So the first question I have to think about, were ancestral hominid eyes just as temperamental as they are today? I say temperamental because modern day human eyes are completely unreliable. From personal experience, my eyes are absolutely useless. If glasses weren't invented I would have been killed off because I am completely useless with partially working eyes. If ancestral hominid eyes were only half as blind as me, could they really see the difference in species? Two species of hominin's look generally the same in height, build and posture. With bad eyesight they would be able to roughly recognize the outline of someone approaching them but not be able to make out and distinguishing features of their face. If a species that look similar to them is walking towards them they would register them as a friend, not a foe because they look like their family/tribe members. Granted, this all depends on the possibility that they are near or far-sighted.
Mirrors weren't invented yet, meaning that these ancestral species didn't have a clear picture as to what they looked like themselves. Yes there are water reflections and such but those aren't as clear of an image. Not knowing what you look like exactly could give a sense of dissociation, you aren't aware whether or not you look like everyone else around you. Yes, they were seeing the people around them and that lived with them either in the same family or tribe but that still brings about variation. If two different species interacted with each other and only looked slightly different from each other in only trivial things such as skull size and bone length they might not even recognize them as a different species. There is variation in physical characteristics within species so if those characteristics in others aren't too vastly different it might not be registered as a different species but as just a different looking person.
They biggest problem I see arising in two different species is the mode of communication. The different forms and ways of communicating is what would set apart different species or even same species but different tribe/family. There was no consensus of language back then, no parameters to follow, they were just communicating however worked for them. While another species might look similar enough in physicality to not pose an immediate threat, once one species doesn't respond to the communication the other is imposing I would imagine problems would start to arise. Even today it can get frustrating communicating with someone who speaks another language because there is so much misunderstanding. I find it very doubtful that two different species had the same form of language. Pointing only goes so far and could be good to use temporarily but I also doubt if that didn't get in the way of species.
My last question posed is, did they even really care? In modern times it is seen as important to know where someone came from but back over a million years ago it might not have. Yes these are clearly two different species but maybe they didn't see it that way. Maybe they coexisted either together or peacefully separately, we are unaware if they felt threatened or not by one another. If there was no threat to their safety I like to think that they wouldn't even bother with each other because there was no reason to. Also, their similarities could have made them to believe that they were the same, again meaning that they didn't care or recognize the differences between them. It was a very different world back then and it is impossible to truly understand how they thought, acted and felt towards themselves and one another. It is fun to speculate about who they were and how they interacted and I like to guess that they had bad eyesight and found a way to coexist.
wow! i love this piece. it is so novel..i never would have thought about how the lack of mirrors might have been a thing. I wonder what we know about human self-image before mirrors/high reflective surfaces were a thing (i remember the story of Narcissus looking into the lake so i guess there is something here...).
ReplyDeleteAnd the communicsation thing is interesting too. Would they both have langauge? Tigers and lions mate without a unified language but humans have all sorts of cultural barriers to gene flow.
I hadn't thought of this before reading your story but it opens up a lot of questions. some anthropologists have argued that the culutal barriers to gene flow (such as only marrying people within your culture) had a large effect on genetic diversity. Since we know Neandertals/Denisovans/Humans interbred what does that mean for how they saw eachother? what a great think piece here, Ashely!