Sometimes I wonder what our world would be like if our evolutionary relatives were still around. How would things be different with intelligent cousins like Neanderthals in the mix? Would we just be perpetually trying to kill them off, since that’s probably what helped them originally go extinct? Would there be nations of Neanderthals or would we intermix? Would their be stigma with interbreeding (which we know sometimes happened) or general species-ist stereotypes? Would there still be tension from the genocide we inflicted on them ages ago, with reparations to current Neanderthals or monuments to those who lost their lives?
Would less intelligent cousins who still had primitive language, likeĀ Homo heidelbergensis, be relegated to a lower class? How would we treat our even more distant cousins like Austrolopithecus? Would we grant them some special rights above other animals, like we sometimes do with intelligent animals like dolphins and chimpanzees? How would the ethics of genetic testing work when trying to get samples from our cousins who are not intelligent enough to consent, but are still more intelligent that what we currently research?
…This is what a human evolution researcher with a penchant for science fiction daydreams about. I guess I’ll add it to the list of “Books I should write but probably never will.”
51 comments
Scott McGreal says:
Aug 25, 2012
An interesting SF series by David Brin is the uplift books, based on the premise that chimpanzees and dolphins are genetically modified (“uplifted”) by humans so that they can talk and even understand and practice science. Furthermore, humans come into contact with a Galactic civilisation in which patron species regularly uplift client species they discover on other planets. The Galactics believe that humans must have been uplifted at some point in their history by unknown patrons who later abandoned them. Interestingly, humans seem to treat their client species much better than Galactic patrons in general treat theirs, although the chimps and dolphins don’t quite have equal rights with humans.