Just finished reading this very long, but fascinating, article:
http://www.archaeology.org/1003/etc/neanderthals.html
Some excerpts:
So, if it were possible, should we clone them? Why or why not?
No. They had their chance way back when. I think we have enough diversity now, without bringing back an ancestor that couldn’t even hack it against similarly primitive peoples.
As long as we don’t put them in a theme park on an island somewhere…
The sad thing is that the Neanderthal culture is completely and irrevocably lost, as is their language. Since cloning would give us a baby Neanderthal it wouldn’t help us much here. Although judging by the article it’s pretty much academic anyway. It would be pretty cruel bringing just one back, and there’s problems with multitudes of them too, as their rights are wrangled and whatnot - which I imagine would depend a great deal on how intelligent they turned out to be. It seems ironic that the species that played a large role in wiping them out could bring them back.
I do wonder how different they’d look, I remember reading a piece saying that if you gave one a shave and put him in a suit you wouldn’t look twice at him in the subway.
No. Not, at least, until we can be sure they have human-level intelligence, or can be re-engineered into having it. Otherwise, they will never be anything other than victims waiting to be victimized.
This quote is interesting, from the article;
“Not to understate the problem of that person living in an environment where they might not fit in. So, if we could also create their habitat and create a bunch of them, that would be a different story.”
The problem is that this wouldn’t do either us or them much good; since we’d have a bunch of baby ones and raise them. So it’d be our culture, our values, our ethics that they’d be raised with. Even if we tried to raise them in the Neanderthal culture, which we don’t know much about, you’d still get our bias creeping in. Unless you tried to minimise all contact, which would probably end up with a bunch of ferals.
Their own habitat, well they don’t have one any more since everything about them apart from their relics was destroyed. Again, depending on their intelligence modern society - the one they could be raised and educated in - might not be too difficult to grasp. To an ancient Egyptian, the modern world would be a frightening place, but we’re pretty much biologically the same as we were 4000 years ago.
Although knowing humanity (which can’t even treat members of its own species with superficial differences in appearance without prejudice), as long as they remain in the minority they will find themselves as either some sort of second-class…species or in some human zoo experiment, giving them a warped view of humans as their observers and providers.
Exactly what I was going to say.
Neanderthals themselves are physically worthless to us; we have the fossils that tell us everything we need to know about that. The value would be in their culture, their behavior, which reviving one or a few won’t bring back; their culture went extinct with them.
Yes. Professional sports are getting too boring as-is.
Neanderthals were human beings. By definition, whatever intelligence they had would be “human-level,” and they would certainly be smarter than the least-capable subsets of modern humans.
The only (arguably) ethical way to do it would be for someone to effectively raise them as adopted children. I suspect the result would be that they’d be more similar to modern kids than most people are assuming.
I’d say no but it would be interesting to see if they could contribute to human genetic diversity in beneficial ways. Maybe they have immunity to diseases modern humans don’t, or maybe they have intellectual aptitudes that would be beneficial, or maybe their senses are keener than modern humans in certain ways.
Isn’t the human race fairly inbred, and lacking in genetic diversity?
I would disagree with that. Fossils often leave large gaps in knowledge. While we know something about the size of their brains, we don’t know much about what internal structures were present in their brains. We don’t whether they had language centers as developed as ours. We don’t know whether they would have been able to meaningfully communicate with Cro Magnons. We don’t know if their primary sense was scent, hearing, or vision. All of these would have an impact on interactions between early H. Sapiens and neanderthals.
To me there is little doubt that very valuable scientific research could be conducted by cloning neanderthals. The question is not one of scientific value but of how to deal with the ethical implications.
This is one of those questions that really has me hard pressed for a solid yes or no. There are too many good arguments for both sides.
Yes. We would have first hand knowledge of their physical and mental capabilities
No. The poor sod would be a lab specimen. Or worse, an insurance salesperson.
Followup question. Would our hypothetical clone be male or female?
Pervert.
I can’t see a way to do so that wouldn’t be incredibly cruel to the individual(s) they cloned.
Clone one, raise it in a modern family – and this poor kid is going to be subject to verbal abuse, ostracism, and quite possibly physical violence/hate crimes from everyone from age 3 to 99 who is not enlightened enough to deal with someone who looks different. Which would be most people. There’s not even established social pressure that doing so is wrong, as there is in cases of racism or homophobia – some people may want to tell racist jokes, but they won’t because they know the other people in the room would look down on them for it. Not so for anti-Neanderthal sentiment.
Or, clone a few, and give them their own habitat… what, like putting them in a zoo display? I’m a bit appalled that anyone would even consider that it’s okay to treat people like zoo animals. And would they have freedom of movement, freedom of choice, or would they be designated lab rats whether they wished to lead that kind of life or not? We can’t, after all, learn anything about their brains unless they agree to, or we force them to submit to, medical testing.
If they could clone an individual that could never become conscious, I might consider that ethical. Maybe. But I’m not sure we could really learn anything that way, as we’d never know if or how (for example) the brain structure was altered because of the lack of consciousness.
Well, just 10 minutes ago at another forum I found an article which says, based on the genetic evidence, that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens Sapiens interbred. So in that sense they didn’t go extinct, but rather were absorbed into a larger population.
I think it’d initially have to be some sort of ‘Truman Show’ style protected environment, however cruel that might seem - seeing as how we now very, very little about their drives and reactions, emotionally speaking. Allowing them to mingle freely straight away could lead to disaster for us and them.
I think it’s more ethical to clone a few if we could, rather than just one - then at least he isn’t completely alone.
The question of intelligence is still the most crucial one, and the most important think we could learn about them. People have a view of them as stupid cavemen, but 30,000 years ago humanity wasn’t doing much better. They had a brain capacity potentially larger than modern humans. With a modern education and today’s technology they might end up as super-geniuses by our standards, we have no idea. Which raises further implications, if they’re more intelligent than us it would rock our very world view - entire religions are build on the assumption that we are the top dog with dominion over all other living things. Their potential could be even greater than our own.
No. If they’re as intelligent as humans then I believe they have the same rights. A scientist would have no right to imprison what’s basically a human being for study.
I’d say proving they did not have human intelligence would be what would make it ethical. We raise other non-human species in captivity all the time.
Yes, well that’s the point, we wouldn’t initially know. After all, we ‘imprison’ children all the time. We’d need a better understanding of their intelligence, emotions, instincts and communications (while they have the biological capacity for language, we don’t 100% know that they could converse) before we could make any concrete decisions. For all we know they could go apeshit at the slightest provocation, or be as calm as you like, we just don’t know.
Plus there’s the question of the truth. Being told that you’re actually a clone of a guy who lived 30,000 years ago from a species humanity helped make extinct, that’s pretty Earth-shattering right there. You’d need the right environment and professionals to ensure the best standard of living for our hypothetical clone, as well as giving us the best chance at increasing our knowledge of our tragic cousins.
hi5
I… well, I don’t know. I know that my feelings have no affect on the issue or whether they’ll actually wind up doing this, but I’m conflicted as to how I feel.
As to the truth bit- it might be Earth-shattering to us, but if you were raised with that knowledge there’d be no culture shock. It’s just something they’d grow up knowing. The “truth” preached by most religions is more shocking than the predicament that any Neanderthals would find themselves in. We wouldn’t summon a fully-grown Neanderthal into a lab and telling it all of this.
It makes me think of what could eventually happen as a result of this.
Say we create a pair. Then as time passes we create a few more and a few more. Maybe we allow them to breed so that we don’t have to create them ourselves anymore. Pretty soon you might have a community of them and if it turns out they’re as intelligent as we are they’d have the right to be free like the rest of us. Now you’ve got a minority species living among us. It seems like Sci Fi stuff but it makes you think, I guess.