Philosophy Now Forum

Who was ejected by whom from what group?

Do you have a story where the first two homo sapiens are two ugly Neanderthal babies - a boy and a girl - who are abandoned, grow up feral, and wait a few hundred thousand years to grow smart and strong enough to return and get revenge? Two big problems with that. One: Great apes are not terribly appearance-conscious and there is no reason to think Neanderthals would reject a healthy child just because it looked funny. Two. The gene pool is miniscule; on the very slight chance that those two kids didn't get eaten by jackals, their offspring would be too inbred to last more than about four generations. Of course, the genetic anomaly might have been prevalent enough to produce a whole colony of marginal children that followed the Neanderthal band on its migrations and hung onto the periphery, picking up scraps and handouts. But then you'd have to come up with an event that cut them off from the main body, so that they could evolve separately...

I guess you could just make shit up.

Skip wrote:Who was ejected by whom from what group?

Do you have a story where the first two homo sapiens are two ugly Neanderthal babies - a boy and a girl - who are abandoned, grow up feral, and wait a few hundred thousand years to grow smart and strong enough to return and get revenge? Two big problems with that. One: Great apes are not terribly appearance-conscious and there is no reason to think Neanderthals would reject a healthy child just because it looked funny. Two. The gene pool is miniscule; on the very slight chance that those two kids didn't get eaten by jackals, their offspring would be too inbred to last more than about four generations. Of course, the genetic anomaly might have been prevalent enough to produce a whole colony of marginal children that followed the Neanderthal band on its migrations and hung onto the periphery, picking up scraps and handouts. But then you'd have to come up with an event that cut them off from the main body, so that they could evolve separately...

I guess you could just make shit up.

I think you've made up plenty for everyone.

Well, do you know what this means?:

The first Homo Sapiens must have looked like freaks to the Neanderthals. How do you know that they weren't simply left behind or ejected from the group?

Everything I said previously is sound anthropology.