9 ms·

New species of ancient human discovered in the Philippines: Homo luzonensis

152 points by curtis 7y ago

wallace_f 7y ago
How would one go about making an educated guess as to how many species of human in total existed, given what we know about the probabilities of discovering evidence of one?
- frostburg 7y ago
  It's similar to the tank problem, but intuitively this should have additional constraints (also tree or rather graph instead of a sequence)
- Baeocystin 7y ago
  You'd have to very closely define what precisely you meant by the word 'species', and go from there. It's a surprisingly slippery thing to do. Even the commonly-accepted 'can have viable offspring together' isn't as cut-and-dried as you might think: https://www.sciencealert.com/darwin-s-finches-evolve-into-new-species-in-real-time-two-generations-galapagos https://www.sciencealert.com/darwin-s-finches-evolve-into-ne... More looking at edge-case compatibility between germlines, in this case modern human vs. neanderthal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans#Neanderthals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_...
  - matt_kantor 7y ago
    Ring species (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species) also throw an interesting wrench into the "viable offspring" definition.
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
What's fascinating about the discovery of Homo luzonesis is that they're from a location which wasn't known to be connected by land for past 2.5 Million years. Considering boat travel wasn't a possibility, their origins might shed us new light on how early hominids migrated and even tell us about human settlements in places like Andaman Islands, Sentinel Islands.
- mrmonkeyman 7y ago
  Boat travel was not a possibility.. ?
  - dboreham 7y ago
    No engines.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  > Considering boat travel wasn't a possibility, Why not? From the article: > “If rhinos can swim and get to places, certainly we can think of erectus, floresiensis, and luzonensis not necessarily just swimming but at least rafting, if not boating,” Petraglia says. “It's just pure speculation, but you could posit that and make some convincing arguments.”
- flukus 7y ago
  > The small-bodied hominin, named Homo luzonensis, lived on the island of Luzon at least 50,000 to 67,000 years ago. That's pretty much when modern humans made it to Australia, boats definitely existed by then. I'm not sure where the idea that pre-agricultural humans didn't have boats comes from but it seems to be rooted in debates about when migrations into North America happened. Rudimentary rafts aren't that big a leap for anyone that's seen a tree trunk float down a river, from there you can iterate pretty rapidly to something ocean going.
  - neuronic 7y ago
    And if the biological Homo sapiens is 250,000 years old or even older that leaves at least another 200,000 years for sapiens or other Homo x species to have built a boat. Just because the fossil record lacks evidence we are pretending that modern humans weren't just as smart for 94% of their existence as a species (since animal husbandry, writing etc. seemingly only developed in the past 15,000 years).
- rolltiide 7y ago
  50,000-60,000 years ago there could have been another 2,000-6,000 period of near linear technological progression and trade and you would never know. The conditions for fossilization are extremely rare. All we have is that people got there and then a hairdresser got fossilized in a mudslide and we are now elevating this person as a representative of their whole species.
llbowers 7y ago
I sometimes wonder what it would be like if another species had survived and developed alongside us. They would be humans but....not quite what we conceive of as human(basically our species). What would their culture have been like? Music, art, language, etc. As tribal as our own species is I imagine we would have gone to war eventually and one exterminated the other (assuming no large difference in population, technology, etc.). I think that might have been what happened to Neanderthals? But still, the thought of going about day-to-day business alongside, let's say homo floresiensis, has something intriguing to it. Perhaps it's the same reason we imagine interaction with extraterrestrial life - it's really just a reflection on us and our own humanity.
- nestorD 7y ago
  It is not my domain but, as far as I know, before finding neandertal DNA in current humans we thought they probably had been exterminated but now the statu quo seem to be that they have been integrated and have mixed with our species. I believe it would be a good bet that another human species living alongside us would have merged with us by know.
  - imesh 7y ago
    That's a rosy colored view of how we mixed. Maybe there was that, but one thing I would bet on is rape. Probably a mixture.
    - TomMarius 7y ago
      And that was out of the norm back then?
    - b5 7y ago
      You're refuting his view as rosy, but positing that the real answer was horror. It's almost certainly something in between the two. Personally, I think that the most likely explanation is that most mixing came through adoption of fertile women into the human tribes. Males of other tribes would probably not have been accepted so readily, and likely driven off or killed, but fertile females would have been more easily integrated. From there, you naturally get a mix of the two. The relative percentages of Neanderthal and Sapien DNA in modern humans would indicate that Sapiens outcompeted the Neanderthals and relatively few interbred with us.
beardedman 7y ago
This is awesome. Makes you wonder what else we haven't discovered yet.
GershwinA 7y ago
Nice, makro-history is interesting. Most of you probably know it, but regarding ancient history Noah Yuval Harari is a master writer, apiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a great book on this topic.
- b5 7y ago
  I read it recently and have mixed feelings about it. I'd recommend it to anyone, especially if you haven't read much on the topic and want an overview. I think it does an excellent job of ancient, pre-historical humans -- the various branches of Homo and how they interrelate. He makes it clear that 'human' and 'Homo Sapien' and not absolute synonyms: Homo Sapiens are one kind of humans, the last surviving, but humans encompass all of the Homo genus that came before too. I liked that distinction and it changed the way I thought about humanity as a whole. I think it gets significantly weaker once it moves past the pre-historical hunter-gatherer stage. Part of that is that the staggering complexity and variety of human civilisation post-agriculture means he has to condense, but I also feel like his real interest lies in pre-agricultural humans of all kinds.
Hnrobert42 7y ago
I watched a documentary on an Amazonian tribe that had just initiated contact with the outside world. accepted help from the government. It was endearing to see how much they appreciated things like flip flops and a cooking pan. From the “noble savage,” I thought pre-modern people understood and lived in harmony with nature. Now I see they live a hella hard life. They are often hungry. They sleep fitfully in fear of being eaten. One guys told of his grandmother being dragged away from dinner by a panther. Their sustainable rate of consumption aside, they don’t really live in harmony with nature any more than I do with city when I cross a busy intersection or operate an elevator. Then I think about what future humans will think of my primitive ass. Which is why I hide photocopies of it in the stacks of libraries I visit. To help the future researchers.
- PuffinBlue 7y ago
  This comment really took a turn at the end there.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    It’s on to something. I think I am the target audience. I didn’t plan to confess this, but it happened more than once, that I upvoted a comment I didn’t read till the end. Alea dictur est
- fredsir 7y ago
  They lived in harmony with nature in every realistic meaning of the term. Being dragged away as somethings dinner, sleeping with one eye open, sometimes going to bed hungry, and so on, is part of natures harmony. That's how it works everywhere in nature for all living things. Sometimes you are the hunter, and sometimes you are the hunted. And that's okay, or no one could survive. It's only when we change the game, like with our modern way of society, that we also have to change the rules. Like it's not okay anymore to go about killing others willy nilly if it's not necessary. Or should I say, one could hope the rules would reflect the change of the game, but not in all aspects has it yet at least.
  - 7y ago
perlgeek 7y ago
> The hominin—identified from a total of seven teeth and six small bones Whenever I read such things, I'm amazed at how much knowledge you can get out of three handful of bones -- and on the hand I wonder if that's maybe still too little to declare the discovery of a whole species of hominin.
qwerty9876 7y ago
None of these species are really extinct. Homo sapiens interbred with them and their genetics still live on in the local populations. In fact this is a major reason how different human populations around the world became so different looking in such a short time.
- jmmcd 7y ago
  > a major reason how different human populations around the world became so different looking in such a short time. Is it true? Any link for this?
  - qwerty9876 7y ago
    Yes, e.g light eyes and light hair in Europeans comes from the neanderthals. https://www.eupedia.com/europe/neanderthal_facts_and_myths.shtml#genes https://www.eupedia.com/europe/neanderthal_facts_and_myths.s... "According to the Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost, the current level of hair colour diversity in Europe would have taken 850,000 years to develop, while Homo sapiens has been in Europe no longer than 45,000 years. This is evidence enough that genes for fair hair were inherited from interbreeding with Neanderthals."
    - Symmetry 7y ago
      Genes from Dennisovans, which had been living in Tibet for a very long time, are also why modern Tibetans are better adapted to high altitudes than other homo sapiens groups living in similar conditions. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/tibetans-inherited-high-altitude-gene-ancient-human https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/tibetans-inherited-h...

152 points by curtis 7y ago

How would one go about making an educated guess as to how many species of human in total existed, given what we know about the probabilities of discovering evidence of one?

frostburg 7y ago
It's similar to the tank problem, but intuitively this should have additional constraints (also tree or rather graph instead of a sequence)
Baeocystin 7y ago
You'd have to very closely define what precisely you meant by the word 'species', and go from there. It's a surprisingly slippery thing to do. Even the commonly-accepted 'can have viable offspring together' isn't as cut-and-dried as you might think: https://www.sciencealert.com/darwin-s-finches-evolve-into-new-species-in-real-time-two-generations-galapagos https://www.sciencealert.com/darwin-s-finches-evolve-into-ne... More looking at edge-case compatibility between germlines, in this case modern human vs. neanderthal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans#Neanderthals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_...
- matt_kantor 7y ago
  Ring species (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species) also throw an interesting wrench into the "viable offspring" definition.

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

What's fascinating about the discovery of Homo luzonesis is that they're from a location which wasn't known to be connected by land for past 2.5 Million years. Considering boat travel wasn't a possibility, their origins might shed us new light on how early hominids migrated and even tell us about human settlements in places like Andaman Islands, Sentinel Islands.

mrmonkeyman 7y ago
Boat travel was not a possibility.. ?
- dboreham 7y ago
  No engines.
darkpuma 7y ago
> Considering boat travel wasn't a possibility, Why not? From the article: > “If rhinos can swim and get to places, certainly we can think of erectus, floresiensis, and luzonensis not necessarily just swimming but at least rafting, if not boating,” Petraglia says. “It's just pure speculation, but you could posit that and make some convincing arguments.”
flukus 7y ago
> The small-bodied hominin, named Homo luzonensis, lived on the island of Luzon at least 50,000 to 67,000 years ago. That's pretty much when modern humans made it to Australia, boats definitely existed by then. I'm not sure where the idea that pre-agricultural humans didn't have boats comes from but it seems to be rooted in debates about when migrations into North America happened. Rudimentary rafts aren't that big a leap for anyone that's seen a tree trunk float down a river, from there you can iterate pretty rapidly to something ocean going.
- neuronic 7y ago
  And if the biological Homo sapiens is 250,000 years old or even older that leaves at least another 200,000 years for sapiens or other Homo x species to have built a boat. Just because the fossil record lacks evidence we are pretending that modern humans weren't just as smart for 94% of their existence as a species (since animal husbandry, writing etc. seemingly only developed in the past 15,000 years).
rolltiide 7y ago
50,000-60,000 years ago there could have been another 2,000-6,000 period of near linear technological progression and trade and you would never know. The conditions for fossilization are extremely rare. All we have is that people got there and then a hairdresser got fossilized in a mudslide and we are now elevating this person as a representative of their whole species.

llbowers 7y ago

I sometimes wonder what it would be like if another species had survived and developed alongside us. They would be humans but....not quite what we conceive of as human(basically our species). What would their culture have been like? Music, art, language, etc. As tribal as our own species is I imagine we would have gone to war eventually and one exterminated the other (assuming no large difference in population, technology, etc.). I think that might have been what happened to Neanderthals? But still, the thought of going about day-to-day business alongside, let's say homo floresiensis, has something intriguing to it. Perhaps it's the same reason we imagine interaction with extraterrestrial life - it's really just a reflection on us and our own humanity.

nestorD 7y ago
It is not my domain but, as far as I know, before finding neandertal DNA in current humans we thought they probably had been exterminated but now the statu quo seem to be that they have been integrated and have mixed with our species. I believe it would be a good bet that another human species living alongside us would have merged with us by know.
- imesh 7y ago
  That's a rosy colored view of how we mixed. Maybe there was that, but one thing I would bet on is rape. Probably a mixture.
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    And that was out of the norm back then?
  - b5 7y ago
    You're refuting his view as rosy, but positing that the real answer was horror. It's almost certainly something in between the two. Personally, I think that the most likely explanation is that most mixing came through adoption of fertile women into the human tribes. Males of other tribes would probably not have been accepted so readily, and likely driven off or killed, but fertile females would have been more easily integrated. From there, you naturally get a mix of the two. The relative percentages of Neanderthal and Sapien DNA in modern humans would indicate that Sapiens outcompeted the Neanderthals and relatively few interbred with us.

beardedman 7y ago

This is awesome. Makes you wonder what else we haven't discovered yet.

GershwinA 7y ago

Nice, makro-history is interesting. Most of you probably know it, but regarding ancient history Noah Yuval Harari is a master writer, apiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a great book on this topic.

b5 7y ago
I read it recently and have mixed feelings about it. I'd recommend it to anyone, especially if you haven't read much on the topic and want an overview. I think it does an excellent job of ancient, pre-historical humans -- the various branches of Homo and how they interrelate. He makes it clear that 'human' and 'Homo Sapien' and not absolute synonyms: Homo Sapiens are one kind of humans, the last surviving, but humans encompass all of the Homo genus that came before too. I liked that distinction and it changed the way I thought about humanity as a whole. I think it gets significantly weaker once it moves past the pre-historical hunter-gatherer stage. Part of that is that the staggering complexity and variety of human civilisation post-agriculture means he has to condense, but I also feel like his real interest lies in pre-agricultural humans of all kinds.

Hnrobert42 7y ago

I watched a documentary on an Amazonian tribe that had just initiated contact with the outside world. accepted help from the government. It was endearing to see how much they appreciated things like flip flops and a cooking pan. From the “noble savage,” I thought pre-modern people understood and lived in harmony with nature. Now I see they live a hella hard life. They are often hungry. They sleep fitfully in fear of being eaten. One guys told of his grandmother being dragged away from dinner by a panther. Their sustainable rate of consumption aside, they don’t really live in harmony with nature any more than I do with city when I cross a busy intersection or operate an elevator. Then I think about what future humans will think of my primitive ass. Which is why I hide photocopies of it in the stacks of libraries I visit. To help the future researchers.

PuffinBlue 7y ago
This comment really took a turn at the end there.
- jacobush 7y ago
  It’s on to something. I think I am the target audience. I didn’t plan to confess this, but it happened more than once, that I upvoted a comment I didn’t read till the end. Alea dictur est
fredsir 7y ago
They lived in harmony with nature in every realistic meaning of the term. Being dragged away as somethings dinner, sleeping with one eye open, sometimes going to bed hungry, and so on, is part of natures harmony. That's how it works everywhere in nature for all living things. Sometimes you are the hunter, and sometimes you are the hunted. And that's okay, or no one could survive. It's only when we change the game, like with our modern way of society, that we also have to change the rules. Like it's not okay anymore to go about killing others willy nilly if it's not necessary. Or should I say, one could hope the rules would reflect the change of the game, but not in all aspects has it yet at least.
- 7y ago

perlgeek 7y ago

> The hominin—identified from a total of seven teeth and six small bones Whenever I read such things, I'm amazed at how much knowledge you can get out of three handful of bones -- and on the hand I wonder if that's maybe still too little to declare the discovery of a whole species of hominin.

qwerty9876 7y ago

None of these species are really extinct. Homo sapiens interbred with them and their genetics still live on in the local populations. In fact this is a major reason how different human populations around the world became so different looking in such a short time.

jmmcd 7y ago
> a major reason how different human populations around the world became so different looking in such a short time. Is it true? Any link for this?
- qwerty9876 7y ago
  Yes, e.g light eyes and light hair in Europeans comes from the neanderthals. https://www.eupedia.com/europe/neanderthal_facts_and_myths.shtml#genes https://www.eupedia.com/europe/neanderthal_facts_and_myths.s... "According to the Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost, the current level of hair colour diversity in Europe would have taken 850,000 years to develop, while Homo sapiens has been in Europe no longer than 45,000 years. This is evidence enough that genes for fair hair were inherited from interbreeding with Neanderthals."
  - Symmetry 7y ago
    Genes from Dennisovans, which had been living in Tibet for a very long time, are also why modern Tibetans are better adapted to high altitudes than other homo sapiens groups living in similar conditions. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/tibetans-inherited-high-altitude-gene-ancient-human https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/tibetans-inherited-h...