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Let's imagine that an advanced alien civilization came to visit us about 200,000 years ago, and that they kidnapped a human group at the beginning of the development of the homo sapiens species.

They placed this human group on an exoplanet with the same specifications as the Earth (with a "exo-animal" population already present, ...), and then allowed them to develop on their own.

By excluding any possibility of interference by the said alien civilization, what could be the social, technological, biological or physical characteristics of this exo-human civilization (compared to our present civilization) in 2017?

I'm not talking about human colonization of space but how humans species could evolve isolated in differents places like :

  • Could the exo-humans be on the same technological level as humans on Earth?
  • What could be their social organisation, considering that they've never been in contact with Earth humans ?
  • Would they be biologically or physically the same as Earth humans ?
  • ...

Thanks for you help !

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marked as duplicate by Mołot, Separatrix, Pavel Janicek, Frostfyre, Thucydides Jan 30 '17 at 15:06

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.

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    $\begingroup$ This is an extremely open question. If you took a group of hominids from 200,000 years ago and moved them to another place on Earth they would evolve a bit differently. If you move them to another planet, all bets are off. Could you be more specific about the planet you have in mind? $\endgroup$ – pablodf76 Jan 30 '17 at 10:28
  • $\begingroup$ @Mołot Possibly related but not a duplicate. $\endgroup$ – a4android Jan 30 '17 at 11:55
  • $\begingroup$ @a4android we will see if it is a duplicate or not, when OP will edit this down and make it less broad. $\endgroup$ – Mołot Jan 30 '17 at 12:15
  • $\begingroup$ @pablodf76 I was thinking about a planet with the same characteristics that Earth, like a twin Earth. $\endgroup$ – P C Jan 30 '17 at 13:43
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    $\begingroup$ No need to relocate them to another planet. Relocating them to the Americas would be enough. The results would be completely unpredictable. Remember that the entire history, from the beginnigs in Sumer to our wondrous days, is not longer than 7000 years. What would happen over a timespan of 200 millennia is impossible to guess. $\endgroup$ – AlexP Jan 30 '17 at 13:54
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The first problem with your idea is that at the beginning of the Homo Sapiens group of species, 200,000 would have been a large part of the total population.

Estimates suggest that 10,000 years ago the entire population was only 2 million.

Homo Sapiens started before that.

So removing 200,000 homo sapiens early on would have been close to devastating the population.

The second problem is that homo sapiens at that time, lacking any technology or support and placed into an alien ecosystem which they were not adapted to would be extremely vulnerable. It's unlikely they could survive either medically (any indigenous pathogen might be lethal to them) or simply as a matter of finding food they could eat.

Even if your aliens picked a planet "safe" for them (in itself a scenario that is unlikely to be practically possible) they would still be removed from their own environment - the one they were adapted to survive in, before they developed the technological and social skills required for such adaptation.

I'd be very skeptical they could survive at all.

It's impossible to say what their current social, biological and physical characteristics could be even if they survived. They'd probably be roughly the same shape and size and there's little time for evolutionary changes of a major kind to happen.

However to survive they'd probably have to develop an immune system that was targeted at different systems from ours. It's simply that their environment would throw different things at them.

As as side note I've speculated that the reason aliens don't contact or visit us is simply because for a less technologically advanced civilization all an alien culture can do for you is expose you to potentially deadly pathogens. So why your aliens would risk such a thing is, for me, a mystery.

At best I'd expect the 200,000 seed population to be reduced to a much smaller population very rapidly by pathogens. The survivors, who would have developed some immunity, might grow but the smaller the seed population, the less likely their continued survival and the smaller their current population would be.

As they're humans they'd be prone to the same problems we are : war, internal competition for scare resources, dispute and identification with sub-groups leading to conflict with other sub-groups. Assuming they could survive they'd probably have a smaller population than we do (say the tens of millions ballpark) and be at roughly the 4000 B.C. cultural/technological mark (based on the size of the starting population, time to develop and likely early loss due to pathogens).

The specifics of such a culture are impossible to even guesstimate.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for your answer, I find the second part of your answer very interesting, you're talking a lot about how the population can influence the level of evolution. You're saying (correct me if I'm wrong) that because the exo-humans population would be lower, their level of development would also be lower : what could happens if the starting population of exo-humans would be twice as large as Earth humans population ? Could they be more developed than us ? $\endgroup$ – P C Jan 30 '17 at 14:02
  • $\begingroup$ Taking more people from Earth's population would probably reduce the Earth's population level to dangerously low levels. But even taking more people will not help as much as (in my view) the transported population would be near wiped out by at least one pathogen (I think a 10% survival rate is a good guess). Say you take a million people, that still only gets you a measly 100,000 survivors. It will simply take them longer to develop than the (say) 500,00 left on Earth (their natural environment). It's the colonized planet's potential to kill that is the problem. $\endgroup$ – StephenG Jan 30 '17 at 15:03

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