Friends, foe, or neither? : interspecies interactions between hominids

About 1.5 million years ago, we would be able to see one of our closest living relatives. Early Homo and even Homo erectus are a couple of hominins that realistically will co-exist. What if these two species were to meet? As modern humans, the closest living relative to us would be chimpanzees, and, humans are quite dangerous. We kill our won; we kill other animals either directly or indirectly, even primates like chimps after we know that they are related to us. Homo erectus looks so like us at least back then as compared to chimpanzees, would that mean they could potentially kill each other? Other questions also arise with these types of interactions. How did they communicate? There are probably a million other questions that could be asked about their interactions, but I think this will suffice for now as they are the most interesting.

Bloodlust, war, to murder these are the attributes of a savage animal. This can be seen in chimpanzees as they hunt down other primate species for food or even fight for their territory with other chimpanzee tribes. As modern humans, we kill our own as do other species alive today. Any animals that live in groups or defend territories ten to be violent. Nearly 4.5% of chimpanzees' deaths are caused by other chimps, according to Gomez and associates in their 2016 paper "The phylogenetic roots of human lethal violence." This would predict that human deaths caused by humans are 2%. This information was combined using archeological excavations, historical records, modern national statistics, and ethnographies to tally up the number of times a human has killed a fellow human. Chimps and humans are almost predisposed to be violent animals. The thought then comes to my head, early humans, among other hominid species like H. erectus had burials and buried them with such items as flowers. This leads me to believe they had morals and knew right from wrong. This means that like humans, they must have killed each other but also killed H. erectus and vise versa. They could potentially kill each other, but there are many reasons why maybe for defending their territory or their own according to how humans and chimpanzees behave.

Communication is a type of interaction, a social one at that. Sometimes we don’t stop and think how we evolved to talk or how did it even start. Communication is beneficial, and in the time where H. erectus and H. sapiens co-existed, I would imagine both groups would want to have similar modes of communication but different enough to where they could plan attacks on each other without them knowing. Deducing their throat structure form skills and neckbones, we can tell their communication was better than that of chimpanzees, but it was not as advance as modern humans. Their communication would have been slow and clumsy; however, they relied on gestures, although humans have muscles in their faces in which they can change in a variety of different ways to show their emotions. Communication between the two species may have been hard to understand for each other. The idea I have is when two different people who speak different languages communicate. They use gestures with their body, arms, hands, or face. Because these hominids have a diet largely based on vegetables and scavenging. Hunting is rare for them so it would be hard for H. erectus and H. sapiens to meet and communication for each other.

Who can tell for sure what happened over a million years ago and the interactions that different hominid species had with each other if any? We know near the end period of Homo erectus, Homo sapiens lived with them, so being able to understand how both of them were able to survive and conquer while being two separate species and being very capable. Although very different, humans and chimps are both capable of tool use and hunting and gathering to survive, and just as we picked up on those methods based on archeological contexts, we can tell that other hominin species like H. erectus or H. neanderthalensis. In the modern world, we never had to face other human species or hominids, but many people have prejudiced thoughts, and some are straight out racist because of someone's skin color even though we are all humans. If people judge others for the color of their skin or their culture, there is a high chance that different hominid species will judge each other for looking different.