We are annoyed by people who act as though they are better than others, including those who believe that their skin color is the source of their superiority. We’ve come to disapprove of those who regard women as innately inferior to men. I’d argue that we should be equally critical of humans who assume that their species is intrinsically superior to all others and therefore think themselves justified in controlling the lives of all other living things, and treating only their fellow species-members as having an innate right to life and self-determination. Since 1970, the term for that latter form of bigotry is “speciesism”.
I wonder how we would react if we suddenly discovered, in an unexplored wilderness somewhere, a tribe of Neanderthals, those long-extinct ancestors of ours who belonged to the same genus that we do, but a different species. Alive, they would look much like us, yet physically distinctive: short, stocky and heavily muscled, with differently-shaped skulls, small chins, and large noses. We don’t know if they’d possess a language of their own, but we have archeological evidence that they’d be skilled in the use of tools and able to create works of art. They probably would prove to be, in some ways, less intelligent than we are.
By our standards, they would obviously be non-human, yet we know that when they thrived, they interbred with early humans and all of us now have some of their DNA. That certainly suggests that they, when encountered as living beings, might be a good deal more like our next-door neighbors than we’d imagined.
If we had alive Neanderthals to observe, we could, no doubt, learn a great deal. Yet, at the same time, given what we now know about many other non-human species, we probably wouldn’t be too surprised by them. Their sensitivity to their environment would be exceptional, for their lives always depended on that. We observe that sensitivity in all animals, and now know, for example, that even songbirds are so responsive to their environments that they alter their calls to compensate for the different ways in which sound travels in dense forests and meadows.
The probability that Neanderthals have a real language is high. We’ve learned that many non-human species communicate with one another extensively. Even dogs, as you’ve probably read, can speak to humans by stepping on floor buttons that convey messages.
What about Neanderthals’ other mental abilities? We’ve learned recently that monkeys can distinguish geometrical shapes, just as we can. That’s a domain of knowledge we’d thought was uniquely human. And monkeys too, along with elephants, dolphins and magpies, can recognize themselves in a mirror. Also, all mammals have good memories and learn from their experiences.
What about emotions? Apes, we now know, can laugh, and most mammals evidently experience fear, hope, anger, pain, hunger, and affection. Some animals will also help a fellow species-member in trouble (rats), and mourn the death of one of their own (elephants and dolphins).
Those studying the Neanderthals will probably find that they, like all social creatures, know each other well, and exhibit all the so-called “social skills”. We used to think that when female animals chose mates, all they judged were a male’s size and strength. We now know that female birds, for example, assess their males’ mental skills as well.
We would not be surprised to learn that Neanderthals, like most evolutionarily advanced animals, aren’t born with all the survival skills that they need. Their young, like those of our own species, must learn from their parents and other adults how to find food, relate to other species, protect themselves from predators, control their behavior with one another, and so forth.
The Neanderthals would, we expect, reveal distinct personalities and individual differences in degrees of skill and understanding. Most of us see this in our pets, but any zoo employee can tell you about the different temperaments, capabilities, attitudes, friendliness, etc. within the species that they care for.
So, our study of Neanderthals would confirm our scientific findings that evolution’s adjacent species are only marginally different from one another
and each usually displays substantial intraspecies variability. Perhaps we would be reminded that our own species has members who, because of birth or injury, actually have less mental and/or physical abilities than some of those Neanderthals do, yet we don’t deny those humans our respect and humane (note the speciesism of that word) treatment. We’d also surely recall that there is no hierarchy of value within an ecosystem since each component species, from microbe to top-predator, plays a useful role, and, in fact, that the loss of any component life-form weakens an ecosystem’s staying-power.
How, then, would we humans treat those surviving Neanderthals? Would we treat them, despite their conspicuous resemblance to ourselves, as an “inferior” species? Would we be comfortable moving them to some sort of humanoid zoo to study, or would we feel obligated to protect their native environment so they could continue their natural way of life? What if we discovered that their home territory overlaid rich deposits of rare-earth metals? What if some of our own species, living a few miles from them, desperately needed to have new grasslands for their cattle to graze upon? Would we feel justified in moving the Neanderthals, whether they wanted to be moved or not?
Wouldn’t those Neanderthals bring home to us the fact that the relative differences between one species and adjacent ones are tiny; that the similarities dwarf the differences? Wouldn’t they suggest to us that species differences are not differences in intrinsic value? Might they not make us realize that our own species’ supposed superiority is based upon a self-serving and biased set of criteria?
We humans, are destroying other species and simplifying their ecosystems. Our selfishness and self-idolization blind us to the fact that it’s life itself, not the different forms life takes, that we should honor and treasure.
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