Nephilim and Neanderthals

While browsing through my favorite blogs the other day, I came across a post over at The Gralien Report about none other then the Nephilim (who I also posted about just recently). Micah (the mind behind The Gralien Report) draws on some inspiration from a post by his friend Nick Redfern and the novel The Descent by Jeff Long and ponders over the possibility of the Nephilim being a species of proto-human. Basically an unknown or primitive species of human.

While reading his post a memory was sparked something I read in the book The Eaters of the Dead (also known as The 13th Warrior) by Michael Crichton. In A Factual Not on Eaters of the Dead (an essay written in 1992 that follows the story) Michael talks about how the story itself came to be, and about the various fictional and nonfictional aspects put into the story.

Now the most interesting part mentioned in his essay, is a segment where he mentions the Wendol (the villains of the story) are a relict group of Neanderthals that survived until the Vikings in the story wiped them out a thousand years ago. He also mentions, that in the decades since he originally wrote Eaters of the Dead (first published in the mid 1970s) some studies done had suggested that perhaps such relict groups Neanderthals may indeed have existed in remote locations. Could such groups of Neanderthals have been the Nephilim?

Not only could they count as being “proto-humans” (albeit not as tall) as Micah puts it, but this very possibility was also gone over in an episode of The Naked Archaeologist called “The Giants of Genesis”. Simcha Jacobovici, the shows host, concludes that the Nephilim are not giants as so many people believe, but perhaps a form of man believed to have been “soulless” (proposed to be Neanderthals in the episode) by the writer of Genesis, and goes to a cave system that shows that perhaps modern humans and Neanderthals lived together. Later in the episode some even more shocking evidence is presented, hinting at the possibility that humans and Neanderthals even mated and gave rise to what may have become the Nephilim in Genesis.