Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Neanderthals and Denisovans had survived. Yes, I realize that humans in some parts of the world today have a bit of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry.<\/p>\n
But I am talking about full blooded representatives of our near-relatives. I wonder how such people would think, and how their thinking would be different from ours.<\/p>\n
Would they be better or worse at math, at spatial reasoning, at emotional engagement and theory of mind? Would they tend to be highly analytical or intuitive?<\/p>\n
If Neanderthal or Denisovan children were to go to school alongside Homo Sapiens children, how would that work out? Would everyone get along?<\/p>\n
I realize there is very little chance we will even know the answers to these questions. Theoretically we could bring back such individuals from their extant DNA, but I don’t believe anybody seriously thinks that would be a good idea.<\/p>\n
Still, it’s an intriguing set of questions. Sometimes it is useful simply to ponder a mystery, even if you never expect to know the answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Neanderthals and Denisovans had survived. Yes, I realize that humans in some parts of the world today have a bit of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry. But I am talking about full blooded representatives of our near-relatives. I wonder how such people would think, and how their thinking … Continue reading “If Neanderthals and Denisovans had survived”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21578"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21578"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21581,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21578\/revisions\/21581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}