Question for the lawyers

[james_davis_nicoll]

A Neanderthal steps through from another history; due to various events he strikes and kills someone here.

Can he be arrested for murder? Does a Neanderthal automatically count as a human in the eyes of the law? If so, how far from homo sapiens sapiens does a hominid have to be before they don't count as a person by default?

Comments

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Of course, this may be genetic essentialism. We do not accord children and the severely mentally handicapped the same rights as adult and undamaged individuals much less genetically divergent than Neandethals, and I suppose that Bob Xyglhm, the three-headed purple standup philosopher from the lesser Magellan cloud could be seen as deserving rights wider than the insane or brain dead.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

http://johnhawks.net/tag/Neandertals.html

runs some risk of keeping one out of trouble for awhile.

There's absolutely no reason to believe that a population of modern humans is any smarter than a population of Neanderthals. (Some habits about that, but not well supported by the modern science. Differently social and possibly not as talkative, yes.) There's not much expectation that a Neanderthal individual in current clothes would obviously stand out in a cosmopolitan modern population, either.

Humans did not emerge from Africa once. The ~60,000 years BP migration was at least the third and it met, as the second had, archaic human populations that had diverged a bit, interbred with those archaic populations -- at least three that we can find in the genes -- that hadn't diverged too far. (No evidence of interbreeding with hobbits on Flores, and indeed the branch point for that population is *way* back there.)

Why is it only 3%? Well, 3% of the ~billion people in Europe and the ~billion people in China is sixty million people, probably more than there ever were of back 50 kyears BP. Cold adaptation's expensive. Subsequent agricultural and city selection and population density selection didn't leave all that much uniquely Neanderthal floating around in the modern population.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Note I'm not arguing here that neanderthals were stupid, but that "human rights" aren't necessarily going to be _interpreted_ as a matter of having the right genes, biological definition of species or not - sorry if I was unclear.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Ah!

Yes, I did read that wrong; thanks for the clarification.

I'd be vaguely hopeful; the trend since we knew what genes were has been to be more inclusive. Got a long way to go, but it does generally seem to be going the right way.