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.
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 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 survived in western Eurasia for 300 thousand years.
Neanderthals have a pretty bad reputation: Prehistoric, big browed, 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,
is actually pretty wrong. 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, interacting well into the agricultural age?
Now, Cody this is completely unrealistic, they would have died anyways, downvote
Yes, I know Jimmy, this is light hearted, asking the "What if?", for fun. You like fun, don't you Jimmy?
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.
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.
Civilisation begins on the borders of their territory, in the fertile crescent, in North Africa.
Civilisation 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 different 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 favour if Neanderthals were still in Europe, Homo Sapiens never come in.
That means modern Europeans never exist. 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 categorisation doesn't exist yet, they aren't considered a separate species. If anything they are just considered savage men.
As civilisation grows Neanderthals always are at a disadvantage.
They'd always have 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.
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.
So, whats 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 acted 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 theorise. This is Cody of AlternateHistoryHub.