I’m posting this because I think there hasn’t been enough popular discussion about the amazing new findings with regards human evolution over the past decade. It would be good to get people’s thoughts about it.
To summarise (and it’s an amateur summary), we’ve gone from a situation that Humans as in Homo Sapiens were supposed to have been alone on the Earth and probably knocked off the Neanderthals to something much more interesting and complex in our understanding of human evolution.
Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals very likely interbred and we probably have some Neanderthal genes in us
Neanderthals wore jewelry and buried their dead , made shelters, made complex tools, had fire and hunted large animals. They weren’t dumb
A new species called Denisovians was discovered 5 years ago and just confirmed by the existence of ONE fingerbone in a Siberian cave
The Denisovians, while being a cousin of the Neanderthals, also have unknown DNA pointing to ANOTHER Homo Species that they interbred with
The Denisovians live on in us and up to 6% of the DNA of Australian aborigines and Melanesian is Denisovian
There has been another possible species discovered in China called ‘Red Deer Man’
A dwarf human species, Flores Man, existed in Indonesia until almost modern times. The humans on Flores probably shrunk over time due to ‘island dwarfism’ just like the elephants and the rhinos,
All of these species may have lived on Earth at the same time and interbred in some form or other.
We are the tip of the human iceberg and we are missing our brothers and sisters.
We should be careful we don’t end up like them
We are not so special as we thought , the reason why we may think we are so special is that our brothers and sister species died out. In the end we were just part of a group of bipedal apes, the last ones surviving.
We are influenced by our environment and evolve with it just like the other animals (Flores man)
Throw out your biology books and bibles and wait for more exciting discoveries to come!
I’ve a few predictions too. I think Neanderthals or Denisovians may actually have made it to North America and interbred with the first American Homo Sapiens, or else the reason why Native Americans have more Neanderthal DNA than any other group must be that their ancestors bred with the Neanderthals/Denisovians in Asia and came across to North America much earlier than thought.
I also predict we’ll find remains of 2 or 3 more human species dotted around the place. Taiwan may have harboured a group of these remnant humans, but the geology and climate makes finding fossil evidence difficult. Perhaps Taiwanese aborigines have the secret in their DNA.
Depends what you mean by Siberians. Eskimoes spread across North America and Siberia. But I have seen studies which point to things that don’t match up with current theories i.e. neanderthals are not supposed to have ever existed in America. Yet native Americans were supposed to have migrated to Asia around 13,000 years ago, when the Neanderthals were supposed to have gone extinct?
The history of humans in the Americas is very unclear, the whole story about the Clovis people being first is unraveling, it’s likely humans moved into North America much earlier over ice bridges. The ice age makes it difficult to find evidence. There is also the possibility of humans coming across by boat from West and East. I think it’s fascinating.
I wonder if they used that old chat-up line back then?
-Say, do you have some Neanderthal DNA in you?
-um, no.
-Would you like to?
I came across a theory the other day that suggested Neanderthals actually had bigger brains than modern humans, with most of the extra volume accounted for by the visual cortex - so they would have had more complex visual processing abilities (although not necessarily better eyesight). The researchers suggested this may have been a disadvantage, leading to their being wiped out by the (relatively unsophisticated) homo sapiens, although I forget their rather convoluted reasoning. Anyone else read this?
Yeah, I think it has been the consensus for quite a few years that the Neanderthals had a larger brain capacity than us. I haven’t read anything of late. One line of thought regarding their extinction is that the Neanderthals were simply cold-adapted animals and couldn’t handle the rapidly warming climate. At least with this simple hypothesis there is evidence - Neanderthal bones are found alongside other cold-adapted species, many of which have also gone extinct. I get a little annoyed at the tendency of some evolutionary biologists to speculate wildly from tiny little scraps of evidence, then spend decades arguing over competing hypotheses, only to see everything overturned by the discovery of one fossil. The entire Asian continent remains understudied so, er, maybe they should all just shut up and dig for a few decades and bring us new fossils, rather than speculation. Also, chimpanzee evolution remains woefully understood - one would think there would be more interest in getting a better understanding of the most recent split in our lineage.
I find that a lot of otherwise intelligent, educated people still don’t get evolution. Only last Friday one of my friends was explaining how he doesn’t believe in it, because a physically weak person could produce more offspring than a strong one. In other words, he doesn’t understand the basic concept of evolutionary fitness, let alone all of the other more subtle stuff. Yet others in our group (all with tertiary education) nodded in assent, . And a couple of weeks ago I had a BenjaminKesque conversation with a student about chickens, eggs and lizards. It was my fault, I jokingly mentioned lizards, assuming he would ‘get it’. :aiyo:
[quote=“finley”]
I came across a theory the other day that suggested Neanderthals actually had bigger brains than modern humans, with most of the extra volume accounted for by the visual cortex - so they would have had more complex visual processing abilities (although not necessarily better eyesight). The researchers suggested this may have been a disadvantage, leading to their being wiped out by the (relatively unsophisticated) homo sapiens, although I forget their rather convoluted reasoning. Anyone else read this?[/quote]
No, sounds interesting though. My understanding is that our sophisticated verbal abilities gave us the big advantage. This theory wouldn’t seem to contradict that.
This is the kind of thing that makes we wish for more tentativeness (not just in this field but science in general).
[quote=“California Academy of Sciences”]The discovery of a very complete skull in Dmanisi, Georgia is shaking up the human family tree.
Last week in Science, researchers reported finding a Homo skull with both an intact cranium and mandible (lower jaw). A finding so complete is quite rare, and this particular specimen displays characters and features that challenge what we know about a few of our human ancestors.
The skull is about 1.8 million years old and was discovered where four less-intact skulls were previously found. That makes it approximately the same age as other Homo erectus specimens, but the features vary from what scientists know of this species.
“The study implies that variability in Homo erectus was common, similar to chimpanzees and Homo sapiens today,” says Academy paleoanthropologist Zeray Alemseged. “Because we see a huge variability today in different human populations, there’s no surprise that there was variability in African and European and Asian populations millions of years ago.”
The implications of this study could be great—it’s quite possible that other Homo species were just further variations of Homo erectus. The authors say that Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and Homo ergaster were likely variations of Homo erectus.[/quote]
Anyway, cracking topic from headhoncholl. It made me click on a link to an article yesterday that I’d been avoiding for quite a few days, namely: The Peking Man Delusion. Fascinating. I didn’t know the Chinese were attempting to extend their glorious culture back another 750,000 years.
Anyone seen any genetic studies showing the relationships between the Asian races? I vaguely remember reading something about south-east Asia having the most diversity.
All I remember from classes and study WAY back, and this is a very general summary and probably out of date by now (Noah Chomsky was big into this area of research as well interestingly) was that the Melanesians supposedly came through Taiwan first something like 100,00-50,000 years ago, and then there was another wave of peoples, the Polynesians, who also may have launched out of Taiwan and went on to displace the Melanesians in most of their territory (excepting PNG/Australia/parts of Philippines/islands in Indian Ocean etc.) and also ventured further to places such as Easter Island and New Zealand.
They traced the linkages through distinctive pottery and languages and of course now it will be much easier with genetic sequencing.
[quote]
The genome of a young boy buried at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia about 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists.
The first is that the boy’s DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last ice age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed.
The second surprise is that his DNA also matches a large proportion - about 25 per cent - of the DNA of living Native Americans. The first people to arrive in the Americas have long been assumed to have descended from Siberian populations related to East Asians. It now seems that they may be a mixture between the Western Europeans who had reached Siberia and an East Asian population.
[quote]
The genome of a young boy buried at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia about 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists.
The first is that the boy’s DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last ice age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed.
The second surprise is that his DNA also matches a large proportion - about 25 per cent - of the DNA of living Native Americans. The first people to arrive in the Americas have long been assumed to have descended from Siberian populations related to East Asians. It now seems that they may be a mixture between the Western Europeans who had reached Siberia and an East Asian population.
so does this help solve the non-clovis European styled stone age tools origin issue? those North American tools were made around 19,000 and 26,000 years ago, and this young individual in Siberia lived around 24,000 years ago.
now we don’t have to have a theory for pre-historic advanced stone age ocean capable ships anymore. they walked there like everyone else.
Yes, what is not well appreciated is that the ice age had warmer and cooler periods where either ice bridges or land bridges would have formed between North American and Siberia and which would have allowed people to migrate at different times.
Usually the theory was they had to wait until 15,000 years ago as North America began to unfreeze but that is probably wrong and there were very likely earlier migrations.
There is a theory that there were three waves of migration, these may have reflected opening and closing of land/ice bridges. boston.com/whitecoatnotes/20 … story.html
and bring us new fossils, rather than speculation. Also, chimpanzee evolution remains woefully understood - one would think there would be more interest in getting a better understanding of the most recent split in our lineage.
