About 40,000 years ago, humans encountered an alien race.
At this meeting, we interacted with another highly, evolved, intelligent hominid that most people know now as the Neanderthal.
Tens of thousands of years ago, as strange as it is to say, there were two species of humans. There were the Homo sapiens, our species of tall, slender, hairless primates that came from Africa. But there were also our European cousins, Homo neanderthalis, who were shorter, bulkier and had that deep furrowed brow that we've come to associate with cave men.
A new book by Chip Walter, Last Ape Standing, details this meeting and covers how exactly we early humans interacted with this other human. Did the meeting break down into primitive hominid warfare? Or did we engage in an epic bone club fight, straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Walter suggests something else, reports NPR. "Imagine this encounter, and its shattering effect," he writes. "Each group must have gazed at the other in bewildered amazement."
Our common view of neanderthals is a little off from the truth. A skeleton found in Southern France in 1908 had led scientists to believe that the hominid was bent over, like a mixture of walking upright and on all fours, like the way an ape walks. But it turns out that this skeleton that led to this belief came from a sickly individual.
"Walking must have been agonizing given the state of his bones" writes Walter. "He died with no more than two teeth, which would have made eating the normal rough, Neanderthal diet nearly impossible. Yet this man's fellow tribesmen must have carried and fed him specialized foods for years, otherwise he would never have lived to such a ripe age."
The presence of this stooped individual doesn't mean the Neanderthals were knuckle dragging brutes, but rather, this man's existence proves that the species were a kind bunch, taking care of their sick.
This other species didn't talk like us either. Neanderthal brains, while conventionally larger than that of Homo sapiens, were not as well suited for language as our brains. But they did speak with one another, but in an alien form that would have sounded unusual to our ancestors. As NPR explains, it was "a more musical, tonal language, a mix of cooing and keening, singsong beats, accompanied by gestures. Chip Walter likes to think that in their speech, and early on with their burial practices, they may have been a touch 'more softhearted than we are,' but we really don't know."
So when we came across these short, stocky, thick browed, cooing people, what happened? Why and how did the skinnier, hairless variant of humanity come out on top, while the Neanderthals died out? Did we wipe the species off the planet due to competition? Was there only room in the forests of Europe for one highly intelligent ape? As Walter points out, we probably didn't wipe out the Neanderthals with brutal violence. Instead, we probably interbred until one species remained.
"If we killed them at all, we killed them with kindness. We neither murdered them nor outcompeted them. We mated with them and, in time, simply folded them into our species until they disappeared."
