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Early humans in Africa may have interbred with an extinct species: new research
- nikolay 7y agohttps://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html https://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html
- wildermuthn 7y agoI love this theory. Not because I believe it, but because of how entrancingly bold it is. I sometimes wonder what we believe in that future generations will look down upon us for. Surely we haven’t discovered everything, right? Surely there are some things we think we know that is actually completely wrong. Is it that human origins are rooted in chimp-pig hybridization? Probably not, but it is high on my “just might be crazy enough to be right” list. The odd similarity-dissimilarities among human, pig, and primate are just too interesting to be dismissed out of hand.
- nikolay 7y agoExactly my point as well - science shouldn't shy away from stuff we wouldn't like. That's why I also respect Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud so much - they dared to tell us things we didn't like, but they didn't care much; they only cared about the scientific truth.
- mirimir 7y agoIt's not accidental that young biologists dissect fetal pigs.
- magduf 7y agoWas it a small group of humanoids that came from another star system composed of 12 colonies after being pursued by a society of artificial lifeforms that was bent on their extermination?
- DiabloD3 7y agoThe real question is: was Kara Thrace, at any point, actually real?
- UnFleshedOne 7y agoIgnore the last episode and the show is much saner.
- dntbnmpls 7y agoOf course she was real. She had a mother, history and upbringing. Now as to whether the post-death Thrace ( "the second coming" ) was the "spirit/angel" of Thrace or an altogether different entity separate from Thrace ( like physical Gaius and the "spiritual/angelic/head" Gaius you see at the end of the series ) that's up for debate. Her destiny ( teased throughout the series ) was to sacrifice herself to lead humanity to salvation ( earth ). It's similar to Christ in a way - self-sacrifice and the second coming to lead the faithful to the kingdom of god.
- DiabloD3 7y agoI've watched through BSG I think 3 times over the years, and I've come to the conclusion that I don't think she was strictly human, in the normal sense. I think from day one of her existence, she was a kind of power on the same level as Baltar and Six's angelic alter egos. Watching it the first time when it originally aired, I had thought she was one of the Five (even though part of me thought that was too obvious, and a cop out)... and then the fifth member was revealed and it wasn't her. Clearly the writers had given her a role beyond merely human or Cylon, something part of the grand scheme of God that Messenger/Head Baltar and Six were part of.
- dkdbejwi383 7y agoSo say we all
- staticautomatic 7y agoNo. It had something do with dinosaurs and volcanoes.
- mr_overalls 7y agoIn an intro-level anthropology class I took 20 years ago, we learned about the competing models of human evolution: Multiregional vs Out of Africa. Perhaps they dumbed down the complexity for a bunch of freshmen, but I remember wondering then why some combination of the two wasn't possible. It certainly looks like a mix of the two canonical models matches the data that is being revealed through genetics.
- turtlecloud 7y agomy suspicion is that the out of Africa theory was promoted since it was more PC. Nowadays the "scientific theories" are all political.
- TallGuyShort 7y agoOut of Africa feels less PC to me, but I won't pretend to understand the rationale behind what is and isn't considered PC a lot of the time. But I agree with GP: we have relatively few DNA samples and try to draw pretty big generalizations between them. Ituitively, I would expect patterns of migration in and out of Africa and all the continents to be far more complex than 1-time events from which entire populations then developed complete independently. edit: On a related note, my siblings' DNA test results say that they're something like 4% Native American, yet we have very reliable documentation of pure British genealogy back on all lines almost all the way back to the 1500s. Very unlikely to actual have a modern link. I'm sure the companies are likely overplaying the similarity more than anthropologists would, but am I to conclude that I have a closer link to Native Americans than other random samples from Europe?
- progval 7y ago> I won't pretend to understand the rationale behind what is and isn't considered PC a lot of the time. It's whatever opinion/theory the person speaking disagrees with.
- dominostars 7y ago
- TallGuyShort 7y agoHow do we draw the line between species, exactly? Similar to this, you can distinguish between races and genders with skeletal tendencies now, but we're all one species. So when they are compatible enough to bone each other and said boning yields offspring, what exactly determines the line between 2 species and 2 distinct populations of 1 species? edit: I'm also always intrigued by statements like this: "Interestingly, they suggest that 6%-7% of the genomes of West Africans is archaic in origin". I know it's over-simplifying for the lay-person, but 6-7% is the high end of what people claim is the genetic difference between us and chimpanzees, and we can't even reproduce with chimpanzees and don't even have the same number of chromosomes. So there's a lot more than that we have in common with some archaic species, and a lot less that we'd expect to have with closer relatives.
- solinent 7y agoI've looked into this, and there's no great way to do so, becuase the concept of species really just means large morphological changes. We assume everything is taxonomized (a tree), but in reality there is no tree--sometimes there is cross polination after some time apart. Ultimately they have a precise set of morphological criteria for each species, and they arrive at this criteria based on a sampling of animals and associating their morphology with their DNA. They also use string similarity algorithms to determine morphological order, so we don't strictly know the order at the most precise level. Of course, this is all very controversial, some people think we're always changing gradually and some people think we always change rapidly. I think they're both wrong--sometimes organisms change rapidly, and sometimes they change rapidly, depending on environmental factors. disclaimer: I'm no expert, I've just looked at it from an algorithmic view and read some taxonomical texts as I had the same question as you.
- moultano 7y agoThe further you zoom out, the more tree-like it gets, but if you zoom in on any particular node in the tree, like hominids, then it becomes a tangled mess.
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- kmerrol 7y agoI'm not sure about extinct. My brother in-law is definitely a living example of a new mysterious species of human.
- christiansakai 7y agoOne of why I like HN is that the posts and comments are generally serious and comments like these are down-voted. But nevertheless, I become 2 years old every time I encounter comments like this. Thanks for the good laugh.
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- losvedir 7y ago> The interbreeding outside Africa happened after our Homo sapiens ancestors expanded out of Africa into new environments. Who's this "our"? Is the author implicitly excluding Africans from her audience (or whoever she's talking about), or do I have the timeline wrong and the aforementioned interbreeding ancestors went back to Africa, and then the "Out of Africa" expansion happened?
- throwaway894345 7y ago"our" refers to homo sapiens. Even if she weren't, many (most?) Africans probably have ancestors who were not born in Africa at some point.
- IGotThroughIt 7y agoI don't think this topic can be discussed without people getting touchy. Best avoided in my opinion.
- pessimizer 7y agoAs a black person of African descent, I feel confident in saying that the group called homo sapiens, of which I and all of my ancestors for millennia am a part, expanded out of Africa into new environments.
- williesleg 7y agoI love hacker news! So much tech going on here!
- s1artibartfast 7y agoOne thing that I always struggle with in these arciles is how the percent of common DNA is defined. >We still think that most – anywhere between about 92% and 98.5% – of the ancestry in people not living in Africa today does indeed derive from the out-of-Africa expansion. >Interestingly, they suggest that 6%-7% of the genomes of West Africans is archaic in origin. But this archaic ancestry wasn’t Neanderthal or Denisovan. How are these numbers reconciled with other statements like 99% of the human genome is shared with Bonobos [1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/bonobos-join-chimps-closest-human-relatives https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/bonobos-join-chimps-...
- danans 7y ago> How are these numbers reconciled with other statements like 99% of the human genome is shared with Bonobos [1] 99% of any hominid genome - whether Neanderthal, Denisovan, or the "archaic" ancestor refererenced - is also shared with bonobos. The branching point with bonobos is at a much earlier stage of evolution, so all descendant branches have roughly the same affinity to them.
- s1artibartfast 7y agoMy point exactly. How can a homo sapien in Europe share 99% of their genome with a Bonobo, but only 92% with another homo sapien in Africa
- akiselev 7y ago99% is comparing the entire genome, introns and exons. 92% is comparing known genes gathered from the human genome project and subsequent research. We don't know the exact genes expressed by our ancestors since RNA is far less likely to survive in enough different types of tissue to get a clear picture of the entire genome but 92% of the genes we recognize in ourselves can be found in early hominids using the latter's full genome sequence. Between epigenetics and embryology, we know that the whole intron/exon dichotomy is fatally flawed and evolutionary genetics has long turned to more complex methods to trace relationships, which are very nonlinear even in our near family tree. Both numbers are ridiculous and meaningless so don't pay them any mind.
- Razengan 7y agoI've always wondered.. If there ever was another sapient species on this planet we either killed them all or interbred with them, or they went into hiding.
- duxup 7y agoOr they died out long before we appeared: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis
- tenpies 7y agoNot mentioned in that Wikipedia article, but the explanation for "why is there no ancient plastic around" is that the civilization could have pre-dated oil. Not enough time may have passed for significant amounts of the stuff to accumulate in the planet, so the civilization would have never developed a use for it. It would have been a rarity to them, not a foundational cornerstone of civilization. It's a cool thought experiment, but also very cool to think about how much we lucked out not just to be on Earth, but to be on Earth at this point in time. Emerge a bit earlier and suddenly industrialization becomes exponentially harder.
- duxup 7y agoAnd an Earth with ... a lot of handy animals and such!
- golemotron 7y agoSpecies is a social construct.
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- TheGallopedHigh 7y ago/s ?
- throwaway41968 7y agoAbsolutely not. There's no clear, ambiguous definition of "species" that does not have counter-intuitive implications. No, the classic "fertile over two generation" thing you learn in high school doesn't cut it. Also, the commonly used criterion vary from which domain is being dealt with. In practice, this means that two individuals are said to belong to a different (resp. identical) species if everyone in the community agrees that they do. That's what it means to be a "social construct", not that the differences per se aren't real. Justifying other statements on the lines of "X is a social construct" similarly, where X ranges across a variety of more-or-less controversial concepts, is left as an exercise to the reader.
- lazyier 7y agoyou start to realize that the color blue is a social construct if you are willing to abandon all reason.
- krapp 7y agoExcept the color blue is at least partially a social construct[0]. [0]https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/GreenIsBlue https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/GreenIsBl...
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- jojostrikesback 7y agoDefinition of species is not clear cut.