What if there were another advanced species on earth?
Source: msnbc.msn.com
What if Neanderthals, who bit the dust just 28,000 years ago, had instead wised up and were now living next door? Or what if, during all these millennia that humans have been evolving, some unrelated creature had evolved cognitive and technological prowess in keeping with our own?Another scenario: what if humans had split into two separate species — the original gangsters, and a successful evolutionary offshoot?
These are all perfectly reasonable histories of the world that would have resulted in two advanced species of Earthlings living side-by-side today. They’re just not the histories that happen to have happened.
But what if they had? Would we break bread with our brainy cohabitants or be locked in a constant battle for supremacy?
Kirk duels with the Gorn. Star Trek, Paramount Pictures
Oh, them – just ignore them
In this hypothetical world, there would be three possible relationships between humans and "others," said William Harcourt-Smith, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History. The most likely one is that competition for resources would cause us to fight, constantly.
"Given knowledge of how humans behave within their species — the endless intertribal conflicts and wars that have sadly gone on for many thousands of years — I think that whenever resources become an issue, or competing ideologies become an issue, you get conflict," Harcourt-Smith said. If one of the species was slightly cleverer or stronger or developed better technology than the other, the former would eventually decimate the latter, reminiscent of Humans vs. Neanderthals.
Alternatively: If, after tens of thousands of years of clashes between Humans and Others, no one had come out on top, the two species might have gradually drifted toward equilibrium, either by populating geographically separate regions of the globe or by adapting to require different resources, Harcourt-Smith said. Others might have developed an appetite solely for fish, for instance, while Humans might have specialized in animal husbandry, and come to find fish disgusting.
In either of those cases — if we lived in different regions or utilized different resources — Humans and Others would have developed cultural systems in which we were taught to avoid one another. That’s what other species do under the same circumstances. "As long as there isn’t competition, species just ignore each other," he said. "Two monkeys living in the same tree, for example — if they’re not going after the same resources, they don’t interact."
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Read the full article at: msnbc.msn.com
Top Image: Still from "Planet of the Apes," a 2001 film. 20th Century Fox.
Humans Versus Reptilians? ;)
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