The savages of Europe

Benjamin Disraeli famously told his gentile counterparts, “Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the Right Honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”   Recent archeological discoveries have shown us that ancient Europeans were not always brutal savages.  Yet there is no denying that much of Europe was backward compared to the classical civilizations that came to dominate them culturally from Roman times onward.
I am reading a book called “A.D. 500” by Simon Young.  It is a fictitious account of the travels of a Byzantine scouting party through the British isles around the year 500 A.D.  Though it is fiction, the story is based on historical fact.  Though he sometimes takes a sympathetic view toward the ancient peoples of Briton, Young does make it clear that the peoples in question were indubitably savages.  According to him, among the British Celts, the Gaels of Ireland, the Picts and the Saxons were practices such as head-hunting, cannibalism, human sacrifices, ritual bestiality, slavery, extreme superstition and episodes of total lawlessness.
Though it is difficult to extract anything resembling a reasoned argument from leftists regarding their dogmatic racial egalitarianism, we may impute to them the argument that we were all, at one time, savages.  What is left unsaid by them is that there was no difference between the European savages of yore and African savages of the more recent past.  Indeed, reading through A.D. 500, I am reminded of the book “Explorations & Adventures in Equatorial Africa” by Paul Du Chaillu (1861).
On the surface, tribal Africa did (does) resemble the ancient British Isles.  In both cases life was cheap, superstition rife and barbaric practices endemic.  In both places, Christianity was twisted into strange local cults.  But there are some important distinctions to be made:
Writing was unknown among native black Africans until/unless introduced to them by outsiders.  All the various British tribes had one form of writing or another – and these forms of writing seem to have developed independently of any contact with the Romans.
Tribal Africans had no sense of the distant past except when it pertained to enchanted/sacred places or something else of practical use in the present.  In contrast, the various British tribes each had their own legends and histories of which they seem to have been keenly aware.
In Africa, though war was common, rarely would an individual knowingly sacrifice his own life for a greater cause.  All humans tend to value their own lives, but black Africans tend to value their lives even more than other groups.  This is reflected in their historically low suicide rates even in America.  In contrast, according to Young, it was common for ancient Britons to rush toward their own deaths rather than suffer disgrace or in order to show their faith in God (among early Christians).
Some groups of early Britons, especially the Picts, suffered great poverty.  Young attributes this, at least partly, to a lack of resources in their lands.  The poverty endured by Africans seems to be not so much due to lack of resources but lack of labor.  When motivated, Africans were capable of building fine houses for themselves.  Generally, however, Africans were not motivated.
Leftists, in their belief that there is no difference between ancient European savages and modern African ones, also assume that a mere two thousand years is not enough time to accumulate any meaningful genetic differences between populations.  I have already written about this fallacy elsewhere.   We Ashkenazic Jews took only several hundred years to increase our average I.Q.’s to the point where the difference is noticeable.   Polynesians have developed distinctive appearances, on their various islands – and yet, by most accounts, they only embarked on their voyages within the last 3,000 years or so.
Even though native Britons were “savages” in the year 500 A.D., this does not mean that their evolutionary advancement only commenced after that.  It takes time to built an advanced civilization.  Until then, and as long as primitive conditions exist, the masses will not meet their true genetic potential.  Such was probably the case in 500 A.D. – and such is certainly the case in many parts of the world today.  Only when we reach near optimum environmental conditions, such as in America today, do genetic differences in I.Q. become clear for all to see.  In the modern Occident we now have the descendants of savages from all over the world.  This is a grand experiment and the results have been coming in for several decades.  We only need to look at SAT scores, I.Q. tests and every other standardized test; they all tell the same story.