Until now, we only had fragments of these cousins. Now we have face. Studying our evolutionary development and our sister-species is one of my favorite aspects of archeology. We’re constantly developing new information.
Side note: look up the initial presentation of Homo naledi. The leading archeologist did a phenomenal talk a couple of years ago (I think in December). It was really an exciting presentation. But I’m also pretty nerdy.
What I meant is the modern accepted view is that Homo Sapiens are, well, what the name implies. The smartest hominds.
We started out saying we knew that was true because of jewelry, burial rituals, and cave paintings. All of which were found in Europe and thought unique to us, specifically Europeans because everyone was hella racist back then.
Then we found out Neanderthals did all that, then we found out Denisovans did it…
Semi-recently we found out the last common ancestor we all shared also did those things that we claimed made Homo Sapiens “the smart ones”.
That’s what I mean later about moving the goalpost so we can still say we’re better.
We’re not smarter than the other hominds were.
We were just the one with an innate drive to kill other hominds that didn’t look exactly like what we grew up around. The vestiges of that is why “in group/out group” still develops in modern humans and why racism is a thing.
That, and we reproduced faster than others, which enabled the crazy levels of aggression. So even when the occasional hybrid tribe showed up, our genes would mostly drown out the genes of other hominids. Wed absorb a few good traits into the population, but still be mostly human in a short amount of time on the evolutionary timeline.
It’s not a pretty story, but all available evidence points to that being the reason why we’re the last standing homind. It’s just hard to admit.
Okay, so I agree on the first bit that goes into the “we are special” thing. See Sir PTerry’s bit on Pans Narrans over the egotistical Homo Sapiens.
I would note that every cultures default state was racism and exclusion, much like the notoriously violent Chimps and the less physically violent but no less ruthless rigid social hierachies of bonobos. Europeans do not have an exclusive lock on that.
Note that eastern cultures are still extremely racist and sexist, and were for a very long time before any meaningful direct contact with Europe. Also the original concept that Sapiens exclusively killed off Neanderthalensis (as well as Denisova) is wildly incorrect.
At least for Homo Erectus, we are absolutely smarter but physically weaker than them. Yeah they apparent could build wooden structures, but for tooling they never moved beyond stone hand axes for over a million years. as others have put it: “they early on perfected the hand held stone tool and never moved beyond it.”
It was really a combination of Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus that wiped out most of the other “human” species, not Homo Sapiens.
You seem to be focusing on intelligence which hasn’t been considered a particularly big factor past like homo-habilus since the 70s, Homo-sapiens were the most adaptive which basically allowed us to exist in any environment. Our biggest strength was our thermo regulation everything else was sub standard compared to the other human populations, but because of our weaknesses we basically had to pursue more advanced technology to compensate. A neanderthal could take a hit from a wooly rhino a Homo-sapien could not, so we made spear throwers and improved the spearheads.
Secondarily neanderthals killed each other about as often as different tribes would interact, this could actually explain their absurd level of population spread compared to actual population size. This population spread is also why they were going extinct before homo-sapiens moved into Eurasia, they were getting pretty damned inbred in a lot of areas.
Mankind is a prime example of survival of the fittest, we weren’t the strongest, biggest, or even smartest, but we were the most stubborn and willing to fuck everyone out of existence. Seriously a new consensus is that most of the other African homo went extinct because they started to interbreed to a massive degree, which Homo-sapiens emerged out of.