MODERATOR COMMENT: Cecil can insert political jabs into his column, but let’s not start that in this thread. Or, at least, let’s not go further with it than the few comments already made. If you want to respond to that line of Cecil’s, please start another thread on his political commentary.
Remember please that Cecil gets paid for writing a column by the Chicago READER, which is an alternate newspaper that is very (very!) left-wing.
WHOA … wait a minute … what about the <i>Homo assaultus</i> populations living in the northern half of Great Britain? Spend a Friday evening in Glasgow sometime, it takes a high level of intelligence to beat on each other so creatively.
If I remember correctly, the last words from the dolphins before the Earth was destroyed was “So long and thanks for all the fish”.
However, the most intelligent species, according to Adams was the lab mouse. It was a multidimensional creature, and when we think we were doing experiments on them, they were actually experimenting on us.
“Do you know what the last Xon said, right before he died? ‘ARGGHHH!’”—Babylon 5
I don’t know how conclusive the findings are, but there are plenty of claims that neanderthals produced art.
And also that they may have played music. The so-called Neanderthal flute may or may not have been used as a flute, but it’s certainly suggestive.
This post goes in ‘You have been served’ hall-of-fame.
I can’t point to any particular work of science fiction that’s used this idea, but it has occurred to me that a largish planet quite close to its star would probably have an uninhabitably hot equatorial belt, and 2 separate intelligent species (indeed, 2 entirely separate ecosystems) could conceivably evolve in the northern and southern hemispheres.
An artificial world like Larry Niven’s Ringworld, or Fred Pohl and Jack Williamson’s Cuckoo could have a gargantuan surface area, such that multiple intelligent species could exist on different parts of it and never come in contact with each other. However, due to the artificiality of such worlds, such races probably wouldn’t have arisen there naturally but would have been imported or discovered it.
However, it seems likely that the main reason you don’t get 2 intelligent species on the same world at the same time is that it just takes a really long time to get even 1 of them, and the odds that another would spontaneously arise during the same 10,000-year stretch of a 4,000,000,000-year planetary lifespan are just vanishingly small. Even assuming that the first one didn’t somehow manage to kill off the entire planetary ecology before it was done.
“Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much … the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.”
—Douglas Adams
Man, I can’t believe nobody has quoted Douglas Adams about the dolphins yet.
The truth? Ancient dildo.
Thank you!
I wouldn’t rule it out.
This book, The Humans Who Went Extinct offers excellent potential reasons. The basic idea is that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Several now-extinct species of humans may well have been “smarter” than the current homo sapiens.
My theory is that they may have been smarter, but probably not meaner. Sadly mean seems to win over nice. Ask any fifth grader – or politician.