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for a minute there I thought we discovered hominids alive today. Phrasing!
by adityar 11y ago
for a minute there I thought we discovered hominids alive today. Phrasing!
- ig1 11y agoPresumably they're close enough to us that if we can recover their DNA we could use gene editing technology to bring them back to life.
- HerpDerpLerp 11y agoPresumably you don't work in a biological field!
- ig1 11y agoIf they're in the same genus presumably the same CRISPR approach that's being used to inject Wooly Mammoth genes into Elephants can apply ?
- yellowapple 11y agoPlease let me know when we actually have resurrected the Wooly Mammoth; I can't wait to try a mammoth steak.
- eru 11y agoDNA's half-life is too short.
- RogtamBar 11y agoRe-constructing neanderthals has been suggested as being perfectly viable..
- kuschku 11y agoDNA decomposes very quickly. It's half-life is 521 years. Even in best case, DNA becomes unreadable in 1.5 million years. While Neanderthals lived 38k years ago, this species lived ~ 3 million years ago. Reconstructing this species is practically impossible.
- mcv 11y agoYou can imagine my disappointment when they turned out to be 3 million years old. I don't consider that "new". Perhaps "Previous undiscovered hominid discovered"? But that sounds a bit tautological. "Hominid discovered"? But we had hominids already.
- TuringTest 11y agoDitto. The BBC writer could have specified "new extint human-like species discovered", or "Fossils of new human-like species discovered".
- rtp 11y agoExtinct might not work since that human-like species might be an ancestor of ours.
- bobwaycott 11y agoExactly. I clicked, incredulous and excited at what news this is! While still fascinating, I'll admit I was just a tiny bit disappointed.
- rsy96 11y agoWhen I read that title, I automatically assumed it to be an extinct human-like race, filling in another gap of human evolution history. Maybe whoever wrote that title thought the same, and failed to realize that ordinary people would construe it otherwise.
- itp 11y agoDitto. I do blame it a bit on not being fully awake yet.
- RogtamBar 11y agoYou gotta wait for that till drones and thermal cameras are an order of magnitude cheape and thus more ubiquitous. Best evidence for the existence of a separate species is recent (late 1800's) genetic admixture to an Abhkazian family. Sadly, however, the paleogeneticist (retired Oxford prof. Bryan Sykes) who has the samples has so far not yet released any further information on the samples, except that the admixture cannot be matched to any known ethnic.
- vvpan 11y agoYes. In youtube comments.