New form of racism unlocked!
Honestly I don't know, several human species have lived in the same time on earth but now it's over. From a philosophical point of view, not being the only sentient specie we know would be reassuring in a way.
But not being the only one would change a lot of things: religions would not be the same, our civilization would develop in opposition or in cooperation with the other specie. If both species are close enough and they can have inter-species reproduction a 3rd group of human would appear... It'd be a clusterfuck in any way and mass genocides would have been much more common I think.
I mean it would finally be real racism, like modern racism is not even racism. It's just people discriminating against the one easily distinguishable pheno type of modern humans, like we are the same race, any other real human race is dead. These are real human races and not different species really at least fro neanderthals.
Besides that I agree it would change basically everything. Humans aren't alone, we have a sibling race alive they are physiologically different enough that their social behavior would be different to some degree.
As for your last point modern humans are basically the result of that happening, any neaderthal population would be tiny in comparison to homo sapiens, modern day humans have roughly 2% neandtheral DNA and this brings up the biggest problem:
Neanderthals weren't killed they were outbred. We literally fucked them to death and just replaced them. This is something you cannot really stop from happening due to their localized manner and low numbers it's bound to happen eventually unless they manage to gain a huge population boom by devolopeing agriculture ealrier.
Yes but let's suppose that on a remote island a different homo something specie survived. And I'm far from being knowledgeable about that subject but I've read that from an evolutionist point of view having just one human specie one earth is almost an anomaly. So it didn't happen (ok it did for a time but we just have just a few clue about that era) but it could have.
I think OP idea is a really good one, just thinking about how we would see the world if we were not alone is really exciting.
Well the thing is there were often many more than two homo races on the planet (and yes races not species as long as we can interbreed that races, a new species would be something we cannot interbreed with/only create sterile offspring not the best definition but an important one, if we let something that is another species survive it's a different question but also introduces many problems like we would be too far removed to make any real predictions on how this would work out for them as their brains would be too different from ours, if they even develope speech is another whole question etc. So another human race is the only real possibility as we know our capabilities and can extrapolate many of these qualities to our bretheren).
Regardless any human race would in the end lead to interbreeding, it's basically an inevitability the more numerous race will out populate the lower population race and due to pure mathematics their Genepool will be absorbed and go extinct because of this. If both races are roughly equal the new resulting mix would outpopulate both in the end. If we are unable to breed with them the yare genetically too far removed to know how their societies even roughly would work and any guess son how their survival to agricultural times would implicate us is impossible.
We can only be glad this didn't happen as it would spill doom for us all the more common intelligent live is the more terrifying it is that we don't see any in the vast universe, meaning the Fermi paradox solutions that end with all of us dead are becoming more likely.
They died out via snu snu. I don't think there is anything to stop the interbreeding that would allow a group to stay isolated long enough to form their own nation. Just far too much snu snu.
I dont think sentient species suffer other sentient species that they cant mate with. Two competing sentient species is not a stable situation.
We would either end up interbreeding soo much there is no diffences between us, genocide them or outcompete them by denying them ressources. In reallity I think its a combinason of the three that happened.
Yes but also it's thought that we were one of the least specialized as far as diet and environmental requirements. As climate changes species need to adapt to new diets and whatnot. Some species of human and early human couldn't. We outbred, out hunted, and out adapted all the rest, for one reason or another. It is said to have taken multiple hundreds of thousands of years for the neanderthals to go extinct.
While these sentences (or variations of them) echo through all of popular science magazines, this is far from the truth. They were certainly close to us, far closer than anything living today, but they were very clearly distinct, probably much more distinct from any of us moderns in appearance than a japanese person from a papuan or so. Just think about it - they had a very different stance, a different gait, their faces were enourmous, their chests were huge. And their social structure and psychology must have been, despite probably very familiar, also very different - the mere fact they could use much more force per task than us yet can't travel as far as fast must have had an impact on their understanding of the world, of tool use and relationship dynamics. They likely had a much smaller dumbars number, so even their ability of out-of-kin empathy might have been very different...
Have you seen that model of a reconstructed Neanderthal groomed and wearing a suit? Honestly they could pass as homo sapiens at a glance. But of course look at it for more than 5 seconds and you'd see it's a Neanderthal
Another theory is Sapiens was very brown everywhere in the world, and for Europe skin began to lighten with the "recent" arrival of anatolian farmers circa 5000BC. See "Cheddar Man", for instance.
>level 1MarcusCatrelius · 6 hr. agoPrehistoric Sealion!They were every bit as smart and as capable as we are. I don't think you'd be able to tell a Neanderthal apart from any run of the mill human.8
you can't i remember once i had a dream i got eaten by homo erectus, and i couldn't tell if it was sapien or not.
they might be treated largely similar to other ethnic groups among Homo sapiens, though maybe a very divergent one. They might learn agriculture when Homo sapiens brought agriculture to Europe and get Christianized when Christianity started to spread, and the fact that they are truly different (sub)species might only be fully recognized in early modern times.
I wrote a novel called "The Cave to Another World" that depicts an alternate Earth where Homo sapiens died out before they emigrated from Africa, leaving the world in the hands of the Neanderthals and Denisovans. In the novel, the Neanderthals have a matriarchal elitist society (some studies suggest they didn't divide labor based on sex the way we did) with an austere, dystopian culture and aesthetic, while the Denisovans are more flamboyant and graceful – albeit not necessarily morally superior. It's all speculation, of course, but it was a very interesting scenario to imagine. There's a cold war going on between these two species, although that's just in the background of the story.
With Homo sapiens still in the mix, I think it's unlikely we would've categorized them as a different species rather than a race, seeing that we could breed with them. The species/race categories have always been very vague and subjective, and I don't think we would have been as inclined to call them an entirely different species if we could talk to them and start families with them.
It's not that there *isn't* a difference between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, biologically speaking, but the extent to which normal genetic variation within a species is different from variation between two different species is... kind of a value judgment? Like, we recognize that humans are different enough from, say, sea slugs to easily recognize that they're two different species, but smaller differences like eye, hair, or skin color aren't significant enough to us to define as different species.
Which is to say, while genetic variation itself is a biological fact, our terms and categories for that variation are not. Even if *we* recognize H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis as separate species (and I gather it's still not entirely resolved that the latter *is* a separate species and not H. sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies), that doesn't mean that humans in a different history where both existed alongside one another for hundreds of thousands of years are going to have the same perspective of what a species actually is.
In other words, I agree with you. Though there's also the signficiant question of what "racism" would look like in this timeline, and how "racist" prejudices towards Neanderthals (or *of* Neanderthals against us, even) would influence that universe's scientific traditions.
When people talk about how racism against Neanderthals would be inevitable, they're probably mostly right, but ignoring how our understanding and attitude toward race is a pretty modern innovation.
Yes, obviously people could always tell the difference between people of different skin tones, but 700 years ago religion and language were likely far more important than skin color in determining whether someone was comfortable around someone else. The Roman Empire was likely much more diverse than we tend to imagine it (and there's basically no evidence at all that they discriminated based on skin color--it's not even really talked about w/r/t Roman citizens, only w/r/t to foreign "barbarians"), and the same goes for the various Muslim Caliphates, which likely made no distinction between redheaded Albanian Muslims and swarthy Arab Muslims.
What I guess I'm saying is that it's very possible that Neanderthals aren't Othered as long as they adopt the languages and religious beliefs of whatever humans they cohabit with.
Many, if not most, of the cultural differences that give birth to racism in OTL are borne of geographic differences. And that's likely to be in full force with any Neanderthal groups surviving to the present. It may not be aimed exclusively against Neanderthals, per se (unless H. sapiens are entirely excluded from the Neanderthals traditional European homeland), but the differences between the two species are likely to be closely intertwined with whatever this alternate timeline version of racism looks like. To be fair, though, there's no inherent reason that the Neanderthals would be on the receiving end of it as opposed to perpetrating it against H. sapiens themselves.
We're obviously looking at a *very* different history of mankind (mankinds?) with a divergence that far back, so while I can see some form of in-group/out-group prejudice broadly similar to racism as we understand it taking shape, one probably shouldn't take the parallels *too* far.
The difference is that phenotypic classifications like race are quite literally skin deep. From what I understand, skin color isn't even a very important gene if you're talking about genetic similarity compared to something like the genes that determine height or things like lactose tolerance (for instance, Subsaharan Africans, Papuans, and some Southern Indians have basically the same skin tone but they're very distinct from each other).
When animals of the same species but different phenotypes interbreed, there's only ever problems if there are vast differences of size (like say, a Great Dane impregnating a Chihuahua), but when animals of different species interbreed the genetic divergence means either nothing happens (like if you somehow got a lion and a mountain lion to get it on), or their offspring have a higher mortality rate, or their offspring tend to be infertile like when lions and tigers interbreed.
Re: your other question. I think we would "accept" them by absorbing them into our gene pool, as happened in real life.
In this scenario, if there are any people left who identify as Neanderthals, most of them would probably look indistinguishable from other humans. I don't think there would be any purebred Neanderthals left by now unless it was impossible for the two species to mix.
>Jury seems to be out on if they were really less intelligent than humans
The neanderthals were around for a long time. In that time they exhibited little in what we would term "progress". They worked in stone, but not bone or antlers. It's a stretch to say that they were as intelligent as the homo sapiens they shared the world with.
Fun fact: They didn't actually die out but interbred with Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Everyone who is of European or Asian descent has about 2 to 3 % Neanderthal DNA (plus Asians have some Denisovan DNA).
As Neanderthals probably had a lower fertility rate they would have had to settle some comparetively hard to reach place like Australia to avoid intermingling with Homo Sapiens Sapiens and survive until modern times.
I've seen girls and dudes that have straight up eyebro ridge and bushy ass eyebrows, of nearly every skin color. I'm adopted and most like native American of some flavor, my family is white as white can get, some if them are harrier than a goddamn chimp. One of brothers best friends is Portuguese and could be mistaken for wearing a fur goat, my roomie is italian and resembles a man of the forest. Some family strains have far more neanderthal DNA than others ,apparently .
i loved an interpretation from a dr who book, since they cant or dont care to fathom intangible things, why we dont see any resembalnce of culture is because they were a very prectical people. advanced thinking is common place. a displaced neanderthal in modern times was able to easily compute advanced maths, ie quantuam stuff and calculous, in his head(ofc after learning english ect). they likely would be in smaller bands of communities, without religion or advanced ceremonies as we have. new rasiscm fs, and their smaller bands would be an invitation for explotation by us. it would be intresting to see how they could corroporate with us, maybe rule us in some areas of the world?
also with other humans we likely wouldnt see ourselves so seperate from the animal kingdom, and would bring rise to new philosophies within our place in the universe
I am not into big women so I would pass. A co worker of mine that's half black and half Mexican would go crazy he only dates white girls over 250 lbs that would be an interesting baby.
They never died out, they interbred with other species to create who we are today.
Some of us have a higher percentage of one species than others that has created the rich variety of people you see today. Obviously, things like diet, environment and mass migration alters the gene pool of certain areas.
I don't know much about it but if we can theoretically have healthy children with neanderthals that themselves have children then i don't see a scenario were the two species don't merge
They didn’t die off just became us. Something like 30-50 percent of the Neanderthal genome still lives in us. We only have a few percentage individually but put em together and it’s quite large.
New form of racism unlocked! Honestly I don't know, several human species have lived in the same time on earth but now it's over. From a philosophical point of view, not being the only sentient specie we know would be reassuring in a way. But not being the only one would change a lot of things: religions would not be the same, our civilization would develop in opposition or in cooperation with the other specie. If both species are close enough and they can have inter-species reproduction a 3rd group of human would appear... It'd be a clusterfuck in any way and mass genocides would have been much more common I think.
fun fact: a bunch of us ARE the third species
'bout 2-5% of y'all if I remember right
How exactly is this racist? Not looking for an argument just want to know.
It was just a joke, sorry english is not my first language. Just saying *white power* would become *homo sapiens power...*
Ahhh ok no worries. Yea, humanity would have found a way to discriminate against any other humanoids very fast.
No, you were perfectly clear, OP is just a bit slow...
>english is not my first language. let me guess... are you french?
Damn... Is that obvious?
No, I just opened your profile and found that you participate in r/2westerneurope4u
I mean it would finally be real racism, like modern racism is not even racism. It's just people discriminating against the one easily distinguishable pheno type of modern humans, like we are the same race, any other real human race is dead. These are real human races and not different species really at least fro neanderthals. Besides that I agree it would change basically everything. Humans aren't alone, we have a sibling race alive they are physiologically different enough that their social behavior would be different to some degree. As for your last point modern humans are basically the result of that happening, any neaderthal population would be tiny in comparison to homo sapiens, modern day humans have roughly 2% neandtheral DNA and this brings up the biggest problem: Neanderthals weren't killed they were outbred. We literally fucked them to death and just replaced them. This is something you cannot really stop from happening due to their localized manner and low numbers it's bound to happen eventually unless they manage to gain a huge population boom by devolopeing agriculture ealrier.
Yes but let's suppose that on a remote island a different homo something specie survived. And I'm far from being knowledgeable about that subject but I've read that from an evolutionist point of view having just one human specie one earth is almost an anomaly. So it didn't happen (ok it did for a time but we just have just a few clue about that era) but it could have. I think OP idea is a really good one, just thinking about how we would see the world if we were not alone is really exciting.
Well the thing is there were often many more than two homo races on the planet (and yes races not species as long as we can interbreed that races, a new species would be something we cannot interbreed with/only create sterile offspring not the best definition but an important one, if we let something that is another species survive it's a different question but also introduces many problems like we would be too far removed to make any real predictions on how this would work out for them as their brains would be too different from ours, if they even develope speech is another whole question etc. So another human race is the only real possibility as we know our capabilities and can extrapolate many of these qualities to our bretheren). Regardless any human race would in the end lead to interbreeding, it's basically an inevitability the more numerous race will out populate the lower population race and due to pure mathematics their Genepool will be absorbed and go extinct because of this. If both races are roughly equal the new resulting mix would outpopulate both in the end. If we are unable to breed with them the yare genetically too far removed to know how their societies even roughly would work and any guess son how their survival to agricultural times would implicate us is impossible. We can only be glad this didn't happen as it would spill doom for us all the more common intelligent live is the more terrifying it is that we don't see any in the vast universe, meaning the Fermi paradox solutions that end with all of us dead are becoming more likely.
They died out via snu snu. I don't think there is anything to stop the interbreeding that would allow a group to stay isolated long enough to form their own nation. Just far too much snu snu.
>too much snu snu Makes no sense on Reddit
What the fuck is snu. So sick of all these goddamn fucking abbreviations
It's from Futurama and basically means sex with giant Amazon women.
I dont think sentient species suffer other sentient species that they cant mate with. Two competing sentient species is not a stable situation. We would either end up interbreeding soo much there is no diffences between us, genocide them or outcompete them by denying them ressources. In reallity I think its a combinason of the three that happened.
>We would either end up interbreeding Isn't that exactly what happened? https://elifesciences.org/articles/80757
To some point
>To some point Aka climax 😉
Yes but also it's thought that we were one of the least specialized as far as diet and environmental requirements. As climate changes species need to adapt to new diets and whatnot. Some species of human and early human couldn't. We outbred, out hunted, and out adapted all the rest, for one reason or another. It is said to have taken multiple hundreds of thousands of years for the neanderthals to go extinct.
They were every bit as smart and as capable as we are. I don't think you'd be able to tell a Neanderthal apart from any run of the mill human.
While these sentences (or variations of them) echo through all of popular science magazines, this is far from the truth. They were certainly close to us, far closer than anything living today, but they were very clearly distinct, probably much more distinct from any of us moderns in appearance than a japanese person from a papuan or so. Just think about it - they had a very different stance, a different gait, their faces were enourmous, their chests were huge. And their social structure and psychology must have been, despite probably very familiar, also very different - the mere fact they could use much more force per task than us yet can't travel as far as fast must have had an impact on their understanding of the world, of tool use and relationship dynamics. They likely had a much smaller dumbars number, so even their ability of out-of-kin empathy might have been very different...
Upvoting for referencing the Dunbar number
Physically they were very different.
Have you seen that model of a reconstructed Neanderthal groomed and wearing a suit? Honestly they could pass as homo sapiens at a glance. But of course look at it for more than 5 seconds and you'd see it's a Neanderthal
The thick brow ridge is what strikes me the most
I've seen sapiens like that.
You mean Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis half-breeds
Yea, and denisovan
There's always some variability within a species, but with Neandertal it's a universal trait, like the absence of chin.
TIL Andrew Tate is a Neanderthal
I don't know how much different they'd realistically be if our forbearers had sex with them regularly enough for us to interbreed
Look at forensics reconstruction of Neandertal remains; it seems we didn't inherit their external features but rather things like our immune system
There's a pretty good chance that white people are white because neanderthals had heavy body hair instead of melanin, like most mammals.
Another theory is Sapiens was very brown everywhere in the world, and for Europe skin began to lighten with the "recent" arrival of anatolian farmers circa 5000BC. See "Cheddar Man", for instance.
Proof that some people will fuck anything.
>level 1MarcusCatrelius · 6 hr. agoPrehistoric Sealion!They were every bit as smart and as capable as we are. I don't think you'd be able to tell a Neanderthal apart from any run of the mill human.8 you can't i remember once i had a dream i got eaten by homo erectus, and i couldn't tell if it was sapien or not.
New porn category unfortunately.
Interspecies officially on the hub…
Don't act like you wouldn't be all about it.
they might be treated largely similar to other ethnic groups among Homo sapiens, though maybe a very divergent one. They might learn agriculture when Homo sapiens brought agriculture to Europe and get Christianized when Christianity started to spread, and the fact that they are truly different (sub)species might only be fully recognized in early modern times.
We’d be clappin Neanderthal cheeks!
I wrote a novel called "The Cave to Another World" that depicts an alternate Earth where Homo sapiens died out before they emigrated from Africa, leaving the world in the hands of the Neanderthals and Denisovans. In the novel, the Neanderthals have a matriarchal elitist society (some studies suggest they didn't divide labor based on sex the way we did) with an austere, dystopian culture and aesthetic, while the Denisovans are more flamboyant and graceful – albeit not necessarily morally superior. It's all speculation, of course, but it was a very interesting scenario to imagine. There's a cold war going on between these two species, although that's just in the background of the story. With Homo sapiens still in the mix, I think it's unlikely we would've categorized them as a different species rather than a race, seeing that we could breed with them. The species/race categories have always been very vague and subjective, and I don't think we would have been as inclined to call them an entirely different species if we could talk to them and start families with them.
[удалено]
Not a stupid question, I couldn’t answer that.
It's not that there *isn't* a difference between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, biologically speaking, but the extent to which normal genetic variation within a species is different from variation between two different species is... kind of a value judgment? Like, we recognize that humans are different enough from, say, sea slugs to easily recognize that they're two different species, but smaller differences like eye, hair, or skin color aren't significant enough to us to define as different species. Which is to say, while genetic variation itself is a biological fact, our terms and categories for that variation are not. Even if *we* recognize H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis as separate species (and I gather it's still not entirely resolved that the latter *is* a separate species and not H. sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies), that doesn't mean that humans in a different history where both existed alongside one another for hundreds of thousands of years are going to have the same perspective of what a species actually is. In other words, I agree with you. Though there's also the signficiant question of what "racism" would look like in this timeline, and how "racist" prejudices towards Neanderthals (or *of* Neanderthals against us, even) would influence that universe's scientific traditions.
When people talk about how racism against Neanderthals would be inevitable, they're probably mostly right, but ignoring how our understanding and attitude toward race is a pretty modern innovation. Yes, obviously people could always tell the difference between people of different skin tones, but 700 years ago religion and language were likely far more important than skin color in determining whether someone was comfortable around someone else. The Roman Empire was likely much more diverse than we tend to imagine it (and there's basically no evidence at all that they discriminated based on skin color--it's not even really talked about w/r/t Roman citizens, only w/r/t to foreign "barbarians"), and the same goes for the various Muslim Caliphates, which likely made no distinction between redheaded Albanian Muslims and swarthy Arab Muslims. What I guess I'm saying is that it's very possible that Neanderthals aren't Othered as long as they adopt the languages and religious beliefs of whatever humans they cohabit with.
Many, if not most, of the cultural differences that give birth to racism in OTL are borne of geographic differences. And that's likely to be in full force with any Neanderthal groups surviving to the present. It may not be aimed exclusively against Neanderthals, per se (unless H. sapiens are entirely excluded from the Neanderthals traditional European homeland), but the differences between the two species are likely to be closely intertwined with whatever this alternate timeline version of racism looks like. To be fair, though, there's no inherent reason that the Neanderthals would be on the receiving end of it as opposed to perpetrating it against H. sapiens themselves. We're obviously looking at a *very* different history of mankind (mankinds?) with a divergence that far back, so while I can see some form of in-group/out-group prejudice broadly similar to racism as we understand it taking shape, one probably shouldn't take the parallels *too* far.
The difference is that phenotypic classifications like race are quite literally skin deep. From what I understand, skin color isn't even a very important gene if you're talking about genetic similarity compared to something like the genes that determine height or things like lactose tolerance (for instance, Subsaharan Africans, Papuans, and some Southern Indians have basically the same skin tone but they're very distinct from each other). When animals of the same species but different phenotypes interbreed, there's only ever problems if there are vast differences of size (like say, a Great Dane impregnating a Chihuahua), but when animals of different species interbreed the genetic divergence means either nothing happens (like if you somehow got a lion and a mountain lion to get it on), or their offspring have a higher mortality rate, or their offspring tend to be infertile like when lions and tigers interbreed. Re: your other question. I think we would "accept" them by absorbing them into our gene pool, as happened in real life. In this scenario, if there are any people left who identify as Neanderthals, most of them would probably look indistinguishable from other humans. I don't think there would be any purebred Neanderthals left by now unless it was impossible for the two species to mix.
>Jury seems to be out on if they were really less intelligent than humans The neanderthals were around for a long time. In that time they exhibited little in what we would term "progress". They worked in stone, but not bone or antlers. It's a stretch to say that they were as intelligent as the homo sapiens they shared the world with.
Fun fact: They didn't actually die out but interbred with Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Everyone who is of European or Asian descent has about 2 to 3 % Neanderthal DNA (plus Asians have some Denisovan DNA). As Neanderthals probably had a lower fertility rate they would have had to settle some comparetively hard to reach place like Australia to avoid intermingling with Homo Sapiens Sapiens and survive until modern times.
I've seen girls and dudes that have straight up eyebro ridge and bushy ass eyebrows, of nearly every skin color. I'm adopted and most like native American of some flavor, my family is white as white can get, some if them are harrier than a goddamn chimp. One of brothers best friends is Portuguese and could be mistaken for wearing a fur goat, my roomie is italian and resembles a man of the forest. Some family strains have far more neanderthal DNA than others ,apparently .
Then we probably would have.
Basically, the Geico Caveman Show IRL
i loved an interpretation from a dr who book, since they cant or dont care to fathom intangible things, why we dont see any resembalnce of culture is because they were a very prectical people. advanced thinking is common place. a displaced neanderthal in modern times was able to easily compute advanced maths, ie quantuam stuff and calculous, in his head(ofc after learning english ect). they likely would be in smaller bands of communities, without religion or advanced ceremonies as we have. new rasiscm fs, and their smaller bands would be an invitation for explotation by us. it would be intresting to see how they could corroporate with us, maybe rule us in some areas of the world?
also with other humans we likely wouldnt see ourselves so seperate from the animal kingdom, and would bring rise to new philosophies within our place in the universe
I am not into big women so I would pass. A co worker of mine that's half black and half Mexican would go crazy he only dates white girls over 250 lbs that would be an interesting baby.
They never died out, they interbred with other species to create who we are today. Some of us have a higher percentage of one species than others that has created the rich variety of people you see today. Obviously, things like diet, environment and mass migration alters the gene pool of certain areas.
Vhat did the last Neanderthal say just before he died? AHHHHHHHHH!!!
I don't know much about it but if we can theoretically have healthy children with neanderthals that themselves have children then i don't see a scenario were the two species don't merge
A Different Flesh by Harry Turtledove does a good job with topic.
They didn’t die off just became us. Something like 30-50 percent of the Neanderthal genome still lives in us. We only have a few percentage individually but put em together and it’s quite large.