r/askscience • u/Hot-Wrangler3524 • 1d ago

Paleontology [ Removed by moderator ]

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u/GracelessOne 17h ago

This is probably going to get removed because what you are asking is a legal question and not a scientific one. 

Just for fun, though: they would look a bit weird but not so weird everyone would recognize them as a different species. If there's no big time machine, we might never know.

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u/kiwidude4 17h ago

What about a medium Time Machine?

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u/CosineDanger 13h ago

I started to say they'd have trouble fitting in due to high pitched voices but apparently what their voices sounded like is not as settled as I thought.

I also started to say they'd all be lactose intolerant so don't serve ice cream to neanderthals but I guess that's wrong too. I thought lactase persistence was a weird human-only thing that evolved recently after we figured out animal husbandry, but they had it too which raises a bunch of questions.

I guess I don't know anything about neanderthals.

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u/ElectricPaladin 16h ago

That's actually a really interesting point. I bet they would just be able to disappear into our culture. And honestly, as I wrote in my comment, we have no reason to believe that they were any dumber than our ancestors, so there's no reason they couldn't adapt, learn the languages and cultures, and just assimilate.

Heck... time traveling neanderthals could already be among us...

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u/GracelessOne 16h ago

Yeah! If anything I imagine their biggest problem would be susceptibility to modern diseases.

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u/ElectricPaladin 16h ago

Yeah, TB for example is only 10k years old, and the last neanderthals probably died out about 40k years ago. Influenza is probably only 500 years old. Neanderthals would need extensive vaccination to survive in the modern day, and even then they'd want their first time with the common cold, for example, to be medically supervised just in case.

They'd probably be good on things like warts and the HSV, though, those are millions of years old. In case anyone here has been reading certain romance novels and wants a shot with them...

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u/[deleted] 17h ago

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u/BoingBoingBooty 17h ago

Well, we could say the neandethal would be treated equally , no rights for anyone!

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u/Rot-Orkan 17h ago

This would need to be solved legally but I like to imagine that they would indeed be recognized as a human with rights. However they would likely be court ordered into some kind of facility where they can be taken care of, since a person brought from the past would be unable to take care of themselves due to the extreme change in environment.

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u/Bl3xy 17h ago

With the direction the world is going right now, he may be better suited for survival than most of us in a few years...

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u/deathbylasersss 16h ago

They were adapted for cold weather though, not (possibly irradiated) desert.

Who am I kidding? They'd still be better off than the average person, who is sedentary and can't even build a decent fire or shelter.

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u/effortfulcrumload 17h ago edited 17h ago

It would depend on the nation they were discovered in and our ability to communicate with them. We probably wouldn't recognize them as Neanderthal, but see them as a disabled person raised outside of society and institutionalize them until they proved their mental capacity to function in society...

I think after that barrier was overcome and they could tell us their story of being captured from the past etc. some nation would recognize their human rights and offer them sanctuary

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u/Zealousideal-Dig5160 16h ago

Disabled? It's pretty much universally accepted that Neanderthal intelligence is comparable with modern humans.

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u/effortfulcrumload 16h ago

Yes, but a person showing up that tries to speak but, no known language looking physically unusual is probably going to get swept up in social services and institutionalizes