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.
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.
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.
Dan Everett, the subject of the New Yorker's article, wrote a book about his experiences with the Pirahã called Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes which is excellent. It's one of my absolute favourite books ever.
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.
Be careful: The Sentinelese and all other uncontacted tribes are Homo sapiens exactly the same as you or I. Just because they might have a very different culture doesn't make them alien in the way Homo neanderthalensis or Homo floresiensis might have been to our (and the Sentinelese peoples') ancestors.
I'm half way into a book by James C Scott "The Art of Not Being Governed, An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia"[1][2] where he makes a compelling case for why (hill) people/tribes evolve differently. Not because they are in some sense isolated (and backward). It's research mostly about the tribes escaping China and looking for safety by going to higher grounds. They chose not to have a written language, reject religion, or farming, etc out of necessity and to avoid the encroaching state (which means slavery, etc). He shows that despite the difference in geography and their scatteredness (Burma, Vietnam, Laos, ...) all have certain customs in common (and even they are not all from China).
they are not unaware of civilization or reject "culture" because they are "backward" but have been part of it at some point. And they have chosen to become outcasts either because of heavy tax collection, risk of enslavement or imprisonment. People who flee into higher altitudes and away from what the rest calls "civilization" (the rice growing padi states).
The Sentinelese and Jawari (despite not being hill people) are hunter-gatherers presumably because it allows them to stay independent (enslaved, taxed etc). Their customs and strange ways should be seen as having evolved out of necessity to avoid being absorbed by a different group.
"The Sentinelese and Jawari (despite not being hill people) are hunter-gatherers presumably because it allows them to stay independent (enslaved, taxed etc)."
I don't know anything about the Jawari but this just seems like speculation w.r.t the Sentinelese. You're ascribing a single-liftetime conscious decision ("I know civilization, it is bad, so we should all just keep to ourselves in this isolated place and not develop technology") to groups of people who have been living in isolation for centuries, possibly even thousands of years. In the case of the sentinelese, it may not even be a type of cultural evolutionary trait to avoid people so much as a consequence of isolation, that people just don't go there because it's out of the way or they don't know about it. And their hostility to outsiders could have any number of explanations... it could be that they see civilization as a threat to their way of life, but it could also be that they are just scared of people who look different and use seemingly magical tools, or due to some pervasive myth/aspect of their religion.
The wiki article include descriptions of several visits where they seem to understand gift giving as good will quite well:
> During a 4 January 1991 visit, the Sentinelese approached the party without weaponry for the first time. They collected coconuts that were offered but retreated to the shore as the team gestured for them to come closer. The team returned to the main ship, MV Tarmugli. It returned to the island in the afternoon to find at least two dozen Sentinelese on the shoreline, one of whom pointed a bow and arrow at the party. Once a woman pushed the arrow down, the man buried his weapons in the beach and the Sentinelese approached quite close to the dinghies for the first time. The Director of Tribal Welfare distributed five bags of coconuts hand-to-hand.
But even if they didn't, it's quite possible that there are other factors influencing their decisions than basing it purely on receiving gifts. As for the missionary that was killed, it seems disliking proselytizers turning up at your door is another universal human attribute.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.