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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5180169" data-attributes="member: 4720">Frankly, that didn't even occur to me.  It seems, frankly, astoundingly obvious.Which is why I dropped it and went back to humans interacting with humans, which has been roundly ignored every time I bring it up in favor of going after the low-hanging fruit of less typical human behavior.  To respond as you did to what you quoted, you had to ignore both the preceding and the antecedent paragraphs placing it securely in the context of humans interacting with humans.To be more specific, watch "Faces of America" or dig up some studies on human genetic histories and you will see that people who are very physically different from each other were very happy to mate.  Often.  This is not a caricature.  This is fact.  People who reliably regarded each other as subhuman on a cultural level were still quite happy to produce large amounts of children with each other on a personal one.  Some of these people were at least as odd-looking to each other as Neanderthals would have been.  Heck, you could plunk a neanderthal on the streets of most cosmopolitan cities in the world today and people wouldn't notice him.  They really were not that different at all.  Or at least, they were no more different than say, a San and a Han Chinese, or a European and a Papuan.  We rock some pretty significant physical dimorphism with very few genetic changes, after all.Claiming that Neanderthals might have been "insufficiently human" is simply absurd on the face of it given the comparative morphology.  Perhaps running to an absurd extreme in the opposite direction wasn't wise on my part, but my brain seems to be stuck in a state of rueful amusement about this whole thing that limits my ability to inhibit the impulse.</blockquote>

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