Up or down?
Brain size is the one thing in this whole subject that can be measured directly. A skull holds a volume, the volume can be filled and poured out, and the number does not depend on anybody's interpretation.
Which makes it the place to test the two accounts against each other.
The mainstream account has it rising. A small-brained ape in Africa at four hundred and fifty cubic centimetres, then a series of intermediates with larger skulls, arriving at our fourteen hundred. Three times the starting volume across seven million years.
The esoteric account has it falling. We were genetically hybridized from local stock and from donors who had larger brains than ours, and what has happened since is loss.
How the ascent was assembled
The ascent of man is a chart. Brain size rising steadily with time, from four hundred and fifty cubic centimetres seven million years ago to the fourteen hundred we carry now. It is the picture everybody has seen, the row of skulls getting larger from left to right, and it is what mainstream palaeontology holds to be the shape of our history.
It was assembled from real measurements. Each skull has a volume that can be measured, and each has a date that comes from the ground around it: first from the layer it lay in, and later from the decay of elements in the volcanic ash above and below.
So the points on the chart are sound. Small brains in that valley long ago, larger ones later, and ours now.
The line drawn through those points is the part to look at.
Which holds where brain size rose steadily. Where it moved in several directions at once, the sorting supplies the trend by itself.
Three of the finds that bear on it arrived after it was built.
Homo floresiensis, found on an Indonesian island in 2003. Four hundred cubic centimetres, the smallest of any hominin in the series, and alive until about fifty thousand years ago. Among the last of all of them to go.
Homo naledi, found in a South African cave and dated in 2017. Five hundred cubic centimetres, a third of ours. Living two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, which is the period of the first skulls that look like us. Its brain size places it at the start of the sequence and its date places it at the end.
The Neanderthals, known since 1856. Fifteen hundred to sixteen hundred cubic centimetres, larger than ours. The largest brain in the whole record belongs to the people we replaced.
Each of these is filed as a side branch, and the sequence keeps the specimens that rise.
What the three of them show is that across the peoples of that period brain size went both ways. Some lines grew and some shrank, and they were doing it at the same time and on the same ground.
Which leaves the question that matters. Our own line: did it rise or fall?
What the line rests on
Two endpoints, four hundred and fifty then and fourteen hundred now, with a line drawn between them and called the ascent of man.
That line is an extrapolation, and it is extrapolated from a patch of ground the size of Delaware.
What lived in that patch may have been our ancestors. It may equally have been relatives of our ancestors, a branch that stayed small while the line leading to us ran somewhere else, in country that dissolves bone.
A skeleton gives a shape and a date. Descent is a separate question and it is answered by other means.
And naledi shows what happens when the line carries the weight
Homo naledi came out of the Rising Star cave in South Africa in 2013, from ground that holds no volcanic ash. So the usual dating had nothing to work with.
For four years its age was estimated from its skull. Five hundred cubic centimetres, therefore around two million years old, because that is where five hundred sits on the line.
The real date arrived in 2017, from the teeth and from the sediment. Two hundred and fifty thousand years.
Two million against two hundred and fifty thousand. The estimate from the skull was eight times the real age, in the one case where the line carried the weight on its own.
The line assumes a full world
For a larger brain to replace a smaller one everywhere, the two have to be in competition everywhere. Something better appears, spreads, and takes the ground. That is how the sequence is read, each stage displacing the one before it.
It describes the world we live in, where every habitable acre is occupied and anything new has to take ground from somebody.
The past was emptier than that.
The figure comes from population genetics. It reads the amount of variation in living DNA and works backward to how many people were breeding, which makes it independent of which bones happened to be found and of any assumption about who descended from whom.
What it gives, for most of our existence, is a total human and parahuman population in the low hundreds of thousands, across the whole planet.
Those people were living where people could live: along rivers, on coastlines, around lakes, in the country that fed them. That is a fraction of the land, and the rest carried few of them.
Even so, a few hundred thousand people occupying the habitable fraction of a whole planet leaves a great deal of room, and what follows from that is separation. Populations sat far apart and met seldom.
Which the record bears out. Homo floresiensis held its island for something like seven hundred thousand years while other peoples held the mainland. The Neanderthals and the Denisovans occupied separate ranges across Eurasia for hundreds of thousands of years, and the crossings between them are countable events rather than a continuous exchange.
An empty world holds many kinds of people at once, each in its own country, each under pressure only from the ground it stands on.
Saturation came late. This book has already given the date: the male line collapses between seven and five thousand years ago, when farming filled the ground and clans began eliminating each other for it.
Before that, there was room.
And our own line came down
The descent is not only visible in the peoples we replaced. It is visible in us.
Upper Palaeolithic Europeans, twenty thousand years ago, carried around fifteen hundred cubic centimetres. Living humans carry around fourteen hundred. Between five and ten percent, gone.
Part of that is body size. Those people were heavier and more robust, and brain volume scales with body mass. Corrected for it the fall is smaller and it remains.
A paper in 2021 put the decline sharper still and later, beginning about three thousand years ago. It was contested the following year over how the specimens had been sorted into time bins.
So the only period where our own species can be measured against itself shows loss.
Dots on a graph
What exists from that period is a scatter of individual skulls. Each one has a volume and a date, and that is the whole of it.
Put them on a graph, volume against time, and what appears is a cloud of points. Four hundred here, fifteen hundred there, five hundred in between, spread across seven million years.
A line through that cloud is drawn by whoever is drawing. A rising line fits. A falling line fits. Several lines going different ways at once fit, and so does no line at all.
The ascent of man is one curve fitted to that cloud. Our own line sits wherever the person holding the pencil puts it.
Why genetics stays quiet here
Descent is a genetic question. DNA survives for about four hundred thousand years at the outside, in cold dry caves, and for much less in African ground.
Everything in this chapter runs from seven million years down to three hundred thousand. For all of it, the evidence available is the shape of the skulls.
Shape gives a volume and a date. Descent needs the molecular evidence, and at this depth there is none to be had.
So which curve gets drawn through the cloud rests on arrangement.
Which leaves the esoteric account standing
The esoteric sources hold that we were genetically hybridized from donors who had larger brains than ours, and that our brain size has come down since.
That is a falling line through the same cloud of points.
The physical evidence from this period is thin, local, and open to several arrangements. It sits comfortably with the esoteric account, and it sits comfortably with the mainstream one.
Which is what this book has been saying all along
The esoteric sources hold that we were genetically hybridized, and they are specific about what went into it.
The first contribution is the local hominin stock, the upright primates that were living in Africa, which was taken and worked on.
The second is extraterrestrial. The sources name over twenty races that contributed genetic material, among them the Lyrans, the Pleiadians, the Sirians, the Arcturians, the Anunnaki, the Greys and the Reptilians.
The third is the two peoples who were already resident on this planet, the Lemurians and the Atlanteans, and neither of those was a single race either. Each is described in the Theosophical literature as a root race containing seven sub-races, with their own countries and their own periods.
And the donors had capacities that we do not have.
They communicated by telepathy, which was their ordinary speech and not an exceptional gift. They worked with the life force itself: Steiner describes the Lemurians building without any engineering knowledge, by a faculty of imagination that acted with the sureness of instinct, and Scott-Elliot describes the early Atlantean motive power as something carried in the operator rather than contained in a machine.
And they could soften stone and work it as though it were clay. That capacity is what the megalithic sites show. Blocks weighing many tons, fitted so closely that a blade will not enter the joint, with curved and irregular faces matched to each other rather than cut square. Sacsayhuaman in Peru is the clearest case, and the same work appears at Ollantaytambo, at Puma Punku, and in Egypt. No tool marks, no straight cuts, and surfaces that behave as though the stone was poured or pressed into place while soft.
What we carry now is the residue of all of that, thinned by negative selection.
So the finding that our brains were larger twenty thousand years ago than they are today, and that the Neanderthals carried more than either, is not an anomaly that needs explaining away. It is exactly what a descent from something greater looks like when it is measured.