Argument 4
While taking down the oral history of the nwo’Khala people, Lutheran missionary Ernst Neider noted a number of sayings attributed to a long-dead elder referred to as !Nwo. In the nwo’Khala syllablery assembled by Dr. Neider, now is the particle for “first” and koala that for “people,” hence nwo’Khala, “first people.” The addition of a click consonant before a word appears to have modified it into a personal adjective or honorific; Dr. Neider thus rendered !Nwo as “the First.”

Dr. Neider’s letters to his brother, a physicist in Leipzig at the Hanseatic University, are preserved in the archives, and once scholarly access was granted in 1990, researchers and fringe figures soon noted the similarity of !Nwo’s teachings to principles of thermodynamics. “One cannot unstir a stew,” “a thrown spear wants to fly, a held spear wants to sleep,” and so on. Even if the similarities between !Nwo’s recorded aphorisms and physics are overblown, they represent a fascinating collection of anthropological anecdotes.

!Nwo also reportedly taught the “fable of the beasts.” Every beast, he said, has a larger beast that eats it. Even man is occasionally hunted by lions, he says. The story goes that a doubting relative responded that while a man may be eaten, men as a group can kill and eat lions if they wish. !Nwo responded that even then, the men will be eaten by worms when they die. The doubter responded that the men’s sons would live on, and it is here that !Nwo’s account becomes of great interest to fringe studies.

Mankind is like a game animal, fattening itself. But one day, an even greater predator will arrive and gobble mankind up. It may be quick, like a lion, or slow, like a disease, but !Nwo expresses absolute certainty in this destruction and urges his people to live in the moment.

Some have used this exchange as evidence that !Nwo was contacted by an extraterrestrial intelligence, but even the most prosaic student of anthropology has to admit that he was right. The nwo’Khala rose in rebellion shortly after Dr. Neider arrived, killing the missionary and other German officials. The response from the colonial authorities was full-blown genocide; by 1910 only a handful of people of people with partial nwo’Khala ancestry remained, and the language was extinct.

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