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Dispatch // From the Book

Hunter or Scavenger?

By Teimuraz Benidze  //  Trickster Collective
ON ALEXANDER NEVZOROV'S THE ORIGIN OF GENIUS AND FASCISM, Ch. 5  //  DRAWN FROM EPISODE 04

Did humanity rise as noble hunters? Nevzorov's answer is anatomical and flat: no. Man carries "not a single morphological mark of a predator." He was a scavenger - a pack corpse-eater who waited his turn at the carcass behind the vultures. The hunter is a costume culture stitched onto the ape to spare its pride.

People ask what early humans really were, and want the campfire and the spear. Nevzorov takes both away in the fifth chapter of the book I read for NOX. Here is his case, in his words.

The anatomy says predator - nowhere

"It should be remembered that early man was never a hunter." A predator is marked in the body: teeth, claws, gut, vision. Man has none of it. His jaw muscles are "eight times more modest than even a macaque's."

A killer? Yes. A hysteric? Undoubtedly. But in no way a predator.

Nevzorov // The Origin of Genius and Fascism

Where the hunter myth came from

"In the nineteenth century Charles Robert Darwin dunked man's proud visage into his ancient evolutionary" past - and the ancestor turned out to be a scavenged monkey. So "culture strained itself and painted a stone 'Berdan rifle' onto the disgraceful granny." But a weapon changes nothing: "a revolver in the paw does not make a monkey a predator. It just makes it a dangerous monkey." Tools "did not raise man's biological status."

What he actually was is unsentimental: "He is a scavenger." Even his stomach acidity matches "the black-headed gull, the opossum, and other lovers of putrid meat." His packs formed for the reasons hyena packs form - "hunger, fear."

The pack as a singularity

Then the turn. That scavenging pack, Nevzorov argues, was "the starting point of human history... a kind of homo singularity," holding "the entire future of this creature. From the red Assyrian beards to the gas chambers of Auschwitz." Millions of years pass and "only the props will change." Name any human -

Archimedes, Chikatilo, Heisenberg, or Stalin, we are always speaking of a washed and costumed pithecanthropus.

Nevzorov // The Origin of Genius and Fascism

And the law running the whole show, he says, is older than man and indifferent to him: "'Fascism' is simply the homely human name of the law of the organization of matter. It is for precisely this reason that it is immortal." That is the cold floor the whole series stands on.

Hear it in Nevzorov's own words: the Episode 4 transcript. More: all dispatches  //  quotes library  //  episode registry. Teimuraz Benidze translates and hosts NOX: Anatomy of Thought, presented by Trickster Collective. The words dissected here are Alexander Nevzorov's, from The Origin of Genius and Fascism.