Would we? Recognize them as something other than human? We might understand intellectually that they were very different from us in a biological sense, but at an instinctive level, we’d still think of them as “people”. Same thing with angels and humanoid aliens.
Humans have a strong tendency to anthropomorphize things that aren’t human, like dolls or pets or fictional characters. If we can pretend someone is a person, we’ll think of them as one. I suspect that that drive is more powerful than the drive to “other” people that are different from us.
That’s not entirely accurate. We’re all forgetting the ground-breaking film, “Fast Times At Elfmont High”.
One of the remarkable things about that movie is that it was directed by a female homo sapien and it depicted, for the very first time, a sexual encounter from the elf’s point of view.
Agreed, these situations are rare. But there you have it.
Actually, I have read an attempt to depict such a relationship from the elf viewpoint. Of course, it was written by an H. sapien so it’s probably not accurate.
But this thread is about the theoretical relationship between Homo Sapiens and other sentient species, and that, IMHO, will based on whether they’re considered people, not whether they’re considered humans.
“Human” is a particular species, or maybe a particular genus. A “person”, meanwhile, could also be some other race of living creature like an elf or an alien, or a supernatural being like a fey or angel, or a sufficiently-advanced AI. The definition of “person” is hard to pin down precisely, since we have a shortage of non-human persons in our world, but one definition might be “a sapient entity with moral agency”.
That, to me at least, is the relevant distinction. That is, whether I’d personally be physically attracted to a member of the other species would depend on the species; whether a physical relationship would be physically possible would depend on the species; but whether it would be morally acceptable depends on the intelligence level.
Of course, in some hypothetical cases with ET’s, it’s the human side which might be considered not bright enough to give consent.
I wonder whether, for some people in prehistory, it might have come down to ‘does this other hominin have language?’ – but we don’t know when our kind of hominin first developed what we would call language, either. Or whether at some points it might have been along the lines of ‘eh, we have verb tenses and can talk about hypotheticals, they can just say “We want to be friends. Do you want to have sex?” – I’m horny, that’s close enough.’
In some senses, of course, a dog can say “I want to be friends. Let’s have sex!” Some dogs often do; including to humans. The leg-humping dog is pretty notorious. A willingness to have sex, or at least to attempt to, with a different species is clearly not limited to humans. (Or to humans and dogs. I’ve had a young tomcat determinedly try to hump my arm. He wasn’t interested in objects, but he clearly didn’t care about species.)
As far as other animals have sex outside their species - apparently those cute bottlenose dolphins are inter-species rapists.
Also, male tortoises are somewhat known for humping objects, some of which bear little resemblance to females of their species.
And wasn’t there some insect in Australia in danger of extinction due to so many of them having sex with some particular item of trash rather than females of their own species?
The point with some of these things is that many creatures respond most to particular features, and exaggerated versions of that one feature results in an exaggerated response even if nothing else is like a potential mate, a supranormal stimulus. Here’s the one you’re probably thinking of.
Australian Jewel Beetle, whose males began attempting to copulate with beer bottles, because the bottles were bumpy and orange-brown. It turns out that the top of the female beetles is also orange-brown and bumpy, but the females were small and the beer bottles were HUGE and the males were absolutely helpless in their presence. (I call this the Dolly Parton effect, if you get my drift.) The males ignored the real females so frequently that the population, (according to a nature special) began to decline. I’m told that the beer company actually changed the bottles so that the males went back to the females.
For those I am not sure they are actually sexual behaviors? My understanding has been that those behaviors in dogs and cats are attempts to be dominant. A social status thing. Neutered pets will do them.
They’re definitely social status things, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not sexual things. Sex and social status are closely tied together in most animals that have social status.
I can’t speak for everybody’s dog; but in this cat it was unquestionably a sexual behavior. And it stopped entirely when he was neutered, though his other behavior towards me didn’t change a bit.
Many Homo Sapiens don’t even recognize each other as human. I’m being partially facetious there, but modern humans are very good at othering each other, so I would expect that prehistoric humans would’ve had that exact tendency.
It seems to me that the only real question would’ve been whether sapiens and neanderthal would’ve put one another in the same category as themselves. I’d lean toward “yes” since there was interbreeding, and anyone who knows about animals (which they probably did) would see they produced fertile offspring and consider them to be the same sort of creature.
