I watched a documentary on an Amazonian tribe that had just initiated contact with the outside world. accepted help from the government. It was endearing to see how much they appreciated things like flip flops and a cooking pan. From the “noble savage,” I thought pre-modern people understood and lived in harmony with nature.<p>Now I see they live a hella hard life. They are often hungry. They sleep fitfully in fear of being eaten. One guys told of his grandmother being dragged away from dinner by a panther.<p>Their sustainable rate of consumption aside, they don’t really live in harmony with nature any more than I do with city when I cross a busy intersection or operate an elevator.<p>Then I think about what future humans will think of my primitive ass. Which is why I hide photocopies of it in the stacks of libraries I visit. To help the future researchers.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like if another species had survived and developed alongside us. They would be humans but....not quite what we conceive of as human(basically our species). What would their culture have been like? Music, art, language, etc.<p>As tribal as our own species is I imagine we would have gone to war eventually and one exterminated the other (assuming no large difference in population, technology, etc.). I think that might have been what happened to Neanderthals?<p>But still, the thought of going about day-to-day business alongside, let's say homo floresiensis, has something intriguing to it. Perhaps it's the same reason we imagine interaction with extraterrestrial life - it's really just a reflection on us and our own humanity.
What's fascinating about the discovery of Homo luzonesis is that they're from a location which wasn't known to be connected by land for past 2.5 Million years.<p>Considering boat travel wasn't a possibility, their origins might shed us new light on how early hominids migrated and even tell us about human settlements in places like Andaman Islands, Sentinel Islands.
None of these species are really extinct.<p>Homo sapiens interbred with them and their genetics still live on in the local populations. In fact this is a major reason how different human populations around the world became so different looking in such a short time.
> The hominin—identified from a total of seven teeth and six small bones<p>Whenever I read such things, I'm amazed at how much knowledge you can get out of three handful of bones -- and on the hand I wonder if that's maybe still too little to declare the discovery of a whole species of hominin.
How would one go about making an educated guess as to how many species of human in total existed, given what we know about the probabilities of discovering evidence of one?
Nice, makro-history is interesting. Most of you probably know it, but regarding ancient history Noah Yuval Harari is a master writer, apiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a great book on this topic.