WI: Humans goes extinct but neanderthals and other hominids survive

[GodzillaFan1992]

First off I wasn't sure if this would count as an ASB given Toba almost drove us to extinction but if it is do move it to that section of the forum.

Anyways as you all may know 75,000 years ago humans actually came rather close to becoming extinct as a great catastrophe from Lake Toba occurred but miraclely we managed to survived only by a few thousand.

What if that wasn't the case? What if the Toba catastrophe theory had indeed wiped us out but otherwise our relatives the neanderthals, denisovans and any others around that time survived? Without us to interfere how different would their world be and how far could they have possibility advanced as a potential civilization?

Discuss.

I do recall there's this book trilogy called The Neanderthal Parallax where our world interacts with a parallel universe where we went extinct but the neanderthals thrived. That could probably give us some hindsight to this alternate history scenario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neanderthal_Parallax

 

[Rockydroid]

As much as this question fascinates me, I think this starts to fall out of the purview of "history" and into paleoanthropology. For example, could they develop agriculture? What are the limits of their intelligence? Beyond that, the questions go into how they would evolve, how they would be impacted by changes in their environment...not much history if you ask me.

 

[GodzillaFan1992]

Hmmm now that I honestly think about it. This might fall into ASB given the scenario of humans going extinct but otherwise other hominids surviving. If a mod can could they move it to that section?

 

[Hvalrossen]

If Neanderthals or other hominids adopted agriculture, began to urbanise, specialise, read and write ,etc. I don't see why they would not become as advanced as otl Homo Sapiens Sapiens. The timeline may differ, but it would be broadly similar to our own.