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Comment by begueradj | Hacker News Reader

I once watched a documentary where it was mentioned that homo sapiens co-existend with around 20 archaic human forms (Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis ...etc) , of which only homo sapiens survived and thrived.

But this is a subject that always scared me especially with nowadays' politics.

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During the period for which we have evidence, Neanderthals seem to have had smaller populations than Homo sapiens, and they reproduced more slowly (longer gestation plus longer interval between pregnancies). So it may be that they went extinct for those reasons.

That may be so .. but I recall reading about Neanderthals' cave drawing .. they depicted Homo sapiens as frightening creatures.

I can’t find anything about neanderthal cave art that represented Homo sapiens.

They also had a lower brain to body ratio so weren't as intelligent.

Their ratio was about the same as homo sapiens. It's not clear that they were less intelligent, they seem to have had a similar degree of intelligence based on findings from caves in Spain.

About the same but significantly lower. Neanderthal cave art is basically scribbles and scratches compared to say Altamira.

Why is brain:body ratio correlated with intelligence?

It’s pretty much the one metric that holds true across all animal species. Read about EQ (encephalization quotient)

What's so scary about it

If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that the species line is somewhat subjective. If you slide broader than today’s definition then we had a lot of human genocide in our collective past. If you slide narrower than today’s definition then we could end up with a lot of human genocide (by today’s definition) in our collective future. Anything to do with genocide is rather scary.

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