Complex Numbers

If Only Things Were Different

I would accompany this article from The Conversation with a significant amount of sodium chloride, but it's still interesting speculation.

8 billion people: how different the world would look if Neanderthals had prevailed  

In evolutionary terms, the human population has rocketed in seconds. The news that it has now reached 8 billion seems inexplicable when you think about our history.

No, it seems inevitable when you think about our history.

There's a graph at the link showing population over time. Unsurprisingly, it's a classic exponential hockey-stick.

Neanderthals were more inclined to stay in their family groups and were warier of new people. If they had outcompeted our own species (Homo sapiens), the density of population would likely be far lower.

For homework, explain why this is a fallacious argument.

Hell, I'll save you the trouble: to outcompete sapiens, they would have had to be more social, and thus increase their population density.

But okay, let's play pretend.

The reasons for our dramatic population growth may lie in the early days of Homo sapiens more than 100,000 years ago. Genetic and anatomical differences between us and extinct species such as Neanderthals made us more similar to domesticated animal species. Large herds of cows, for example, can better tolerate the stress of living in a small space together than their wild ancestors who lived in small groups, spaced apart. These genetic differences changed our attitudes to people outside our own group. We became more tolerant.

I know this is going to raise objections from the down-on-humans brigade, but remember, "more tolerant" doesn't have to mean "very tolerant." We still have in-groups and out-groups.

The article then goes into what it says in the headline, speculating (based on data, not wild guesses) how things might be different. I don't find this particular speculation useful, but it still sheds light on the differences between the two human species... assuming, of course, that inferences of their behavior based on archaeology and other disciplines are correct.

As an aside, "species" can be a fuzzy concept. Usually it's meant to describe non-interbreeding populations. But, clearly, sometimes sapiens and neanderthalensis did interbreed. The whole designation thing is over my head, but for general purposes, calling them different species is good enough for communication; I'll let biologists hammer out the details.

The more technology humankind develops, the more our use of it harms the planet. Intensive farming is draining our soils of nutrients, overfishing is wrecking the seas, and the greenhouse gases we release when we produce the products we now rely on are driving extreme weather.

And yet, despite discussing both population and technology, the article stops short of what, to me, is a blindingly obvious connection there.

The vast majority of human population increase has occurred over the last 200 years, roughly coinciding with the industrial revolution. But that's not a coincidence. Advances in science have increased average life spans and reduced infant mortality, while at the same time fouling the environment. On the surface, reduced mortality seems like a good thing, but the increase in population requires extraction and processing of ever more resources, feeding back onto the "fouling the environment" part. "Intensive farming" is needed to feed the 8+ billion. So is "overfishing." It's not "the more technology humankind develops, the more our use of it harms the planet;" it's "the more people there are, the more we need that technology to survive and make more people."

So far, the benefits of technology have outweighed the downsides. But I doubt that will persist.

I feel like the article veers way too close to romanticizing the Neanderthal, kind of a "noble savage" conceit. Sure, maybe the ecosystem would be in better shape had they been more successful, from an evolution perspective, than we were, but that's like speculating about whether dinosaurs would have ended up building rockets if that asteroid hadn't fucked things up for them.