5 ms·
Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave
- yohann305 9y agoIt seems in the past couple years, scientists keep finding new artifacts that shake our current understanding of our roots. We live in a fascinating time!
- publicfig 9y ago>That does not mean that this person contributed to the DNA of anyone living today, he added. It is possible that the jawbone belonged to a previously unknown population of Homo sapiens that departed Africa and then died off. From the article
- themgt 9y agoAs far as I can tell, the entire "Out of Africa" model taken for granted within the MSM is being treated with increasing skepticism/nuance by scientists actually studying the facts on the ground, leading to these odd & increasingly ancient "first modern out of Africa" stories which may be confusing the public more than they're illuminating the history of human populations. Razib Khan had a good short primer on this topic a little while back [1], excerpt: The data for non-Africans is rather unequivocal. The vast majority of (>90%) of the ancestry of non-Africans seems to go back to a small number of common ancestors ~60,000 years ago. Perhaps in the range of ~1,000 individuals. These individuals seem to be a node within a phylogenetic tree where all the other branches are occupied by African populations. Between this period and ~15,000 years ago these non-Africans underwent a massive range expansion, until modern humans were present on all continents except Antarctica. Additionally, after the Holocene some of these non-African groups also experienced huge population growth due to intensive agricultural practice. To give a sense of what I’m getting at, the bottleneck and common ancestry of non-Africans goes back ~60,000 years, but the shared ancestry of Khoisan peoples and non-Khoisan peoples goes back ~150,000-200,000 years. A major lacunae of the current discussion is that often the dynamics which characterize non-Africans are assumed to be applicable to Africans. But they are not. [1] https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2017/04/28/beyond-out-of-africa-and-multiregionalism-a-new-synthesis/ https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2017/04/28/beyond-out-of-afri...
- Retric 9y ago200,000 years is still very recent. 2 million years ago we where limited to Africa. After that things get complicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus#/media/File:Human_evolution_chart-en.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus#/media/File:Human... And of course on these time scales people can easily walk all over the place. We only see remnants of larger populations lone wanderers are extremely unlikely to leave any evidence behind.
- danharaj 9y agoRazib Khan is a shit source
- toasterlovin 9y agoCan you elaborate? What I've read from him seems fairly reasonable, but I am open to updating my model.
- z2210558 9y agoI wouldn't have said "shit source", but I think he's better viewed as a reasonable populariser than a proper source. He is up with the literature (in the sense that the day after a new paper is published, he blogs about it), but he's not an authority in any way, and some of what he writes about e.g. the gendered aspect of IE migrations is a bit florid and unsupported by facts, as far as I can tell. You'd never find a reputable scientist in the field (lets say someone from Reich or Willerslev's labs) pushing lines like that. Regarding the Out of Africa (OoA) model, that is definitely still the consensus model. What is becoming clearer is that subsequent to the OoA event, there was substantial admixture within OoA populations, backflow into Africa, and introgression from Archaic Humans (i.e. interbreeding with Neanderthals etc). Razib refers to this as the "Braided streams" model, rather than a model where populations split and then remained isolated. The real revolution in understanding seems to me to be the role played by human migrations in hte formation of modern populations (i.e. the refutation of the "pots not people" view popular since the 60s.
- runlevel1 9y ago
- skimaskninja87 9y agoMelanated people (aka Africans, which is a European term) were the first Hebrews and Arabs. "Africans" who migrated East to China, then back migrated after they went through mutation, and mixed with the original people. But of course, no one would believe it unless, well, you already know. Hopefully all the "pseudo-scholars" who spread this knowledge can rest easy now. Most of them died broke while these "discoverers" will die wealthy and famous. Of my post is perceived as racist, so what. I didn't hurt nothing but feelings.
- burfog 9y agoThe current population of Syria is the closest genetic match to Egyptian mummies.
- zakki 9y agoWill it conclude who the owner of Jerusalem is?
- castle-bravo 9y agoHomo Erectus, obviously.
- pdog 9y agoEvery couple of months, we find new fossil evidence that "rewrites" the history of our species. At what point is the theory just wrong?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- psyc 9y agoThis is a background issue in any study of the past: history, archaeology, genealogy. There's "true" in the absolute sense, as in what would you have seen had you been there. That's not really attainable. The kind of truth that's left in studies of the past is the consensus model reconstructed from the records, and that's always full of controversies.
- badosu 9y agoThe theory is always 'wrong' if 'correct' means fitting the data perfectly. Having to adjust the parameters of the model and having to change the fundamental aspects (e.g. humans came from Africa) are different things.
- tootie 9y agoWhen new evidence suggests otherwise. All theories are based on our best evidence and we absolutely don't have all the evidence for anything. See, Structure of Scientific Revolution.
- macrael 9y agoOne of the laws of archeology is "There's always an older find"