Was Carl Sagan in Cosmos right about Ancient Greece *almost* making it in science (and fast moving tech)?

Dancing Fool

Aluma said:
I was arguing purely on economic terms, I think slavery just holds humanity back in general
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I wish with all my heart that was true.

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A question came up in a university class:

What if earlier, actually more primitive hominids such as the Australopithecus still existed? How would we treat them?

On first blush, we’d treat them just horrendously. We’d have them working in mines and so on and so forth.

But on thinking about it, since a big part of racism, colonialism, etc, is to “prove” some group of people are inferior to us— when they’re really not! For example, we deprive slaves of education and then call them stupid. And so, if the people were genuinely inferior, we may not be so motivated to try to “prove” it.
 

Gloss

Dancing Fool said:
I wish with all my heart that was true.

=============

A question came up in a university class:

What if earlier, actually more primitive hominids such as the Australopithecus still existed? How would we treat them?

On first blush, we’d treat them just horrendously. We’d have them working in mines and so on and so forth.

But on thinking about it, since a big part of racism, colonialism, etc, is to “prove” some group of people are inferior to us— when they’re really not! For example, we deprive slaves of education and then call them stupid. And so, if the people were genuinely inferior, we may not be so motivated to try to “prove” it.
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This is a non-sense question, we wouldn't treat them any differently because either we would have bred with them and thus no distinct group would have survived or we would have out-competed and led them to extinction before agriculture was discovered/invented.
Behavioral modernity and human speech even if it's a concept that can be criticized surely can't be extended much before the division of homo sapiens*2 and homo heidelbergensis.
 
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