We are domesticated animals

[cthulu2016]

13. There's killing and then there's killing

I don't know that we put rocks to the heads of every single hominid, but we almost certainly killed plenty directly while also driving many to undesirable lands where they died out.

Considering the Bantu expansion and the _____ expansion (? drawing a blink here... the Asian equivalent of the Bantu expansion) resulting in the disappearance of much of homo sapiens variety, it seems likely that genocide is just how we roll.

For instance, the whole stretch from Africa to Australia would have once been full of people much like Australian aborigines, but the only ones who survived were in Australia, on the lucky side of a new sea barrier.

There is nothing implausible about more than one hominid species coexisting on the planet. Whales and apes and great cats didn't end up one global species... but we did.

There were lots of hominids in different places before we busted out out northeast Africa. And in a geological blink they were gone.

There were many species of large mammal in the Americas, but few remained after only a few thousand years of humans in the Americas. Our exceptional abilities seem to include causing the extinction of large animals.

I think the most parsimonious explanation is that something distinctive about us about us is why the world ended up with one global hominid species.