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Comment by kromem | Hacker News Reader

In the 50s, it was thought that we were smarter than them and killed them all off (the author of Lord of the Flies even wrote a book on this).

This seemed to inform futurists at the time thinking about what it would one day look like if there was something smarter than humans.

Hopefully we do a better job at considering this revision to our picture of the past and correcting our anchoring bias in our estimation of such a future.

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It's not known for sure why they went extinct and the extent of their cognitive abilities. It's also only one example. Another might be Europeans coming to the Americas (with more deadly technology and infections diseases, not smarter). Or humans being super predators. We don't know what advanced alien life would be like. Or what AI might become. There's lots of possibilities. Sagan's Contact and The Culture are on on one end, with The Dark Forest and Skynet being on the other.

I wonder how much both the early 20th century and the current postmodern views on relations with the Neanderthals was influenced by the politics of the times. Back then people wanted justifications for colonialism and promoted social Darwinism; now we’re looking to promote multiculturalism and global trade. Both ways we’re projecting onto the prehistoric past what we want to see there.

Well we don’t know that they were smarter than us. The EQ (brain to body ratio) of homo sapiens is 0.019 and Neanderthals was 0.017. They were probably considerably stupider.

> They were probably considerably stupider.

What makes you say that?

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