An Alternate History: What if Neanderthals Didn't Go Extinct?
The global population is roughly 7 billion. Each and every one of those 7 billion is a member of the species Homo-Sapien. give or take a few reptile overlords.
What if Neanderthals Didn't Go Extinct?
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| What if Neanderthals Didn't Go Extinct?: whatifhub.com |
There are physical differences between races and ethnic groups in terms of bone structure, height, you get the point. But we are all anatomically, scientifically from the same species. Yes, even Canadians.
This is not how it always used to be; Homo Sapien is the combination of two words: Homo (don’t even) in Latin translates to human or man. Sapien means wise.
So we as a species are wise men, good job with us! But we weren’t the only men, it’s only been within the last 40 thousand years the anatomically modern humans have occupied this planet alone.
Homo Neanderthalensis lasted in western Eurasia for 300 thousand years. Neanderthals have a pretty bad reputation: Prehistoric, big-browned, dumb brutes, who can’t even figure out how to make huts.
They were just too stupid for their own good, before being brought to extinction by our obviously superior Homo Sapien ancestors. We sit in our mammoth tusk ivory towers chuckling at the Neanderthals; they are all gone, now lost in history like every evolutionary dead end. Like the Dodo. Or Fred.
Well check your privilege right there, Bucko, and throw this preconceived notions out the window. Our common knowledge of the Neanderthals and collective agreement on how they must have been being actually pretty wrong.
What if Neanderthals survived today
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Neanderthals probably were not dopey idiots, at least any less than humans. It’s still widely debated why Neanderthals went extinct, it could have been a gradual process for multiple reasons. Yet it resulted in one thing: Humans, taking over.
What if in an alternate timeline Neanderthals somehow had not gone extinct? What if there were two separate species of humans on Earth, associating well into the agricultural age?
In this alternate timeline Neanderthals simply don’t go extinct. No matter how unlikely this sounds, no matter what realistically happened. Neanderthals just, stay alive.
In our timeline, they lived in primarily Europe (that wasn’t covered in Ice), down to the middle east and a bit of central Asia. This is a vast area, but that doesn’t mean it was densely populated.
It’s estimated Neanderthals had a population of 50 thousand in the entire species. For the time the global Homo Sapien population could’ve been twice to six times more than that.
In this alternate scenario, humans and Neanderthals don’t interbreed. If they did, then after a few generations, the Neanderthal gene would just be bred out of existence.
What if Neanderthals exist today
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Which is one variable possibility of how they went extinct in our timeline?
You’d have half human half Neanderthal children who due to population have children with humans, who have children with humans. You see where I’m going with this... As more humans migrate out of Africa, Neanderthals are pushed back into cold, sparsely populated Europe.
Civilization begins on the borders of their territory, in the fertile crescent, in North Africa. A civilization or not, what matters is the interaction between these 2 species.
Since humans have the number advantage, how do they perceive neanderthals?
Are Neanderthals close enough to humans just to be considered another race or they are so distinctive that they’d be considered animals?
This isn’t too crazy, even mind aboriginals were considered fauna by the Australian government?
Odds are in their best favor if Neanderthals were still in Europe, Homo Sapiens never come in. That means modern Europeans never exist.
Read Trending One: What if The Ice Age never ended?
There’s still Arabs, Africans, Asians, you get the point. But what is perceived as Europeans are stocky people with huge brows, living on this cold peninsula.
Since scientific categorization doesn’t exist yet, they haven’t considered a separate species. If anything they are just considered savage men.
As civilization grows Neanderthals always are at a disadvantage. They’d always have a lower population, they’d always be driven out in over thousands of years as Middle-East empires grow. They are pushed further and further North.
What would a Neanderthal look like today
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On occasion, Neanderthals are probably used as slave labor, workhorses, just as any empire does with conquered people (for the time). I imagine people from central Asia and the middle east migrating up into an increasingly empty continent.
There are no Germans or Italians or Brits. There are entirely new ethnic groups, descended from Persians, or Egyptians, who wiped out the native Europeans - Neanderthals.
The fate of the species would be like really any other minority group who is pushed from their land. Any population of them left is either bred out of existence or pushed so far up north, they are completely out of mind.
Read More: What If The Glyptodon Didn't Go Extinct?
So, what’s the point of this? The question this scenario raises is how two different species of people interact in a modern setting?
How would Homo Sapiens threat Neanderthals who might have conversed and behaved very much like us?
Would society have split itself up and considered the other group a separate species?
Could that even have happened?
Or would our scientific ideas of what makes us human simply be altered to include them?
This is simply one speculative scenario for fun, we will never truly know what would’ve happened if Neanderthals had survived. But hey, it’s interesting to theorize.
* This article was originally published here
