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3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia

296 points by iamben 7y ago

vfc1 7y ago
Why does it have to be only one ancestor ape, and not several that evolved human-like features simultaneously in the same environment? We have Neanderthal DNA, that we inherited through interbreeding. Why can't both we and the Neanderthals be descendent from a varied group of very similar apes that interbred as well? Isn't this the most likely scenario? Sometimes I think scientists fall for the same simplistic patterns of thinking that the men on the street fall for every day. Like, there is only one solution, there is only one cause, there is only one reason, when in fact reality is much more complex than that.
- deleted 7y ago
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- jamesb93 7y ago
  This is your own painting with a massive brush. Obviously people who devote a lot of their lives to figuring this stuff out know there is not one solution. It's important to at least create a hierarchy of species that we've evolved from and something will inevitably be closest to our genetic makeup.
- rvense 7y ago
  Is it a metaphor problem? That in the language there's still an underlying assumption of a tree-like shape, where a trunk diversifies into many little branches... but of course if you look at an individual and trace backwards, the further you get, the more ancestors you have.
  - taneq 7y ago
    Yeah, it's a blegg/rube error. The lines between species are a lot blurrier than our nice neat taxonomy would have you believe.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > Why does it have to be only one ancestor ape It doesn’t. That is the crux of this article and almost all the scholarship I’ve encountered on the question over the past few decades. > Isn't this the most likely scenario? No. The human genome is unusually homogenous, in part thanks to recent Ice Ages inducing bottlenecks. The simplest explanation, to our proximate evolution, is linear. (The simplest explanation is wrong.) The fossil evidence, for that matter, while it shows significant overlap, does, broadly, present a remarkably-linear path over about 4 million years, with a series of branching-then-consolidating phases.
- seszett 7y ago
  > a varied group of very similar apes that interbred Such a group would simply be one species. Having many different species as ancestors also wouldn't explain the exceptional homogeneity of the human genome. The present discovery though doesn't change things as much as the article tries to imply. It just means the speciation (from the appearance of A. afarensis to the disappearance of A. anamensis) lasted longer than previously thought, or at least that the A. afarensis species appeared earlier than we thought. All the rest is complete speculation and the discovery doesn't really give any reason to think our ancestry tree might be different than previously thought.
- de_watcher 7y ago
  > Why does it have to be only one ancestor ape, and not several that evolved human-like features simultaneously in the same environment? They have first to geographically split to live and evolve in two separate similar environments and then merge while still being compatible.
- tome 7y ago
  > Sometimes I think scientists fall for the same simplistic patterns of thinking that the men on the street fall for every day. Sometimes I think that BBC articles don't do a perfect job of precisely explaining the patterns of thinking of scientists.
- CathedralBorrow 7y ago
  HN is such an amazing community. Where else could you find commenters that know better than the scientists authoring the Nature article in question, and can then identify exactly why their own thinking is so much deeper than of most other people?
  - bnegreve 7y ago
    > Where else could you find commenters that know better than the scientists authoring the Nature article in question, They don't know better, they try to understand better. Why not?
    - CathedralBorrow 7y ago
      When someone talks about how "scientists fall for the same simplistic patterns of thinking that the men on the street fall for every day", while explaining how "in fact reality is much more complex than that", does it feel like they're humbly trying to better understand the world? To me it sounds like someone who clearly has a deeper understanding of the topic than those scientists. And I love that.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      Does the comment strike you as "understanding" or even "trying to understand"? It paints a blanket picture, with no qualifications (read a few articles at best), and belittles what the scientists in general "do".
      - Scriptor 7y ago
        Also the point the commenter thinks they're original in making is the main point of the actual article.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - OJFord 7y ago
    Every online newspaper's comment section?
- sgt101 7y ago
  >Sometimes I think scientists fall for the same simplistic patterns of thinking that the men on the street fall for every day. Practising scientists are loath to speculate without good evidence; it lays them open to criticism by peers, and damages their credibility with reviewers. Unfortunately this means that there is often a lot of inertia that slows the change of focus and means that there is some waste as the wrong work gets done (work that is known to be irrelevant by most of the community, but passes review). On the other hand this reticence does mean that there is less flailing around and hype than you see in other areas - such as business IT fads (Big Data, ML, AI, Serverless, Microservices...)
- ttsda 7y ago
  >Sometimes I think scientists fall for the same simplistic patterns of thinking that the men on the street fall for every day. From the article: >The term "missing link" drives anthropologists crazy when they hear anyone, especially journalists, use it to describe a fossil that is part-ape and part-human. >Indeed Dr Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature, once threatened to "rip my liver out and eat it with onions, borlotti beans and a glass of claret" if I did so when reporting a previous discovery. >There are many reasons for Henry's irritation, but chief among them is the recognition that there are many links in the chain of human evolution and most if not nearly all of them are still missing.
vanderZwan 7y ago
The impression I got from a recent PBS Eons video on the non-existing missing link[0] is that interbreeding happened all the time and that a very realistic possibility for the answer is "most, possibly all of them". [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwW40Dj5Sro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwW40Dj5Sro
- dalbasal 7y ago
  At >4mybp, this species may have been genetically close enough to interbreed with chimp ancestors. If it overlapped with afarensis and other australopithecines, hybridisation almost certainly would have been possible. These guys were as closely related (at least in the earliest periods) to eachother as we were to Neanderthals, denisovans and the other undiscovered species who we know our ancestors mixed with. Homo habilis started its career as an australapithicine, and could probably reproduce with "non-homo" species. A lot of the classification only makes sense after the fact. If habilis hadn't produced the homo genus, it would just be an australapithicine, and we wouldn't consider it separate from them.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    To what extent does number of chromosomes matter, here? I'm still confused about how species with different number of chromosomes can successfully interbreed without major problems in their offspring and thus I am still confused about the process of how a species can change its number of chromosomes (since the genetic problems that might occur with such crossbreeding would not likely be terribly helpful in survival). Is there any really good explanation for this that someone can point me to?
    - dalbasal 7y ago
      Having a different number of chromosomes is a hurdle, but not an absolute barrier to offspring reproductive viability. It's not necessarily an issue for animal health. Horses & donkeys have a different number of chromosomes. They're also separated by an estimated 4m years of evolution, which is around the rule of thumb limit for large mammal hybridization so it makes sense that they're borderline hybridizable. They have shorter generations than us apes. Anyway, mules are healthy. No survival issues. They are mostly infertile, but not 100% of the time.
eurasiantiger 7y ago
Nature be damned, this has hoax written all over it.
paraschopra 7y ago
The concept of species is a construct of language.
- deleted 7y ago
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- lmilcin 7y ago
  Not exactly. Our brains like to put things into separate categories because it makes it easier to think about things being in the same category having same properties. We do this to a fault because otherwise we would be overloaded with complexity of the Universe.
- ta1234567890 7y ago
  Yes, but if you look at it that way, to humans, almost everything except direct experience, is a construct of language. What's the point?
  - paraschopra 7y ago
    The point is that there’s a continuum in reality. Biological tradition developed around classification of life into categories but life doesn’t come in neat packages.
    - has2k1 7y ago
      Just because there is a continuum does not mean specific points along the continuum cannot be identified and tagged as distinct from all other points. There are humans and there are dolphins two different species. It is analogous to the colour spectrum, there is red and there is blue two different colours.
      - specialist 7y ago
        Absolutely. The Smithsonian has an amazing display of skulls arranged in a grid which shows the subtle changes over time. It's amazing. (Sorry, quick search doesn't reveal a pic.) -- I'd love a layperson's identification guide. Why is a homo floresiensis (aka "hobbit") not just a small person? Surely there are people alive today that could mistaken for "hobbits". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis#Anatomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis#Anatomy Maybe a visual diff tool. I did just found some charts showing the evolution of select skulls. Hmmm. I guess I want more.
ojosilva 7y ago
> The truth is far more complex and far more interesting. It tells a story of evolution "trying out" different "prototype" human ancestors in different places until some of them were resilient and clever enough to withstand the pressures wrought by changes in climate, habitat and food scarcity - and evolve into us. To me this is the gist of the article as well of the stream of recent discoveries and papers released. It's also a pattern that permeates computer science nowadays, applying to different realms, from system design to DevOps to team collaboration.
dalbasal 7y ago
>The reason for this likely elevated status is because we can now say that anamensis and afarensis actually overlapped in time. This seems to be the rule, rather than the other exception, at least in human evolution. Erectus overlapped with more modern archaics, for example. Habilis overlapped with afarensis. A lot of these are more about the semantics than the substance. Words like "species" get tricky, when you're dealing with chronspecies, introgression and such. In any case, our evolution since speciating from chimps is extremely bushy. There are lots of species, and several families. The process involved lots of innovation/speciation and extinctions. Ie, The australopithecine family that this species may have founded produced many species, including at least two that formed their own families with multiple species of their own (paranthropous & homo). I think this is characteristic of fast evolutionary processes.
- deleted 7y ago
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- deleted 7y ago
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- olooney 7y ago
  My impression is that we just don't have enough data to draw an accurate timeline, much less a tree, and are an order of magnitude away from being able to study second-order phenomenon like introgression. I think fewer than 10,000 early hominid individuals have been found, most with very partial skeletons. And they aren't distributed uniformly across time and space; you might find a dozen in one cave, then nothing for thousands of years, or nothing on an entire continent. "You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck if you didn't mind how much you jumbled everything up." - Ian Tattersall https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6578939-since-the-dawn-of-time-several-billion-human-or-humanlike https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6578939-since-the-dawn-of-t... It also seems like every time they find a new fossil, they change their mind about how everything fits together. I am not an expert in this field, but if I had a small dataset and I fit a very complex model to it with literally hundreds of free parameters and I found that the model completely changed every time I added a few new data points and re-fit, then I would conclude I was dealing with a high-variance model that was overfitting the data and either use a simpler model or wait until I had collected much more data before trying to fit such a complex model.
TBurette 7y ago
Regarding the multiple human ancestors aspect, here is an diagram of human species or groups if you want to avoid the "what is a species discussion" : https://imgur.com/a/AfrYjqF https://imgur.com/a/AfrYjqF It is from a recent symposium [1] on human evolution The vertical axis is the age. The horizontal axis represent the geographical spread and the color represents the continent. We can see multiples things: - Disregard the 2010, it is indeed up-to-date. These past few years new bars have been added regularly. - A single homo species is a new development and is an exception and not the rule - Not only did different species live at the same time they sometimes lived in the same places - There is no edges between the groups to represent ancestors as a simple "single ancestor" link is not easy to establish. [1] https://www.college-de-france.fr/media/jean-jacques-hublin/UPL4439769573810557760_Jean_Jacques_HUBLIN___colloque_juin_2019.pdf https://www.college-de-france.fr/media/jean-jacques-hublin/U...
- mirimir 7y ago
  Wow, that is an amazing chart!
- posterboy 7y ago
  is the poster from, or for* the symposium? If it's the later, it'd not be useful without the resulting discussion.
siempreb 7y ago
The whole idea that humans have evolved from apes is something so stupid that I still cannot digest since the first day I heard of it in primary school. But besides the bone structure, we do have some resemblance, especially the impaired brain functionality to actually believe that shit.
- superpermutat0r 7y ago
  What happened then?
- otabdeveloper4 7y ago
  Careful with that crimethink, only one kind of skepticism is allowed lest you be unpersoned.
- vasama 7y ago
  Do you mean as opposed to humans and contemporary apes sharing common ancestors?
  - siempreb 7y ago
    I mean we are a very different species, we have not evolved from apes, nor have apes evolved from fish. It is an idiot theory that doesn't serve us at all. These apes are not our ancestors fortunately, we are very fortunate to be real humans. I believe all species DNA are designed by our true ancestors. Imagine what is possible if technology evolves another 1000 years what we would be capable of! And it is incredibly naive to think we are the first and only life in the universe and build an evolution theory upon that..
    - craigsmansion 7y ago
      So our DNA is engineered and then bestowed upon us by some sort of Promethean figure. Someone should make a movie about this!
      - gnulinux 7y ago
kwonkicker 7y ago
What bugs me is the concept of "one point origin". Are we even exploring different angles? Also, how a 4m year old bone is so prestine? African ancestory hoaxes are so common that i just read such news for the sake of it. Doesnt chamge anything even if it were true. But i like the idea that we are sobriety special, even tho the opposite is also just as amazing.
throw0101a 7y ago
How do {archaeologists?, paleoanthropologists?} even know where to look for these things? "There's a whole bunch of land, let's dig... [throws dart at map] here."
- derekbreden 7y ago
  Geologists/geology can be useful in identifying promising sediments with particular characteristics, like dried lake beds, of particular ages.
- arnsholt 7y ago
  Neil Shubin's Your inner fish (a pretty cool book, I might add) discusses this briefly in the introduction. From memory, it's a question of combining geological knowledge with knowledge of what you want to find. Basically, you're looking for rocks that are likely to preserve fossils and of the correct environment (no use looking for deep sea sediments when looking for humanoids, for example) and the correct age for the fossils you're interested in. Now that you know more or less what kind of rocks are relevant, you can look at geological maps and find places where these rocks are exposed (and not, say, buried 2000 metres below the surface).
- xallace 7y ago
  brute-force is one way to find these things
- skywhopper 7y ago
  Geologists have been studying and codifying various layers of rock and the types of fossils within them across the world for centuries. So it’s well established how old the exposed rock layers are in any particular part of the world long before they had any idea how old things are. Then as dating methods have improved we can make correspondences between these rocks and their age. So as mentioned by another commenter, paleontologists can take that knowledge of how old the rocks are, and what environment they were laid down in, and how they were formed, along with our existing knowledge of the age of various species, and their locations, and then find a likely spot with easily accessible layers from the right location and time period and conditions and they might get lucky.
dahves 7y ago
Prof Haile-Selassie? Is Haile-Selassie a common last name or has he anything to do with the other Haile Selassie?
- mkl 7y ago
  The parts of the name seem relatively common. There's a distance runner Haile Gebrselassie [1], and a soccer player Theodor Gebre Selassie [2], and others with no obvious connection to Haile Selassie. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Gebrselassie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Gebrselassie [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Gebre_Selassie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Gebre_Selassie
- Mikeb85 7y ago
  Haile Selassie means 'Power of the trinity' in Ethiopic. Given Ethiopia is quite religious (Orthodox Christian), it seems like it'd be common enough.
- sampleinajar 7y ago
  The naming conventions in Ethiopia are different than the western world. My Ethiopian friend explained it to me that the first name is their name, second is father's name, third grandfather's. I'm not sure about the hyphen though. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_conventions_in_Ethiopia_and_Eritrea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_conventions_in_Ethiopia...
Yajirobe 7y ago
How did they determine its age?
- linnaeus 7y ago
  > A fossil hominin cranium was discovered in mid-Pliocene deltaic strata in the Godaya Valley of the northwestern Woranso-Mille study area in Ethiopia. Here we show that analyses of chemically correlated volcanic layers and the palaeomagnetic stratigraphy, combined with Bayesian modelling of dated tuffs, yield an age range of 3.804 ± 0.013 to 3.777 ± 0.014 million years old (mean ± 1σ) for the deltaic strata and the fossils that they contain. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1514-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1514-7
  - Yajirobe 7y ago
    ELI5
    - polymatter 7y ago
      They found the bone in the rock. Scientists look at the rock and can tell the rocks age. They assume that the bone is about the same age as the rock it was found inside.
      - Yajirobe 7y ago
        And how did they determine the age of the rock?
        jcmoscon 7y ago
        Scientists look at the bone and can tell the bones age. ((Just kidding))
        ralphhughes 7y ago
        There are many methods of determining rock age. A common one is finding signature fossils that are known to only exist between certain ages. Putting the rock in a machine to record its magnetic field and correlating this with pole reversals on earth. Using isotope ratios (not just radiocarbon dating), chemical composition, identifying how the sediment was laid down by rivers or the sea etc.
kavalg 7y ago
I wonder if it is possible to extract some DNA from the artifact and use it for cloning?
- yaa_minu 7y ago
  I don't think it's possible unless the fossil is well-preserved in a way that some cells retain intact genetic materials[1]. [1] - https://youtu.be/cQR5P_C2ElE?t=2373 https://youtu.be/cQR5P_C2ElE?t=2373
TravisCooper 7y ago
Evolution is simply not sufficient. Dr. David Gelertner, a CS professor from Yale, penned an essay in May that lays out the high level argument against Darwin/Evolution, including references to background material. https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/ https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/
- the_af 7y ago
  Ugh, no. Intelligent Design strikes again I see. Almost everything in that article is wrong (and also, the same tired pseudoscientific arguments), starting from the fact he claims "Darwinism" is a "credo". Also, Stephen Meyer is not brilliant and he is a quack. Also, a Computer Science professor has no business arguing about evolution. Or rather, his opinion is as informed as yours or mine, i.e. not very.
  - barking 7y ago
    Sometimes it's no harm to have eyes from outside a discipline have a look at things.
    - the_af 7y ago
      But this guy mostly took a look at things from widely discredited and dishonest Intelligent Design and Creationist sources (every single person he mentions in his article). ID organizations like the Discovery Institute (of which he quotes people related to) is known to be fundamentally dishonest in trying to hide religious beliefs and pass them as science. So it's fundamentally dishonest. If this CS professor said "I'm a conservative religious guy [as is the case], I fundamentally believe in Creationism and mainstream science gets in the way of my beliefs" it'd be one thing. We could safely disregard his beliefs in evolution while acknowledging he was honest about choosing his religious beliefs over current science. It should be noted that another lie of Intelligent Design is that it constantly re-invents itself as the "new thing" but it's as old as the science of evolution. It's essentially Creationism wrapped in new language, but even in this guise it's pretty old. It has been discredited again, and again, and again. For someone "outside a discipline" to be worth paying attention to, he/she must: - Accurately describe the current state of the art in said discipline, and explain why they chose to pursue a line of thought at odds with it. - Take pains not to misrepresent the field they are talking about, and accurately address current beliefs and not outdated views. They must not engage in demolishing strawmen. - Explain how their current expertise relate to the field they are talking about. - Be honest about their intentions. If it's about religion, they should say so upfront, so people interested about science can decide whether they find religious arguments relevant. - Be honest about how they represent the fringe views purportedly backing their own opinion. For example, he claims "Stephen Meyer demolished Darwinism", but Meyer did nothing of the sort -- he is widely thought of as a fringe creationist quack, with no scientific reputation at all within the field of biology. He could instead have argued "Stephen Meyer, contrary to mainstream scientific thought, argues that [something]" instead of saying he "demolished" something (which a cursory search would reveal he didn't). This is a huge red flag.
lovelycarboxyl 7y ago
I studied under Carol Ward as an undergrad (years ago and no longer my profession). She was a great and dynamic professor so happy to see her get some national press. Scientists are quick to claim descent because it is exciting. Louis Leakey made a career of it. While it is clearly a hominid fossil so there is no question of familial relatedness, human descent is a different question and absent genetic data we would need many hundreds or even thousands of fossils to be more definitive and there will always be gaps where we try to fill in missing data. As we have acquired and published additional finds over time, we have learned that the hominid tree is much more like a bush with numerous evolutionary 'dead ends' (kind of a biased term implying they somehow weren't good enough), so I think it is safe to say that the tree will remain in constant revision as new discoveries are made.
cro0o 7y ago
Sure, this isn’t a popular opinion around here but I find all of these theories such nonsense. Creationism, to me, is a lot kore logical than a random big bang - fast fwd apes / fast fwd humans. So many random events with hardly any logic attached to it. Humans have grown to be so full of themselves, especially in this tech age, where a lot of us find it hard to believe there’s a more intelligent being out there that could have placed us here in the first place. Human arrogance is destroying us from the inside.
- deleted 7y ago
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EL_Loco 7y ago
Is there any type of ultrasound-like equipment used by archaeologists that scans below ground and allows some crude-resolution view of whats below?
- ryanmarsh 7y ago
  Yes, but it's "crude", and therefore not very high resolution. I've never seen anything high enough resolution to discover bone fragments. The same technology is used for oil and gas exploration. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_seismology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_seismology https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/energy-and-environment/tools-and-processes/exploration-technology/discovering-hidden-hydrocarbons-using-seismic-imaging-technology-to-map-formations https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/energy-and-environment/tool... https://www.pgs.com/imaging/ https://www.pgs.com/imaging/
proc0 7y ago
Interesting to see the intermediate nose shape as it evolved from ape to human.

296 points by iamben 7y ago

vfc1 7y ago

Why does it have to be only one ancestor ape, and not several that evolved human-like features simultaneously in the same environment? We have Neanderthal DNA, that we inherited through interbreeding. Why can't both we and the Neanderthals be descendent from a varied group of very similar apes that interbred as well? Isn't this the most likely scenario? Sometimes I think scientists fall for the same simplistic patterns of thinking that the men on the street fall for every day. Like, there is only one solution, there is only one cause, there is only one reason, when in fact reality is much more complex than that.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jamesb93 7y ago
This is your own painting with a massive brush. Obviously people who devote a lot of their lives to figuring this stuff out know there is not one solution. It's important to at least create a hierarchy of species that we've evolved from and something will inevitably be closest to our genetic makeup.
rvense 7y ago
Is it a metaphor problem? That in the language there's still an underlying assumption of a tree-like shape, where a trunk diversifies into many little branches... but of course if you look at an individual and trace backwards, the further you get, the more ancestors you have.
- taneq 7y ago
  Yeah, it's a blegg/rube error. The lines between species are a lot blurrier than our nice neat taxonomy would have you believe.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> Why does it have to be only one ancestor ape It doesn’t. That is the crux of this article and almost all the scholarship I’ve encountered on the question over the past few decades. > Isn't this the most likely scenario? No. The human genome is unusually homogenous, in part thanks to recent Ice Ages inducing bottlenecks. The simplest explanation, to our proximate evolution, is linear. (The simplest explanation is wrong.) The fossil evidence, for that matter, while it shows significant overlap, does, broadly, present a remarkably-linear path over about 4 million years, with a series of branching-then-consolidating phases.
seszett 7y ago
> a varied group of very similar apes that interbred Such a group would simply be one species. Having many different species as ancestors also wouldn't explain the exceptional homogeneity of the human genome. The present discovery though doesn't change things as much as the article tries to imply. It just means the speciation (from the appearance of A. afarensis to the disappearance of A. anamensis) lasted longer than previously thought, or at least that the A. afarensis species appeared earlier than we thought. All the rest is complete speculation and the discovery doesn't really give any reason to think our ancestry tree might be different than previously thought.
de_watcher 7y ago
> Why does it have to be only one ancestor ape, and not several that evolved human-like features simultaneously in the same environment? They have first to geographically split to live and evolve in two separate similar environments and then merge while still being compatible.
tome 7y ago
> Sometimes I think scientists fall for the same simplistic patterns of thinking that the men on the street fall for every day. Sometimes I think that BBC articles don't do a perfect job of precisely explaining the patterns of thinking of scientists.
CathedralBorrow 7y ago
HN is such an amazing community. Where else could you find commenters that know better than the scientists authoring the Nature article in question, and can then identify exactly why their own thinking is so much deeper than of most other people?
- bnegreve 7y ago
  > Where else could you find commenters that know better than the scientists authoring the Nature article in question, They don't know better, they try to understand better. Why not?
  - CathedralBorrow 7y ago
    When someone talks about how "scientists fall for the same simplistic patterns of thinking that the men on the street fall for every day", while explaining how "in fact reality is much more complex than that", does it feel like they're humbly trying to better understand the world? To me it sounds like someone who clearly has a deeper understanding of the topic than those scientists. And I love that.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Does the comment strike you as "understanding" or even "trying to understand"? It paints a blanket picture, with no qualifications (read a few articles at best), and belittles what the scientists in general "do".
    - Scriptor 7y ago
      Also the point the commenter thinks they're original in making is the main point of the actual article.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- OJFord 7y ago
  Every online newspaper's comment section?
sgt101 7y ago
>Sometimes I think scientists fall for the same simplistic patterns of thinking that the men on the street fall for every day. Practising scientists are loath to speculate without good evidence; it lays them open to criticism by peers, and damages their credibility with reviewers. Unfortunately this means that there is often a lot of inertia that slows the change of focus and means that there is some waste as the wrong work gets done (work that is known to be irrelevant by most of the community, but passes review). On the other hand this reticence does mean that there is less flailing around and hype than you see in other areas - such as business IT fads (Big Data, ML, AI, Serverless, Microservices...)
ttsda 7y ago
>Sometimes I think scientists fall for the same simplistic patterns of thinking that the men on the street fall for every day. From the article: >The term "missing link" drives anthropologists crazy when they hear anyone, especially journalists, use it to describe a fossil that is part-ape and part-human. >Indeed Dr Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature, once threatened to "rip my liver out and eat it with onions, borlotti beans and a glass of claret" if I did so when reporting a previous discovery. >There are many reasons for Henry's irritation, but chief among them is the recognition that there are many links in the chain of human evolution and most if not nearly all of them are still missing.

vanderZwan 7y ago

The impression I got from a recent PBS Eons video on the non-existing missing link[0] is that interbreeding happened all the time and that a very realistic possibility for the answer is "most, possibly all of them". [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwW40Dj5Sro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwW40Dj5Sro

dalbasal 7y ago
At >4mybp, this species may have been genetically close enough to interbreed with chimp ancestors. If it overlapped with afarensis and other australopithecines, hybridisation almost certainly would have been possible. These guys were as closely related (at least in the earliest periods) to eachother as we were to Neanderthals, denisovans and the other undiscovered species who we know our ancestors mixed with. Homo habilis started its career as an australapithicine, and could probably reproduce with "non-homo" species. A lot of the classification only makes sense after the fact. If habilis hadn't produced the homo genus, it would just be an australapithicine, and we wouldn't consider it separate from them.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  To what extent does number of chromosomes matter, here? I'm still confused about how species with different number of chromosomes can successfully interbreed without major problems in their offspring and thus I am still confused about the process of how a species can change its number of chromosomes (since the genetic problems that might occur with such crossbreeding would not likely be terribly helpful in survival). Is there any really good explanation for this that someone can point me to?
  - dalbasal 7y ago
    Having a different number of chromosomes is a hurdle, but not an absolute barrier to offspring reproductive viability. It's not necessarily an issue for animal health. Horses & donkeys have a different number of chromosomes. They're also separated by an estimated 4m years of evolution, which is around the rule of thumb limit for large mammal hybridization so it makes sense that they're borderline hybridizable. They have shorter generations than us apes. Anyway, mules are healthy. No survival issues. They are mostly infertile, but not 100% of the time.

eurasiantiger 7y ago

Nature be damned, this has hoax written all over it.

paraschopra 7y ago

The concept of species is a construct of language.

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lmilcin 7y ago
Not exactly. Our brains like to put things into separate categories because it makes it easier to think about things being in the same category having same properties. We do this to a fault because otherwise we would be overloaded with complexity of the Universe.
ta1234567890 7y ago
Yes, but if you look at it that way, to humans, almost everything except direct experience, is a construct of language. What's the point?
- paraschopra 7y ago
  The point is that there’s a continuum in reality. Biological tradition developed around classification of life into categories but life doesn’t come in neat packages.
  - has2k1 7y ago
    Just because there is a continuum does not mean specific points along the continuum cannot be identified and tagged as distinct from all other points. There are humans and there are dolphins two different species. It is analogous to the colour spectrum, there is red and there is blue two different colours.
    - specialist 7y ago
      Absolutely. The Smithsonian has an amazing display of skulls arranged in a grid which shows the subtle changes over time. It's amazing. (Sorry, quick search doesn't reveal a pic.) -- I'd love a layperson's identification guide. Why is a homo floresiensis (aka "hobbit") not just a small person? Surely there are people alive today that could mistaken for "hobbits". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis#Anatomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis#Anatomy Maybe a visual diff tool. I did just found some charts showing the evolution of select skulls. Hmmm. I guess I want more.

ojosilva 7y ago

> The truth is far more complex and far more interesting. It tells a story of evolution "trying out" different "prototype" human ancestors in different places until some of them were resilient and clever enough to withstand the pressures wrought by changes in climate, habitat and food scarcity - and evolve into us. To me this is the gist of the article as well of the stream of recent discoveries and papers released. It's also a pattern that permeates computer science nowadays, applying to different realms, from system design to DevOps to team collaboration.

dalbasal 7y ago

>The reason for this likely elevated status is because we can now say that anamensis and afarensis actually overlapped in time. This seems to be the rule, rather than the other exception, at least in human evolution. Erectus overlapped with more modern archaics, for example. Habilis overlapped with afarensis. A lot of these are more about the semantics than the substance. Words like "species" get tricky, when you're dealing with chronspecies, introgression and such. In any case, our evolution since speciating from chimps is extremely bushy. There are lots of species, and several families. The process involved lots of innovation/speciation and extinctions. Ie, The australopithecine family that this species may have founded produced many species, including at least two that formed their own families with multiple species of their own (paranthropous & homo). I think this is characteristic of fast evolutionary processes.

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olooney 7y ago
My impression is that we just don't have enough data to draw an accurate timeline, much less a tree, and are an order of magnitude away from being able to study second-order phenomenon like introgression. I think fewer than 10,000 early hominid individuals have been found, most with very partial skeletons. And they aren't distributed uniformly across time and space; you might find a dozen in one cave, then nothing for thousands of years, or nothing on an entire continent. "You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck if you didn't mind how much you jumbled everything up." - Ian Tattersall https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6578939-since-the-dawn-of-time-several-billion-human-or-humanlike https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6578939-since-the-dawn-of-t... It also seems like every time they find a new fossil, they change their mind about how everything fits together. I am not an expert in this field, but if I had a small dataset and I fit a very complex model to it with literally hundreds of free parameters and I found that the model completely changed every time I added a few new data points and re-fit, then I would conclude I was dealing with a high-variance model that was overfitting the data and either use a simpler model or wait until I had collected much more data before trying to fit such a complex model.

TBurette 7y ago

Regarding the multiple human ancestors aspect, here is an diagram of human species or groups if you want to avoid the "what is a species discussion" : https://imgur.com/a/AfrYjqF https://imgur.com/a/AfrYjqF It is from a recent symposium [1] on human evolution The vertical axis is the age. The horizontal axis represent the geographical spread and the color represents the continent. We can see multiples things: - Disregard the 2010, it is indeed up-to-date. These past few years new bars have been added regularly. - A single homo species is a new development and is an exception and not the rule - Not only did different species live at the same time they sometimes lived in the same places - There is no edges between the groups to represent ancestors as a simple "single ancestor" link is not easy to establish. [1] https://www.college-de-france.fr/media/jean-jacques-hublin/UPL4439769573810557760_Jean_Jacques_HUBLIN___colloque_juin_2019.pdf https://www.college-de-france.fr/media/jean-jacques-hublin/U...

mirimir 7y ago
Wow, that is an amazing chart!
posterboy 7y ago
is the poster from, or for* the symposium? If it's the later, it'd not be useful without the resulting discussion.

siempreb 7y ago

The whole idea that humans have evolved from apes is something so stupid that I still cannot digest since the first day I heard of it in primary school. But besides the bone structure, we do have some resemblance, especially the impaired brain functionality to actually believe that shit.

superpermutat0r 7y ago
What happened then?
otabdeveloper4 7y ago
Careful with that crimethink, only one kind of skepticism is allowed lest you be unpersoned.
vasama 7y ago
Do you mean as opposed to humans and contemporary apes sharing common ancestors?
- siempreb 7y ago
  I mean we are a very different species, we have not evolved from apes, nor have apes evolved from fish. It is an idiot theory that doesn't serve us at all. These apes are not our ancestors fortunately, we are very fortunate to be real humans. I believe all species DNA are designed by our true ancestors. Imagine what is possible if technology evolves another 1000 years what we would be capable of! And it is incredibly naive to think we are the first and only life in the universe and build an evolution theory upon that..
  - craigsmansion 7y ago
    So our DNA is engineered and then bestowed upon us by some sort of Promethean figure. Someone should make a movie about this!
    - gnulinux 7y ago

kwonkicker 7y ago

What bugs me is the concept of "one point origin". Are we even exploring different angles? Also, how a 4m year old bone is so prestine? African ancestory hoaxes are so common that i just read such news for the sake of it. Doesnt chamge anything even if it were true. But i like the idea that we are sobriety special, even tho the opposite is also just as amazing.

throw0101a 7y ago

How do {archaeologists?, paleoanthropologists?} even know where to look for these things? "There's a whole bunch of land, let's dig... [throws dart at map] here."

derekbreden 7y ago
Geologists/geology can be useful in identifying promising sediments with particular characteristics, like dried lake beds, of particular ages.
arnsholt 7y ago
Neil Shubin's Your inner fish (a pretty cool book, I might add) discusses this briefly in the introduction. From memory, it's a question of combining geological knowledge with knowledge of what you want to find. Basically, you're looking for rocks that are likely to preserve fossils and of the correct environment (no use looking for deep sea sediments when looking for humanoids, for example) and the correct age for the fossils you're interested in. Now that you know more or less what kind of rocks are relevant, you can look at geological maps and find places where these rocks are exposed (and not, say, buried 2000 metres below the surface).
xallace 7y ago
brute-force is one way to find these things
skywhopper 7y ago
Geologists have been studying and codifying various layers of rock and the types of fossils within them across the world for centuries. So it’s well established how old the exposed rock layers are in any particular part of the world long before they had any idea how old things are. Then as dating methods have improved we can make correspondences between these rocks and their age. So as mentioned by another commenter, paleontologists can take that knowledge of how old the rocks are, and what environment they were laid down in, and how they were formed, along with our existing knowledge of the age of various species, and their locations, and then find a likely spot with easily accessible layers from the right location and time period and conditions and they might get lucky.

dahves 7y ago

Prof Haile-Selassie? Is Haile-Selassie a common last name or has he anything to do with the other Haile Selassie?

mkl 7y ago
The parts of the name seem relatively common. There's a distance runner Haile Gebrselassie [1], and a soccer player Theodor Gebre Selassie [2], and others with no obvious connection to Haile Selassie. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Gebrselassie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Gebrselassie [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Gebre_Selassie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Gebre_Selassie
Mikeb85 7y ago
Haile Selassie means 'Power of the trinity' in Ethiopic. Given Ethiopia is quite religious (Orthodox Christian), it seems like it'd be common enough.
sampleinajar 7y ago
The naming conventions in Ethiopia are different than the western world. My Ethiopian friend explained it to me that the first name is their name, second is father's name, third grandfather's. I'm not sure about the hyphen though. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_conventions_in_Ethiopia_and_Eritrea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_conventions_in_Ethiopia...

Yajirobe 7y ago

How did they determine its age?

linnaeus 7y ago
> A fossil hominin cranium was discovered in mid-Pliocene deltaic strata in the Godaya Valley of the northwestern Woranso-Mille study area in Ethiopia. Here we show that analyses of chemically correlated volcanic layers and the palaeomagnetic stratigraphy, combined with Bayesian modelling of dated tuffs, yield an age range of 3.804 ± 0.013 to 3.777 ± 0.014 million years old (mean ± 1σ) for the deltaic strata and the fossils that they contain. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1514-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1514-7
- Yajirobe 7y ago
  ELI5
  - polymatter 7y ago
    They found the bone in the rock. Scientists look at the rock and can tell the rocks age. They assume that the bone is about the same age as the rock it was found inside.
    - Yajirobe 7y ago
      And how did they determine the age of the rock?
      - jcmoscon 7y ago
        Scientists look at the bone and can tell the bones age. ((Just kidding))
      - ralphhughes 7y ago
        There are many methods of determining rock age. A common one is finding signature fossils that are known to only exist between certain ages. Putting the rock in a machine to record its magnetic field and correlating this with pole reversals on earth. Using isotope ratios (not just radiocarbon dating), chemical composition, identifying how the sediment was laid down by rivers or the sea etc.

kavalg 7y ago

I wonder if it is possible to extract some DNA from the artifact and use it for cloning?

yaa_minu 7y ago
I don't think it's possible unless the fossil is well-preserved in a way that some cells retain intact genetic materials[1]. [1] - https://youtu.be/cQR5P_C2ElE?t=2373 https://youtu.be/cQR5P_C2ElE?t=2373

TravisCooper 7y ago

Evolution is simply not sufficient. Dr. David Gelertner, a CS professor from Yale, penned an essay in May that lays out the high level argument against Darwin/Evolution, including references to background material. https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/ https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/

the_af 7y ago
Ugh, no. Intelligent Design strikes again I see. Almost everything in that article is wrong (and also, the same tired pseudoscientific arguments), starting from the fact he claims "Darwinism" is a "credo". Also, Stephen Meyer is not brilliant and he is a quack. Also, a Computer Science professor has no business arguing about evolution. Or rather, his opinion is as informed as yours or mine, i.e. not very.
- barking 7y ago
  Sometimes it's no harm to have eyes from outside a discipline have a look at things.
  - the_af 7y ago
    But this guy mostly took a look at things from widely discredited and dishonest Intelligent Design and Creationist sources (every single person he mentions in his article). ID organizations like the Discovery Institute (of which he quotes people related to) is known to be fundamentally dishonest in trying to hide religious beliefs and pass them as science. So it's fundamentally dishonest. If this CS professor said "I'm a conservative religious guy [as is the case], I fundamentally believe in Creationism and mainstream science gets in the way of my beliefs" it'd be one thing. We could safely disregard his beliefs in evolution while acknowledging he was honest about choosing his religious beliefs over current science. It should be noted that another lie of Intelligent Design is that it constantly re-invents itself as the "new thing" but it's as old as the science of evolution. It's essentially Creationism wrapped in new language, but even in this guise it's pretty old. It has been discredited again, and again, and again. For someone "outside a discipline" to be worth paying attention to, he/she must: - Accurately describe the current state of the art in said discipline, and explain why they chose to pursue a line of thought at odds with it. - Take pains not to misrepresent the field they are talking about, and accurately address current beliefs and not outdated views. They must not engage in demolishing strawmen. - Explain how their current expertise relate to the field they are talking about. - Be honest about their intentions. If it's about religion, they should say so upfront, so people interested about science can decide whether they find religious arguments relevant. - Be honest about how they represent the fringe views purportedly backing their own opinion. For example, he claims "Stephen Meyer demolished Darwinism", but Meyer did nothing of the sort -- he is widely thought of as a fringe creationist quack, with no scientific reputation at all within the field of biology. He could instead have argued "Stephen Meyer, contrary to mainstream scientific thought, argues that [something]" instead of saying he "demolished" something (which a cursory search would reveal he didn't). This is a huge red flag.

lovelycarboxyl 7y ago

I studied under Carol Ward as an undergrad (years ago and no longer my profession). She was a great and dynamic professor so happy to see her get some national press. Scientists are quick to claim descent because it is exciting. Louis Leakey made a career of it. While it is clearly a hominid fossil so there is no question of familial relatedness, human descent is a different question and absent genetic data we would need many hundreds or even thousands of fossils to be more definitive and there will always be gaps where we try to fill in missing data. As we have acquired and published additional finds over time, we have learned that the hominid tree is much more like a bush with numerous evolutionary 'dead ends' (kind of a biased term implying they somehow weren't good enough), so I think it is safe to say that the tree will remain in constant revision as new discoveries are made.

cro0o 7y ago

Sure, this isn’t a popular opinion around here but I find all of these theories such nonsense. Creationism, to me, is a lot kore logical than a random big bang - fast fwd apes / fast fwd humans. So many random events with hardly any logic attached to it. Humans have grown to be so full of themselves, especially in this tech age, where a lot of us find it hard to believe there’s a more intelligent being out there that could have placed us here in the first place. Human arrogance is destroying us from the inside.

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EL_Loco 7y ago

Is there any type of ultrasound-like equipment used by archaeologists that scans below ground and allows some crude-resolution view of whats below?

ryanmarsh 7y ago
Yes, but it's "crude", and therefore not very high resolution. I've never seen anything high enough resolution to discover bone fragments. The same technology is used for oil and gas exploration. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_seismology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_seismology https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/energy-and-environment/tools-and-processes/exploration-technology/discovering-hidden-hydrocarbons-using-seismic-imaging-technology-to-map-formations https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/energy-and-environment/tool... https://www.pgs.com/imaging/ https://www.pgs.com/imaging/

proc0 7y ago

Interesting to see the intermediate nose shape as it evolved from ape to human.