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Sometimes I wonder how things would be if we had more than one hominid species in the world and I get trapped in fascinating hypothesis of all sorts. Then I re

Sometimes I wonder how things would be if we had more than one hominid species in the world and I get trapped in fascinating hypothesis of all sorts. Then I remember how we treat animals in general and it makes me think we'd be destined to have a dominating species making all others miserable and I stop thinking those hypothesis are so fascinating. Just thinking out loud.

msla 6y ago
I think it would be an unstable situation unless the hominid species were somehow incompatible enough to prevent cross-breeding; otherwise, what would happen is what evidently did happen, which is that all of the hominids cross-bred and produced a single remaining phenotype.
lordnacho 6y ago
Just because science says Denisovans are a subspecies of humans doesn't mean human societies would see it like that. Women have only been allowed to vote for about 100 years. It's not that long ago that you could go to an advanced country where people could be bought and sold. We are good at defining the boundary socially, rather than scientifically. Who knows, perhaps we'll also decide that eating animals is wrong sometime. Certainly, there's some hope in that violence has lessened over recent decades.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  > perhaps we'll also decide that eating animals is wrong sometime. At some point, there's the very real possibility that vat-grown meat may become a main staple. It sounds a bit icky, but think about it: We could have flavors and textures of meat that were never available in nature (and maybe also some horrific mistakes). It's entirely possible that we could have "top-shelf vat" brands that sell for more than farm-raised. Of course, the biomass to create the foodstuff needs to come from somewhere...Soylent Green? I wonder how this would affect some vegetarians.
  - pachico 6y ago
    Well, they still start from real animal cells, from what I understand. As a vegan, I'd have that dilemma. If I was an utilitarian, I'd probably justify it more clearly. In the meanwhile, I'm quite happy with vegetable based "meat". It was definitely harder to be vegan 10 years ago (social interaction somehow demands a certain diet), and especially here in Spain. Now it's really easy and confinement makes it easier too.
    - dahfizz 6y ago
      What's the vegan reason to not eat lab grown meat? No animal was harmed or even involved in the production of the meat. It's morally equivalent to greenhouse grown plants IMO.
      - kitotik 6y ago
        Not the op, but not all vegans have animal cruelty as their primary concern. Many do it for health reasons and avoid ingesting animal proteins in general, regardless of how they were produced.
        pachico 6y ago
        Take in consideration that being vegan is considered something that goes beyond diet. It takes you to decide on pretty much anything you buy or consume (it took me some time, for instance, finding a strap for my 6 strings bass guitar that wasn't made out of leather). (Btw, do you call it strap or did I just make that out?)
        uhtred 6y ago
        Sorry to nitpick, but if someone chooses to not eat animal products for a reason other than animal welfare, they are not vegan, but rather "eating plant based" or whatever they want to call it. Being vegan is more than about what you eat, it's trying to live in a way that reduces as much as possible the cruelty to other animals from one's own lifestyle. e.g. don't eat animal products, don't wear animal products, don't use products tested on animals.
- voldacar 6y ago
  > It's not that long ago that you could go to an advanced country where people could be bought and sold. I believe this can be done in Libya today
  - riffraff 6y ago
    That is also true in most of Europe, but not legally, and lybia is not generally considered an advanced country.
    - voldacar 6y ago
      >lybia is not generally considered an advanced country true. Second world, maybe? And where in Europe would one go to buy a human?
      - BurningFrog 6y ago
        The Second World was the Soviet block. But I understand what you mean.
      - hutzlibu 6y ago
        Well, the status of quite some illegal immigrants, who owe the smugglers a lot, who need to work and who therefore cannot refuse a work and who cannot go to the police - is probably quite close to that of original slaves.
      - riffraff 6y ago
        third world, the second one was the soviet block (it was an alignment thing, not a poverty thing). Human trafficking is the 3rd largest crime industry in the world, and to find slaves you just need to go wherever there are prostitutes in your area. Yes, even when prostitution is legal, for example Germany is one of the main destinations in Europe. EDIT: Some useful FAQ from the EU website on the matter are here https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/citizens-corner/trafficking-explained https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/citizens-corner/traffi...
        6y ago
- pachico 6y ago
  Well, I guess that's a hope outside the timescale of individual lives, after hundreds of thousands of years of preventing individuals from florishing. I understand your point but somehow it sounds like a romantic idea only. Nevertheless, I hope you are right. :)
- lowestprimate 6y ago
  Some women voted 100 years ago. Not all women. As an example US born Japanese Americans got to vote in 1952
  - wolco2 6y ago
    Just Japanese women or all Japanese?
    - edgyquant 6y ago
      They aren’t talking about Japanese women but Japanese Americans in general. There point is just because women got to vote doesn’t mean they were allowed to. Furthermore a big reason women got to vote, initially, is that married men thought they were getting an extra vote out of the deal (luckily women are individuals and that wasn’t the case.)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- darkerside 6y ago
  Great apes can behave in ways that are stunningly similar to humans
xenospn 6y ago
This is basically the plot of the time machine. One of my favorite books!
- minikites 6y ago
  Or "Planet of the Apes"
- alanbernstein 6y ago
  Similar, Robert J Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy.
  - eesmith 6y ago
    Or Turtledove's "A Different Flesh" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Different_Flesh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Different_Flesh > a collection of alternate history short stories by American writer Harry Turtledove set in a world in which Homo erectus and various megafauna survived in the Americas instead of Native Americans or any other human cultures.
minikites 6y ago
Humans don't need a species difference to dominate other groups and make them miserable, we're perfectly capable of selecting some other difference to create an "other".
- pachico 6y ago
  True, absolutely.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  Much of the history of the west’s treatment of africans was essentially justified by classifying them as lower forms of human. Romans did it to northern european “barbarians”, Europe and colonies did it do african and native american “savages”
  - wolco2 6y ago
    And African's did it to other tribes. Who do you think sold the west the slaves in the first place. Tribes in central Africa would be sold through western African countries.
    - colechristensen 6y ago
      Again weird slavery denial responding to a comment that doesn't mention slavery.
    - pachico 6y ago
      And not only Africans: pre-Columbian civilizations did that to each other too. You don't become an empire just by handshakes and agreements.
  - mistrial9 6y ago
    although well-meaning, I believe this is a shallow and Anglo-centric interpretation of history. Slaving was practiced across the world, and is generally regarded as "barbaric" because, well, it is. BUT the "West" did NOT make African Slavery.. Its incomplete to say that, and points fingers at modern people in the USA. I cannot start to give examples without a complete treatment due to the seriously toxic nature of this subject. But since I personally am descended from people in the USA that opposed slavery for the last 300 years AT LEAST, in EVERY FORM, I am sensitive, and strongly opposed, to a "guilt by association" on this topic.
wh1t3n01s3 6y ago
I personally think Homo Sapiens killed to extinction all the other ‘human’ species, and the megafauna as well. (That’s sad, I know)
- tejtm 6y ago
  And we don't even stop there. Never minding the flashy war/genocide aspects, we self-select mono cropping to a detrimental degree to our species genetic diversity.
  - tomjakubowski 6y ago
    What's the connection between monocropping for agriculture and human genetic diversity?
    - tejtm 6y ago
      humans self selecting for a lack of genetic diversity (as we do) creates a monocrop of humans with all the susceptibility that entails. Perhaps a real geneticist will chime in, but I seem to recall we can find more genetic diversity within a family of another species say chimps or dogs than we do across the entire human species. We thought our lack of diversity was due to some "bottleneck" event where the global human population dropped to around 10K. But then we sequenced neanderthal and had to re adjust that to many repeated bottle necks each decreasing the chance of being it being a correct hyposisis as just one bottleneck is unproven. A different explanation is there were no global bottlenecks just the multitude of day to day local choices we have been making for a long time. (don't date the people from the other side of the river... they wear funny hats) From a CS perceptive I would describe it as too much DFS not enough BFS which matters because backtracking means we go extinct.
- sildur 6y ago
  Given that modern humans carry Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA (and who knows how many other subspecies DNA), I prefer to think we humped them to extinction.
moultano 6y ago
The fact that humans interbred with them likely means we would just think of them as another kind of slightly different looking people.
- in3d 6y ago
  It's possible that their speech abilities were different from modern humans. If that's the case, it would be more than just looking differently. "We show that genes associated with face and vocal tract anatomy went through particularly extensive methylation changes." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15020-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15020-6
disown 6y ago
> Sometimes I wonder how things would be if we had more than one hominid species in the world and I get trapped in fascinating hypothesis of all sorts. What fascinating hypothesis? Why not spell it out rather being so coy? Well we have different races of people. Why not work off that? It's not like we lack diversity amongst human. > Then I remember how we treat animals in general Oh I see now. It gets exhausting and boring to see everything twisted for the vegan agenda. You should see how we treat plants. Now that's horrifying. > it makes me think we'd be destined to have a dominating species making all others miserable 99.99% of animals killed on earth aren't killed by humans. Each day more animals are killed in nature than are killed by humans in a century. Most animals are made "miserable" by non-humans. I doubt you're losing sleep over that since you can't win virtue signaling points that way. > Just thinking out loud. We get it.
- pachico 6y ago
  I'm sorry your chose to pursue this as a personal attack and with such intensity but, nevertheless, and for the sake of those reading this with less animosity, allow me to reply. It strikes me as fascinating how societies would evolve and behave when different species could have and exchange different narratives. This a something not new, that has been exploited more than once in science fiction, precisely because the diversity between humans is not enough (many would argue that there are not human races) or simply not enough to be a scenario for picturing vastly different realities, or a playground for a different role playing. I won't reply to unfortunate comments about plants but allow me to tell you that not only vegans agree on many of the the things that have been said regarding the domination of a species above others. And yes, even among vegans there are debates about wellbeing/misfortunes of animals cause by other animals. As many other topics concerning ethics, it's open and, although science has helped much to set a path, much there is still to discuss. By discuss, however, I mean tolerant and well-intentioned exchange of thought, not cheap attempts of mocking perspectives you don't share.
  - disown 6y ago
    > I'm sorry your chose to pursue this as a personal attack and with such intensity but, nevertheless, and for the sake of those reading this with less animosity, allow me to reply. Don't be sorry. Just stop hijacking threads for your vegan agenda. > It strikes me as fascinating how societies would evolve and behave when different species could have and exchange different narratives. This a something not new, that has been exploited more than once in science fiction, precisely because the diversity between humans is not enough (many would argue that there are not human races) or simply not enough to be a scenario for picturing vastly different realities, or a playground for a different role playing. I really can't make sense of what you are trying to say here. Did google translate mangle what you wrote? > I won't reply to unfortunate comments about plants Yeah, it's hard to confront the horrors of mass plant torture isn't it? All these innocent plants hopelessly stuck in the ground unable to run away or defend themselves. > By discuss, however, I mean tolerant and well-intentioned exchange of thought, not cheap attempts of mocking perspectives you don't share. What is cheap is turning a topic that has absolutely nothing to do with veganism into a vegan virtue signaling session. And I highly doubt you are interested in a "tolerant" and well-intentioned exchange of thought given the way you snuck toxic "veganism" into this thread. Your response made it absolutely clear that you aren't here for a "discussion" like most virtue signaling militant vegans.

msla 6y ago

I think it would be an unstable situation unless the hominid species were somehow incompatible enough to prevent cross-breeding; otherwise, what would happen is what evidently did happen, which is that all of the hominids cross-bred and produced a single remaining phenotype.

lordnacho 6y ago

Just because science says Denisovans are a subspecies of humans doesn't mean human societies would see it like that. Women have only been allowed to vote for about 100 years. It's not that long ago that you could go to an advanced country where people could be bought and sold. We are good at defining the boundary socially, rather than scientifically. Who knows, perhaps we'll also decide that eating animals is wrong sometime. Certainly, there's some hope in that violence has lessened over recent decades.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
> perhaps we'll also decide that eating animals is wrong sometime. At some point, there's the very real possibility that vat-grown meat may become a main staple. It sounds a bit icky, but think about it: We could have flavors and textures of meat that were never available in nature (and maybe also some horrific mistakes). It's entirely possible that we could have "top-shelf vat" brands that sell for more than farm-raised. Of course, the biomass to create the foodstuff needs to come from somewhere...Soylent Green? I wonder how this would affect some vegetarians.
- pachico 6y ago
  Well, they still start from real animal cells, from what I understand. As a vegan, I'd have that dilemma. If I was an utilitarian, I'd probably justify it more clearly. In the meanwhile, I'm quite happy with vegetable based "meat". It was definitely harder to be vegan 10 years ago (social interaction somehow demands a certain diet), and especially here in Spain. Now it's really easy and confinement makes it easier too.
  - dahfizz 6y ago
    What's the vegan reason to not eat lab grown meat? No animal was harmed or even involved in the production of the meat. It's morally equivalent to greenhouse grown plants IMO.
    - kitotik 6y ago
      Not the op, but not all vegans have animal cruelty as their primary concern. Many do it for health reasons and avoid ingesting animal proteins in general, regardless of how they were produced.
      - pachico 6y ago
        Take in consideration that being vegan is considered something that goes beyond diet. It takes you to decide on pretty much anything you buy or consume (it took me some time, for instance, finding a strap for my 6 strings bass guitar that wasn't made out of leather). (Btw, do you call it strap or did I just make that out?)
      - uhtred 6y ago
        Sorry to nitpick, but if someone chooses to not eat animal products for a reason other than animal welfare, they are not vegan, but rather "eating plant based" or whatever they want to call it. Being vegan is more than about what you eat, it's trying to live in a way that reduces as much as possible the cruelty to other animals from one's own lifestyle. e.g. don't eat animal products, don't wear animal products, don't use products tested on animals.
voldacar 6y ago
> It's not that long ago that you could go to an advanced country where people could be bought and sold. I believe this can be done in Libya today
- riffraff 6y ago
  That is also true in most of Europe, but not legally, and lybia is not generally considered an advanced country.
  - voldacar 6y ago
    >lybia is not generally considered an advanced country true. Second world, maybe? And where in Europe would one go to buy a human?
    - BurningFrog 6y ago
      The Second World was the Soviet block. But I understand what you mean.
    - hutzlibu 6y ago
      Well, the status of quite some illegal immigrants, who owe the smugglers a lot, who need to work and who therefore cannot refuse a work and who cannot go to the police - is probably quite close to that of original slaves.
    - riffraff 6y ago
      third world, the second one was the soviet block (it was an alignment thing, not a poverty thing). Human trafficking is the 3rd largest crime industry in the world, and to find slaves you just need to go wherever there are prostitutes in your area. Yes, even when prostitution is legal, for example Germany is one of the main destinations in Europe. EDIT: Some useful FAQ from the EU website on the matter are here https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/citizens-corner/trafficking-explained https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/citizens-corner/traffi...
      - 6y ago
pachico 6y ago
Well, I guess that's a hope outside the timescale of individual lives, after hundreds of thousands of years of preventing individuals from florishing. I understand your point but somehow it sounds like a romantic idea only. Nevertheless, I hope you are right. :)
lowestprimate 6y ago
Some women voted 100 years ago. Not all women. As an example US born Japanese Americans got to vote in 1952
- wolco2 6y ago
  Just Japanese women or all Japanese?
  - edgyquant 6y ago
    They aren’t talking about Japanese women but Japanese Americans in general. There point is just because women got to vote doesn’t mean they were allowed to. Furthermore a big reason women got to vote, initially, is that married men thought they were getting an extra vote out of the deal (luckily women are individuals and that wasn’t the case.)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
darkerside 6y ago
Great apes can behave in ways that are stunningly similar to humans

xenospn 6y ago

This is basically the plot of the time machine. One of my favorite books!

minikites 6y ago
Or "Planet of the Apes"
alanbernstein 6y ago
Similar, Robert J Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy.
- eesmith 6y ago
  Or Turtledove's "A Different Flesh" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Different_Flesh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Different_Flesh > a collection of alternate history short stories by American writer Harry Turtledove set in a world in which Homo erectus and various megafauna survived in the Americas instead of Native Americans or any other human cultures.

minikites 6y ago

Humans don't need a species difference to dominate other groups and make them miserable, we're perfectly capable of selecting some other difference to create an "other".

pachico 6y ago
True, absolutely.
colechristensen 6y ago
Much of the history of the west’s treatment of africans was essentially justified by classifying them as lower forms of human. Romans did it to northern european “barbarians”, Europe and colonies did it do african and native american “savages”
- wolco2 6y ago
  And African's did it to other tribes. Who do you think sold the west the slaves in the first place. Tribes in central Africa would be sold through western African countries.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    Again weird slavery denial responding to a comment that doesn't mention slavery.
  - pachico 6y ago
    And not only Africans: pre-Columbian civilizations did that to each other too. You don't become an empire just by handshakes and agreements.
- mistrial9 6y ago
  although well-meaning, I believe this is a shallow and Anglo-centric interpretation of history. Slaving was practiced across the world, and is generally regarded as "barbaric" because, well, it is. BUT the "West" did NOT make African Slavery.. Its incomplete to say that, and points fingers at modern people in the USA. I cannot start to give examples without a complete treatment due to the seriously toxic nature of this subject. But since I personally am descended from people in the USA that opposed slavery for the last 300 years AT LEAST, in EVERY FORM, I am sensitive, and strongly opposed, to a "guilt by association" on this topic.

wh1t3n01s3 6y ago

I personally think Homo Sapiens killed to extinction all the other ‘human’ species, and the megafauna as well. (That’s sad, I know)

tejtm 6y ago
And we don't even stop there. Never minding the flashy war/genocide aspects, we self-select mono cropping to a detrimental degree to our species genetic diversity.
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  What's the connection between monocropping for agriculture and human genetic diversity?
  - tejtm 6y ago
    humans self selecting for a lack of genetic diversity (as we do) creates a monocrop of humans with all the susceptibility that entails. Perhaps a real geneticist will chime in, but I seem to recall we can find more genetic diversity within a family of another species say chimps or dogs than we do across the entire human species. We thought our lack of diversity was due to some "bottleneck" event where the global human population dropped to around 10K. But then we sequenced neanderthal and had to re adjust that to many repeated bottle necks each decreasing the chance of being it being a correct hyposisis as just one bottleneck is unproven. A different explanation is there were no global bottlenecks just the multitude of day to day local choices we have been making for a long time. (don't date the people from the other side of the river... they wear funny hats) From a CS perceptive I would describe it as too much DFS not enough BFS which matters because backtracking means we go extinct.
sildur 6y ago
Given that modern humans carry Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA (and who knows how many other subspecies DNA), I prefer to think we humped them to extinction.

moultano 6y ago

The fact that humans interbred with them likely means we would just think of them as another kind of slightly different looking people.

in3d 6y ago
It's possible that their speech abilities were different from modern humans. If that's the case, it would be more than just looking differently. "We show that genes associated with face and vocal tract anatomy went through particularly extensive methylation changes." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15020-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15020-6

disown 6y ago

> Sometimes I wonder how things would be if we had more than one hominid species in the world and I get trapped in fascinating hypothesis of all sorts. What fascinating hypothesis? Why not spell it out rather being so coy? Well we have different races of people. Why not work off that? It's not like we lack diversity amongst human. > Then I remember how we treat animals in general Oh I see now. It gets exhausting and boring to see everything twisted for the vegan agenda. You should see how we treat plants. Now that's horrifying. > it makes me think we'd be destined to have a dominating species making all others miserable 99.99% of animals killed on earth aren't killed by humans. Each day more animals are killed in nature than are killed by humans in a century. Most animals are made "miserable" by non-humans. I doubt you're losing sleep over that since you can't win virtue signaling points that way. > Just thinking out loud. We get it.

pachico 6y ago
I'm sorry your chose to pursue this as a personal attack and with such intensity but, nevertheless, and for the sake of those reading this with less animosity, allow me to reply. It strikes me as fascinating how societies would evolve and behave when different species could have and exchange different narratives. This a something not new, that has been exploited more than once in science fiction, precisely because the diversity between humans is not enough (many would argue that there are not human races) or simply not enough to be a scenario for picturing vastly different realities, or a playground for a different role playing. I won't reply to unfortunate comments about plants but allow me to tell you that not only vegans agree on many of the the things that have been said regarding the domination of a species above others. And yes, even among vegans there are debates about wellbeing/misfortunes of animals cause by other animals. As many other topics concerning ethics, it's open and, although science has helped much to set a path, much there is still to discuss. By discuss, however, I mean tolerant and well-intentioned exchange of thought, not cheap attempts of mocking perspectives you don't share.
- disown 6y ago
  > I'm sorry your chose to pursue this as a personal attack and with such intensity but, nevertheless, and for the sake of those reading this with less animosity, allow me to reply. Don't be sorry. Just stop hijacking threads for your vegan agenda. > It strikes me as fascinating how societies would evolve and behave when different species could have and exchange different narratives. This a something not new, that has been exploited more than once in science fiction, precisely because the diversity between humans is not enough (many would argue that there are not human races) or simply not enough to be a scenario for picturing vastly different realities, or a playground for a different role playing. I really can't make sense of what you are trying to say here. Did google translate mangle what you wrote? > I won't reply to unfortunate comments about plants Yeah, it's hard to confront the horrors of mass plant torture isn't it? All these innocent plants hopelessly stuck in the ground unable to run away or defend themselves. > By discuss, however, I mean tolerant and well-intentioned exchange of thought, not cheap attempts of mocking perspectives you don't share. What is cheap is turning a topic that has absolutely nothing to do with veganism into a vegan virtue signaling session. And I highly doubt you are interested in a "tolerant" and well-intentioned exchange of thought given the way you snuck toxic "veganism" into this thread. Your response made it absolutely clear that you aren't here for a "discussion" like most virtue signaling militant vegans.