Return of the Neanderthal
Randall Parker comments on whether sequencing the Neanderthal genome means that we'll eventually meet some of our old homeboys face to face, and if so what issues that will raise:
Neanderthals might not make nice semi-people. Would they be smart enough and capable of being civilized enough to qualify for human rights? One of the biggest debates of the 21st century (at least until the robots take over) is going to be on the question of which attributes must an intelligence possess to be eligible for rights and even to be eligible for not immediately getting destroyed or at least imprisoned. But that debate hasn't started in earnest yet because all the politically correct liberals are still denying that genetics plays a big role in creating cognitive characteristics that determine why human societies take the forms we see.
What if we found that the Neanderthals were not only much more intelligent than us, but much nicer, too? Not likely, I realize. But maybe they just weren't brutal enough to survive in the face of competition with their homo sapien cousins. What if we're Cain to their Abel?
Or maybe they're still around, are of roughly the same intelligence as us, have impeccable taste, and are just a little bristly when the whole subject of their "extinction" comes up. This idea has been explored recently...