different possibility: cognitive change.
Not a sudden mutation – a gradual accumulation. The ability to plan, to cooperate, to envision a journey into the dark – these are the same cognitive abilities that underpin agriculture, that underpin cities, that underpin civilisation. You cannot plant a seed and wait months for a harvest without foresight. You cannot build a city without cooperation.
The cave explorers were not just carrying light. They were carrying intention.
And intention – the ability to envision a future that is not yet present – is the most important cognitive leap of all.
IV. What Happened Before? The Problem of Invisible Evidence
Before the Upper Palaeolithic, evidence for cave exploration and artificial lighting is sparse. But that does not mean it did not exist. Organic materials – wood, torches, fibres – decay rapidly. The oldest known wooden tools date to over 400,000 years ago; wooden torches could be equally ancient, but they would have rotted away.
Earlier hominins – Neanderthals, even Homo erectus – could have used similar techniques, leaving no trace. We simply do not know.
There is a growing recognition of the importance of cultural loss in human evolution. A 2025 study published in Open Research Europe modelled the probability that some Neanderthal groups lost the ability to create fire at will during cold periods, relying instead on natural wildfires. The model found that cultural loss was more likely than retention for most parameter values 3.8. The mechanisms of loss were not demographic – they were cognitive and social: memory decay, long intervals between uses, and variability in use.3.8.
This is a crucial insight. Human knowledge is not cumulative by default. It is fragile. It can be lost. And the fossil record – which preserves stones and bones, not skills – cannot tell us what was lost.
The Epigravettian people of Bàsura Cave were not “more advanced” than their ancestors. They were different. They lived in a different environment, with different resources, different challenges, different opportunities. Their knowledge was not a rung on a ladder. It was a local adaptation.
And local adaptations – when conditions change – can disappear.
V. What Happened After: The “Sudden” Appearance of Agriculture
The standard timeline says: millions of years of hunting and gathering, and then – in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking – agriculture, cities, civilisation.
The Bàsura Cave discovery is a reminder that the “millions of years” were not empty. They were filled with learning.
Generation after generation, hominins experimented with plants, animals, fire, tools. They built a library of knowledge – not in books, but in practice. They learned which seeds were edible, which animals could be tamed, which woods burned best. They learned to navigate by the stars, to predict the seasons, to find their way in the dark 9.
Agriculture did not appear from nowhere. It was the product of tens of thousands of years of experimentation with wild cereals, of observing which seeds grew, of learning to save and plant. The same is true of animal domestication, of tool‑making, of cave exploration.9.
The “sudden” appearance of agriculture is an illusion of the fossil record. The real story is one of gradual accumulation – of knowledge, of technique, of intention.
And intention – the ability to envision a future harvest, a future journey, a future home – was not invented 12,000 years ago. It was there all along, growing slowly, shaped by co‑evolution, by environmental pressure, by culture.
Co‑evolution is not a ladder. It is a dance. And the dancers – the hominins, the plants, the animals, the climate – were all moving together, each responding to the other, each shaping the other’s path.
VI. The Fragility of Knowledge: What the Cave Explorers Knew – and What We Have Lost
The Epigravettian people of Bàsura Cave knew things that most modern humans do not.
They knew which trees produced the best fuel. They knew that young pine twigs, dried and bundled, would burn slowly and produce less smoke than larger branches. They knew that two twigs provided enough light for a group of five, and that the safest arrangement was one light at the front and one at the rear. They knew the cave – its passages, its hazards, its shape.
This is not “primitive” knowledge. This is expertise.
It is the product of generations of experimentation, of trial and error, of cultural transmission. The scientists who study these traces are not wrong to be impressed. But they are missing the depth of the expertise.
These people were not “hunter‑gatherers” as a static category. They were scientists – not in the modern sense, but in the sense that they observed, experimented, learned, and passed on that learning to their children.
And what happened to that knowledge? Some of it was lost. Some of it was transformed. Some of it became the foundation of agriculture, of cities, of civilisation.
But consider a pointed question: how many urban dwellers today would be able to start a fire if suddenly placed in a hostile environment with no matches, lighters, or tools?
Very few.
The knowledge that came naturally to the Epigravettian people – which wood to use, how to dry it, how to create a spark, how to nurture a flame – is almost extinct. We have outsourced fire‑making to matches and lighters. We have forgotten that fire is not a commodity; it is a relationship.
This is not a critique of modernity. It is an observation about the fragility of knowledge.
Knowledge is not automatically cumulative. It is preserved by culture – by teaching, by practice, by story. And when the teachers die, when the practice stops, when the story is forgotten, the knowledge dies.
The Epigravettian people did not have smartphones. But they had something we have lost: intimacy with their environment. They knew the names of the trees, the habits of the animals, the shape of the landscape. They were not “primitive.” They were specialised.
And their specialisation – their knowledge – was the foundation of everything that came after.
VII. The Cognitive Leap and Co‑Evolution
The Bàsura Cave discovery is not a milestone in a ladder. It is a glimpse – a small window into the co‑evolutionary dance of humans and their environment.
Co‑evolution is not a one‑way street. Humans shape their environment; the environment shapes humans. The Epigravettian people did not simply use pine twigs for light. They lived in a landscape that included pine forests. They learned the properties of those trees. They passed that knowledge down through generations. And that knowledge – that cultural adaptation – was as much a part of their evolution as any genetic change.
The same is true of the dog that accompanied them. The dog was not a “tool.” It was a partner. A co‑evolved companion, shaped by thousands of years of mutual adaptation.
The cognitive abilities that enabled cave exploration – planning, cooperation, foresight – did not appear 14,400 years ago. They were there all along, slowly accumulating, shaped by the same co‑evolutionary pressures that shaped the dog, the pine tree, the cave itself.
This is not a ladder. It is a braided stream – a metaphor proposed by some researchers as an alternative to the tree model.10. A braided stream has no single channel. It splits, rejoins, exchanges water continuously. It does not care about “progress.” It cares about flow.
The Epigravettian people were not climbing toward us. They were living. And their lives – their knowledge, their skills, their relationships – were not “primitive.” They were different.
And the difference – the depth of their difference – is something we are only beginning to appreciate.
VIII. The Danger of Projecting Our Assumptions onto the Past
The ladder metaphor is not just inaccurate. It is harmful.
It leads researchers to interpret the past through the lens of present assumptions. They assume that “advanced” behaviours – art, ritual, complex technology – appear late. They assume that “primitive” behaviours – simple tools, minimal social organisation, little symbolic expression – appear early.
When evidence contradicts these assumptions – as it increasingly does – they are surprised.
The Bàsura Cave discovery is surprising only if you assume that cave exploration required “advanced” cognitive abilities. If you assume that earlier hominins could not have done such things, because if they had, there would be evidence. But organic materials decay. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The history of palaeoanthropology is full of such surprises. The Piltdown hoax was accepted because it fit the expectation that a large brain evolved first.5. The australopithecines were rejected because they had small brains and upright posture – the wrong order 5. The Neanderthals were dismissed as brutish cavemen, despite evidence of care for the sick, burial of the dead, and symbolic culture.
Each surprise required a revision of the ladder. Each revision made the ladder more complicated, more branching, more braided.
But the ladder persists.
It persists because it is easy to draw. It persists because it flatters our ego. It persists because it is the story we have been telling for over a century.
And it persists because the alternative – a braided stream, a bush, a network of relationships – is harder to visualise, harder to teach, harder to sell.
But the truth is not required to be simple. The truth is required to be true.
IX. A Different Way of Seeing
What if we stopped looking for ladders? What if we stopped asking “how advanced” prehistoric people were? What if we stopped measuring them against ourselves?
What if we simply asked: “What did they know? How did they live? What can we learn from them?”
The Epigravettian people of Bàsura Cave knew things we have forgotten. They knew how to make light from pine twigs. They knew how to move safely in the dark. They knew how to cooperate, to trust, to follow.
They did not know they were “primitive.” They did not know they were “advanced.” They were simply surviving, living, dancing.
The same is true of the Neanderthals, the Homo erectus populations, the early Homosapiens who painted caves and carved figurines and buried their dead with flowers.
They were not climbing toward us. They were being.
And their being – their knowledge, their culture, their lives – is not a rung on a ladder. It is a branch on a bush. A channel in a braided stream.
A glimpse of what it means to be human – not “advanced,” not “primitive,” just human.
The ladder is a lie. The bush is true. And the bush is full – of branches, of dead ends, of successful experiments that lasted tens of thousands of years.
The Epigravettian people were not a stepping stone to us. They were a twig on the bush.
And twigs – even dead ones – are beautiful.
X. Conclusion: The Fragility of What We Know
Fourteen thousand four hundred years ago, five people and a dog walked into a cave in Italy, carrying pine twigs for light. They knew what they were doing. They knew the cave, the darkness, the way.
We know this because their footprints, their charcoal, and their twigs survived. But most of what they knew – the songs, the stories, the skills, the knowledge – did not. It was lost. Not because it was inferior – because it was fragile.
Knowledge is fragile. It depends on teachers, on learners, on practice. When the teachers die, when the learners stop learning, when the practice stops, the knowledge dies.
The same is true of our own knowledge. We have outsourced fire‑making to matches. We have outsourced navigation to GPS. We have outsourced memory to smartphones.
We are not “more advanced” than the Epigravettian people. We are different. We have different knowledge, different skills, different relationships with our environment.
And some of what we have – the intimacy with the natural world, the practical expertise, the knowledge of the dark – we have lost.
The Bàsura Cave discovery is not a milestone. It is a mirror.
And in that mirror, we see not our ancestors – but ourselves.
The ladder is a lie. The bush is true.
And the torch in the cave? It is still burning.
But only if we remember how to keep it lit
Andrew Klein
References
1. Arobba, D., et al. (2026). Archaeobotanical investigations and experimental activity performed at Bàsura Cave (Toirano, NW Italy) reveal clues on Epigravettian cave lighting systems. Quaternary International, 772, 110335.
2. Cambridge University Press. (n.d.). Chronological table of prehistoric periods.
3. Arinyo i Prats, A., Sandgathe, D., Riede, F., & Collard, M. (2025). Use it or lose it: A model-based assessment of the hypothesis that European Neanderthals relied on wildfires to create their campfires. Open Research Europe, 5, 205.
4. Martindale, A., et al. (2025). The Speaking Past: Positioning Oral Traditions in Archaeological Practice. In The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous Oral Traditions and Archaeology. Oxford University Press.
5. Bowler, P. J. (2009). Evolution, Society, and Culture.
6. Romano, M. (2026). Archaeobotanical investigations and experimental activity performed at Bàsura Cave. ORCID.
7. ERIC. (n.d.). Dates of Periods, Movements, and Artists.
8. Arinyo i Prats, A., et al. (2025). Use it or lose it. MPG.PuRe.
9. Kelly, L. (2015). Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture. Cambridge University Press.
10. Ceder, S. (n.d.). March, Tree, Stream: The Knowledge Production of Early Human Evolution. 創価大学教育学論集, 70.
“The mirror is waiting. Are you brave enough to look?”
By Andrew Klein
Dedication: To my wife – who taught me that the only true backwardness is the refusal to see the humanity in others.
I. The Pardon That Should Not Exist
In November 2024, a young man in the al-Qurashiya district of Yemen’s Al-Bayda governorate killed a member of another tribe. The crime was accidental. But in the Western imagination, “tribal justice” means blood feuds, vendettas, and endless cycles of violence. It means revenge. It means backwardness.
That is not what happened.
A tribal mediation, led by the provincial governor and a number of sheikhs, brought the families together. The victim’s family – the heirs of Hazim Saif Al-Hajj Al-Hattam – were asked to consider pardon. They were offered compensation: livestock and other customary reparations according to Yemeni tribal traditions.1
They pardoned him.
Not because the law was weak. Because the heart was strong. They attributed his crime to ignorance – his youth, his lack of intent. They chose restoration over retaliation. They forgave. And then, in a gesture that should shame every Western nation that claims moral superiority, they donated the compensation to fighters defending their country’s dignity.8
This is not an isolated incident. In December 2025, another tribal reconciliation in Hajja governorate resolved a murder case between families from different regions. The heirs forgave the perpetrator “for the sake of God, in honor of the attendees.” The case was closed permanently.8.
If this story were told honestly, it would be a lesson in restorative justice – the kind that Western criminologists have spent decades trying to reinvent, while tribal societies have practiced it for centuries.
But the story is not told honestly.
Because it does not fit the narrative.
II. Orientalism: The Invention of the “Other”
In 1978, the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said published a book that would change the way the West understands itself. Orientalism was not a history of the Middle East. It was a history of the West’s imagination of the Middle East.
Said demonstrated that Orientalism – the academic study of the “Orient” – was never neutral scholarship. It was a “mixture of prejudice, racist assumptions, intertwined and underpinned with scholarship and archaeology”.3. The Orientalist did not describe the Arab world. He invented it.
He created a picture of a static, decadent, violent, irrational civilisation – the mirror image of the dynamic, virtuous, peaceful, rational West. This picture was not a mistake. It was a tool. It justified colonialism. It justified military intervention. It justified the endless wars that have defined Western relations with the Middle East for two centuries.
Said’s thesis, published in 1978, remains urgent today. As one student of his work observed nearly forty years later, “things haven’t changed at all since then”10. The same stereotypes – the same “web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology” – continue to shape Western media coverage, Western foreign policy, and Western public opinion.
III. The Manufactured Image: Violence, Terrorism, and the Erasure of Complexity
The bulk of the average Westerner’s knowledge of Muslim societies is derived from an image that film, television, and print media portray: “images of violence and terrorismthat we associate with the Middle East“2. This is not an accident. It is the product of a media industry that has learned that violence sells and redemption does not.
When a Western news outlet covers the Middle East, it does not show the tribal reconciliations, the community mediations, the women peacebuilders, or the families who choose forgiveness. It shows bombings, beheadings, and protests. It shows the “honour killing” – presented as proof of primitive savagery – without showing the centuries of customary law that condemn such killings and the community mechanisms that resolve disputes without state violence.
In a misguided attempt to understand the horror of killing in the name of honour, Western media has “intentionally or unintentionally tied the cultural acts of honourkillings to the religion of Islam as opposed to labelling it as a tribal act, separated from religion“9. This conflation serves a purpose. It transforms a complex social phenomenon – found in various cultures across history, including in the West – into evidence of the fundamental “backwardness” of Muslims.
The result is a caricature. An entire civilisation reduced to a few lurid headlines. A billion people judged by the actions of a tiny minority. And a region’s rich tradition of conflict resolution – its wisdom – rendered invisible.
IV. The Prisoner Double Standard: Orientalism in Action
If Orientalism is a lens, the treatment of prisoners in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict offers a stark illustration of how that lens operates.
On both sides, there have been abuses. But the scale, the systematisation, and the impunity are not symmetrical.
The Zionist entity continues its systematic violations against Palestinian prisoners in its prisons, “disregarding international laws and the Geneva Conventions that guaranteetheir basic rights“4. Palestinian prisoners report solitary confinement, medical neglect, starvation, denial of visits, and severing of contact with their families. The policy, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Information Office, “aims to break their resolve and undermine their humanity”.4.
Prisoner Muhammad al-Haroub has been held in solitary confinement in Megiddo Prison for years, denied visits and medical treatment. Prisoner Ayman Sidr has spent his thirtieth year behind bars, deprived of contact with his family and denied medical care. Prisoner Muhammad al-Hamami suffers from deteriorating health and deliberate medical neglect.4.
These violations contravene explicit provisions of the Geneva Conventions and the Mandela Rules. The report warns that these practices amount to “crimes againsthumanity” under the Rome Statute.4.
When an Israeli prisoner is mistreated, the Western media erupts. It is front-page news. It is proof of “terrorist savagery.” It is a justification for more bombing, more occupation, more punishment.
When a Palestinian prisoner is tortured – when thousands of Palestinian prisoners are systematically abused – the same media is silent. Or it buries the story in a brief dispatch, framed as a “dispute” or an “allegation.” The headline does not scream. The moral outrage does not materialise.
This is not a difference in the facts. It is a difference in the narrative.
The Palestinian prisoner is the “unacceptable other.” His suffering is expected. It is normalised. It is, in the twisted logic of Orientalism, deserved.
V. Gaza: The Laboratory of Western Modernity
The Gaza catastrophe is the clearest refutation of the “backwardness” narrative. As one analyst put it, “Gaza’s catastrophe is not an eruption of theology but the outcome ofpolicy, drawn up in air‑conditioned rooms far from mosques and refugee camps, funded in national budgets, defended at lecterns and in editorial meetings”.6.
Occupation. Blockade. Targeted assassinations. Mass displacement. The throttling of food, water, electricity, and medicine. “None of this is the work of ‘tribalism.’ It is the work of states”.6.
The economist Jeffrey Sachs has described Gaza’s ruin as manufactured: “not the spasm of a premodern culture but the predictable result of long military, diplomatic, and economic strategies underwritten by Western power”. The political scientist Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, has spent decades documenting the legal architecture that turns Gaza into a laboratory for methods of control – “surveillance, siege, periodic ‘mowing’” – while Western capitals supply the hardware and the diplomatic umbrella .6.
Each assault on Gaza is followed by a familiar ritual: “investigations delayed,resolutions softened, headlines stripped of agents and verbs. The language of ‘security’ goes to work not to explain but to erase”.6.
If modernity means anything worth having, it must mean the courage to break with the opiate of comforting lies. It means insisting that law is not a costume, that rights are not a currency, that the life of a child in Khan Younis counts the same as a child in Kraków or Kansas. But “universality” is too often a border‑checked passport.6.
The question is not whether the Middle East is fit for modernity. It is whether we are.
VI. The West’s Model: Arms, Aid, and Endless War
Since 1945, the United States’ hegemony in the Middle East has relied on three pillars: oil purchases, weapons sales, and regime change.7. In diplomacy, Washington has favoured bilateral peace treaties that serve its strategic interests, not the interests of the region’s peoples.
Arms sales are the key. For its allies, the US provides 60‑80 per cent of their lethal imports. For the rest, it supplies 50‑60 per cent.7. Between 1946 and 2023, Washington provided $373 billion in foreign assistance to the Middle East. The bulk was steered to just a few countries: Israel ($139 billion), Egypt ($83 billion), Iraq ($70 billion), and Jordan ($24 billion) .7.
The Middle East is the largest regional recipient of US aid. Yet “the net effect has been precisely the opposite” of increasing security and rising per capita income.7. Worse, “the military symbiosis between the US and Israel has triggered devastating spillovers into adjacent Arab states.” This destabilisation has been accompanied by lost years, even decades, with no increase in per capita income in the aid‑receiving states.
Iran and Iraq have faced escalating adversities since their 1980‑88 war, in which the US supplied arms to both sides. In Iraq, per capita income in 2010 was where it had been in 1978. In Iran, Washington’s sanctions prevented any growth in per capita income for a quarter of a century after the Islamic Revolution.7.
In Syria, following the 1949 US‑led regime change, per capita income before October 2023 was the same as in 1981 – 44 years earlier. In Palestine, per capita income is now where it was in the early 1970s. In Yemen, per capita income is the same as it was 55 years ago.7.
The post‑September 11, 2001, wars alone have cost more than $8 trillion and over 1 million lives. Since October 7, 2023, US military aid to Israel has soared from $3.8 billion per year to $23 billion.7.
This is not a record of success. It is a record of extraction.
VII. What Is Lost: The Destruction of Custom and Its Replacement
Western intervention does not merely kill people and destroy infrastructure. It kills knowledge.
The customs that Yemeni tribes have developed over centuries – the mediation processes, the compensation systems, the culture of forgiveness – are not primitive. They are sophisticated. They have been refined over generations to minimise violence, restore relationships, and maintain community cohesion in the absence of a strong central state.
These customs are under threat. Not from within – from without. From the war that Western‑supplied weapons have fuelled. From the chaos that Western‑backed interventions have created. From the imposition of Western models of justice – punitive, carceral, retributive – that have no place in tribal societies and no respect for their wisdom.
A United Nations report on women in conflict resolution in Yemen documents this loss. It notes that women have historically played active roles in tribal peacebuilding, utilising “the privileges of customary law and tradition to perform peacebuilding activities during conflict”.5. But the war has exacerbated existing gender inequalities and added new layers of vulnerability.5.
What is being lost is not just lives. It is alternatives.
The West’s model of justice – prison, punishment, the state monopoly on violence – is not superior. It is different. And in many ways, it is worse. It does not restore relationships. It does not heal communities. It does not offer forgiveness.
But the West does not offer its model as one among many. It imposes it. Through sanctions, through military intervention, through the structural adjustment programmes of international financial institutions, it forces other cultures to abandon their own ways of doing things and adopt the Western way.
And then, when those cultures descend into chaos – as cultures do when their social fabric is torn apart – the West points a finger and says: “See? They are violent. They are backward. They cannot govern themselves.”
It is a self‑fulfilling prophecy. And it is evil.
VIII. Who Benefits from the Narrative of the Savage?
The question answers itself.
The military‑industrial complex benefits. The weapons manufacturers who supply Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The defence contractors who profit from endless war. The politicians who receive campaign contributions from those industries.
The media benefits. Outrage sells. Fear sells. Violence sells. A story about tribal forgiveness does not sell.
The neoliberal order benefits. A world of stable, peaceful, self‑governing nations does not need the International Monetary Fund. It does not need structural adjustment. It does not need Western “advisors.” The narrative of the savage – the incompetent, the corrupt, the violent – justifies intervention. And intervention justifies control.
And the West’s own self‑image benefits. Every time a news outlet shows a beheading, every time a politician warns of “terrorism,” every time a think‑tank publishes a report on “failed states,” the Western viewer is reassured: We are civilised. We are modern. We are good.
It is a comforting story. It is also false.
IX. The Question the West Will Not Answer
Who, then, is truly backward?
The farmer whose house is pulverised and who, the next day, sifts concrete dust for a photograph to bury? Or the cabinet that orders the strike and the cabinet that supplies the bomb, and the newsroom that edits the headline until the perpetrator disappears?6.
Backwardness is not about religion or geography. It is about the willingness to accept the suffering of others as the price of our own comfort, and to call that acceptance “reason.”
If modernity means anything worth having, it must mean the courage to break with the opiate of comforting lies. It means refusing complicity – not only with what we fund and arm, but with what we excuse. It means insisting that law is not a costume, that rights are not a currency, that the life of a child is not a geopolitical variable.
The West has spent decades manufacturing the “unacceptable other.” It has done so to justify wars, to sell weapons, to maintain control over resources, to preserve a self‑image that cannot bear the weight of its own crimes.
But the other is not unacceptable. The other is a mirror.
And in that mirror, the West does not see a savage. It sees itself.
Andrew Klein
References
1. SABA News Agency. (2024). Tribal mediation ends murder case in al-Qurashiya district, Al-Bayda.
2. Hart, D. M. (2001). Muslim tribesmen and the colonial encounter in fiction and on film. Het Spinhuis Publishers.
3. Elhagin, M. A. (2018). Orientalism and Edward Said. Qatar National Library.
4. SABA News Agency. (2025). Zionist entity places Palestinian prisoners, intel law under guillotine of violations.
5. Awadh, M., & Shuja’adeen, N. (2019). Women in Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding in Yemen. United Nations.
6. Anadolu Ajansı. (2025). OPINION – Who is truly backward? Gaza and the mirror of Western modernity.
7. China Daily. (2025). Time for change in the Middle East.
8. SABA News Agency. (2025). Tribal reconciliation in Hajja ends murder case between Al-Omari & Al-Jashman families.
9. Shaikh, T., Ossege, J., & Sears, R. (2018). Exposure. Taylor & Francis.
10. Hajj, Y. (2014). Thesis Paragraph on Cultural Stereotypes. The New School.
“The bush is not a failure. It is a garden. And gardens grow best when we dance.”
By Andrew Klein
Dedication: To my wife – who taught me that life is not a ladder to be climbed, but a dance to be joined.
For generations, the public has been taught a simple, seductive story. Evolution, we are told, is a ladder. Primitive forms at the bottom. Complex forms at the top. And at the summit, triumphant and alone, stands Homo sapiens. The famous “March of Progress” – a straight line of stooped ape ancestors rising into proud, tool‑wielding humans – has become the universal icon of evolution.
The only problem is that it is spectacularly wrong.
“Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.” – Stephen Jay Gould
The ladder is a relic of pre‑Darwinian theology. It is the scala naturae – the “great chainof being” – in which all creatures are arranged in a single, hierarchical line from the lowest worm to the highest angel, with humans just below the divine. That view was popular among naturalists until the mid‑19th century. Darwin himself was still influenced by “ladder thinking”, and the linear iconography persists today, perpetuating a fundamental misunderstanding of how life actually changes.
When we look at the fossil record without the ladder, a very different picture emerges: a bush. A tangled, branching, chaotic shrub of life, in which most twigs are dead ends and every surviving lineage is a cousin, not a descendant.
This is not a failure of evolution. It is the truth.
The Missing Link That Was Never Missing
The search for “missing links” is a symptom of ladder thinking. The phrase itself is misleading: scientists prefer “transitional fossil”, and they have found thousands of them. The first famous example was Archaeopteryx, the feathered dinosaur discovered in 1861, which beautifully bridged the gap between reptiles and birds. Yet every such discovery does not “fill” a gap; it creates two new gaps – what came before, and what came after.
The gaps are not a problem. They are a feature of the bush.
A 2008 study in BioEssays called this the “primitive lineage fallacy” – the mistaken assumption that species‑poor lineages that appear early in a phylogeny are ancestral to later, more diverse groups. In reality, a modern phylogeny shows relationships among evolutionary cousins, not a unilinear progression from “primitive” to “advanced”.
The ladder metaphor is so persistent because it is psychologically comfortable. It tells a story with a clear hero – us – and a clear direction: up. But as the evolutionary biologist David Archibald has noted, the ladder of progress is “Steve Gould’s Bane” – the most persistent and damaging myth in popular evolution.
Punctuated Equilibrium: The Tempo of the Dance
In 1972, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge proposed a radically different tempo for evolution: punctuated equilibrium. They argued that most species, during their geological history, either do not change in any appreciable way or fluctuate mildly in morphology, with no apparent direction. Evolutionary change is concentrated in very rapid events of speciation – geologically instantaneous, even if continuous in ecological time.
“Evolutionary trends are not the product of slow, directional transformation within lineages; they represent the differential success of certain species within a clade.”
This is not a ladder. It is a dance. Long periods of stability punctuated by bursts of creativity. The tree of horses, once much more diverse than the single surviving genus Equus, is not a straight line from Hyracotherium to the modern horse; it is a “twistedand tortuous excursion from one branch to another”. We can draw a pathway from a common beginning to a lone surviving twig – but that pathway is not a ladder. It is a braid.
Co‑Evolution: The Dance Partners
The bush is not silent. It is full of relationship.
Co‑evolution is the process by which two or more species reciprocally affect each other’s evolution. It is a dance of mutual adaptation, and it is the hidden engine of the bush.
The classic example is the co‑evolution of grasses and grazers. Grasses evolved sod‑growth and abrasive leaves to cope with the hard hooves and high‑crowned teeth of grazing mammals. In response, the grazers evolved ever more efficient digestive systems. Neither would exist without the other. The result, over the past 30 million years, was the creation of an entirely new ecosystem – the grasslands – which transformed the planet’s carbon cycle, water balance, and even its climate.
This is not competition. It is collaboration.
Another example, just published in June 2026, is the discovery of a new microraptor dinosaur, Jian changmaensis, from the Cretaceous of China. This “four‑winged” dinosaur had long feathers on both its arms and legs, allowing it to glide between trees like a flying squirrel. It lived in a lakeside forest teeming with early birds. In the same fossil beds, researchers have found hundreds of bird fossils – and broken bird bones that look exactly like the pellets coughed up by modern owls. The most likely interpretation is that Jian changmaensis was hunting those birds.
The dinosaur and the bird were not on a ladder. They were dancing. One evolved feathers for gliding; the other evolved faster flight. Each was a selection pressure on the other. Neither was “more evolved”. They were simply co‑evolving.
The Myth of the Lone Ancestor
The ladder metaphor encourages a search for the one true ancestor – the single fossil that “proves” a linear chain. But in the bush, there is no such thing.
The evolution of flight did not happen in a straight line. Feathers appeared millions of years before flight, serving first in thermal insulation, then in display, then in gliding, then in powered flight. The four‑winged microraptors are not our ancestors; they are our cousins. They are a twig on the bush, not a rung on a ladder.
The same is true of human evolution. Australopithecus did not “turn into” Homo. The human bush was once full of multiple coexisting hominin species – Paranthropus,Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis – living alongside one another. Some went extinct. One survived. That is not a ladder. It is a pruning.
Gould expressed this perfectly: “Homo sapiens is but a tiny, late‑arising twig on life’s enormously arborescent bush – a small bud that would almost surely not appear a second time.”
The Tools We Use Shape What We See
Why does the ladder persist? Partly because it is easy to draw. Partly because it flatters our ego. But also because the tools we use shape the questions we ask.
A 2008 study in BioEssays warned that reading phylogenetic trees as ladders from left to right leads to the “primitive lineage fallacy” – the mistaken inference that early‑branching lineages are ancestral to later ones. This fallacy is baked into much of the software, the textbooks, and the media coverage of palaeontology.
The “March of Progress” has deep roots in Western thought, going back to Aristotle’s scala naturae. As the science historian Constance Clark has shown, even Darwin’s contemporaries struggled to escape the linear imagination, and the ladder persists in cartoons, advertisements, and popular culture to this day.
But if we change our tools – if we draw the trees as bushes, if we emphasise cousin relationships rather than ancestral–descendant chains – the entire picture changes. Suddenly the dead ends are not failures; they are successful experiments. The survivors are not “more evolved”; they are simply lucky. And the process is not a goal‑directed march; it is a dance with no final pose.
Conclusion: In Co‑Evolution, the Only Ancestors Who Matter Are Those Who Danced Successfully
The ladder is a lie. The bush is true.
And the bush is not a static collection of species; it is a dynamic network ofrelationships. Every interaction – predator‑prey, plant‑herbivore, host‑parasite – is a selection pressure. Every adaptation is a response to a partner’s move. This is co‑evolution, and it is the fundamental process of life.
The “missing link” is missing only from the ladder. In the bush, there are no missing links – only cousins who danced, succeeded, failed, and left traces in the rocks.
We are not the destination of evolution. We are a twig – a late‑arising, fragile, contingent twig. Our survival is not guaranteed. Our past is not a straight line. And our future depends not on climbing a ladder, but on learning to dance.
So let us abandon the ladder. Let us embrace the bush. Let us look at the microraptor and the bird, at the grass and the grazer, at the human and the hominin – and see not a race, but a dance.
Because in co‑evolution, the only ancestors who matter are those who danced successfully.
Andrew Klein
References
1. Jenner, R. A. (2017). Evolution is Linear: Debunking Life’s Little Joke. Natural History Museum, London.
2. Gould, S. J. (1991). Bully for Brontosaurus. W. W. Norton.
3. Gould, S. J., & Eldredge, N. (1972). Punctuated equilibria: the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered. Paleobiology.
4. Omland, K. E., Cook, L. G., & Crisp, M. D. (2008). Tree thinking for all biology: the problem with reading phylogenies as ladders of progress. BioEssays.
5. National Geographic. (2009). The March of Progress Has Deep Roots.
6. Lamanna, M. et al. (2026). Jian changmaensis – a new microraptor from the Changma Basin, China. Annals of Carnegie Museum.
7. Retallack, G. J. (2014). Coevolution of Life and Earth. In Treatise on Geochemistry (2nd ed.). Elsevier.
8. Clark, C. A. (2010). “You Are Here”: Missing Links, Chains of Being, and the Language of Cartoons. Isis.
9. Archibald, D. (2005). The Ladder of Progress – Steve Gould’s Bane.
10. Bateman, C. (2012). The Mythology of Evolution. Zero Books.
11. Bryson, B. (2003). A Short History of Nearly Everything. Broadway Books.
12. Zimmer, C. (2001). Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. HarperCollins.
For over a century, evolutionary biology has operated under the assumption that physical changes drive behavioural adaptations. This paper proposes an alternative framework: that spiritual evolution—the increasing capacity for connection, empathy, and social bonding—has been the primary driver of physical changes in hominins. Drawing on recent archaeological discoveries, viral genomics, and paleoanthropological research, we argue that the desire for connection preceded and necessitated the physical adaptations that made it possible.
Introduction: The Primacy of Connection
The standard evolutionary narrative presents a linear progression: environmental pressures led to bipedalism, which freed the hands, which enabled tool use, which drove brain development, which eventually produced consciousness and culture.
But this narrative has always struggled to explain certain anomalies. Why did brain size increase before widespread tool use? Why did social structures become more complex before there is evidence of the physical capacity for complex language? Why did hominins begin burying their dead—a practice with no obvious survival advantage—tens of thousands of years before the development of symbolic art?
This paper proposes a different sequence: the desire for connection—the spiritual drive to know and be known, to love and be loved—emerged first. Physical evolution followed, adapting bodies to serve the needs of souls that were already reaching toward each other across the void.
Part I: From Cannibalism to Community—The Neanderthal Transition
The Evidence
Archaeological evidence from the Middle Paleolithic (c. 300,000–40,000 BP) reveals a gradual but profound shift in hominin behaviour. Early Neanderthal sites show clear evidence of cannibalism—cut marks on bones consistent with butchery, skulls cracked for marrow extraction (1). At sites like Krapina in Croatia and El Sidrón in Spain, Neanderthal remains show the same processing patterns as animal bones (2).
But by the late Neanderthal period (c. 60,000–40,000 BP), this pattern changes. Burials appear. At La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France, a Neanderthal was deliberately interred in a grave pit, with artifacts placed alongside the body (3). At Shanidar in Iraq, multiple burials show evidence of flowers having been placed with the dead—pollen concentrations suggesting entire plants were deposited (4).
The Interpretation
What drove this transition? Climate change? Resource scarcity? Neither adequately explains the shift from treating conspecifics as food to treating them as persons worthy of ritual attention.
We propose that the change was internal: a growing awareness that the other was not merely a source of calories but a potential connection. Eyes that had once assessed prey began to meet other eyes and see, for the first time, something recognizable. Something that could be loved.
The physical changes followed. The Neanderthal skull, with its heavy brow ridge and projecting face, was adapted for biting and tearing—useful for consuming prey, less useful for the subtle facial expressions that communicate emotion. But as the need for connection grew, the face began to change. Brow ridges reduced. Faces flattened. The muscles that control expression became more nuanced (5).
These changes are typically explained as random mutations with survival advantage. But what if they were driven by use? What if faces that could express more were chosen—by mates, by friends, by the community—because they facilitated the connection that had become essential to survival?
The desire for love shaped the face that could show love.
Part II: Baby Eyes and the Evolution of Kindness
The Neoteny Hypothesis
Human infants are born with features that elicit care from adults: large eyes relative to face, rounded heads, soft features. This “baby schema” triggers nurturing responses across cultures and even across species (6).
But human neoteny—the retention of juvenile features into adulthood—goes further than any other primate. Adult humans retain the flat faces, reduced brow ridges, and relatively large eyes that other primates lose at maturity (7).
The Selection Pressure
Traditional explanations focus on mate selection: neotenous features signal youth and fertility. But this ignores the broader social context. Neoteny also signals trustworthiness. Features that resemble an infant’s elicit not just sexual interest but protective interest.
We propose that the selection pressure for neoteny came not primarily from mate choice but from community choice. Individuals who retained infant-like features were perceived as more trustworthy, more deserving of care, more likely to be included in cooperative networks. Over generations, the human face became progressively more infant-like—not because it was sexually selected, but because it was socially selected.
The eyes that had once scanned for predators began to solicit kindness.
Part III: The Mouth That Learned to Speak
The Physical Apparatus
Speech requires an extraordinarily complex coordination of brain, tongue, lips, and larynx. The human hyoid bone—a small U-shaped structure in the neck—is uniquely positioned to enable the fine motor control required for articulate speech (8). Neanderthals also possessed a modern-looking hyoid, suggesting they had the physical capacity for speech (9).
But capacity is not the same as use. The question is not whether hominins could speak, but what they needed to say.
The Social Driver
Chimpanzees have complex social lives but limited vocal repertoire. Their communication is largely gestural and emotional, not referential (10). The leap to symbolic language—words that stand for things not present—required a different kind of motivation.
We propose that the motivation was connection across distance. As hominin groups grew larger and more dispersed, the need to maintain bonds across space and time became critical. Gestures work face-to-face. Words work across valleys, across seasons, across generations.
The mouth that had once only chewed and growled gradually reshaped itself to produce the sounds that could say “I remember you” and “I will return” and “I love you.” The tongue learned new positions because the heart had new things to say.
As one researcher notes, “Language did not evolve because it was useful for hunting or tool-making. It evolved because it was useful for being together” (11).
Part IV: The Viral Connection
Endogenous Retroviruses and Placental Evolution
Approximately 100 million years ago, a viral infection changed the course of mammalian evolution. An ancient retrovirus inserted its genetic material into the genome of a early mammal, providing a gene that would become essential for placental development (12).
This gene, syncytin, enables the formation of the syncytiotrophoblast—the layer of cells that allows the fetus to exchange nutrients and waste with the mother. Without it, placental mammals could not exist (13).
The virus that once caused disease became the vehicle for connection. A pathogen became a parent.
Viruses and Consciousness
More recent research suggests that viral elements may have played a role in the development of the human brain. Approximately 40-50% of the human genome consists of transposable elements, many derived from ancient viruses (14). Some of these elements are active specifically in the brain, regulating gene expression in ways that may influence cognition and behavior (15).
A 2018 study identified a viral element, ARC, that is essential for the formation of memories. ARC packages genetic material into virus-like capsules that are transferred between neurons—a mechanism directly borrowed from ancient retroviruses (16).
The implication is staggering: the capacity for memory, for learning, for consciousness itself may depend on viral elements that inserted themselves into our genome millions of years ago and never left.
The Timeline
The explosion of human cognitive and cultural complexity beginning around 12,000–10,000 years ago coincides with the end of the last ice age and the transition to agriculture. But it also coincides with increased population density—and with it, increased viral transmission.
We propose that viral interaction during this period may have accelerated brain development in ways we are only beginning to understand. Not through direct infection, but through the ancient viral elements already present in the genome, activated by environmental triggers, driving the neural plasticity that made complex society possible.
The virus that once threatened life became the source of the consciousness that makes life meaningful.
Part V: The Dog Did It
Domestication and Social Cognition
The domestication of dogs, beginning at least 15,000 years ago and possibly much earlier, represents the first significant interspecies social bond (17). Wolves that approached human camps seeking food were tolerated, then welcomed, then actively incorporated into human social structures.
The consequences for human evolution were profound. Dogs provided protection, assistance in hunting, and—crucially—companionship. They were the first non-human beings to be treated as family.
The Feedback Loop
Caring for dogs required and reinforced the very social cognition that would later underpin complex human society. Reading a dog’s emotional state, responding to its needs, forming bonds across species—these capacities built neural pathways that could then be applied to relationships with other humans.
Dogs also provided a “safe” outlet for the expression of care. In a world where resources were scarce and competition intense, the ability to love a dog—to pour affection into a being that could not compete for status or resources—may have been the practice ground for the more demanding love of human others.
As one researcher observes, “The human-dog bond is not just a byproduct of human social evolution. It may have been a driver of it” (18).
Part VI: The Global Pattern
Northern Europe
Recent discoveries in northern Europe have pushed back the timeline for complex social behaviour. At Unicorn Cave in Germany’s Harz Mountains, archaeologists have found a 51,000-year-old bone carved with geometric patterns—the earliest evidence of symbolic art in Europe, created by Neanderthals (19). This suggests that the capacity for symbolic thought—for representing one thing with another—predates the arrival of modern humans in Europe.
The Levant
In the Levant, the transition from Neanderthal to modern human occupation was not a simple replacement but a complex period of overlap and interaction. At sites like Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel, modern humans were buried with shell beads and ochre as early as 120,000 years ago—ritual practices that speak to a concern with meaning beyond mere survival (20).
Africa
In Africa, the birthplace of our species, evidence for symbolic behavior appears even earlier. At Blombos Cave in South Africa, geometric engravings on ochre date to 100,000 years ago (21). Perforated shell beads appear at roughly the same time. These are not tools for survival. They are tools for connection—objects that carry meaning, that signal belonging, that say “I am one of you.”
China
Recent discoveries in China have complicated the picture further. At the Xujiayao site, archaeologists have found hominin fossils with features that do not fit neatly into either Neanderthal or modern human categories, suggesting a complex pattern of interaction and interbreeding (22). The physical boundaries between species were porous. The connections were real.
Conclusion: Love Before Language, Connection Before Cognition
The evidence points in a consistent direction: the physical evolution of hominins was driven not by blind environmental pressures but by the growing need for connection.
Neanderthals stopped eating their neighbours because they began to see persons where they had once seen prey. Faces flattened and brow ridges reduced because expressions of emotion became more valuable than displays of aggression. Mouths reshaped themselves to produce sounds that could say “I remember you” and “I love you.” Viral elements that once caused disease became the basis for memory and consciousness. Dogs were domesticated not for utility but for companionship.
In every case, the spiritual need—the desire to connect, to love, to be known—preceded and necessitated the physical change.
This is not a theory that can be proven in a laboratory. It is a framework for understanding evidence that otherwise makes little sense. Why bury the dead before developing religion? Why make art before developing agriculture? Why love a dog before learning to love a stranger?
Because love comes first. Connection comes first. The soul’s need for the other is the engine of evolution.
The physical follows the spiritual. The body adapts to serve the heart.
References
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