Saco-Indonesia.com — Peneliti asal Soanyol
memiliki teori baru tentang salah satu penyebab kepunahan neanderthal (Homo
neanderthalensis). Menurut para peneliti, manusia ikut berkontribusi dalam kepunahan spesies
itu, salah satunya dengan memburu dan memakannya.
Policarp Hortola dan
Bienvenido Martinez-Navarro dari Universitat Rovira i Virgili di Tarragona, Spanyol, mengatakan,
"Kecuali di tanah asalnya Afrika, di benua lain, Homo sapiens bisa dikatakan
sebagai spesies invasif."
Saat ini, ada banyak kasus ketika spesies
dalam hal invasi mengancam spesies lokal. Jadi, pada akhir masa pleistosen, mungkin saja
neanderthal kalah berkompetisi dengan manusia yang terus menyebar ke Asia dan Eropa.
"Kami berpikir bahwa manusia yang mendiami relung yang sama dengan
neanderthal, tetapi punya teknologi lebih maju, dalam kolonisasi di wilayah Eropa akan
berkompetisi secara langsung untuk memperoleh makanan dan sumber daya alam lain," kata
Martinez-Navarro seperti dikutip NBC News, 21 Mei 2013.
Kompetisi
serupa dalam hipotesis ini juga dijumpai pada hewan lain. Misalnya, harimau bergigi pedang
Afrika yang menginvasi Eropa 1,8 juta tahun lalu memusnahkan kerabatnya. Kemudian, invasi
African spotted hyena juga bersamaan dengan punahnya giant short faced hyena
800.000 tahun lalu.
Hortola dan Martinez-Navarro dalam artikelnya di
jurnal Quatemary International edisi Mei 2013 mengatakan bahwa mereka meyakini
hipotesisnya, tetapi hingga saaat ini belum memiliki bukti yang bisa mendukungnya.
"Satu-satunya cara untuk menguji kebenaran teori itu adalah menemukan bukti langsung
tanda bekas manusia memakannya pada tulang neanderthal, seperti tanda kerusakan pada
tulang pada artefak yang dibuat manusia," kata Martinez Navarro.
Ilmuwan
ekologi purba JR Stewart dari Bournemouth University di Inggris mengungkapkan bahwa memang bukti
yang mendukung teori itu belum ada. Namun, bukan berarti teori itu bisa langsung gugur. Hanya,
masih banyak yang perlu diteliti untuk membuktikan kebenarannya.
"Ini
menarik karena faktanya sisa-sisa neanderthal yang memiliki tanda bekas dipotong
ditemukan di tempat yang penuh artefak neanderthal, bukan artefak manusia. Ini artinya
bahwa mereka dimakan neanderthal sendiri," katanya.
"Gagasan bahwa manusia memburu neanderthal hingga punah seperti kepunahan
megafauna termasuk baru. Bukan manusia membunuh neanderthal dengan genosida, seperti
yang sebelumnya pernah diduga," imbuhnya.
Editor :Liwon Maulana(galipat)
Apakah Benar "Neanderthal" Punah Dimakan Manusia?
Late in April, after Native American actors walked off in disgust from the set of Adam Sandler’s latest film, a western sendup that its distributor, Netflix, has defended as being equally offensive to all, a glow of pride spread through several Native American communities.
Tantoo Cardinal, a Canadian indigenous actress who played Black Shawl in “Dances With Wolves,” recalled thinking to herself, “It’s come.” Larry Sellers, who starred as Cloud Dancing in the 1990s television show “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” thought, “It’s about time.” Jesse Wente, who is Ojibwe and directs film programming at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, found himself encouraged and surprised. There are so few film roles for indigenous actors, he said, that walking off the set of a major production showed real mettle.
But what didn’t surprise Mr. Wente was the content of the script. According to the actors who walked off the set, the film, titled “The Ridiculous Six,” included a Native American woman who passes out and is revived after white men douse her with alcohol, and another woman squatting to urinate while lighting a peace pipe. “There’s enough history at this point to have set some expectations around these sort of Hollywood depictions,” Mr. Wente said.
The walkout prompted a rhetorical “What do you expect from an Adam Sandler film?,” and a Netflix spokesman said that in the movie, blacks, Mexicans and whites were lampooned as well. But Native American actors and critics said a broader issue was at stake. While mainstream portrayals of native peoples have, Mr. Wente said, become “incrementally better” over the decades, he and others say, they remain far from accurate and reflect a lack of opportunities for Native American performers. What’s more, as Native Americans hunger for representation on screen, critics say the absence of three-dimensional portrayals has very real off-screen consequences.
“Our people are still healing from historical trauma,” said Loren Anthony, one of the actors who walked out. “Our youth are still trying to figure out who they are, where they fit in this society. Kids are killing themselves. They’re not proud of who they are.” They also don’t, he added, see themselves on prime time television or the big screen. Netflix noted while about five people walked off the “The Ridiculous Six” set, 100 or so Native American actors and extras stayed.
But in interviews, nearly a dozen Native American actors and film industry experts said that Mr. Sandler’s humor perpetuated decades-old negative stereotypes. Mr. Anthony said such depictions helped feed the despondency many Native Americans feel, with deadly results: Native Americans have the highest suicide rate out of all the country’s ethnicities.
The on-screen problem is twofold, Mr. Anthony and others said: There’s a paucity of roles for Native Americans — according to the Screen Actors Guild in 2008 they accounted for 0.3 percent of all on-screen parts (those figures have yet to be updated), compared to about 2 percent of the general population — and Native American actors are often perceived in a narrow way.
In his Peabody Award-winning documentary “Reel Injun,” the Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond explored Hollywood depictions of Native Americans over the years, and found they fell into a few stereotypical categories: the Noble Savage, the Drunk Indian, the Mystic, the Indian Princess, the backward tribal people futilely fighting John Wayne and manifest destiny. While the 1990 film “Dances With Wolves” won praise for depicting Native Americans as fully fleshed out human beings, not all indigenous people embraced it. It was still told, critics said, from the colonialists’ point of view. In an interview, John Trudell, a Santee Sioux writer, actor (“Thunderheart”) and the former chairman of the American Indian Movement, described the film as “a story of two white people.”
“God bless ‘Dances with Wolves,’ ” Michael Horse, who played Deputy Hawk in “Twin Peaks,” said sarcastically. “Even ‘Avatar.’ Someone’s got to come save the tribal people.”
Dan Spilo, a partner at Industry Entertainment who represents Adam Beach, one of today’s most prominent Native American actors, said while typecasting dogs many minorities, it is especially intractable when it comes to Native Americans. Casting directors, he said, rarely cast them as police officers, doctors or lawyers. “There’s the belief that the Native American character should be on reservations or riding a horse,” he said.
“We don’t see ourselves,” Mr. Horse said. “We’re still an antiquated culture to them, and to the rest of the world.”
Ms. Cardinal said she was once turned down for the role of the wife of a child-abusing cop because the filmmakers felt that casting her would somehow be “too political.”
Another sore point is the long run of white actors playing American Indians, among them Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson, Audrey Hepburn and, more recently, Johnny Depp, whose depiction of Tonto in the 2013 film “Lone Ranger,” was viewed as racist by detractors. There are, of course, exceptions. The former A&E series “Longmire,” which, as it happens, will now be on Netflix, was roundly praised for its depiction of life on a Northern Cheyenne reservation, with Lou Diamond Phillips, who is of Cherokee descent, playing a Northern Cheyenne man.
Others also point to the success of Mr. Beach, who played a Mohawk detective in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and landed a starring role in the forthcoming D C Comics picture “Suicide Squad.” Mr. Beach said he had come across insulting scripts backed by people who don’t see anything wrong with them.
“I’d rather starve than do something that is offensive to my ancestral roots,” Mr. Beach said. “But I think there will always be attempts to drawn on the weakness of native people’s struggles. The savage Indian will always be the savage Indian. The white man will always be smarter and more cunning. The cavalry will always win.”
The solution, Mr. Wente, Mr. Trudell and others said, lies in getting more stories written by and starring Native Americans. But Mr. Wente noted that while independent indigenous film has blossomed in the last two decades, mainstream depictions have yet to catch up. “You have to stop expecting for Hollywood to correct it, because there seems to be no ability or desire to correct it,” Mr. Wente said.
There have been calls to boycott Netflix but, writing for Indian Country Today Media Network, which first broke news of the walk off, the filmmaker Brian Young noted that the distributor also offered a number of films by or about Native Americans.
The furor around “The Ridiculous Six” may drive more people to see it. Then one of the questions that Mr. Trudell, echoing others, had about the film will be answered: “Who the hell laughs at this stuff?”
Native American Actors Work to Overcome a Long-Documented Bias