and somewhere one of their talking head scientists did a whimsey ... I will build a derivative work and reconstruct a notion:
25-100k years ago there were multiple hominds wandering about. The content I watched juxataposed H erectus and H sapien 70k years ago in coexistence in India. This deviates from my understanding of H erectus, but lets go with the point of an H erectus, or florensis or whatnot.
certainly H neaderthal coexisted with H sapien, indeed interbred, fancy that.
The point is this: modern religion etc all revolves around a few premises among which is the notion that there is a species, human, and then a big gulf between human and everything else. And that is true. Monkeys can't compare with humans (nor dogs, kitties, snakes, dolphins, walruses or anything else). We really are special.
But what if neaderthal (24k years ago) and erectus (pick a date) didn't go extinct. What would we construct for our mythos if the gulf wasn't anything like a gulf, but a more obvious continuum. Both erectus and neanderthal were big, strong, had tools, fire, language, and culture. They made art, they cared for the disabled.
It seems their extinction prior to our written history lost us the opportunity for a more broadly considered belief set.
I don't have more on the point for the moment. H neanderthal went extinct 24k years ago, the last of them essentially huddled in a few caves around Gibraltar ... and they knew they were done, and they knew we weren't. They literally held up in the most distant place at the tip of the Iberian penn, us having wandered in through the caucuses about 40k years earlier.
I find it very dramatic.
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