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What if Neanderthals had not gone extinct?
DarkCrawler
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Say hello to our closest cousins.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal
Homo neanderthalensis AKA Neanderthal. One of the ancestors of human race. However, these guys differ from the previous sapiens - they actually co-existed with humans. For a some time, around 170,000 years, this planet actually had more then one intelligent species.
Then they dissappeared. Some say that they melded into human race, others say that they just withered away, while some believe that we killed them all.
Anyway, they are gone. But this thread is meant to explore the possibilities if they had not gone extinct. If they had continued to grow and develop their own societies alongside humanity, and continued to do so to modern age. How different would the world be? Would we coexist peacefully, or would there be massive conflicts between the two species? Would there be racism between humans with another species to project our prejudices against? Would we have Neanderthal rights movements, would mixed couples be spurned, etc.
Or how different would historical events themeselves be. Which species would have been the more unlucky one?
Talk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal
Homo neanderthalensis AKA Neanderthal. One of the ancestors of human race. However, these guys differ from the previous sapiens - they actually co-existed with humans. For a some time, around 170,000 years, this planet actually had more then one intelligent species.
Then they dissappeared. Some say that they melded into human race, others say that they just withered away, while some believe that we killed them all.
Anyway, they are gone. But this thread is meant to explore the possibilities if they had not gone extinct. If they had continued to grow and develop their own societies alongside humanity, and continued to do so to modern age. How different would the world be? Would we coexist peacefully, or would there be massive conflicts between the two species? Would there be racism between humans with another species to project our prejudices against? Would we have Neanderthal rights movements, would mixed couples be spurned, etc.
Or how different would historical events themeselves be. Which species would have been the more unlucky one?
Talk.
DarkCrawler on
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However, neanderthal as slaves would have had to have been treated very carefully; they were by all accounts as strong as several humans put together. An H.S. slave overseer who tried to keep his slaves in line with a whip would have probably had his head shoved up his ass (literally) unless he was constantly surrounded by heavily-armed bodyguards. And while Neanderthals couldn't have invented things like swords and axes, I'm sure they could have used them. A neanderthal slave revolt would never have been very organized, but it would have been extremely difficult to destroy by force alone.
The most interesting question, to me, would have been what it made humans ask about themselves. We're the only human species alive on the planet now; were Erectus and Neanderthal still around, we would have to redefine our definitions of what is human and what is not.
I imagine something like this happened with the Neanderthals. Two species of hominids, highly intelligent, hunting in groups, but before any sort of laws or civilization. They occupy the same evolutionary niche, so one is necessarily going to dominate and out-compete (i.e. wipe out) the other.
This could have happened through outright genocide (which happens commonly among chimpanzees, who attack rival "tribes"). Or it could have happened because our ancestors had a slight intelligence edge which allowed us to vastly outcompete the Neandertals in hunting and gathering and constructing defenses. Or both. In either case, over time, all the Neadertals would die off. There can be only onnnee
See how many books I've read so far in 2010
It is also very interesting to suppose what we would think about racism. Old racist "science" tried to differentiate the different races into superiority and inferiority biologically (this race is smarter but this race is stronger). In a multi-species society, such a dichotomy might actually exist, outside of people's minds. How would we be required to treat neanderthals morally? Are they to be treated like any other animal, or like any other human, or like something entirely different?
I do think it would be difficult, if not impossible, for two species to coexist as a society. Humans survive today because in the past when there was genocide committed against humans, the victors were always humans too. If one species wanted to completely wipe out another, they would have little trouble. The only way that two intelligent species could develop a society together, I think, is if we were two species who had co-evolved and had a mutualistic relationship prior to their evolution of intelligence, and we can't even be sure that intelligence could evolve under such conditions.
It was us or them as far as I'm concerned. Humans are very violent and territorial even amongst our own, the only way for Neanderthals to have survived would have been to either be more advanced or geographically isolated, which would only delay the inevitable confrontation.
Well with the big predators I'm sure it was more a matter of humans hunting out the megafauna herbivores like the mammoth out from under them - it sucks to be a sabertooth if some neolithic guy has made a house out of your main food source.
As to the neanderthals I could see them hanging on in dense northern woodlands where their strength and toughness would beat out Sapiens' endurance and smarts, and probably even adopting tools from successive Sapiens cultural waves. Eventually however the Sapiens would hit on something the Neanderthals couldn't copy/allow them access to the Neanderthals woods (something like the bows or bronze axes) and then it would be game over, possibly with humans retaining legends of scary muscular guys in the woods. Alternatively you have them survive on some island isolated by the last ice age, and they're 'discovered' by humans in large ships, and you get what happened to the Native Americans...squared.
But then again, I wonder if the two species would have seen each other as possible mates at all, or if it would have been more animal-like in that you only breed with your own type.
I'm sure it happened. I mean, it happens in the wild occasionally with other species like bears. Whether it happened regularly probably had more to do with how much the societies jived with one another; as it is, I don't think they were best friends.
This is sort of what I was assuming, as well. Nobody knows exactly why the Neanderthals died out - changing climate (since Neanderthals were specifically adapted to extremely cold conditions), outcompeted by H. Sapiens, or actually killed off b H. Sapiens - although it was probably a combination of "all of the above". I personally lean more toward "outcompeted" than "genocided", simply because it would have been much easier for humans to simply starve neanderthals out than actually try to wipe them out forcibly - Sapiens' weapons weren't a hell of a lot better than what the neanderthals had, and neanderthals were huge and powerful.
There's been a lot of speculation regarding interbreeding, but there's really no way to prove it one way or the other. Actually, I'm not sure if Neanderthals are universally agreed to be a separate species at all - as in, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis or something - but it's been a long time since Paleoanthropology.
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If the neanderthals had stayed neanderthals, then nothing really would have changed. It doesn't appear that neanderthals had the capacity to develop civilization as we know it without evolving. Their linguistic abilities seem to have been somewhere between ourselves and H. erectus (practically nothing), at least anatomically speaking. Most anthropologists are of the opinion that N-thals (getting tired of typing it out) could speak, but their speech was simpler and more limited than our own - both linguistically and in terms of the concepts expressed.
I'd be really interested in hearing more about this.
I've read information about scientists actually trying this. I'm sure they haven't tried yet, but I think they have the genome down.
EDIT: According to wiki:
I second that.
Something to do with trying to trace the origin of the bony protrusion some people have on the base of their skulls (mimics our inner ear in regards to balance in Neanderthals)
There's an article like what they were discussing when I first heard it. I think Nova, but maybe it was National G.
Well a quick skim of the primary article for that story seems to be very much 'more data needed' on the inbreeding, but it makes an interesting point that, based on bone morphology traits, the Neanderthals have more in common with the earliest modern human skeletons than we late modern humans do - significant loss of diversity with the great migrations maybe?
Actually, for most of human history there were several similarly-intelligent hominids living at the same time.
It is a rare fluke that we live in an era where we are the only really intelligent hominid.
So going from "many like us" to "few like us" is actually kind of expected.
We need to be careful in viewing our place in history as privileged and projecting our modern sensibilities on the past.
It is easy to see history as inevitable and leading up to us on a mountain of progress but that is an inaccurate view.
Neandertals (or -thals, I guess it's a current debate), IIRC, had their own stone tool technology they developed on their own at the same time. It's not like they needed to figure out spears, just that you could throw them instead of stab with them.
:?:
If humans and some other hominids are sharing the same niche, for the human population to increase requires that the others decline.
I mean, there's no guarantee it'd be us. But it's pretty natural that when one species suddenly gains a strong advantage over others in its niche, the other ones will start to die out.
Once we started organizing, we started killing shit like it was nobody's business. We kill and have been killing and genociding the hell out of each other for a long time, I think it's only natural to off the big scary stupid guys when we get the opportunity.
Barring direct killing, we would hardly have been sympathetic in regards to resource sharing.
It seems quite possible that they could have mated. We could have mated together, into one species. It is hard to say. There currently is no evidence that this happened though. Just a thought some people are putting around.
but they're listening to every word I say
We actually see it with loads of animals, and I don't think its that likely we'd see a similar thing with any of the hominids. The sterility issue is generally only when one species has two extra chromosomes compared to the other, leaving the hybrid with an odd number.
I think you'd see pretty much all of the hominids being able to interbreed, or at least the later ones as we're pushing the idea of a species to the extremes here as we're looking at the same group of organisms over time rather than two seperate ones. Way to imagine it would be to remember that the genetic distance between two current species goes down to the common ancester and then back up again, so between a current one and one of its predecessors is about half as long.
I'm in the probably a mix of interbreeding and genocide. Far as I'm aware a lot of the presumed genocides modern humans have perpatrated against one another have never really been quite as complete as we imagine.
What about the extinctions that we've caused.
They do look a little unsual when you see pictures of them, but not obviously a different species. Its also subtle enough that if you're willing to accept that the black guys are the same as the white guys, and don't really want to get into comparative anatomy its not a stretch to assume that the stocky guys are just another varient.
Like Valuev:
Apart from being freakishly large he also has a slightly pointed skull.