Showing posts with label Neanderthals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Neanderthals. Show all posts

Thursday, August 23, 2018

Thought Floating on Different Blood

I've been rereading a couple of Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters novels. Magicians in this series work with one of the classic four elements (air, water, earth, fire). People with those powers can see and talk with elemental creatures (sylphs, salamanders, gnomes, fauns, and many others) invisible to non-magicians. Many elemental entities have human-level intelligence; some are more intelligent and powerful than human mages. Elemental magicians, able to communicate with nonhuman creatures, must surely have a different view of the world from us ordinary mortals. People in ancient times believed in a host of intelligent beings who populated the natural realm, such as nymphs, satyrs, dryads, minor gods of rivers and mountains, dwarfs, faerie folk, trolls, etc. I suspect, however, that few ordinary people ever expected to meet one of those creatures. How different our world would be if such entities existed openly, where any of us (not just magicians) might encounter them in our daily lives.

In C. S. Lewis's PERELANDRA, the protagonist, Professor Ransom, travels to Perelandra (Venus), where he finds three intelligent species (not counting the life-form of pure spirit who rules the planet). One of his Perelandran acquaintances expresses surprise upon learning that Earth's ecosystem has only one sapient species. How can we fully understand ourselves, he wonders, if we can't compare our thoughts to "thought that floats on a different blood"? How would our view of our own species and the world we inhabit change if we weren't alone on our planet?

Although I've often wondered about a hypothetical alternate history in which other human species or subspecies, such as Neanderthals and the "hobbits," had survived to the present day, I sadly suspect that the prevailing attitude toward other races wouldn't be very different. Neanderthals and other hominids, and maybe Yeti if they existed, would look too human. They might well get treated as inferior beings, similar to the way Europeans historically treated other races, only worse, because some anthropologists might classify such hominids as "animals"—a bridge between Homo sapiens and lower species, intelligent enough to be useful but inhuman-looking enough to justify enslaving them.

Demonstrably sapient but clearly nonhuman creatures, on the other hand, would probably evoke a different response. What if we shared Earth with centaurs, merfolk, or intelligent dragons? Or the semi-civilized talking animals of Narnia? Tolkien (in his essay on fairy tales) says animal fantasies satisfy the perennial human yearning to reestablish communication with the natural world from which we've been cut off. Would a common experience of living alongside other sapient species—or extraterrestrial visitors—make human racial differences seem insignificant, as STAR TREK optimistically postulates?

The TV series ALIEN NATION explored this question in thoughtful detail. It portrayed human-on-alien prejudice and hatred, human-alien friendships and love affairs, and the mind-expanding experience of exposure to another species' view of the universe. This series about a shipload of extraterrestrial refugees settling in California, all of whose broadcast seasons and follow-up TV movies are available in DVD format, deserves multiple viewings. Also, a number of tie-in novels were published, most of which I thought were quite good. If nothing else, the fact that the Newcomers have three sexes would give them a different outlook on life from ours. The body and the senses inevitably shape the mind's perceptions of reality. An intriguing spec-fic example of "thought that floats on a different blood."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, May 18, 2017

Early Hominids in America

Scientists have conjectured that a prehistoric site in San Diego County may prove relatives of early humans entered North America 130,000 years ago, at least 100,000 years earlier than commonly believed:

First Americans May Have Been Neanderthals

Researchers have been working on this discovery since the early 1990s. The ambiguous evidence meets with skepticism. Are the mastodon bones found at the dig evidence of human or prehuman hunters in the New World at that remote period? If so, they might not have been modern humans (Homo sapiens). They might be older members of the genus Homo such as Neanderthals or Denisovans (a distinct subspecies discovered in Siberia).

The idea of other kinds of human-like people sharing the world with us—Neanderthals, Denisovans, the Indonesian "hobbits" (Homo florensiensis)—fires the imagination. It would be like having aliens among us. An SF explanation of orcs, elves, and dwarves might be developed by postulating that those creatures were independently evolved humanoid species or subspecies. Suppose some of them lingered into historical times as the truth behind the myths? Or remnants of their kind live secretly in isolated wilderness areas to this day?

Personally, I'm holding out for the possibility that survivors of hypothetical early hominids in California form the basis of the Bigfoot legend. Why shouldn't a small breeding population of such a species continue to hide in the depths of old-growth forests? After all, mountain gorillas were discovered and identified as a separate species only in the early 20th century, and only about 800 are estimated to exist in the wild. Why couldn't other types of supposedly extinct primates have survived?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Sunday, November 07, 2010

Links You May Have Missed

Basically, I've amused myself with the labels, and also with alliteration. I thought I'd share a list of some of the places on the internet that I've been.

Sites that I've bookmarked this week:

Cognitive Dissonance Theory (you value more what you have to work harder to obtain)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/la-heb-food-hard-to-get-20111105,0,6232759.story

Fantasy world-building
http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-worldbuilding-questions/

The well-being of sperm
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bpa-semen-quality

Neanderthals Live On
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ozzy-osbourne-genome

Or maybe they don't
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dna-sequence-may-be-lost-in-tr

Did We Mate With Neanderthals Or Eat Them?
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/nov/30-did-we-mate-with-neanderthals-or-murder-them

Motivated Reasoning (Believing what you want to believe, regardless of the evidence)
http://www.skepdic.com/motivatedreasoning.html

Critique of the Kindle and its ilk, and gobsmacking ignorance about copyright law
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-trouble-with-e-readers&page=2&posted=1#comments

One ripped-off author
http://www.kpho.com/news/25653553/detail.html

Ripping (Rightly) Into (an alleged) Ripper-Offer
http://illadore.livejournal.com/30674.html
http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1553538.html

 A lot of good info about copyright and a who's who of professionals who care passionately about plagiarism and copyright infringement.

For Lovers Of Lists (10 Things You Didn't Know...)
http://discovermagazine.com/columns/20-things-you-didnt-know

Do let me know which you enjoyed most, if any!
All the best,

Rowena Cherry