Let's say that somehow-and to be honest I don't have the slightest idea how-a breeding population of Neanderthals reach North America. Time: sometime between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago. I initially visualized a hop from Europe to the Eastern US, but crossing Asia actually makes more sense. Some ecological barrier apparently kept Neanderthals from spreading across northern Asia to Siberia and from there to North America in our time-line, but if they somehow got past that barrier they could easily enough spread to the New World.

Neanderthals were a cold-adapted subspecies (or possibly species) of humanity. Think Eskimos but with less technology and more extreme physical adaptations to make up for the missing technology and you won't be too far off.

Where do we go from there? The Neanderthals initially spread through the coldest parts of North America, areas that they are already adapted to. They find the hunting easy, because North American animals haven't had a chance to adapt to human predators. In our time-line, the first Indians may have killed off 70% of the large animals of North and South America, either directly through hunting or indirectly by modifying the habitat or competing for scarce resources like water or sheltered areas for the winter. (That's very controversial, with paleontologists splitting fairly evenly between a camp that blames climate change and one that blames the Indians for the die-off. I lean toward the Indians as the cause.)

In any case, Neanderthals are less technologically advanced than our Indians and somewhat less destructive. As they spread, they still change ecological balances in hundreds of subtle ways, just as the Indians did when they arrived in North America in our time-line. Large species quickly become rare as Neanderthals move into an area, and a few species that are already on their way out get pushed over the edge by the new elements in the environment. For the most part though, the Neanderthals have more subtle, long-term impacts on their new environment. The balance between slow but powerful animals like Ground Sloths and fast animals like horses and antelopes shifts in favor of fast animals.

The Neanderthal occupation of the Americas is much slower and less complete than the Indian occupation was in out time-line. The Neanderthals simply don't have as flexible or advanced a tool-chest as the Indians did, so it takes them longer to adapt to new climates and new prey species. Ecological frontiers stop or reroute their expansion for generations, especially as they reach warmer climates. It takes them thousands of years to reach the southern tip of South America, and large parts of both North and South America remain uninhabited for even longer.

As the centuries pass, the American Neanderthals gradually diverge from their European cousins. They also diverge from one another. They have to adapt to their environment physically more than the Indians did, because they don't have as much technology to do the adapting for them. Branches of the American Neanderthals quickly come to differ from each other physically more than any existing humans races differ. That's especially true in Alaska and Beringia, where a branch of the Neanderthals are isolated from the rest by glaciers for tens of thousands of years.

Events in the Old World continue pretty much along the same path as they took in our time-line. For reasons that are still controversial, modern humanity comes to dominate Eurasia and Africa. European Neanderthals are either absorbed or exterminated by our ancestors, with the process starting around 40,000 years ago and with the last few identifiable European Neanderthals vanishing 10 to 15 thousand years later.

Neanderthals in Siberia begin feeling the pressure of modern humanity's expansion about the same time Europe's do, though the process is somewhat slower there. Modern humanity comes to North America via a coastal route. The inland route is more difficult than in our time-line because the proto-Indians are not expanding into territory empty of humans. The big-game hunters that in our time became a significant part of the ancestry of American Indians don't make it across the Bering land-bridge before the land-bridge floods. The timing was pretty close in our time-line and the Neanderthals slow the advance down by several thousand years.

We're now at around 9,000 years before the present. North and South America are for the most part isolated again. As the glaciers quickly retreat, the two continents start to take on the shape and climate they will keep until the present.

In terms of geography and climate, North and South America look pretty much the same as they do in our time-line. In terms of humans and animals, they look very different. The animals of both continents look more like our time-line's Africa than they do in our time-line. Some of the ice age North American animals simply can't survive in a human-dominated landscape. Glyptodonts become extinct. Saber-tooth tigers become very rare and are probably headed for extinction. Some large species of Ground Sloths die out or become rare. Other animals that died out in our time-line survive and even thrive in this one. Mammoths adapt to human predation and maintain healthy populations, just as the elephants of Africa and Asia did in our time-line. Their ranges do shrink, and individual animals get somewhat smaller, but they show no signs of becoming extinct.

The horses of North and South America also thrive, as do antelopes, North and Central American camels and llamas, peccaries and the North American Lion. The highly carnivorous ice age North American bear becomes rare, and smaller, but survives, as does the North American ice-age cheetah.

The Neanderthals of the New World gradually develop more advanced technology, or it diffuses to them from modern humans they are in contact with, just as the late Neanderthals in Europe adopted a more advanced toolkit in response to the incursion of modern humans into their territory. For the next several thousand years, modern humans and Neanderthals co-exist uneasily in the New World. Let's call the modern humans Indians, though they only represent part of the ancestry of our time-line's Indians. Indians are in sporadic contact with Asia across the Bering Strait, and new technology diffuses across the strait from time-to-time. That gives modern humans an edge. On the other hand, Neanderthals have been in the New World long enough that they've developed their own unique group of diseases, and those diseases give them an advantage over Indians trying to encroach on their territory. Neanderthal physical strength is another advantage. They are simply stronger than Indians, which gives them a major advantage in any hand-to-hand combat.

The two kinds of humanity don't mix very much. It isn't physically impossible, but there are social and behavioral barriers far greater than the barriers between modern human races. Neanderthals and modern humans just don't smell right, act right, talk right, or look right to each other. Also, relationships between the two types are somewhat more likely to produce still-born children, infertile kids, or a mother dead or sterile from complications of childbirth. There is some gene-flow between populations in direct contact with one another, but much less than between human races, and the genes tend not to spread much beyond areas of direct contact.

The New World Neanderthals have now been isolated from their European cousins for hundreds of thousands of years. They haven't stopped changing in those years. They are different genetically, socially, and technologically than their now extinct cousins were. They are quite capable of borrowing technology from the neighboring modern humans and adapting it to their lifestyle. They seem somewhat less able than modern humans to innovate, but that may be cultural rather than genetic.

Neanderthals dominate the plains, and mountainous areas, while modern humans are common along seacoasts and infiltrate the interior of the continent along the major river valleys.

In South America, small races of Neanderthals specifically adapted to the rainforest are common. They live along-side and compete to some extent with at least two kinds of very large spider monkeys that play ecological roles similar to the African and Asian Great Apes. Both species of monkey became extinct in our time-line. In the mountains of North and South America, other races of Neanderthals become adapted to a high-altitude life-style. At some point, Neanderthals have reached some of the larger West Indies islands and have developed some very odd forms there.

The Neanderthals have a couple of opposite impacts on technology. On the one hand, they don't tend to develop much in the way of innovations. On the other hand, in the hundreds of thousands of years they have been in the New World they have gradually developed a very sophisticated knowledge of which plants are and aren't useful. They have also had an impact on how those plants have developed. They have used sophisticated burning practices and other ways of altering the environment for over ten thousand years. Indians copy that plant knowledge and those techniques, giving them a head start toward agriculture, though they have fewer places to invent it due to the fact that Neanderthals control much of the continent.

And that's where I ran out of time. What happens next? Are Neanderthals still around to greet the first Europeans? (And yes, I know that there are serious questions as to whether our set of European nations and individuals would exist in this time-line.) If the Europeans in this time-line were anything like the ones in ours, how would they react? Would the Neanderthals be treated even worse than the Indians were? Would any of them even survive the colonial era? How would the Church react to them? How would they be explained? Europeans debated whether or not Indians had souls in our time-line. That debate would undoubtedly be much more intense in this time-line.

Would this time-line develop a Darwin in the 1500's? Probably not. Neanderthals were very different from Europeans, but from a European perspective so were Indians, Africans, and even Eskimos. They would probably develop a contempt for the Neanderthals, but probably not excessively more of a contempt than they felt for other races of mankind.

 

 Comments are very welcome.