The world where sims (the European settlers' name for Homo erectus) rather than Indians inhabit the New World is differem from ours in several ways. For one thing, the grand fauna of the Pleistocene, mammoths, saber-tooth tigers, ground sloths, glyptodons, what have you, might well have survived to the present day. Sims would be less efficient hunters than Indians, and would not have helped hurry the great beasts into extinction.

Human history starts looking different too. North America would have been easier for Europeans to settle than it was in our history, where the Indians were strong enough to slow if not to stop the expansion.

Central and South America, on the other hand, would have been more difficult: Spanish colonial society was based on the ruins of the American Indian empires. And Spain, without the loot it plundered from the Indians, probably would not have dominated sixteenth-century Europe to the extent it did in our history.

Also, the presence of sims, intel igent beings, but different from and less than us, could not have failed to have a powerful effect on European thought. Where did they come from? What was their relationship to humans? Having these questions posed so forcefully might well have led thinkers toward the idea of evolution long before Darwin. Sims might also make us look rather more careful y at the differences between various groups of ourselves.

To return to Gould's question: how would we treat sims. I fear that the short answer is, not very well. They are enough like us to be very useful, different enough from us to be exploited with minimal guilt, and too weak to resist effectively for themselves. The urge to treat them better would have to come from the ranks of humanity, and to compete against the many reasons, some of them arguably valid, for continuing exploitation.