Why there isn’t variety of human beings like different species of cows, bats and every other mammals?
In: Biology
There used to be other species of human.
They died out before we got to where they lived or simply were out-competed when we lived in the same place and time as them.
It should be pointed out that cow or bat is not on the same level as human.
“Bat” is a grouping on the level of “order”. There are over a thousand different species of bats. In fact about 1 out of 5 of all mammal species are bats.
The equivalent for the grouping bat would not be human, but primates The order primates contains us homo sapiens but also hundreds of other species like all sorts of apes and monkey.
There are fewer primate species than there are bat species, but there are still quite a lot.
With cows it is even worse. All cows you see are the same species. We made them from wild ancestors to modern cows. (The wild cows called aurochs are no longer around.)
The equivalent for bat or primate for cows would be even-toed ungulates. A grouping that includes sheep, goats, pigs and deer but also giraffes, camels and technically all whales and dolphins.
A normal person would never look at a giraffe and a bison and say that they are basically the same thing, but they will look at completely different types of bats, with different appearances, size, behavior, diet and anatomy and group them together under the heading of bat.
Human is a very narrowly defined group to bat. so it makes sense that there are 1400 species of bat and only one of human.
There used to be other species of humans around. Scientist aren’t quite clear if for example counted as a different species of humans or just a different sub-species. They were closer related to us than anything else alive today, but further away from us than any living human is from another.
Other species and sub-species of human were around though.
The problem was that when human started invading the entire world, these other guys had to compete with us for food and habitat. There is some evidence that we may have competed with them directly in a few cases and maybe even killed and eaten each other potentially.
There is quite a bit of evidence that our ancestors and neanderthals have interbred quite a bit, so if you have any Caucasian ancestry, you probably can count the neanderthals among your ancestors too.
The reason why in some cases so many different species of a type of animal can coexist while human only allowed for one to survive has to do with specialization.
With other animals you may have groups that specialize in different types of habitat or that eat different types of plant/creatures, and over time those specialized groups will turn into their own species.
Humans don’t do that. We are everywhere and eat everything. There are no separate species of fruit-eating human and insect-eating human or types of mountain humans or Forrest human or costal humans.
We adapt to those difference with culture not by evolution. It is much faster. You can take a human from one habitat and plop them down in to a different one and they will learn to live like the locals.
There are a few special genetic adaptations to different environments but overall those difference are extremely minor and don’t amount to much.
It also means that there is no room for any other species that tries to do the same thing but is less good at it.
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