Costin

Posted Saturday, April 29, 2023

12mo

ENFP

Gemini

2

1

What if Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens coexisted?

Some guy on Reddit wrote this: ' Some Neanderthals lived in Doggerland before it was flooded. They did not need ships to reach the British Isles. A lot of what you do depends on how much intelligence/culture you ascribe to Neanderthals. There's not a ton of concrete evidence about that stuff though they are probably the most studied and researched extinct branch of the human evolutionary family. From the books I have on the subject the consensus appears to be that they although they were omnivores some societies of neanderthals ate shockingly high protein diets consisting almost entirely of megafauna like Woolly Rhinoceros and Mammoth in contrast to similar human diets that focused on small game like rabbit or deer. Also, while neanderthals appear to have lived in small family groups there is evidence of larger gatherings such as near huge megafauna kill sites in France probably to take advantage of the available food. Their trade networks were limited compared to later human habitation of the same areas but neanderthals did go out of their way quite a bit to find appropriate tools, particularly stones. Whether they had myths or songs or rituals or decorated themselves and their homes or even if they could speak is all controversial speculation but I usually opt for the more generous interpretations. The answer also depends on why they died out, or rather, why they didn't die out in this timeline. You mention better clothes but as far as I know nobody suggests Neanderthals froze to death having survived for hundreds of thousands of years in Ice Age Europe and the Middle East. The most common one I've heard recently is being unable to compete with agile long-range human hunters using throwing spears while the forests dwindled and made close-range ambush hunting a struggle for the less nimble neanderthals. There's also the question of whether they integrate into human societies or remain distinct. If there's enough of them, like more of them than in our timeline, then human history is changed forever. Still, there are a lot of fun stories about relic populations of neanderthals surviving far later than assumed. Sometimes the troll myths get attributed to them as travellers occasionally encounter ugly-looking wild people living in caves who run away or try to scare away travellers which I think is a lovely, though clearly fantastical, thought. There's Michael Crichton's famous Eaters of the Dead which, almost as a joke/dare, is meant to be the true historical account of a war between a Viking village and Neanderthal cannibals which later gave rise to the story of Beowulf and Grendel and Grendel's mother all recorded by a real-life ambassador from Baghdad who truly met Viking traders in Russia but never sailed with them back to Scandinavia. I say unless Neanderthals have some special skill or knowledge they probably get subsumed by human civilisation though there would probably be small tribes living out in the wilderness for a long time before getting integrated into spreading human cultures. There's probably enough diversity in physical appearance that neanderthal traits soften over time rather than get more pronounced so that the chinless brow-ridged folks with the oblong shaped heads don't stand out THAT much when everyone's wearing beards and hats. We know they can have sex and hunt so as long as they can laugh and drink I think they'd get along reasonably well with humans.' (edited)