Meet the nonhumans. Meet Ourselves.

I have mentioned this before but here is a good overview via NPR on humans having sex with neanderthals. The title is wonderfully provocative: "What Happened When Humans Met An 'Alien' Intelligence? Sex Happened" 
Some suspenseful and imaginative moments throughout the article including:
We were more recently up from Africa, still dark skinned. They'd been 200,000 years in Europe, had grown fair, freckled and some of them had red or blond hair. And while you wouldn't know it from looking, their brains were even bigger than ours, at over 1700 cubic centimeters. "That's about 300 ccs larger than your brain or mine," says Walter.

Anthropologists differ on what happened. There is some evidence, but not a lot, that we regularly attacked and eventually annihilated the Neanderthals. There's evidence too, that we crowded them out of the best hunting sites, making it harder for them to earn a living (and they needed to eat more than we do to stay alive). But the third possibility, writes Chip Walter, is that "if we killed them at all, we killed them with kindness. We neither murdered them nor outcompeted them. We mated with them and, in time, simply folded them into our species until they disappeared." 

Neanderthals challenge humanism

The walls of the humanist subject turn out to be rather porous. 

We are part Neanderthal or as as Riel-Salvatore says “Recent sequencing of ancient Neanderthal DNA indicates that Neanderthal genes make up from 1 to 4 percent of the genome of modern populations – especially those of European descent. While they disappeared as a distinctive form of humanity, they live on in our genes." 

The oldest works of art are not by humans, but by neanderthals. Anthropologists have found neanderthal paintings of seals on a cave in Spain's Costa del Sol dating from approx. 40,000 BCE. Scientist Jose Luis Sanchidrian describes it as a "bombshell" to how we think about culture.

UPDATE: a Neanderthal built structure from stalagmites in the Bruniquel Cave in southern France. The structure dates to approximately 175,000 years ago. Its purpose is unknown. It was not thought that neanderthal built elaborate structures but this circle structure deep in a cave suggests some interest in building. Its purpose remains unknown.