Amanda Miller

Here’s a Friday off-topic thought: what if Neanderthals and Denisovans hadn’t disappeared, and Homo sapiens had been contained in Africa for another few hundred thousand years? We tend to imagine Neanderthals as rather dim cavemen who were inevitably going to lose to us, but the reality is more interesting. They survived for hundreds of thousands of years across some pretty unpleasant parts of Eurasia, made sophisticated tools, controlled fire, used pigments and ornaments, cared for injured members of their groups and interbred with us. We don’t actually have good evidence that the average Neanderthal was dramatically less intelligent than the average Homo sapiens.

Perhaps the real Sapiens advantage was less about individual IQ and more about networking: larger groups, wider trade networks, faster cultural exchange and an apparently ridiculous talent for cooperating with complete strangers. If the other human species had survived long enough to develop their own civilisations, we might now be living in a world where “human history” meant the history of several competing intelligent species - with Neanderthal empires, Denisovan kingdoms, Sapiens maritime powers, inter-species religions and probably some truly spectacular arguments about immigration and species rights. And knowing us, we'd still somehow end up arguing about which species has the best football team.