Rozzombie

POV you're an artist that lives in the USA and now returning to your roots

IT'S GOOD TO BE BACK YALL!!!

For some reason, humans really don’t like things that look like humans but aren’t quite human. Hence why a lot of people are uncomfortable with movies with animation like Monster House and The Polar Express. It looks too realistic to us and sets us off.

Scientists call this the “Uncanny Valley” effect and its thought to be an evolutionary tactic for survival.

Back when Homo sapiens weren’t the end-all of hominids, we also had some other two legged “humanish” cousins like the Neanderthals, Denisovians, and more!

There were nine different species of “humans”

By 10,000 years ago, they were all gone. The disappearance of these other species resembles a mass extinction. But there’s no obvious environmental catastrophe – volcanic eruptions, climate change, asteroid impact – driving it.

Instead, the extinctions’ timing suggests they were caused by the spread of a new species, evolving 260,000-350,000 years ago in Southern Africa: Homo sapiens.

Neanderthal skeletons show patterns of trauma consistent with warfare.

Like language or tool use, a capacity for and tendency to engage in genocide is arguably an intrinsic, instinctive part of human nature.

Optimists have painted early hunter-gatherers as peaceful, noble savages, and have argued that our culture, not our nature, creates violence. But field studies, historical accounts, and archaeology all show that war in primitive cultures was intense, pervasive and lethal.

Basically: the reason we as Homo Sapians find other human-ish figures unsettling and have an instinctual fear/aggression response called “The Uncanny Valley” is because we literally TOOK OVER THE WORLD by hunting down and killing every other hominid on the planet.

Dunno if the “9 species of hominid genocide” was a result of uncanny valley or the cause of it, but it’s a pretty sure bet to guess they’re linked.

The lead theory now is that rather than killing all the Neanderthals, we actually out-competed them.

The Neanderthals had adapted to a very specific environment, in very specific ways. They were almost entirely reliant on hunting big game. Because they were cold-adapted, they probably had greater caloric needs.

For a while it all worked out. They got the cold plains just south of the glaciers, and we got the tropics. Then the climate changed, the glaciers melted, and some schmuck went and invented clothes.

The more adaptable species spread, and the less adaptable one faded…but again, there was mating.

By mating with Neanderthals, we picked up useful genes…and gave their species a legacy. But it’s even possible that they would have gone extinct without our input at all.

It’s not impossible we committed species-level genocide, but it’s unlikely.

My brain:

“A rambunctious wombat named Timothy at a local animal sanctuary.”

Just a good boy who wants the ball