Imagine that instead of Earth being the sole domain of Homo Sapiens, we shared ownership of the planet with another very different intelligent species. Here is an example I thought up: Let's say that there was no Bering strait (maybe Alaska doesn't exist and/or Siberia doesn't extend so far East) so that N/S America are completely isolated by large oceans. Now let's say that while Homo Sapiens evolved and emerged from Africa, at the same time, an intelligent lizard-like species, say, evolved in the Western Hemisphere. Now you have humans on one part of the Earth developing civilization and societies while simultaneously you have lizard-people doing the same. Until the Age of Exploration, they'll not know about each other but then eventually they'll make contact. If Earth's natural history had developed this way with two (or more) very different but equally capable and intelligent species sharing the planet, I wonder what the history of that alternative Earth would have been like. Would we humans and lizard-people have destroyed each other due to intense hatred and competition? Or would we have eventually learned to co-exist peacefully and even live amongst each other? Perhaps the inter-species rivalry may have accelerated advancement and we'd even be better off? It's an interesting premise to discuss...
Knowing how humans have historically reacted to differences in race and color, my guess would be war and subjugation/slavery of humans by lizards or vice versa.
One of the two species would have been killed off. There were two species of intelligent huminoid on this planet not too long ago. Humans and Neanderthals. Neanderthal could use tools and probably languange, however, for whatever reason they died out and we survived. No one really knows why but they were probably killed off by humans. Historically whenever two cultures meet, the less developed culture ends up devestated. Look at all of human history. Let's hope we don't meet aliens from outerspace!
I for one welcome our new overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground caves.
I agree that if there were a significant difference in technological advantage and/or numbers that one species would have been wiped out the other. But if that isn't the case, I don't think it would have been possible, at least until the the advent of modern weaponry, for one species to wipe out the other ver easily. If the two species were able to both survive in reasonable numbers over a period of several centuries, wouldn't it be possible that after the shock of discovering them, we'd just get use to the idea that Earth was a two sentient-species planet and slowly integrated and lived in peace and harmony rather than fight endless wars until the last human or lizard-person was killed? I'd think that given time and if there was parity, we'd just accept it and learn to share the planet together.
Here's some interesting trivia: What former Detroit Piston 'Bad Boy' actually acted as a Sleestack on Land of the Lost?
It's also possible that early humans and Neanderthals interbred, so they died off resulting in us.... We'd probably only learn to coexist with the lizard species if they lived in the water or in some region where humans would have a hard time colonizing. I don't think the dominant species arrogance would be lessened with another intelligent species. Dominance and progress are subjective terms that both species might disagree upon. If humans had the technological advantage at this stage in civilization, they'd either impose a wildlife reserve that restricts contact or leverage some form of cultural superiority to force the lizard people to integrate into our unbalanced world. I imagine slavery would be a longer lasting issue than it would've been in our history.
I generally agree that one species or the other probably would've wiped the other out. If we encountered each other in the 15th C. Look what Europeans did to the native human inhabitants of the New World. If those weren't humans I don't think they would've hesitated to wipe them out. As a sidenote on Neanderthals its possible they weren't wiped out but were assimilated into modern humans. There've been findings of skeletons with a mix of both Cro-Magen and Neanderthal features. Also with the discovery of the hobbit like skeletons on Flores its possible there were many other off shoots living together even that there may still be other humanoids alive hiding in caves in Indonesia or deep jungles.
But in the New World IRL the native human inhabitants there were much smaller in numbers and technologically in the Stone Age compared to the Euorpeans. If the lizard-people were in the same situation vis-a-vis humans then sure the same thing would have happenend. But if the lizard-people had larger numbers and were about on-par with humans then humans and lizard-peoples would not have been able to wipe each other out until the modern nuclear era. But by then both species might have reached consensus on the futility and utter lack of need to wipe each other out rather than live together in peace and harmony.
Yes that's possible but at the same time the competion for global resources is pretty intense and given our own history of racism towards fellow humans I have hard time seeing how two different intelligence species could mutually coexists. If they were on par with humans in the 15th C. I still predict one species would've eventually wiped out the other even to the extent of using nukes in the 20th C to do so. I just don't believe given our own drive towards resource depletion and overpopulation the Earth is big enough for two intelligent species.
