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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

I think they went extinct because we were horrified by them. Horror movies are most terrible when the creatures there are mostly human, but somehow different. Humans don't like different kinds of humans.

If a human being sees another human that is different enough to fall into the horror movie monster category, we immediately kill it. I think that humans would have this reaction to the other human species, otherwise why are our horror movies dominated by humanoids, and not by animals?

Other animals that have such horror reactions are snakes, rats, cockroaches and spiders which are also horror movie material. Of all the bad stuff in the horror movies, the only one that is not directly around right now is the strange looking humanoid.

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> I think that humans would have this reaction to the other human species, otherwise why are our horror movies dominated by humanoids, and not by animals?

For the same reason that Dr. Who/Star Trek aliens (not all intended to be horrific) are humanoid - they are played by humans in a costume.

The reason there is that until very recently the only way to make a believable alien in the TV was to dress up a human in a costume.

Godzilla is played by a man in a costume; do you think Godzilla is humanoid?

If we killed off other humanlike species because they terrified us, wouldn't we have also killed off other species that terrify us, like snakes, rats, cockroaches and spiders?

I can't find a reference right now but I remember reading somewhere that European Homo Sapiens contain genetic evidence of interbreeding with Neanderthals, and Asian Homo Sapiens contain genetic evidence of a second, later round of more interbreeding with Neanderthals. I think that suggests we didn't find them all that horrifying :)

This is a very recent discovery - the findings come from sequencing the Neanderthal genome by the Max Planck Institute.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8660940.stm

Whoa, I had no idea we had done that. Have we sequenced genomes from any human species?

edit: wikipedia and google searches haven't revealed any positives. Thanks for that link though, very interesting.

Snakes, rats, cockroaches and spiders are very difficult to kill off. If we could, we would wipe them off, but even with modern technology, we can't get rid of them, back in the past it would not have been possible.

The reference to interbreeding with neanderthals is a single DNA study, and it does not say what you think it says. It says that non-african humans share a more DNA with neanderthals than africans. The shared DNA could have come from the exit point from Africa or some other location where everyone leaving Africa passed through (like the horn of Africa). The neanderthal breeding theory is not credible at all, because the strongest overlap between neanderthals and modern humans on a DNA basis comes from the far east, where there is no skeletal history of neanderthals existing.

You can read more about this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Neanderthal_admixture_theo...

Is there actually a demand for killing off snakes, rats and cockroaches entirely?

I'm sure if we really thought long and hard...

Has anyone else got a crawling sensation on their skin?

Perhaps not, but there is a demand for killing off mosquitoes entirely, and in fact we've tried many times now...

We came close to succeeding with DDT, until emotions got the better of us.

Not quite -- we simply drew down the population of Anopheles enough that malaria was unable to spread. DDT is a very effective insecticide, but resistance has been described and can spread if it is overused; in fact it is estimated that agricultural use of DDT causes more deaths from malaria by contributing to DDT resistance in Anopheles and thereby affecting vector control operations.

See: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v293/n5829/abs/293181a0... -- http://localhostr.com/file/itFWMaa/zzz.pdf

"it can be estimated that at current rates each kilo of insecticide added to the environment will generate 105 new cases of malaria"

In short, it just ain't that easy.

killing off spiders would be a god terrible idea. then who would kill your bugs?

We would, of course. Then we would manually polinate flowers and break down plant waste with chemicals.

Might as well kill all the flowers and plants too and just make food directly from organic chemicals in processes powered by solar panels and cut living organisms out of the equation completely.

Patience.

All of those other species you mentioned can hide from us easily, can reproduce relatively quickly, and/or can live in environments that humans can't survive in. Not so with humanoids.

Evolutionarily, that would make sense as well: creatures similar to us are likely to be competing for the same resources -- and as they are different they can't be trusted to collaborate.

I guess this could also be the cause of racism.

That's an interesting theory. Maybe we're around partly because we were the most genocidal variant.

If I had met another hominid on my way, I doubt I would want to kill it right away because it horrifies me. I would rather expect the natural trigger that prevents me from killing other people to turn on.

I'm not saying that different species of hominids didn't kill each other, I just think that the main reason behind killings was fight for food and other resources, not the low level fear instinct that we experience during encounters with spiders, snakes and worms.

It doesn't have to be direct conflict.

The margins for survival are very slim. Out-competing through more effective hunting and gathering would make a huge difference.

Your applying your modern-day, urban culture to ancient tribal societies. Studies of our remaining modern day tribal societies in Papua New Guinea disagree with you. I suggest reading "Guns, Germs, & Steel"

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