#humanfeels

a proud Neanderthal mother stroking the small, but definitely there, ridges above her son's eyes

a Sapiens father cradling the tiny occipital bun behind his daughter's head, so much like the one he's felt on her mother's

That is the purpose of the humanfeels tag! 

Individual humans can do some pretty fucked up stuff, and even in a group we can be bad. But as a whole? As a species? We’re amazing. If you take the broad view of us and our actions, we’re such an overwhelmingly good species. We just want to help and love and be helped and be loved.

Humans are my favorite animal. H. sapiens sapiens is hands-down my favorite species on this planet. 

Like, the Opportunity rover.

It was only planned to operate for 90 sol (the Martian “day”, slightly longer than an Earth day), but it’s gone above and beyond. It keeps exploring unknown territory. It has a job to do, and by gum, it’s going to do it! I know I’ve been there. Haven’t you?

That makes it Human Enough to our brains that upon learning of its existence, we immediately feel attached to it. 

We immediately feel a bond to it. We worry about it. We want it to succeed, to keep doing its little Mars Rover Thing, because we’ve persevered and kept doing our little Earth Human Thing through tough times.

I literally learned about Oppy--the official twitter calls Opportunity Oppy, so that’s what I’m calling it--this afternoon, and I’ve spent a good half-hour debating whether or not my gods would be annoyed if I prayed for them to look out for it.

Today, we gave the kids a chance to run solo after they finished with their partner, and we had a kid who ran all five courses. One with a partner, four on his own. He was that fast.

As he came in on his final course, the entire class came together for him. Kids ran outside to be the first to spot him and ran in alongside him, cheering nonstop. They made an archway for him to run through as he finished. They held a long piece of toilet paper to be the finish line. They chanted his name.

Our exhausted champion staggered in to his classmates' voices praising him and "Chariots of Fire" blasting from one of the naturalist's phones. He broke the finish line, ducked under the many hugging arms and hands raised in high-fives, stumbled to the water fountain, and drank uninterrupted for a solid two minutes.

I was about to cry from the humanfeels.

...Scratch that, not "about to". I did tear up.

I think you and I feel something very similar when we contemplate our lost genus-mates.

For me, it’s almost a sense of loss. We, of course, know nothing for certain about their cognition, but from what I understand, current research puts them on our level intellectually. We know they had tools that were comparable to those of the early Homo sapiens they shared the Earth with. They probably had nuanced languages just like we do. They were almost certainly as capable of complex, abstract thought as we are.

And they’re gone. They’re gone and we’ll never know for sure. And we’ll never know what it was like to not be so taxanomically alone.

Now granted, I imagine if H. neanderthalensis was still around today, it almost certainly would not be all sunshine and lollipops. Humans are clannish and inherently mistrustful of things that look Different, and Neanderthals and H. sapiens were very, very Different in the way they looked. We would be weird about them, and they would probably be weird about us.

A sapiens-neanderthalensis couple would likely be handled about as gracefully by society as any interracial couple is today; their children would probably face the same struggles to fit in as biracial kids. There would be horrible stereotypes about each others’ species, the same way there are horrible racial stereotypes. We would have derogatory terms for each other. There would be predominantly-sapiens neighborhoods and predominantly-neanderthalensis neighborhoods, and whenever a family of the “wrong” species moved in, people would get Weird about it.

But here’s the thing about H. sapiens sapiens: As suspicious as we are of things that are Different, we absolutely love things that are even a tiny bit Like Us.

So even though it would be awkward for or even scorned by some, that sapiens-neanderthalensis couple would absolutely exist, and would exist proudly and lovingly.

For every mailbox of a “wrong-species” house that was smashed, there would be a neighbor afterward who came quietly and knocked on the door, and offered a cake and a “welcome to the neighborhood, sorry about the Michaelsons, I promise we’re not all like that”.

There would be sapiens and neanderthalensis children laughing and chasing each other on a playground, not caring that their new best friend didn’t have brow ridges like the rest of her family--she likes polar bears and has a pink fidget spinner too, and that’s what’s really important.

For me, the feeling of loss comes from thinking about what could have been, if only the Neanderthals had been able to survive past the last ice age. (Or, depending on which theory you hold to, if we hadn’t killed them all.) They were an incredible species, so Like Us and yet so Different. The interaction between our two species--the conflicts, the wars, the hatred, the love, the cooperation, the joint struggle for survival as two incredibly unique species of ape--would have made for a very different world than the one we inhabit today.