Humaliens 1,000,000 BC

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: this is speculation. The factual foundation of this article rests on what we know about human evolution, extinct hominin species, genetics, archaeology, anthropology, and the search for life beyond Earth. Everything beyond that foundation is interpretation, possibility, and a question deliberately left open.

Because apparently, before we’re allowed to wonder about something, we have to hang a disclaimer from the ceiling. Fair enough. But speculation does not automatically mean nonsense. Some of the most interesting questions we’ve ever asked began with somebody looking at established facts and realizing the obvious explanation might not be the only explanation.

So let’s start with something we actually know. Leave it to us to look up when we haven’t even finished looking around. We spend an extraordinary amount of time searching the sky for evidence of intelligent life. We build increasingly sophisticated instruments to detect distant planets, examine their atmospheres, listen for signals, and search the universe for signs that something else might be out there.

And yet, when we imagine the alien, we almost instinctively look upward. Maybe that’s the first mistake. Because before we decide that alien life must have come from somewhere else, perhaps we should take a harder look at what happened here. Earth has not always belonged to one kind of human. There were others. And they’re gone.

THE HUMAN FAMILY WAS NEVER AS SIMPLE AS WE LIKE TO PRETEND

We have a bad habit of picturing human evolution as a neat progression. Ape-like ancestor. Primitive human. Slightly less primitive human. Modern human standing triumphantly at the end of the line. It makes a nice graphic. It’s also mad oversimplified. Human evolution was not a straight line. It was a branching tree, and Homo sapiens was only one branch.

Neanderthals lived alongside our ancestors. Denisovans occupied parts of Asia. Homo erectus survived for an extraordinarily long period of prehistory. Homo floresiensis existed on an island in Indonesia. Homo naledi occupied southern Africa. Other hominin populations appeared and disappeared across the planet, and scientists continue to debate exactly how some of these populations should be classified and related.

The important point isn’t the exact number. The important point is this: We were not alone.

For enormous stretches of prehistory, multiple forms of human life occupied Earth at the same time. Some adapted to environments very different from those our ancestors occupied. Some produced sophisticated tools. Others controlled fire. Some demonstrated behaviors suggesting social complexity and symbolic thought while some cared for injured/sickly members of their communities. Some interbred with populations ancestral to modern humans.

Then they disappeared.

That fact deserves more attention than it usually receives. Extinction doesn’t necessarily mean inferiority. A species can be remarkably successful in one environment and still become vulnerable when conditions change. A body can become highly specialized for cold, altitude, diet, geography, or a particular ecosystem and still struggle when the world around it changes. Perhaps Homo sapiens wasn’t the “best” human. Perhaps we were the most adaptable.

We can live in deserts, mountains, forests, islands, frozen regions, crowded cities, and places where sane people apparently decided to build houses despite the weather. We change our clothing. We change our diets. We change our shelters. We change our technology. We change our behavior. When food disappears, we find another source. When the environment becomes hostile, we modify our surroundings. When geography separates us, we develop transportation and communication. When nature presents us with a problem, we invent something that changes the problem itself.

Adaptability may have been one of the characteristics that helped us survive while other human lineages disappeared. But that raises an interesting question. What if adaptability was more than something that helped us survive Earth? What if it was the reason we were left here?

THE CHAMELEONS

Now take that idea somewhere stranger. Suppose intelligent humanoid life exists beyond Earth. Not little green caricatures with enormous heads. Not necessarily creatures that look exactly like us. Humanoid doesn’t have to mean identical. It could mean another intelligent species with some broadly familiar characteristics: advanced cognition, communication, social organization, technological development, manipulation of objects, and perhaps an upright or otherwise highly mobile body plan.

We already know how dramatically related populations can diverge. So why should we assume that intelligent life elsewhere must look completely unrelated to us? Where did the whole big-headed, blacked-out eye sketch even come from?! This whole assumption may say more about our imagination than biology; but still, let's take it a step further.

What if extraterrestrial humanoids aren’t one species? What if there are many? The universe could theoretically contain countless forms of intelligent life, each shaped by its own environment, history, biology, and evolutionary pressures.

It would be totally stupid of us to automatically assume they are physically different from us. Others might possess characteristics that seem strangely familiar. And if intelligent species are capable of migration, exploration, or colonization, perhaps some could eventually exist far from the worlds where they evolved. Maybe they could establish settlements elsewhere.

Perhaps enough time has passed that the connection between one population and another has become impossible to recognize. That’s where the idea gets particularly strange. We tend to treat the word “alien” as though it automatically means “creature from another planet.” But those words aren’t interchangeable. Extraterrestrial describes origin. Alien describes unfamiliarity. Those are two different ideas.

If we encountered an intelligent species on Earth that had evolved along a completely different branch of the human family, communicated differently, looked radically different, and possessed technology we didn’t understand, would we recognize it as human? Or would we call it alien too?

THE ALIEN PROBLEM

Imagine discovering an intelligent terrestrial species tomorrow. It has a complex social structure. It communicates in a way we don’t initially understand. It uses tools. It solves problems. Its physical form is radically different from ours. Would knowing that it evolved on Earth automatically make it feel familiar? Probably not. We might classify it as something entirely separate simply because we couldn’t recognize the relationship.

That matters because our definition of “alien” comes from our own perspective. We decide what is familiar and what qualifies as human. We decide what belongs here and what doesn’t. But something seems off. I don't know about you, but to me, it looks like we’ve been asking the question backward. Instead of asking only, “Where are the aliens?” perhaps we should also ask, “What would we actually recognize as alien if we encountered it?”

THE LAST HUMANS

There is another uncomfortable fact sitting quietly underneath all of this speculation. We are the last humans. Not the first and definitely not the only humans who ever existed. The last.

Other human species occupied this planet before and alongside us. Some disappeared entirely. Others left traces of themselves in the genomes of living people. Their remains, tools, settlements, art, DNA, and other evidence give us fragments of stories that began long before recorded history. But! All those stories are incomplete. We don’t know everything about these populations and we never will.

We don’t know why they disappeared. We don’t know every interaction that occurred between different human groups. We don’t know how much information about extinct populations has simply been erased by time. That doesn’t mean an advanced prehistoric civilization existed and it doesn’t mean an extinct hominin species built spacecraft.

It means something much simpler yert harder to accept: The history of intelligent life on Earth cannot be completely known. Ever. Unless you have a tricked-out time machine, we are all categorically assed out. That distinction matters.

THE SPECULATIVE LEAP

Now we can make the leap. Suppose, purely as a thought experiment, that another intelligent humanoid lineage had developed along a radically different path. Perhaps it became more technologically advanced. Perhaps it remained isolated. Perhaps it adapted to an environment so different from ours that its biology changed dramatically. Perhaps it developed social structures, technology, or forms of communication we would find difficult to recognize.

Perhaps it disappeared. Or perhaps it left. There is currently no credible evidence demonstrating that an extinct human lineage developed an advanced civilization AND departed Earth. There is no established scientific evidence that Homosapiens originated as extraterrestrial beings. And there's no evidence proving that alien humanoids are responsible for our existence either.

Those are speculative possibilities, not conclusions. But speculation becomes interesting when it exposes an assumption we didn’t realize we were making. We assume that if something is alien, it came from somewhere else. We assume that if something is intelligent, we’ll recognize it. We assume that our form of intelligence represents some kind of natural endpoint. We assume that because we’re standing at the end of the story, we understand everything that came before us. We may not.

THE PLANET OF THE ADAPTABLE

Earth is an extraordinary place to test the limits of adaptability. Ice ages come and go. Sea levels rise and fall. Continents move. Climates change. Food sources disappear. Diseases emerge. Ecosystems collapse and reform and collapse again. And entire civilizations rise up and disappear. And throughout all of this, we’ve repeatedly adjusted not at all realizing that we were supposed to have been gone a while ago. But in each instance, where modern society "adapted" to an environment, it was only because we modified it. And we continue to do so. We build artificial climates. We manufacture food. We create synthetic materials. We travel through environments our bodies were never designed to tolerate. We carry ventilators into space because you know, we can't breathe out there yet here we are floating in space like it's ok to do so. Man, we sure are arrogant!

That last one is particularly revealing. We have already begun doing things that would have sounded absurd to our distant ancestors. We leave the environment in which our species evolved. We construct machines to carry us beyond the atmosphere. We send instruments into environments no human body could survive. We extend what our bodies can do through technology.

If we can eventually leave Earth, it isn’t inherently absurd to imagine another (more) intelligent species doing the same. But there’s another side to adaptability. We increasingly solve problems by creating tools that perform tasks for us. We externalize memory, navigation, calculation, communication, and information storage which is impressive; but, it’s also worth wondering where adaptation ends and dependence begins.

We evolved by developing tools.

Now we’re developing tools capable of helping us think. WTF happened here?! Maybe that's simply another stage of adaptation or maybe it raises a more uncomfortable question about what happens when a species becomes so dependent on its artificial environment that its original biological capabilities become less important. The point isn’t that technology is making us less human. The point is that we have always changed in response to our surroundings not the other way around.

If that process continues for long enough, what would we eventually become? And would something descended from us still look human enough for us to recognize it?

THE SEARCH FOR ALIENS

This brings us back to the sky. We search for extraterrestrial life using the evidence available to us. We look for planets that might support life. We study atmospheric chemistry. We listen for technological signals. We search for patterns that might indicate biology or intelligence. We have no choice but to begin with what we understand. But that also means we’re searching the universe through the lens of our own experience.

We know one intelligent species for certain. Us.
We know one planet with a technological civilization.
Earth.
We know one example of biology becoming technological.
Us.

So when we search for intelligence elsewhere, we’re inevitably carrying our own template with us. That may be unavoidable. It may also be limiting. How would we recognize an intelligence that doesn’t communicate through radio? Seriously. What if it doesn’t use technology in a form we recognize? What if its biology is radically different? What if its intelligence is distributed rather than individualized? As in to say that an extraterrestrial visit would simultaneously communicate with all Earth's inhabitants - none of that "take me to your leader" bullshit.

And, lastly, what if we encountered something intelligent that had actually originated here? Would we call it human? Or would we call it alien?

THE HUMAN EGO PROBLEM

We have a long history of assuming that whatever we encounter should fit into categories we’ve already invented. We classify. We name. We rank. We separate. We decide what is primitive, advanced, natural, supernatural, intelligent, civilized, human, and alien. Then reality inevitably does something inconvenient. It refuses to cooperate. Perhaps that is part of what makes the search for extraterrestrial life so fascinating. We aren’t simply searching for another organism.

We’re searching for something that could challenge our definition of intelligence itself. And maybe that challenge has already happened. Our own planet once contained multiple human species. We share genetic history with some of them. We know they existed. We know they disappeared. We know we survived. We don’t know every detail of how or why. That alone should make us a little less confident about how completely we understand the human story.

SO, ARE WE THE ALIENS?

Not literally, at least not according to anything established by modern science. There is no scientific evidence demonstrating that Homo sapiens are extraterrestrial beings. But there are several different questions hiding inside that phrase. Scientifically, we are a terrestrial species that evolved on Earth. Evolutionarily, we are one surviving branch of a much larger human family. Philosophically, the word “alien” becomes much less straightforward when unfamiliarity is separated from extraterrestrial origin. Speculatively, it is possible to imagine intelligent humanoid life developing independently elsewhere. It is also possible to imagine connections between intelligent life that we currently have no evidence to establish.

Those possibilities should remain possibilities. The facts are strange enough without pretending they say more than they do. That alone is extraordinary in itself. A terrestrial species that survived while other human branches did not. Perhaps “alien” isn’t a single category at all, but simply the word we use when something is sufficiently unfamiliar that we don’t know where to place it.

We are living on a planet that has already produced multiple kinds of human. We are living at the end of a story that once contained branches we can no longer fully reconstruct.

We are the survivors of a family that was once much larger. So perhaps we should stop assuming that the search for the alien begins by looking upward. It begins by looking around. Here comes more maybes: Maybe it begins with the realization that intelligence has already taken forms we barely understand, that entire human lineages have vanished, and that our species is not the inevitable conclusion of some grand evolutionary plan. Maybe we are merely the descendants of survivors. Maybe we are exactly where we're supposed to be. Or maybe we’re looking at the wrong end of the telescope.

The universe may contain beings we can never imagine. So before we decide what an alien "probably" looks like, maybe we should remember that there was a time when the Earth itself contained humans who would have been strangers to us.

They lived here.

They adapted here.

They disappeared here.

And we remained.

The aliens we keep searching for may still be somewhere beyond the stars. But perhaps the stranger possibility is that “alien” has never meant what we thought it meant. Maybe the first alien we need to understand is ourselves.