Suppose I jump into my handy dandy time machine and whirl back 50,000 years ago. I walk around a bit, pick up what seems like a healthy baby, and bring it back to 2023. Would there be any major differences between the baby I brought back and today’s babies? Would there be any pronounced differences that would make the time travel baby stand out?
NNM, sorry
First question, did you find a baby that was Home Sapiens or one of our cousins like Neanderthal, Floresiensis or Denisovan?
Assuming Homo Sapiens …
That was in the period of language development. The capacity for language is estimated at about 50,000 years ago in fact. Brain capacity is general is pretty close to today.
This was also a time when features were a mix of archaic and modern. Archaic meaning heavy brows vs. smaller facial features. In the last 10,000 years ours jaws and teeth shrunk.
Homo sapiens of the time were surprisingly tall. The Cro-Magnon people of 40,000 years ago had males averaging 6’0". Shortness came later with early agriculture.
So the baby would probably look a little alien in the face or perhaps very primitive looking if features inherited were more archaic. But they should have the capacity to learn like a modern child and with good nutrition have an excellent chance of being a little on the tall side.
The baby’s immune system may have trouble dealing with all the pathogens that affect us today, and likewise, the baby could bring along an unwanted visitor from the past none of us has been exposed to.
We had one like it back in August.
As the baby grew into an adult, it would likely have a strong jawline, no overbite whatsoever and would not need to have any wisdom teeth removed.
Legally, that baby is at least 50,000 years old. The baby is considered an adult of majority age. You have kidnapped that person and just about anything you do adds crimes after the fact. I would run as fast as possible back to the time machine and return the baby to its own time. If possible, when you return to the future come back to the time just before you went on this crime spree.
I’ll just note that this is the plot, more or less, of the Asimov short story “The Ugly Little Boy”.
I wonder how far away Earth is from its location 50,000 years ago. Depending on how long the journey into the past and back again takes we could be talking about FTL travel, a condition under which landing on the surface (instead of six feet under or two miles too high) of a rapidly spinning planet with elevation differences of several thousand meters is a wonder of precission. Good luck with your endeavour, and while you are at it, would you please bring me a baby mammoth, a dodo and a sabre-tooth tiger cub?
Great little story with a bite.
So, now we know how we got Ron Perlman: some time-traveler brought him back from the past!
I thought someone genetically hybridized H. Sapiens and Felis Catus “Maine Coon”.
Wow, I didn’t know. I will look up the story.
Confirming Homo sapiens is a good point - we were not the only hominids on Earth back then.
But, if it was a H. sapiens baby it would be completely within the range of modern human variation. By 50,000 years ago, the ancestors of the Aboriginal people of Australia had exited continental Southeast Asia and occupied most of Australia and New Guinea. Some of their immediate ancestors had made sweet hominid love to Denisovans and carried their genes, which other humans don’t do so much, but otherwise these were people who carried the full genetic array the rest of us have.
This occupation, and subsequent relative isolation tells us that H. sapiens back then had fully developed language skills. We’d probably go back to around 100,000 years for any difference from modern.
Other than being exhibit one at your kidnapping trial?
Each H. sapiens of that time is either the ancestor of every living human, or the ancestor of none. If you want to minimize temporal disruption, it’s better that the baby is the latter.
Hollywood Insider Behind the Scenes News reported that Ron Perlman has avoided having his DNA analyzed.
Of course if the baby grows up and has children, they’ll no longer be the ancestor of none, and there might be things in the species’ genome that currently aren’t…
If the statute of limitations has not expired, then jurisdiction would be an issue. (Just don’t put them in a playpen, or else you are restrianing them in modern times.) You’re safe until somewhere, sometime someone requests an extradition… Obviously 50,000 years ago would not be USA jurisdiction.
Just out of curiosity, when do the experts think melanin-challenged skin evolved?
Starting roughly 20,000 years ago, with modern distributions in place by about 5,000 years ago.