who says they are extinct?
take a real good look around you, they're bloody everywhere, some people have real heavy neanderthal traits. much in the same way as a lot of people have genghis khan traits.
it's all in our DNA, it pops out all over the place - although it's regional to a degree
<insert witty signature here>
Not entirely sure why that distinction should apply thou, you are actually breeding an inteligent sentient species, no matter how limited their inteligence may be.
It would be the same thing as cloning a "current" version of the human evolucionary form when it comes to their definition of "human being"
But you don't know how he'd react. If I remember my evolution and systemmatics 101 correctly, one species died out when they came along. You couldn't clone one, then go SUCCESS! Lets throw it out there and see what happens!. You'd have to run observational experiments, introduce different situations to how he would react. For example, introducing a human of similar age, see the initial reactions, give them say a loaf of bread, see if he shares it or hoards it or tries to break the skull of the human for wanting some - don't get me wrong isolation in the first place is a terrible idea and can lead to undesirable traits which would interfere in just about any experiment you could run.
But my point stands, you could not clone one or ten, then introduce them into a general population without exploring the unknown.
Regardless - De-extinction would be completely unethical to do on Neanderthal DNA, this tool should only be used for conservation purposes, or recently extinct animals, ones that have gone extinct due to human interference. Using it for to bring back Neanderthals, would be completely unethical.
Well assuming that you would only clone a small number of Neanderthals, their descendants would be reabsorbed into our own population within a few generations through interbreeding. Unless you prevent them from breeding with us by segregating them, in which case their population would stay relatively tiny compared to ours due to lack of resources and land. Either way it would probably be a short lived experiment.
That presumes we come up with a reason to clone neanderthals.
“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.” ~ Emily3, World of Tomorrow
Words to live by.
enslave them, like humans have always done to humans
Defenitely. And we can't forget we're not talking about bringing an adult Neanderthal back from the dead/past. A cloned Neanderthal would start from the beginning, as a baby, not as a full-grown adult with reasoning and behavior influenced and taught by his parents.
We might one day be able to bring them back genetically, but we can't bring back their culture and social aspects. In the end chances are, just like us, a great part of what they become depends on how they are raised. A human doesn't really behave like a human unless raised and taught by humans, despite our "intelligence". Human children raised by animals usually seem to start behaving like those animals, and have a very hard time reintegrating after they are rescued.
If you clone a medieval warrior, chances are he won't go around raping and killing people with a sword at the first change he has, or think cars are roaring metallic dragons, because he will be raised and taught to live in the modern world, not in th medieval world.
We don't have any adult Neanderthal to raise them, so how would that go? Raised by humans, they would likely adopt human-like behaviour, even if their DNA makes that behaviour different in some ways - The point is that even though they would genetically be Neanderthal, a lot of what they "were" is almost completly lost and we can't replicate that in any way.
There's also many problems that people already mentioned here. They would likely be fairly susceptible to modern diseases, and with such a small sample they would either fairly quickly disappear after a few generations of interbreeding or, if isolated, likely go extinct again due to lack of genetic variety.
Last edited by Kolvarg; 2016-11-28 at 11:06 AM.
Name one Vandal.
Proceed with World Domination.
Produce an army and go to war with something for the lulz.