People who think colonialism is solely a Western/European concept, go read about the Ainu sometime.
Wherever there is a dominant, more powerful culture, and what is seen as an inferior, backwards culture, colonialism seems to happen. This seems to almost be universal. One theory of how the neanderthals went extinct is essentially this.
@Elizafox You know, ..., I *literally* had never thought of this possibility. I'd been so indoctrinated with the (for lack of better expression) superior-genetics-theory explaining our dominance that the thought just never occurred to me.
It's so obvious, though, and I'm much more inclined to trust this explanation as being closer to the actual truth.
@vertigo @Elizafox There's so much complexity to the Neanderthal story though. For one thing we kind of merged. Humans naturally spread much more quickly and were comparatively hyper social, so to some degree we might have just overwhelmed them by spreading and procreating both with and around them.
Seems like in a fight we'd have beat them mostly the way we also hunted all the megafauna to extinction: by coordinating and overwhelming them in bigger groups. They were good in a small fight but early homo sapiens were truly made for *war*.
Still I really wonder to what degree the two groups fought. I keep saying "we" to mean the early homo sapiens but in reality like most modern humans I'm also some part Neanderthal.
