Million-Year-Old Skull Rewrites Human Evolution, Scientists Claim (bbc.com) 54
The BBC reports that a million-year-old human skull found in China suggests that the human species "began to emerge at least half a million years earlier than we thought, researchers are claiming in a new study."
It also shows that we co-existed with other sister species, including Neanderthals, for much longer than we've come to believe, they say.
The scientists claim their analysis "totally changes" our understanding of human evolution and, if correct, it would certainly rewrite a key early chapter in our history. But other experts in a field where disagreement over our emergence on the planet is rife, say that the new study's conclusions are plausible but far from certain.
The discovery, published in the leading scientific journal Science, shocked the research team, which included scientists from a university in China and the UK's Natural History Museum. "From the very beginning, when we got the result, we thought it was unbelievable. How could that be so deep into the past?" said Prof Xijun Ni of Fudan University, who co-led the analysis. "But we tested it again and again to test all the models, use all the methods, and we are now confident about the result, and we're actually very excited."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.
The scientists claim their analysis "totally changes" our understanding of human evolution and, if correct, it would certainly rewrite a key early chapter in our history. But other experts in a field where disagreement over our emergence on the planet is rife, say that the new study's conclusions are plausible but far from certain.
The discovery, published in the leading scientific journal Science, shocked the research team, which included scientists from a university in China and the UK's Natural History Museum. "From the very beginning, when we got the result, we thought it was unbelievable. How could that be so deep into the past?" said Prof Xijun Ni of Fudan University, who co-led the analysis. "But we tested it again and again to test all the models, use all the methods, and we are now confident about the result, and we're actually very excited."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.
Co-existence? That's not a new idea is it? (Score:1)
About 30 years ago I read Clan of the Cave Bear and thought it was considered to be well grounded in then-current scientific knowledge. The story was all about Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens living in the same space at the same time. This article makes it sound like this is a new idea.
Anyone know what the actual consensus was and is?
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I don't read that much anthropology these days, but I still feel like the overlap wasn't much mentioned until recently. The DNA analyses opened up that can of worms.
I actually think the most interesting angle for anthropology would involve the neurological side that Jeff Hawkins talks about in his interesting book. Also strange recent thoughts about evolutionary mechanisms with sexual reproduction pruning the evolutionary tree...
Consensus (Score:5, Informative)
About 30 years ago I read Clan of the Cave Bear and thought it was considered to be well grounded in then-current scientific knowledge. The story was all about Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens living in the same space at the same time. This article makes it sound like this is a new idea.
Anyone know what the actual consensus was and is?
Current consensus is that Neanderthals and modern humans are the same species. Genetic analysis shows a couple of percent Neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans. The image of Neanderthal as "hunched, sloping forehead, and ape-like" is thought to be incorrect, it comes from one skeleton that is believed to have been deformed, possibly having acromegaly.
About half a dozen distinct human "types" (Neanderthal is one) are known to have existed, it's thought that there were several more, possibly many more, but evidence from that far back is sparse. It's thought that they were all the same species and could interbreed successfully.
Neanderthals were shorter, stockier, and had larger cranial capacity, but sometime around 70,000 years ago, a different subtype, homo sapiens sapiens, got the upper hand cognitively. Around 40,000 years ago they were the only subtype remaining. (Note that there was an ice age at the time.)
About 10,000 years ago we switched from hunter-gatherers to farming and herding, stayed in one place for generations, and began to build civilization. About 3,000 BC we started casting metal, which was the start of the bronze age.
All of these are approximate, different sources give different dates, the dates change as new evidence comes up (usually pushing the dates further back), and you can't really pin down a specific date anyway. For example, lots of cultures went through the bronze age at different times: it started somewhere in the near East, and swept over the globe over the course of hundreds of years, agriculture was independently invented in 10 or more places, and so on.
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Re:Consensus (Score:4, Interesting)
there's certainly no concensus on neanderthal and sapiens being the same species, that's very fringy, unless you're stretching out 'same species' to mean anything that can interbreed and if you do that you just cut the number of species on the planet down by 90% or more.
I've read some compelling pieces that modern humans were uniquely able to invent a few things that our cousin's didn't have. maybe enough short term memory to 'imagine' a town or farm, or the ability to imagine years into the future. Our neanderthal cousins were very likely just as 'smart' as us but probably in a bit different way. I question the timelines of our advancement and seeing arcticlues like this make me more confident that the timelines are wrong. I think there's enough evidence that modern humans were into agriculture much sooner. The existence of 20,000+ year old pots suggests basic agriculture or at least placing villages near natural outcroppings of edible plants. The only real purpose for a clay pot is to store plant food. meat doesn't keep in pots and water goes stale in pots. I think it's reasonable to think that maybe we were well ahead of things until the ice age hit and then we mostly started over.
I doubt we'll ever have satisfactory answers to these questions though. time ticks. most of the evidence is fragile.
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There are several definitions of "species." One is that if they can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, they are the same species. Thus horses and donkeys are not the same species because mules are sterile, but dogs and wolves are because their offspring can procreate.
It is not the most commonly used definition these days, but it's there.
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The only real purpose for a clay pot is to store plant food. meat doesn't keep in pots and water goes stale in pots.
Well, that sounds very much like, "I can't think of a way it could be otherwise, so it must be true." Here are some counter-examples:
Smoked and dried meat keeps indefinitely.
Salted meat keeps indefinitely.
Water in a slightly porous jug is cooled from evaporation, making it more refreshing.
Snow and ice in a clay pot melts into water when near a fire.
Clay pots are excellent for carrying things from point A to point B, no matter what they are.
And that's with 30 seconds of thinking. Thus, I assert that your a
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The only real purpose for a clay pot is to store plant food.
Or cooking
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Neanderthals had larger eyes. That will mean they need more of their brain to process vision, leaving less brain matter for abstract thought. Whether this made a material difference is hard to determine, but it points to that homo sapiens ended up outsmarting them.
A shame. I would prefer to have superior vision to having nuclear weapons. Not that I have any nuclear weapons.
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The question of species is also that species doesn't really have a great definition.
Like many things in biology, most cases are obvious, but towards the edges it is basically impossible to define well. It's obvious I'm the same species as my brother. It's obvious I'm not the same species as a starfish. But for close relatives, it's awfully hard to define.
Biology is complicated.
There's not even a good definition of life, and I can think of other things too where most examples one might see are obvious but a
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Is there any actual evidence that Sapiens Sapiens was smarter? What I read, a long time ago, was that the key difference was language capability (more developed voice box) allowing modern humans to better coordinate for fighting, foraging, etc.
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Eye size. Larger eyes suck up more neural capacity, leaving less for other tasks.
Re: Consensus (Score:2)
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This is science. There is no consensus.
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From the fourth paragraph of TFA:
"But other experts in a field where disagreement over our emergence on the planet is rife, say that the new study's conclusions are plausible but far from certain".
See? No consensus. Science is done by experiment, not by weighing the papers.
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It's not new. There's even genetic evidence homo sapiens and neanderthal interbred.
This paper is suggesting they co-existed for a lot longer than previously believed. Homo sapiens is generally believed to have emerged 300 000 to maybe 500 000 years ago. A million doubles that, and also increases the amount of time sapiens would have co-existed with neanderthal (~430k - 30k) and, in this case, denosovians (~200k - 40k).
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Glancing at the paper, not just the article, the skull is not homo sapiens but is from a group that probably included denosovian. It's not really accurate to say that "our species" or "we" have been around for a million years.
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Re:Humans evolved in China (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably because nothing remotely like news comes out of China without being vetted by, and altered to fit the political agenda (which is world domination and subjugation) of the Chinese government. Some of it is very true and accurate, but all of it is suspect.
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Thanks for admitting you're a willing agent of the Chinese government because the love the taste of Pooh Bear's dick so much.
Re: Humans evolved in China (Score:2)
TBF though, there is plenty of, let's say patriotic palaeoarchaeology in China. I'm immediately suspicious of archaeology from China which suggests something is much older than thought and what do you know, it started in China.
Maybe... (Score:2)
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Evolution does not give a damn about us killing or not killing each other. The sole point, and process, of evolution, is that the genetic line that is most successful at procreating becomes dominant, and the rest adapt to compete, to die out.
Thus, when resources are plentiful, evolution will breed people who are good at cooperating, which means not killing each other. But when resources are scarce, evolution will breed people who are good at killing their neighbors, so they can feed their own children.
Evolu
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Ideology is a fancy form of tribalism, and many animals will set their group before other groups to the point of hunting and killing them.
Re: Maybe... (Score:2)
And by far the most of us who died before having kids throughout history, died from disease, not from being killed by our neighbors. Even with the industrialized murder of the 20th century, we don't hold a candle to the plague bacteria or the malaria parasite.
Anyone who's played with genetic programming or computer games with genetic breeding elements (CK2, anyone?) knows that if most people die from A, selection for B is going to be painfully slow.
Diarrhea is not as sexy as war and harems, though, for sell
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Your mother took Tylenol while she was pregnant, didn't she?
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Or snorted Drano.
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By writing. It's in the title.
A Difference Between Human and Chimps (Score:2, Flamebait)
A major difference between a human and a chimpanzee is a gap in language abilities; with chimps generally unable to grasp the mechanics of syntax that are commonplace in the world's (human) languages.
It may be impossible to ever know, but I am curious of differences in language function that a million old version of humans has versus modern humans. And of course if they intend on voting Republican.
Such foolishness (Score:3, Funny)
There is no such thing as a million year old bone or fossils of any type. Death has only existed for about 6,000 years.
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There is no such thing as a million year old bone or fossils of any type. Death has only existed for about 6,000 years.
I hope you're trying to be funny. Because the amount of people who believe this horse shit continues to amaze me.
NOVA (Score:2)
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/... [pbs.org]
Not much worth watching on TV these days, but this is one.
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I see your link points to the episodes on-line, along with a speed-controllable video player. That would be better, but I don't know whether they force commercials there.
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The basic point of the one episode I've watched was that different traits that are associated with homo sapiens appeared in different population groups across Africa. One group evolved trait A, a second evolved B, etc. Then these groups melded together to produce us who now have traits A,B,C... But I was a bit disappointed with the program for two reasons. First was that the narrator seemed to base this on one subgroup found in a cave in Morocco that had the gracile face of modern humans but heavy brow ridg
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>"There is an interesting 5 part series on this very topic airing right now on PBS. [NOVA] Not much worth watching on TV these days, but this is one."
Yep, I have been watching it. But it is very slow-paced and overly melodramatic, so I keep falling asleep while watching it and have to figure out where I was the next day :) Still, it is pretty good. This is the kind of stuff I watch, and what used to be all over the Discovery Channel, until it turned into nothing but reality shows, a long time ago. An
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I ditched cable TV in 2001 and every year I am a little happier about what I'm not paying for. I barely have time to watch what my DVR pulls in from the antenna, which is mostly PBS and Jeopardy. If I wanted more, there are stations with multiple channels worth of syndication shows, including stuff that you would see on those random cable channels like Discovery Channel, all free with an antenna, 24 hours per day.
FYI, a big chunk of your monthly bill goes toward "basic cable" sports like ESPN. ESPN alone i
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(There is a noscript element to make sure they hit googletagmanager, which gets blocked by privoxy.)
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So my Mom really IS that old! (Score:2)
We all thought she was lying. ;)