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I sometimes wonder what it would be like if another species had survived and developed alongside us. They would be humans but....not quite what we conceive of a

I sometimes wonder what it would be like if another species had survived and developed alongside us. They would be humans but....not quite what we conceive of as human(basically our species). What would their culture have been like? Music, art, language, etc. As tribal as our own species is I imagine we would have gone to war eventually and one exterminated the other (assuming no large difference in population, technology, etc.). I think that might have been what happened to Neanderthals? But still, the thought of going about day-to-day business alongside, let's say homo floresiensis, has something intriguing to it. Perhaps it's the same reason we imagine interaction with extraterrestrial life - it's really just a reflection on us and our own humanity.

nestorD 7y ago
It is not my domain but, as far as I know, before finding neandertal DNA in current humans we thought they probably had been exterminated but now the statu quo seem to be that they have been integrated and have mixed with our species. I believe it would be a good bet that another human species living alongside us would have merged with us by know.
- imesh 7y ago
  That's a rosy colored view of how we mixed. Maybe there was that, but one thing I would bet on is rape. Probably a mixture.
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    And that was out of the norm back then?
  - b5 7y ago
    You're refuting his view as rosy, but positing that the real answer was horror. It's almost certainly something in between the two. Personally, I think that the most likely explanation is that most mixing came through adoption of fertile women into the human tribes. Males of other tribes would probably not have been accepted so readily, and likely driven off or killed, but fertile females would have been more easily integrated. From there, you naturally get a mix of the two. The relative percentages of Neanderthal and Sapien DNA in modern humans would indicate that Sapiens outcompeted the Neanderthals and relatively few interbred with us.
    - dogma1138 7y ago
      I’m not entirely sure that this was only one way. Neanderthal mtDNA is fairly rare in humans while nuclear DNA is much more common. Oddly enough in population with higher percentage of nuclear DNA mtDNA is rarer so it’s not clear which side did the gene transferring. It could be that there are other reasons behind this for example that Neanderthals and modern human female offsprings were less likely to survive or reproduce than males. But overall it’s really not clear how the populations mixed and who did more of the pillaging and raping.
      - Symmetry 7y ago
        That's probably more a matter of natural selection. neanderthal y-chromosome DNA was also almost entirely eliminated from the human genome, as well as neanderthal genes in several other places. When two different dog breeds have pups those mutts are just as fertile as any other dog. When a horse and a donkey have a mule that mule is almost entirely infertile. The first human/neanderthal descendants were probably significantly less fertile than their parents but generations of selective pressure seem to have purged the particular genes that were causing problems which you would expect to include mDNA.
      - 238sjni9 7y ago
        Can you provide a source for human neanderthal mtDNA?
  - DC-3 7y ago
    That's only true insofar as a massive proportion of all intercourse prior to civilized society was probably rape - interspecies or otherwise.
  - dogma1138 7y ago
    Rape was a valid reproductive strategy for humans for most of our history. Why do you think mongol DNA is so prevalent? Reproduction through “love” is a fairly modern concept, while not all rape was at the hands of an invading army or by some serial predator in a dimly lit cave (or parking lot) the sexual dynamics were very different across the population and would be considered rape by most people today especially in the west.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    Rape is probably behind at least 10% of human pregnancies throughout history, and it would have been much more without all extreme countermeasure people had to take. I roll my eyes at people who talk about American "rape culture". But we definitely are a rape species!
pjmlp 7y ago
We kind of have that with the animal species that have some intelligence level, are capable of using tools or do provide teaching to their children. So far, it doesn't look like they get very positive actions from many of us.
lordnacho 7y ago
It would be like it is now. Even though everyone is very similar, people will figure out some differences and call that "race", positing that there's some fundamental difference why one group should be treated differently to another. And you'll get societies where some group is targeted, people will be forced to segregate public transport and schools, and so on. But there's also going to be movements that focus more on the similarities.
kieckerjan 7y ago
Just finished reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, which deals with a theme related to that, about a terraformed planet where jumping spiders become a dominant, intelligent species. Good read. You might enjoy it!
- b5 7y ago
  Children of Time is excellent, and does a really good job of tracking the evolution and eventual ascension of the Portiid spiders. Tchaikovsky creates a really convincing civilisation based on the limits of the planet and the spiders: a technological civilisation without major metal use and with nearly perfect information transfer between generations. The sequel Children of Ruin was a disappointment. It came out recently and I bought it straight away. I'm fascinated by octopuses, but I felt their civilisation was given short shrift to make way for the rest of the story he wanted to tell
- monus21 7y ago
  Also see the brilliant anime Terra Formars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Formars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Formars
zawerf 7y ago
There are still a few uncontacted tribes left. I remember reading about the Sentinelese[1] last year when some guy snuck onto their island to try to convert them to christianity and died. I forgot where I read this but apparently they don't have a concept of gift-giving as a sign of goodwill. I had a really hard time wrapping my head around that! Like how else could gifts be interpreted? Maybe as a sign of submission, like cats who think it must be a god to people who feed it? But can it even be possible for biological humans to not have a concept of reciprocal altruism? Or did their culture evolve to a different point where they can get (homicidally) mad at people for being too nice? The fact that this simple gesture wasn't as universal as I thought really got me thinking about how much of our actions only make sense within a narrow shared context. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese
- hoseja 7y ago
  Not sure if I am understanding you correctly but they didn't kill him because he brought them gifts, they killed him because previous outsiders brought disease and death, so they are rightly xenophobic.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    ISTM we don't have the faintest clue as to why they killed him. That's kind of the point. One doubts that any of them have studied public health.
    - gota 7y ago
      What does ISTM mean?
      - dogma1138 7y ago
        It seems to me.
- legulere 7y ago
  A powerful person can feel humiliated by an outstanding gift. It can also be seen as an temptation of evil.
ljf 7y ago
I am at just shy of 4% neanderthal dna - more than 99% of other humans today, so don't count us as gone completely ;)
dalbasal 7y ago
Neanderthals or denisovans encountering sapiens probably would have been much like sapiens encountering sapiens of a different culture/tribe. Fighting, trading, cultural exchange and some breeding. They would have registered as different tribes but I doubt that the "species" concept (all sapiens unite to defeat the denisovan threat!) would have registered. They weren't that different to us biologically, but people can be pretty different from eachother behaviourally) culturally. One tribe is nomadic, eats a lot of elephants, does monogamy and lives in big hierarchical groups. Another is settled, clannish, matriarchal, polygomous and does a lot of fishing. Behaviourally, that's a lot of difference. It's possible that neighboring neanderthal tribes we're culturally more similar (food, language, art..) to your sapiens tribe than some far off sapiens tribe. Also, it can be little bit misleading to think of those two as separate species. It's more that the human gene pool was much deeper then than now. We are all very close genetically today, especially for such a populous and widespread species. Back then, even within groups classed as Sapiens or Neanderthals, the genetic (and to an extent, morphological) diversity that existed was much bigger. The newly discovered species though... Homo Naledi, florisiensis and luzonensis. These guys do seem like different species. Hopefully, some DNA will be found and we'll know more about them.
barry-cotter 7y ago
Humans are already almost as diverse as canids (wolves, dogs, coyotes) as a whole. Until the Bantu arrived in Southern Africa (I think less than 300 years ago, definitely les than 500) the San has been reproductively isolated for at least 200,000 years. You don’t need to wonder what that world would be like, you live in it. All non Sub Saharan Africans are ~2% Neanderthal. Papuans are 5% Denisovan, from probably three different sub populations, likely as different from each other as the major continental ancestry groups of today. Tibetans have a high altitude adaptation from Denisovans at more or less ~100% fixation that is almost absent among the Han Chinese they otherwise closely resemble. We fought with, killed and mated with the other kinds of human. They may not all still be here but there’s a lot of them in us. Humanity mostly comes from Africa around 200,000 years ago but there’s a lot of deep population structure that’s much older than that.
- jmmcd 7y ago
  > You don’t need to wonder what that world would be like, you live in it. Nah, there's a big difference between interbreeding, leading to a single species, and two non-interbreeding species living side-by-side.
  - Smithalicious 7y ago
    But the species did very much interbreed
    - sunstone 7y ago
      Speak for yourself buddy :)
    - jmmcd 7y ago
      That's my point.
- PsylentKnight 7y ago
  My understanding was that the genetic diversity in humans is actually quite small due to a near-extinction event about 70,000 years ago.

nestorD 7y ago

It is not my domain but, as far as I know, before finding neandertal DNA in current humans we thought they probably had been exterminated but now the statu quo seem to be that they have been integrated and have mixed with our species. I believe it would be a good bet that another human species living alongside us would have merged with us by know.

imesh 7y ago
That's a rosy colored view of how we mixed. Maybe there was that, but one thing I would bet on is rape. Probably a mixture.
- TomMarius 7y ago
  And that was out of the norm back then?
- b5 7y ago
  You're refuting his view as rosy, but positing that the real answer was horror. It's almost certainly something in between the two. Personally, I think that the most likely explanation is that most mixing came through adoption of fertile women into the human tribes. Males of other tribes would probably not have been accepted so readily, and likely driven off or killed, but fertile females would have been more easily integrated. From there, you naturally get a mix of the two. The relative percentages of Neanderthal and Sapien DNA in modern humans would indicate that Sapiens outcompeted the Neanderthals and relatively few interbred with us.
  - dogma1138 7y ago
    I’m not entirely sure that this was only one way. Neanderthal mtDNA is fairly rare in humans while nuclear DNA is much more common. Oddly enough in population with higher percentage of nuclear DNA mtDNA is rarer so it’s not clear which side did the gene transferring. It could be that there are other reasons behind this for example that Neanderthals and modern human female offsprings were less likely to survive or reproduce than males. But overall it’s really not clear how the populations mixed and who did more of the pillaging and raping.
    - Symmetry 7y ago
      That's probably more a matter of natural selection. neanderthal y-chromosome DNA was also almost entirely eliminated from the human genome, as well as neanderthal genes in several other places. When two different dog breeds have pups those mutts are just as fertile as any other dog. When a horse and a donkey have a mule that mule is almost entirely infertile. The first human/neanderthal descendants were probably significantly less fertile than their parents but generations of selective pressure seem to have purged the particular genes that were causing problems which you would expect to include mDNA.
    - 238sjni9 7y ago
      Can you provide a source for human neanderthal mtDNA?
- DC-3 7y ago
  That's only true insofar as a massive proportion of all intercourse prior to civilized society was probably rape - interspecies or otherwise.
- dogma1138 7y ago
  Rape was a valid reproductive strategy for humans for most of our history. Why do you think mongol DNA is so prevalent? Reproduction through “love” is a fairly modern concept, while not all rape was at the hands of an invading army or by some serial predator in a dimly lit cave (or parking lot) the sexual dynamics were very different across the population and would be considered rape by most people today especially in the west.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Rape is probably behind at least 10% of human pregnancies throughout history, and it would have been much more without all extreme countermeasure people had to take. I roll my eyes at people who talk about American "rape culture". But we definitely are a rape species!

pjmlp 7y ago

We kind of have that with the animal species that have some intelligence level, are capable of using tools or do provide teaching to their children. So far, it doesn't look like they get very positive actions from many of us.

lordnacho 7y ago

It would be like it is now. Even though everyone is very similar, people will figure out some differences and call that "race", positing that there's some fundamental difference why one group should be treated differently to another. And you'll get societies where some group is targeted, people will be forced to segregate public transport and schools, and so on. But there's also going to be movements that focus more on the similarities.

kieckerjan 7y ago

Just finished reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, which deals with a theme related to that, about a terraformed planet where jumping spiders become a dominant, intelligent species. Good read. You might enjoy it!

b5 7y ago
Children of Time is excellent, and does a really good job of tracking the evolution and eventual ascension of the Portiid spiders. Tchaikovsky creates a really convincing civilisation based on the limits of the planet and the spiders: a technological civilisation without major metal use and with nearly perfect information transfer between generations. The sequel Children of Ruin was a disappointment. It came out recently and I bought it straight away. I'm fascinated by octopuses, but I felt their civilisation was given short shrift to make way for the rest of the story he wanted to tell
monus21 7y ago
Also see the brilliant anime Terra Formars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Formars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Formars

zawerf 7y ago

There are still a few uncontacted tribes left. I remember reading about the Sentinelese[1] last year when some guy snuck onto their island to try to convert them to christianity and died. I forgot where I read this but apparently they don't have a concept of gift-giving as a sign of goodwill. I had a really hard time wrapping my head around that! Like how else could gifts be interpreted? Maybe as a sign of submission, like cats who think it must be a god to people who feed it? But can it even be possible for biological humans to not have a concept of reciprocal altruism? Or did their culture evolve to a different point where they can get (homicidally) mad at people for being too nice? The fact that this simple gesture wasn't as universal as I thought really got me thinking about how much of our actions only make sense within a narrow shared context. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese

hoseja 7y ago
Not sure if I am understanding you correctly but they didn't kill him because he brought them gifts, they killed him because previous outsiders brought disease and death, so they are rightly xenophobic.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  ISTM we don't have the faintest clue as to why they killed him. That's kind of the point. One doubts that any of them have studied public health.
  - gota 7y ago
    What does ISTM mean?
    - dogma1138 7y ago
      It seems to me.
legulere 7y ago
A powerful person can feel humiliated by an outstanding gift. It can also be seen as an temptation of evil.

ljf 7y ago

I am at just shy of 4% neanderthal dna - more than 99% of other humans today, so don't count us as gone completely ;)

dalbasal 7y ago

Neanderthals or denisovans encountering sapiens probably would have been much like sapiens encountering sapiens of a different culture/tribe. Fighting, trading, cultural exchange and some breeding. They would have registered as different tribes but I doubt that the "species" concept (all sapiens unite to defeat the denisovan threat!) would have registered. They weren't that different to us biologically, but people can be pretty different from eachother behaviourally) culturally. One tribe is nomadic, eats a lot of elephants, does monogamy and lives in big hierarchical groups. Another is settled, clannish, matriarchal, polygomous and does a lot of fishing. Behaviourally, that's a lot of difference. It's possible that neighboring neanderthal tribes we're culturally more similar (food, language, art..) to your sapiens tribe than some far off sapiens tribe. Also, it can be little bit misleading to think of those two as separate species. It's more that the human gene pool was much deeper then than now. We are all very close genetically today, especially for such a populous and widespread species. Back then, even within groups classed as Sapiens or Neanderthals, the genetic (and to an extent, morphological) diversity that existed was much bigger. The newly discovered species though... Homo Naledi, florisiensis and luzonensis. These guys do seem like different species. Hopefully, some DNA will be found and we'll know more about them.

barry-cotter 7y ago

Humans are already almost as diverse as canids (wolves, dogs, coyotes) as a whole. Until the Bantu arrived in Southern Africa (I think less than 300 years ago, definitely les than 500) the San has been reproductively isolated for at least 200,000 years. You don’t need to wonder what that world would be like, you live in it. All non Sub Saharan Africans are ~2% Neanderthal. Papuans are 5% Denisovan, from probably three different sub populations, likely as different from each other as the major continental ancestry groups of today. Tibetans have a high altitude adaptation from Denisovans at more or less ~100% fixation that is almost absent among the Han Chinese they otherwise closely resemble. We fought with, killed and mated with the other kinds of human. They may not all still be here but there’s a lot of them in us. Humanity mostly comes from Africa around 200,000 years ago but there’s a lot of deep population structure that’s much older than that.

jmmcd 7y ago
> You don’t need to wonder what that world would be like, you live in it. Nah, there's a big difference between interbreeding, leading to a single species, and two non-interbreeding species living side-by-side.
- Smithalicious 7y ago
  But the species did very much interbreed
  - sunstone 7y ago
    Speak for yourself buddy :)
  - jmmcd 7y ago
    That's my point.
PsylentKnight 7y ago
My understanding was that the genetic diversity in humans is actually quite small due to a near-extinction event about 70,000 years ago.