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If visitors to our planet in millions of years found fossils of a Homo sapiens and another great ape in an elaborate tomb, would they be able to prove which one built it? (cont.)

Allen Wright
Penzance, Cornwall, UK

New Scientist often has articles about proto-hominoid species and these seem to provoke a good deal of interest. The latest discoveries about the Denisovans shows that archaeologists have the ability to recognise which human groups and species were associated with which sites.

The interesting question is whether the alien visitors would have any kind of sociocultural interest in archaeology or whether their societal ethos would be focused purely on advancement – although can you advance without knowledge of your past?

If the visitors do have an interest in archaeology, then I would presume they would recognise the importance of a site that seemed to contain multiple species using it in a religious manner. It might be that such an inter-species site becomes noted as a galactic anomaly. It might prove to be a vital planetary social evolutionary moment – the moment when a second species achieves ritualised cultural practice and something all advanced planets go through on their way to becoming spacefaring, ready to deal with aliens as equals and not as competitors.

Such a site might even become a tourism hotspot, as visitors race around intergalactic landmarks to discover themselves.

Luce Gilmore
Cambridge, UK

Abhranil Dasgupta’s answer (20 July) emphasises the intuitive, mental and spiritual powers that we might expect from a civilisation with a technology capable of crossing interstellar distances. I beg to differ.

Our own species’ technological advances have been accompanied by a rise in materialism: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was excoriated, not for promoting evolution, which has been a respectable stance since ancient Greece at least, but for its materialist explanatory basis.

As a materialist, I would examine the Homo sapiens fossil and the Pan or Gorilla fossil, say, in the tomb and observe that the latter fossil has demonstrably less agile and weaker hand grips: almost the only feature where Homo sapiens is the stronger. Even more telling, Homo sapiens‘ feet, ankles, legs and hips are far, far better adapted to walking.

If the elaborate tomb had stairs (as most do) without handrails (bathetic in grandiose funerary fittings), then Pan or Gorilla-originated architecture could be ruled out.

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