It might be. But it might take having them live separately, away from us.
Obviously Neanderthals can function in a tribal band, they did for countless thousands of years. I just worry about forcing them to fit in the world we’ve created.
Who is saying they would live in a cage? Implant them in volunteer surrogates (who also want to be their parents), raise them as normal children, and the researchers will periodically visit for non-intrusive observation. That would be it.
Dude- cats can be toilet trained. I don’t think that neanderthals, who undoubtedly developed a system for not pooping where they sleep or eat, wouldn’t be able to manage.
Reread. It was in response to someone claiming that since we take care of those people there is no problem.
This is all equally applicable to humans with impaired cognition. They can be, and are, provided for as well. I fail to see your point.
No, I wouldn’t personally seek employment at the Neanderthal Institute or foster home or what have you. I work in a different industry. We don’t need volunteers and hugs, we’d need funding, a competent staff, and surrogate parents.
Unless you’re talking about dissecting a fetus, it’s infanticide.
No comment.
Which is it, are they ignorant brutes or sentient beings? If its the former, they can be provided for. If its the latter, they can see to their own needs, as we all do.
Ok, my mistake.
They’d start as children, obviously.
Once they reached adulthood, it would indeed be wrong to ‘cage’ them. Any Neanderthal who wished to make his own way in the world should be allowed to do so, with every reasonable provision being made to assist him in getting started, and his equal rights being protected thereafter.
What if it turned out that the Neanderthal group decided among themselves that they didn’t want to be ‘released’ into modern society? IMO, it would be our responsibility to give them a sanctuary–that is, appropriate territory–to do as they will, as long as their population endures.
That would depend on how functional they were. Remember they’re superhumanly strong. What if they’re more aggressive than us? What if they constantly are in a heightened state of anxiety because they have trouble processing our world, language and social systems.
They’re intelligent, but not homo sapiens. They might have strong differences in the way they interact with the world. If that’s the case, raising them among civilians might be unwise.
True. I’m sure with training they could handle it. But maybe it would freak them out. I’d certainly think that a facility is necessary for at least the first parts of their lives, in order to find out how much they can deal with the 21st century.
They’d be as valuable to the scientific community as the Mona Lisa is to the artistic community - literally priceless, as individuals and a group. Anyone who aimed to intentionally hurt one of them would be met with the same reaction as if you wanted to take a butcher’s knife to the works of Da Vinci.
We can teach chimpanzees sign language for communication and Neanderthals are both genetically closer to us and from archaeology undoubtedly more intelligent than chimpanzees. In any case, if a certain communication attempt was resulting is psychological trauma who would allow it to continue?
I’d be mucking them out with gusto. We do the same for horses and they’re of less use to science than a clone of a hominini long extinct.
I made the point in the other thread that there’s no reason to assume that they’d be undue suffering (beyond the suffering that comes with all comprehending intelligence). They would without a doubt have a better life than many humans alive today who had the misfortune to be born in some third-world hellhole. Again remember that we’d be starting with babies, our knowledge of them growing as they grow, your arguments seem to assume that we’re plucking one from his time fully adult.
If the aim is minimising suffering, I can’t see how rendering one which would otherwise be fully intelligent into a drooling candidate for vivisection accomplishes this goal. It would be inhuman to subject someone so close to us to such treatment.
We help developmentally disabled humans because they’re here and it would be cruel not to. We don’t generate them on purpose. We don’t spend tens of millions on projects to make more developmentally disabled humans to suffer.
You might want to look up the term gestation. If you clone a living body with an inert brain, you can chop it up and serve it as dinner and it’s not hurting anyone.
They won’t be superhumanly strong until they’re nearly adults, and by then we’ll know if they’re prone to high aggression. Perhaps the first generation could be all females. And I don’t buy the “heightened anxiety”- a baby (or puppy, kitten, etc) from anywhere raised in Tokyo is going to see Tokyo as the normal state of existence.
Not that I don’t think that there aren’t valid concerns- but the ones you’ve raised don’t really worry me so far.
They’re intelligence is probably quite different then ours. But they’ll be babies first, then children, then adolescents, etc. We’ll learn about their capabilities and characteristics long before they become dangerous to themselves or to us.
These will be brand new people- whatever environment they are raised in will seem normal to them. There’s no way they’re a risk to anyone while they are babies or small children- so I think such a facility could wait.
Sentient doesn’t mean functional in a modern human society. And brutes can be sentient as well.
Remember they didn’t make much in the way of art. They may be utterly non iconographic. No phones, no ATMs, no paying bills, perhaps no using money at all.
Far too dangerous for a first-generation. Agree with Lobohan here - they are not homo sapiens sapiens and treating them off the bat as if they were could cause untold problems for them and us.
“The populations had been separate for hundreds of thousands of years and I think there would have been significant physical and behavioural differences between them.”
That’s not to say I’m in favour of sticking electrodes in their heads either. But for best care to be provided you would need a specially constructed facility and a number of staff who can first determine and then provide for their needs; medical, dietary, psychological, pedagogically etc. Like I said we have evidence that they mature faster than us, just one aspect of their physiology that would cause problems for a surrogate who treats the first generation just as a stocky human.
You say that almost as if it were a bad thing.
Oh, and on the question of unsuppressed aggression, just remember that *we *are the ones who are still here. If they cause us any trouble, well, we wiped them out once and can do it again if called for.
Don’t get me wrong, not being the only intelligence on Earth is awfully attractive.
Again, I’d like to know if we’ll be making a Frankenstein’s Monster whose life is torture, before running one off.
True. I’m sure they’d be able to communicate somehow. They hunted after all.
So would I, actually. To be able to interact with a non-homo sapien intelligence is very attractive.
I’m sure a level of acclimation could be had, since we’re raising them. What I worry about is the fact that they might be unable to truly function in our society. That the very wiring of their brains allows them to be fully sentient, but forever apart.
I’d rather a biological Neanderthal who is utterly mindless be cut up, than a sentient one be miserable.
Is there no benefit to a cloning project that you can see that might outweigh the small risk that the Neanderthals would be unhappy?
Ok, our bio-ethics are wildly divergent here; so as to not hijack this thread, let’s agree to disagree on this, alright?
They need not be functional in a modern human society to have happy lives, while also enriching our understanding, in a mutually beneficial relationship.
What could possibly be the danger for the first few years?
This isn’t true - like humans today we have evidence that they used feathers for ornamental purposes. They also used red ochre for decoration and buried their dead with flowers.
They were not human, but they were not mindless savages either. The idea of phones, paper money etc wasn’t anywhere in human minds 30,000 years ago either, so I see no reason why a Neanderthal would have too much difficulty when raised from birth with modern teaching.
I made the point in the other thread that if you brought an Ancient Egyptian to the modern day he would find it a terrifying and incomprehensible place. Yet we’re biologically identical to how we were 4000 years ago. If you’re saying that they would be physically unable to grasp modern concepts, that’s something you’d need study of the first generation to find out. Given their intelligence, however, I doubt this would be the case.
In the jungle no. In a place where you need to engage in transactions for food, that might suck.
I like the idea of a million Neanderthals living among us. Working as teachers, dance instructors and au pairs. I’d like my daughter to bring one home from college and to have to deal with my feelings about that.
If it turns out that they can only be happy living in a tribal situation, I’d be all for setting aside some space and letting them have it, with as much help as they want.
There are huge benefits. And to be honest, even though I’m against it unless we know more, I’d still like to know about what they find.
<3
True. If we can confidently make them happy I’d support that.
I would think mostly that they might hurt other children. They have linebacker necks and stronger grips. They might, even as a toddler, kill or injure another child.