@futurebird @quinn

Mandrill bums?

@magicalthinking @quinn

Mandrills don't squick me out since they don't seem like little hairy people, they are majestic and goofy in their own way.

@futurebird

The idea of different species of humans is bonkers¹ and I don't know any book² that tackles correctly the wrecking ball that it is to lazy antiracism...

¹ not as "factually false" of course, but as "doesn't fit with the informal consensus about what humanity is"
² except of course Vercors' "Les animaux dénaturés", written at a time where racism wasn't really condemned, and which is consequently a bit ambiguous on that aspect

@futurebird from about age 10 to about age 30, I genuinely thought primates were among the most interesting of animals. Ironically, or appropriately, I don't know which, for most of that part of my life, animals were only a tertiary interest of mine. As I became more interested in animals generally, I became much less interested in primates specifically.

@lienrag

I agree. It's not trivial to grapple with people who are not sapiens sapiens. I think either they just become too much like regular humans, or authors try to make analogies about racism or war or bigotry which can be either good or bad in their political implications but miss what I think is really interesting.

Neanderthals *were* people but they also were not like any people who are alive today at a fundamental level. We have no idea what that could mean.

@lienrag

If I'm honest I just want to meet some real neanderthals. And not some genetic reconstruction ... Creatures are more than their genome. You couldn't "meet" a neanderthal without the context of their culture and history.

Maybe they would be scary, maybe impossible to really communicate with, maybe they would just be like the person next door. Probably a mix of all of these things.

I do think one book comes close: The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz who is on here I think @annaleen

@futurebird wait, aren't we partially neanderthals too? It's just that instead of two separate groups only one mixed group exists now?

@lienrag @annaleen

I read the book last year and enjoyed it a lot. The neanderthals are more on the "just like us" end of things, but they do have some very different emotional and moral landscapes. I especially enjoyed the neanderthal who got exhausted from how much the sapiens sapiens would keep running their mouths. It hinted at a different pace of thinking, more considered and deliberate. But, also just slower and less excitable and bold.

@IngaLovinde

Some but not all humans have a small part of more recent neanderthal ancestry. 700,000 years back we all have some common ancestor.

When sapiens sapiens moved out of Africa they encountered humans (neanderthals and others) who left before and blended but mostly replaced them. We don't know how this went down exactly.

But, it's not like anyone has more than the equivalent of one or two great-great-great-great ancestors who would be neanderthals.

That's my understanding?

@nazokiyoubinbou @futurebird

Never try to wrestle a chimpanzee.

@michael_w_busch @futurebird Apes have significantly more muscle strength to body weight ratio than we do. It's part of the cost of so many of our calories going to our brains instead of our muscles from what I've read.

@nazokiyoubinbou @futurebird

Chimps win at strength contests.

Humans win at distance running.

Consequence of us having evolved to run around throwing things at stuff.

@michael_w_busch @futurebird We're not going to beat most animals at running either, but when you pick them specifically, yeah, chimps definitely don't have the legs that we do. But then there are some apes like patas monkeys which apparently are faster than humans. Apparently even gorillas still are going to beat out many of those of us who aren't athletes. (Even assuming they aren't swinging from trees which can go even faster still.)

But then if you look at animals built for running, even if you limit to two legs, most are still going to beat humans. For example, I doubt even the best athletes will beat out the average ostrich.

We're built to use our brains more than our muscles. Which is why it's so ironic that humanity seems not to want to do that very thing these days...

@nazokiyoubinbou @michael_w_busch

Can an ostrich run for ten miles?

@futurebird @michael_w_busch Apparently yes. Supposedly with taking breaks they could go something like 180 miles in a day running a bit at a time.

However, one key thing to pause and take note of here is an ostrich wouldn't. They're also tuned not to waste those calories, so they generally only run to escape from danger.

@nazokiyoubinbou @michael_w_busch

I know I keep bringing this up but humans are kind of big as far as animals go. (so are ostriches) are we really THAT physically mid, or even... just not great at all.

I guess throwing things is cool. Not many animals can do that!

*gets smacked in the head by a sharp shooter fish, a trap jaw ant and some kind of hoverfly egg in quick succession.*

@nazokiyoubinbou @michael_w_busch @futurebird I've also seen the suggestion that we wouldn't have the fine motor skills in our hands if we were as strong as chimpansees

(Also, while our brains require a lot of calories, apparently Neanderthals managed to evolve both brains and muscle mass to the point of requiring over twice as many calories a day as we do, which worked just fine for a while. Until that became a selection pressure against them. There's a pbs eons episode about it on YT)

@vanderZwan @michael_w_busch @futurebird That would explain why neanderthals were so much fewer and swallowed up into our own subspecies so quickly. It would have been a lot harder to truly sustain those requirements.

It's popular to act like neanderthals were dumb because they were "cave men" but, in fact, they were quite intelligent (supposedly they taught our subspecies a lot of ways to make better tools and hunt better.) Of course, people confuse knowledge and intelligence for being the same thing when they aren't. (By that same token, humans 10,000 years from now -- if our species lives that long -- will think we were ignoramuses for not knowing how to create such super simple exotic energy sources as they've been using forever and bending spacetime or something, lol.)

@nazokiyoubinbou @vanderZwan @michael_w_busch

Well, if other people are projecting their philosophical ideals on to this question of neanderthals vs. sapiens sapiens I'll mention my pet notion:

sapiens sapiens could figure out how to live in much larger groups than neanderthals, something, maybe reproductive speed, maybe all those calories, maybe a commitment to living in small groups on vast tracts of land limited neanderthals.

They couldn't get into the 100s, let alone the 1000s

@nazokiyoubinbou @vanderZwan @michael_w_busch

Contemporary humans, even deeply anti-social ones know dozens of people well, and a hundred or two as acquaintances. But even more important I don't *need* to "know" someone to work with them, to ride in their cab, or help them with a math problem, or help them find the Library.

Maybe neanderthals needed to know people to work with them? Then all these little gregarious people show up and they have less and less space.

Just a speculation.