The Human Animal

Richard D. Fuerle, Erectus Walks Amongst Us, Spooner Press, 2008, 340 pp.

Over the past 10 or 15 years, it has become so much more difficult to find mainstream publishers for race-realist scholarship, that in retrospect the 1990s appear to be a period of great openness. That was when commercial and academic houses accepted the ground-breaking work of Arthur Jensen, Richard Lynn, Michael Levin, Phil Rushton, and Charles Murray. Libraries stocked their books and newspapers reviewed them. Today, there are still a few specialized journals that accept dissident scholarship but book publishers have grown markedly more timid, and in the new decade even Arthur Jensen — one of the most respected figures in the social sciences — has had trouble getting books published.

This does not mean race-realist scholarship has come to an end, only that there is more self-publishing and the use of small, specialty houses like Washington Summit Press. There may even be more good work than ever, and in increasingly broad areas. Richard Lynn continues to write seminal books on the role of IQ in the success and failure of nations, and Michael Hart recently wrote an illuminating account of human history that explicitly considers racial differences in average intelligence.

Richard D. Fuerle’s Erectus Walks Among Us is another example of race-realist scholarship that could not have found a place in today’s mainstream. It suffers from the short-comings of self-published books, but it is a remarkable excursion into some of the more obscure and taboo corners of the social sciences.

Erectus Walks Among Us is several books in one, all written from a firmly race-realist perspective. It is a primer on evolution and genetics, a catalog of how populations differ, an introduction to sociobiology and the concept of genetic interests, and a plea for white survival. At its core is a sustained argument against the now generally accepted theory that modern man appeared in Africa 50,000 to 90,000 years ago, and went on to replace the primitive humans then found on the other continents.

Mr. Fuerle is not a paleoanthropologist — he is a polymath with degrees in math, law, economics, physics and chemistry — but this may be an advantage. He does not share the anti-racist prejudices so common among social scientists, and he has written a clear and engaging book that benefits greatly from generous use of graphs and photographs, almost all in color.

Evolution

Because this book is about the emergence of the races of man, it includes a good survey of what is known about our origins. Mr. Fuerle notes that according to surveys, only 40 percent of Americans accept the theory of evolution — a figure lower than in any European country — but evolution is the book’s fundamental perspective. Evolutionists generally accept that perhaps the single greatest step forward in our lineage — bipedalism — took place about 10 million years ago. When proto-humans started walking on their hind legs it freed their hands for investigating surroundings, making tools, and carrying things.

Australopithecus, who lived about four million years ago, is considered the last bipedal ape in our lineage, and he gave rise some two million years ago to Homo habilis, the first member of the genus Homo. Habilis made primitive tools and may have had rudimentary speech. He, in turn, evolved into Homo erectus, whose fossilized variants have been found in Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia. What may be a local variant of erectus, the three-feet-tall Homo floriensisor “hobbit,” may have lived on some Pacific islands as recently as 18,000 years ago, overlapping with modern humans.

Mr. Fuerle takes a particular interest in the distant ancestors of whites, among whom he includes Neanderthal man, who lived in Europe from about 300,000 to 30,000 years ago. Neanderthal was adapted to the cold, with a stocky, heat-retaining build and short fingers and feet. He was also much stronger than modern man, and well adapted for hunting large animals. His skull capacity was greater than modern man, but he was less intelligent because he had a less efficient brain. His skin was white, and Mr. Fuerle argues that he could probably pass for a burly, rough-looking European if he were to appear today.

There is much debate as to whether there was intermixture between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, the immediate ancestors of Caucasians. The two groups coexisted in the same territory for thousands of years, and Mr. Fuerle marshals evidence to support the view that Neanderthal man contributed at least some alleles (distinctive forms of genes) to modern Europeans.

Mr. Fuerle suspects that the two groups may have managed to share territory for such a long time because their hunting strategies may have been different, with Neanderthal hunting by night and Cro-Magnon hunting the same animals by day. In a one-on-one fight, the more powerful Neanderthal would have routed the slighter Cro-Magnon, but the newcomers were smarter and more generalized: less adapted to the cold and for hunting. When the mammoths and other large animals went extinct, Neanderthal went extinct along with them while Cro-Magnon found other ways to survive.

This was a demonstration of one of a dozen or so rules of evolution, which Mr. Fuerle explains with considerable clarity: the significance of specialized vs. generalized populations. When an environment is stable for a long time, species tend to specialize, and when the environment is unstable they tend to stay general. A tropical environment is both rich in energy and stable throughout the year, and this encourages a large number of specialized, even bizarre plants and animals that exploit narrow niches. Temperate areas, where the seasonal differences in temperature are the greatest, pose the greatest challenge to survival, and animals tend to be generalists. Further north, the environment is harsh but also relatively stable because it is cold all the time. Here we find animals like the polar bear and arctic fox that are highly cold-adapted and much more specialized than their cousins in temperate regions.

Man is less specialized than his closest simian kin. He does not have the long arms or massive teeth and jaws of apes, is not covered with protective fur, nor can he swing through trees. His foot, however, has become specialized for support only, and has lost its ability to grasp things, which apes still retain.

Mr. Fuerle argues that human races also differ in levels of specialization, with Africans adapted to the heat, Asians adapted to the cold, and whites the most generalized. The skulls of Africans, for example, are narrow, front to back, which makes it easier to cool the brain whereas Asian skulls are more spherical, thus retaining heat by offering less surface area per unit volume. European skulls are intermediate. Africans have wooly hair that wicks sweat away from the head, also helping to cool the brain, and have dark skin to protect against the sun. They are also long-limbed, which makes for better cooling. Asians are stockier, for better heat retention, and have fat evenly distributed around their bodies, which protects against cold and gives them a “yellow” appearance. Again, Europeans are intermediate.

Mr. Fuerle cites the general rule that it is much easier for generalists to evolve into specialists than the other way around. He says it would take much longer to breed a wolf from a Chihuahua than a Chihuahua from a wolf. This is one of the arguments he makes later against the Out of Africa theory: that it would be unusual for heat-specialized Africans to have evolved into generalized Europeans or cold-specialized Asians.

Climate is undoubtedly the single most important environmental influence on evolution, and it is commonly argued that the races that evolved in the north were subjected to harsh requirements that put a premium on high intelligence. The two most recent ice ages were a particularly demanding test.

A huge eruption some 73,000 years ago of a volcano now known as Toba on the island of Sumatra sent so much ash into the air that it blocked out the sun and caused a sharp drop in temperature. Evaporating sea water fell as snow that remained on land, and this lowered sea levels. The resulting land bridges made it possible for early man to migrate to areas now cut off by the sea. The sudden drop in temperature also killed many inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Europe, but had much less effect on the tropics. This lead to a considerable boost in the intelligence of the surviving northern populations.

Another ice age that lasted from about 30,000 to 12,000 years ago had a similar effect: opening land bridges and severely winnowing northern populations for intelligence. The effects may not have been so catastrophic as the earlier ice age, however, because by this time humans could control fire and make clothing.

Mr. Fuerle points out that evolution — whether for intelligence or for any other trait — is not a continual process. An organism can evolve to a more or less optimal state, and if the environment holds steady it need not change. Sharks, for example, evolved into very efficient, even optimal predators, and have remained essentially unchanged for millions of years.

Why don’t animals constantly improve? Because improvements are not without costs. More of one trait means less of something else. More fast-twitch muscle means more speed and power but less slow-twitch muscle, which means less endurance.

Greater intelligence comes at a particularly high price; the brain is metabolically the most expensive part of the human body. Although it accounts for only two percent of adult body weight, it uses 20 percent of the body’s energy, making it 22 times more costly than skeletal muscle. In an infant, whose brain is already 25 percent of its adult size even though its body is only 5 percent of its adult size, the brain consumes an astonishing 75 percent of the entire body’s energy. Evolution does not care about intelligence per se; only reproduction. It gave humans enough intelligence to reproduce successfully, but — within the broad limits of natural variation — no more than necessary.

This is why other animals did not evolve huge, expensive brains. A lion needs no more intelligence than it already has to catch prey. Greater intelligence would mean a sacrifice in speed or some other quality that is more important to lions than intelligence.

Mr. Fuerle points out that intelligence can decline if the environment changes in ways that make it less necessary. This is thought to have happened to humans 12,000 years ago with the beginning of agriculture. Hunters need cunning and prowess whereas farmers need only steady effort, so although the transition to agriculture led to a huge increase in population, human intelligence and physical stature declined.

The same thing can happen in other species. When wild dogs were domesticated their brains shrank because they could depend on humans to feed them. Wolves and foxes, which must hunt for a living, are smarter than domesticated dogs, and when cats go feral they develop larger brains to cope with the challenges of fending for themselves.

There is another reason why improvement is slow or even comes to a stop in an ancient species in a stable environment. As Mr. Fuerle explains, beneficial mutations are increasingly unlikely because most of them have already been tried and retained. Harmful mutations drop out of the population because their carriers are less likely to survive and reproduce, but this means they can keep recurring.

Race Differences

It is therefore the different environments in which the races evolved that gave rise to racial differences in both physiology and behavior. Mr. Fuerle has probably collected the most extensive catalog of physical racial differences since Prof. John Baker of Oxford wrote his magisterial work Race in 1974, and some of the most interesting have to do with the skull. Africans tend to have heavy jaws and exhibit prognathism, which means their jaws protrude forward. This is considered a primitive trait left over from when our most effective weapon was our teeth, which, in order to be effective, had to be able to cut a swath that extended out in front of the face. Apes, for example, have extended jaws that let them meet an enemy with their teeth rather than their faces.

Africans also have a larger post-orbital constriction than whites, and that of Asians is smaller. The constriction is a pair of left-right dents in the skull just behind the eyes that leave room for jaw muscles. The larger the constriction, the larger the chewing muscles and the more powerful the bite, but less room is left for the forebrain. Africans also have eyes set wider apart than Europeans or Asians.

Another racial difference is in the location of the foramen magnum, the large hole in the skull, through which the spinal cord attaches to the brain. Since man walks upright, the hole is at the base of the skull, whereas in animals that go on all fours the hole is at the back. Apes therefore have the foramen magnum farther back in the skull than humans, and in Africans, it is slightly farther back than in Eurasians.

The skull is made up of several large bones that join along lines called sutures. At birth the sutures are not fully closed, and they close earlier in blacks than in Eurasians.

There are important racial differences in soft tissue as well as bone. The three outer layers of the brain are called the supragranular layers, and they increase in thickness from the lower to the higher animals. Mr. Fuerle reports that the supragranular layers are 15 percent thinner in blacks than in whites.

One important human characteristic is that the sclera of the eyes (the area around the pupils) is white. This contrasts with dark pupils and makes it easy to tell where a person is looking, and eye contact is a subtle and important form of human communication. Non-human primates have dark sclera. Some African and Australian aboriginal populations are reported to have yellowish sclera due to the presence of melanin.

High levels of melanin in tropical peoples are usually attributed to the need to block harmful radiation from the sun, but it may serve another purpose. It appears to act as a bacteriocide and fungicide, which may have been particularly useful in the damp of the tropics, and blacks are more resistant than whites to skin diseases.

The light skin of Europeans is generally explained by the need to process sunlight — which would be blocked by dark skin — and produce vitamin D. Why, in that case, do Eskimos not have the lightest skin? Mr. Fuerle explains that they get vitamin D from fish, and that slightly darker skin protects from cosmic radiation in the Arctic and from ultraviolet rays reflected from snow.

One of the most obvious racial differences is in shape of the nose. Narrow, long noses evolved where the air was cold or dry, so that it could be warmed or moistened before it entered the lungs. Asian noses are flatter to the face than European noses as a protection against the cold. Apes have little of what could be called a nose, and the nostrils open almost directly onto the muzzle.

Mr. Fuerle points out that Somalis and Ethiopians are the most Caucasian-looking of sub-Saharan Africans, and explains that this is because the horn of Africa has long been easily accessible to populations from outside the continent. He argues that non-Africans entering from Asia mixed with the most easily-contacted Africans, giving them less typically African features.

Although this book is primarily concerned with differences between the major races of man, Mr. Fuerle has interesting observations about the traits of such sub-groups as Australian Aborigines, Andaman Islanders, and Bushmen, including speculation as to how those traits might have arisen.

Mr. Fuerle has compiled a tremendous amount of racial/anthropological data but believes there is much more: “Because research on racial differences, except where they are medically important, has been effectively outlawed for at least the last 50 years, there are no doubt thousands of other racial differences that have not been discovered or published.”

Mr. Fuerle notes that despite the popular contention that race is a myth, there is a magazine called Ethnicity and Health that is devoted to racial differences in medicine. It has been found, for example, that blacks get lung cancer at far higher rates than whites even when they smoke the same amount. Mr. Fuerle speculates that this may be because whites spent many thousands of years living in smoky caves, whereas Africans either did not need fire or could make fires in the open air and therefore did not build up a tolerance for smoke.

One of the chapters of Erectus Walks Amongst Us is devoted to racial differences in intelligence and behavior. Mr. Fuerle covers this ground capably and thoroughly, including such details as the fact that American whites save 20 percent more than blacks even when they have the same incomes.

Some of this book’s most provocative observations, however, are about mating. An essential difference in the environments in which blacks and whites evolved, writes Mr. Fuerle, is that in the tropics there was so much food that a woman could, if necessary, rear a child to maturity without the help of a man. In the harsher north, a woman needed a hunter — a man — to provide for her and her children. This led to pair bonding, because children could not survive without it, and the tendency to bond was passed to future generations. Africans, on the other hand, evolved less pair bonding because it was less necessary.

In primates with little pair bonding, there can be much promiscuity. Males therefore compete with each other not only in the number of females they mate with but in the amount of sperm they produce, because if a female has mated with several males, the one that deposits the most sperm has an advantage. When chimpanzee females are in heat they are extremely promiscuous. As a consequence, male chimpanzees have evolved the largest ratio of testicle weight to body weight of any primate.

Humans pursue similar strategies. In the promiscuous tropics, men competed by producing more sperm. Africans, therefore, have the largest testicles and Asians have the smallest. Mr. Fuerle notes that testicles, like brains, are very costly, and increased size in either leaves fewer resources for other organs.

The fact that women in the tropics could support themselves and their young may have had the sinister effect of making rape more biologically adaptive. In cold climates, where women and children could not survive without a man, the impulse to rape was seldom passed on because any resulting child was likely to die. In the tropics, where mother and child had a better chance of surviving, it would have been maladaptive not to rape. This may explain high rates of rape among African populations.

Self-supporting females in the tropics also meant that dominant men could maintain more than one woman, whereas in the north, it was beyond the abilities of most men to support more than one woman and her children. In the north, because it was the sex that hunts that could offer or withhold meat, it was men, rather than the women, who were in a better bargaining position for choosing mates. They selected for beauty, which is a good proxy for health and fertility and this, according to Mr. Fuerle, led to increased beauty in Eurasian women.

African men, on the other hand, chose multiple wives on the basis of their ability to gather food or raise crops rather than beauty. At the same time, polygamy meant that some men had no wives at all, and the remaining, smaller number of women were in a position to take their pick from among the men. Since African women, unlike northern women, could support themselves, they chose men, not according to whether they were “good providers,” but according to their beauty. Thus, writes Mr. Fuerle, African men are more handsome than African women. This may also explain data that suggest African women have higher IQs than African men: Since women selected men for beauty rather than ability, there was not as much of a premium on intelligence.

Mr. Fuerle points out that Eurasian women who live in advanced societies can now support themselves, and need not mate with the men who can best provide food and shelter. This means they can choose according to appearance — which means future generations of Eurasian men may be more handsome but less intelligent.

Another racial trait that may have been influenced by environment is the willingness to cooperate. In the north, men had to work together to bring down big game and to establish rules for sharing meat. Cooperation and respect for rules were less necessary closer to the equator, and this may explain high rates of crime and sociopathy among Africans.

All these racial traits add up to considerable genetic distance between Africans and other populations. Mr. Fuerle cites Frank Salter, who points out some of the surprising consequences of this genetic distance. The members of stable breeding populations are genetically close to each other and have many alleles in common. They are even closer to their immediate family members, but this relation can be reversed by hybrid crosses between parents from groups that are genetically far apart. Bantus, for example, are so genetically distant from East Asians that the Asian father of an Asian/Bantu mulatto would be genetically closer to a random Asian stranger than to his own child. That is to say, he would have more alleles in common with any member of his own people than with his own hybrid child.

This is not good for such children. Studies have shown that parents are more attached to children who look like them and with whom they share the most genes. Abuse and neglect are more likely when it is obvious that parent and child come from dissimilar stock, which is usually the case with hybrids. A preference for mates from one’s own stock may also protect from infection, because genetically similar people are likely to have the same antibodies and not carry exotic diseases.

Mr. Fuerle points out that the physical differences between human races are, in many cases, vastly greater than the physical differences between animals that are classified as separate species. There are species of birds, for example, that look so similar they can be distinguished only by experts. They could produce fertile young if they mated but in the wild they never do. Chimps and bonobos are easier to tell apart, as are the two species of gorilla, yet these pairs of species are closer to each other genetically and physically than are the more distant races of humans to each other. It is not scientifically consistent to classify gorillas into as species but lump all living humans into one. Mr. Fuerle makes the provocative argument that if there were no living Africans — only their bones and DNA — scientists would classify them as a separate species from Eurasians.

Mr. Fuerle writes that Africans and Eurasians are not only genetically distant from each other but that the distance runs in a consistent direction:

[V]irtually all of the racial differences between Africans and Eurasians are in traits that are primitive; there are few, if any, African traits that are more modern than Eurasian traits. The evidence comes from a large variety of very different traits: hard tissue, soft tissue, physiology, behavior, intelligence, accomplishments, and genes. And most importantly, all of the evidence is consistent. It is not the case that genes are saying blacks are modern and bones are saying they are primitive. All of the evidence is saying the same thing . . .

It is often argued that crosses between genetically distant groups result in an advantage called “hybrid vigor.” Mr. Fuerle devotes a chapter to this question, in which he explains how this works. When populations are thoroughly inbred, they have similar sets of alleles, meaning that recessive traits — both positive and negative — are likely to appear. Crossing with another inbred population can mix up the alleles in a way that is beneficial, but the effect lasts for only one or two generations. It is because the benefit is short-lived that farmers have to buy new kinds of hybrid seeds every year.

Hybrid vigor is almost never found in humans because the major races are not nearly inbred enough to benefit from distant crosses. On the contrary, genetically distant matches can result in health problems due to subtle genetic incompatibilities that stable breeding populations ironed out long ago. In the case of black-white mixes, regression towards the mean draws hybrid children’s IQs toward a point mid-way between the black and white average IQs. Thus, the children of two white parents with IQs of 100 will, on average, be smarter than the children of one black and one white parent, even if they, too, have IQs of 100.

Out of Africa or Asia?

The central question raised in this book is whether the Out of Africa theory is correct. Most scholars now agree that Homo sapiens sapiens evolved in Africa about 150,000 years ago and began to migrate out of Africa some 90,000 to 60,000 years ago. He then spread to all corners of the globe, replacing the variants of erectus that had arisen on different continents. Racial differences therefore appeared after modern man evolved, and the most recent common ancestor of all humans would have lived 150,000 years or so ago. Mr. Fuerle argues strongly that race began with Australopithecus and that racial differences even predate the genus Homo. The most recent common ancestor of all men would therefore have lived some three million years ago, and modern man first evolved in Eurasia.

Readers will have to judge Mr. Fuerle’s many arguments for themselves, but here is a sample. He finds it improbable that modern man would have evolved in the least demanding environment, namely the African tropics. He also doubts that the migration out of Africa — 60,000 to 70,000 years ago — would have begun just at the time of the Toba-eruption-induced ice age, when northern populations were heading south, fleeing the cold. Mr. Fuerle also emphasizes that Out of Africa appears to violate one of the general laws of evolution: Heat-adapted Africans would have been unlikely to become generalized, like Europeans, and even less likely to lose their heat-adaptive traits and evolve the cold-adaptive traits characteristic of Asians.

Furthermore, modern humans coming from Africa are supposed to have replaced erectus populations that had been developing in their specialized environments for, in some cases, a million years. Neanderthal man, for example, had been in Europe for approximately 300,000 years and was well adapted to his niche. Mr. Fuerle finds it hard to believe that Africans could have displaced him, and points out that remains of early European man show no characteristics that appear African or heat-adapted. In any case, Mr. Fuerle does not believe that the innumerable differences found in modern human populations could have arisen in 60,000 to 90,000 years.

Mr. Fuerle also wonders how Africans managed to get all around the world when they were unable to get to some of the islands off the coast of Africa. Madagascar, for example, is less than 300 miles from Africa but it was first settled by Indonesians, who had to sail thousands of miles to reach it.

Another well-known difficulty for Out of Africa is the fact that Asian Homo erectus had incisor teeth of a distinct “shovel shape,” and some modern Asians still have similarly-shaped teeth. Mr. Fuerle finds it improbable that Africans would have displaced Asian erectus and then evolved their own shovel-shaped incisors. He considers it more likely that Asian erectus evolved into modern Asians.

It is often pointed out that modern Africans have the most genetic variety, which suggests they are the oldest human population, since older populations have had more time to accumulate mutations. Mr. Fuerle argues that the great genetic variation of Africans is due to repeated incursions into Africa of more modern lineages that evolved outside the continent, leading him to conclude that “the African lineage did not so much evolve as it did acquire.” He also argues that the ice ages killed huge numbers in the north and that this artificially reduced the genetic variation in some non-African populations.

Out of Africa theorists have replies to these arguments but Mr. Fuerle is so convinced they are wrong that he accuses them of bowing to egalitarian pressures to describe different populations as more similar than they really are. This is not altogether fair. Vincent Sarich of Berkeley and his occasional co-author Frank Miele are hardly egalitarian pushovers, nor are Richard Lynn and Phil Rushton. They are well aware of the arguments, pro and con, for Out of Africa, and conclude that it is the theory that best fits the facts.

One’s position on Out of Africa need not detract from the appreciation of this or any other section of Erectus Walks Amongst Us. Indeed, whether the evolution of racial differences took three million years or just 65,000 does not reduce their number or significance — which is the question of greatest concern.

Separation and survival

Naturalists appreciate nature’s diversity and go to great lengths to preserve it. They separate animals in zoos so as to avoid hybrids that would not occur in nature, and rejoice at the rediscovery of any species that was thought to be extinct. They show no such concern about humans, however, and condemn parents as bigots — especially if they are white — if they want their children to marry within their race.

The final section of Erectus Walks Amongst Us is a plea to cherish human variation as much as plant or animal variation. Mr. Fuerle writes of the unique alleles that have been sorted out among the different races:

[I]t takes only an instant of miscegenation to scramble them up again. The selection of some of those alleles required the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of people who did not have them, so the creation of racial differences was not without great cost. To destroy this monumental natural creation — us — so thoughtlessly and permanently, is akin to desecrating graves, dynamiting ancient statues, bombing cathedrals, and burning the library at Alexandria. What is the most valuable possession populations have that they can pass on to the next generation? It is not wealth or even knowledge. It is their genome, their ability to reproduce themselves as the unique people that they are. To squander that by miscegenation is the ultimate betrayal of one’s heritage.

Today, whites are the only major racial group that faces oblivion through miscegenation and sub-replacement fertility, yet whites are also the only race that welcomes racial aliens into their homelands. This is a new phenomenon in human evolution because, as Mr. Fuerle points out, it has always been the rule that “a homeland is so vital to survival that an ethnic group will go to almost any length to have and hold one.” He adds that “if whites do not defend their homelands, they will soon have no homelands, and not long after that, there will be no more whites.”

As he explains: “The carrying capacity of the earth will eventually be reached, and it has probably already been reached in some countries. When that happens in white countries, our descendants will be in a life-and-death struggle for survival with the descendants of the non-whites that whites foolishly let into their homelands . . .”

What is more, most of the newcomers have relatively low IQs. Mr. Fuerle writes that their arrival in large numbers will eventually make it impossible to maintain modern civilization and that the West will be hopelessly outstripped by East Asian nations that have carefully limited immigration.

Today, any white who speaks out for the preservation of his people or race is condemned as a “racist,” but it is only by putting its interests first that any group survives. Mr. Fuerle marvels at the mentality of whites who think it virtuous to decline in numbers while others take their lands and inherit what their ancestors built: “These white anti-racists don’t like what they are. How could creatures evolve who are capable of not liking themselves? Surely, such creatures would have been driven extinct long ago by others of their kind who do like themselves.” He adds: “Why so many whites eagerly embrace white-hating, however, remains to be explained.”

Mr. Fuerle suspects the problem may be altruism run amok. Whites rose to the top, not only through high intelligence but through cooperation with and even sacrifice for others. When whites sacrificed for other whites it promoted their genetic interests, but today’s “promiscuous altruism” means sacrificing for non-whites.

At the same time, aside from a few groups such as the Mormons, whites have become unable or unwilling to reproduce themselves: “Caucasians may be good at making discoveries in math and science and at creating great works of art, but they aren’t so good at making more Caucasians which, as far as evolution is concerned, is all that matters.” Mr. Fuerle clearly cares deeply about the fate of his people, and this book concludes with a strong appeal to racial consciousness, without which whites will disappear.

Erectus Walks Amongst Us is stuffed with so much information and so many good arguments it is a pity it suffers from several flaws. First and worst, the title and cover illustration are so insulting to blacks — implying that they are primitives just down from the trees — that one can hardly carry this book around in public. The writing can also be contemptuous of blacks and of people who accept the Out of Africa theory. No book that flouts as many orthodoxies as this one does can afford to aid its critics by indulging in intemperate language.

Erectus Walks Amongst Us also has an irritating stylistic peculiarity. It has more than 1,200 footnotes, most of which include additional information rather than just a reference. The reader must constantly look back and forth between the text and notes (which are mercifully at the bottom of the page rather than at the back). Most of the material in the notes should have been worked into the text.

These are some of the consequences of foregoing the help of professional publishing, but these defects do not detract from the vast collection of eye-opening information Mr. Fuerle has gathered. “This book contains material I find absolutely fascinating,” he writes in the Acknowledgements. Open-minded readers will certainly agree.