The rise of the hopeful monsters: the true story of humanity

Razib Khan · 20 Aug 2026 · razibkhan.com ↗

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Modern humans, not Neanderthals, were the fearsome party in their encounters with archaic humans.

Their wordsToday, it seems more likely that it was we who were the monsters out of the dark, the demons about which Neanderthal mothers would tell their little-ones.
Our reading
The population of modern humans that expanded out of Africa around 50,000-60,000 years ago numbered only a few thousand individuals at most.

Their wordsAll the evidence, both ancient and modern, points to a tiny non-African ancestry population between 50 and 60,000 years ago, a few thousand individuals at most