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Mysterious ‘super-archaic’ populations had multiple trysts with human ancestors
- adenozine 6y agoMan, I've always actually kinda wondered about this. I know it's macabre, but I think about human migratory routines and when different groups clashed back when life was so primitive and brutish, they're must've been those tendencies to rape and sexually conquer the opposition. Surely that is reflected in the genetic ledger of time. What a crazy insight. Genetics is such an interesting field. It's bonkers there's just strings of data that we can read the past through.
- ves 6y agoYou don’t even have to go back that far; the, uh, productivity of Ghengis Khan and the mongols generally is widely discussed.
- adenozine 6y agoOh well I mean sure, there's a similar case with colonists and slaves too, right? I think at some point in the far past though there might have been a wider gap, genetically, between the two forces meeting. I haven't had time to read the whole article in detail, just skimmed it. Anyhow, thanks. You're right, there's definitely been plenty of mandatory diversification before.
- carabiner 6y agoAll mammals rape. And murder, and steal. Dolphins torture each other. You don't think it's all sunshine and rainbows in the wilderness, do you?
- dragonwriter 6y ago> All mammals rape 2. John does not rape. 3. Therefore, John is not a mammal.
- shard 6y ago1. ∀ Species ∈ Mammal, ∃ at least 1 member of Species that rapes 2. John does not rape 3. ∴ John is not the raping member of a Species of Mammals Pardon any misuse of symbols, it's been a while.
- dragonwriter 6y agoSo, the first member of any mammal species must, ipso facto, be a rapist?
- bigbubba 6y agoWhat would the 'first' of a species be, in an objective sense? As I understand it, speciation is a gradual process. Trying to pin down exactly where the change occurs is like trying to pin down precisely where a rainbow gradient shifts from green to yellow. You can pick a point and declare that to be the demarcation line, but discrete categorization in this way seems inherently arbitrary. Even seeming straight forward metrics like "can they produce viable offspring" isn't so black and white, since between 'yes' and 'no' exists a continuum of 'maybe's. In very rare cases even horses and donkeys can have fertile offspring, e.g. mules that aren't mules (the typical infertility of mules has lead to the occasional use of the term to describe any infertile hybrid.)
- abathur 6y agoHumans and proto-humans have presumably done most of the fundamental things we do for a very long time. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/colored-pigments-and-complex-tools-suggest-human-trade-100000-years-earlier-previously-believed-180968499/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/colored-pigmen... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_findings_for_hominid_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_findings_for_hominid_... There was inevitably conflict, but I'm skeptical of the "tendencies to rape and sexually conquer the opposition" framing. AFAIK there isn't much evidence for large amounts of inter-group violence. A paper like https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23751 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23751 lays out a contra case that the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence--but I think it is a reason to be cautious about what we project back on those populations.
- gen220 6y agoI encourage you to explore the early history of the pre-Roman Empire peoples. These were largely mythologies that the romans retroactively constructed for themselves (i.e. they had the opportunity to omit the raping and kidnapping in retellings, but chose not to). It’s full of “and then tribe X invaded and the land of Y, took their women and enslaved their men”. Back and forth for centuries. This behavior was cyclical, inevitable, and universal, until violence was monopolized and institutionalized. We’ve come a long way, I guess. Still have work to do.
- tsimionescu 6y agoI think GP was thinking about early humans, back when other species of humans still existed. From what I understand, the most common view is that in hunter-gatherer times there was much less inter-group violence than there was after the advent of agriculture, simply because there was much less of a notion of territory and any need to defend it before agriculture was a thing.
- lebuffon 6y ago"pre-Roman Empire peoples" Do you mean the Bible? "Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has commanded you,...? Deut. 20:16..
- adenozine 6y agoThat's an interesting scripture for this situation! Very insightful. I was thinking actually quite a bit earlier than a lot of the Hebrew historical times, like species that were more apelike.
- 082349872349872 6y agoWe're told that when Ghengis Khan said Ahnold's famous Conan line, he wasn't just interested in "hearing the lamentations" of their women... https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/23975/what-was-the-context-of-this-famous-genghis-khan-quote https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/23975/what-was-t...
- m463 6y agoYou know, the title of this article puts a slant on this investigation by choosing the word tryst. Why couldn't they have been meaningful relationships?
- dfischer 6y agoInteresting in the limelight of pandemics in regards to the closing paragraph: > Today, H. sapiens doesn’t have the possibility of quickly grabbing a load of diversity by mating with another group: For perhaps the first time in our history, we’re the only humans on the planet. It’s another reason to miss our extinct cousins, says population geneticist Carina Schlebusch of Uppsala University. “To have such a large densely spread species with … so little genetic diversity … is a dangerous situation,” she says.
- chmod775 6y agoThis sentence doesn't make any sense: "H. sapiens doesn’t have the possibility of quickly grabbing a load of diversity by mating with another group". It would make sense if she specifically referred to Homo sapiens sapiens, but for Homo sapiens that "other group" would be of a different species and we thus we shouldn't be able to produce fertile offspring with them. Also Homo sapiens sapiens have plenty of genetic diversity. Even just the number of easily observable environmental adaptions present in populations are countless (Sherpa, Bajau people, etc.) As for COVID-19, most people are more-or-less unaffected by it. Our genetic diversity is working as intended.
- jimktrains2 6y agoSpecies is a much more fluid term than I think you realize. Also, we don't know that most people are more or less unaffected by covid-19. We're only beginning to understand long term affects of even mild cases. Please don't spread misinformation.
- holoduke 6y agoCovid is comparable to flu with a higher mortality rate. Don't make it bigger than it is. 99.95% of the people are doing perfectly fine. Genetics are thus pretty effective
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Covid is comparable to flu with a higher mortality rate. So, like 1918 pandemic flu?
- jimktrains2 6y agoIt's a running joke in Dr who, where as humanity spreads into the starts there eventually ceases to be any pure humans (and many other alien species) because humans will mate with anything. I think it's most interesting to think of how fluid what we mean by species really is. We've always known it was fluid, but I think many people never really consider that when thinking about ourselves.
- mc32 6y agoI thought that would be dogs which seem to want to hump on anything...
- phkahler 6y agoYou haven't met Chad?
- Ygg2 6y agoDr. Who is wrong. We could not mate with anything amongst the stars. Even if aliens exist they would be radically different. You might as well as bone your VCR. The act of separation would create new species. Not our drive to bone.
- ladberg 6y agoDoctor Who is also wrong about magic and time travel existing, but it's a fantasy show so it doesn't matter.
- tsimionescu 6y agoGiven that we have absolutely no idea what other biological systems could look like, what you're saying seems extremely likely, but not an absolute certainty.
- Ygg2 6y agoIt's near certainty. I mean it's not absolutely certain that your nearest pencil won't transform into Jesus and tell you the message that will unite all of humanity. I kinda doubt you would entertain it though.
- tzs 6y ago> The story of human evolution is full of ancient trysts. Genes from fossils have shown that the ancestors of many living people mated with Neanderthals and with Denisovans, a mysterious group of extinct humans who lived in Asia In the case of Neanderthals, isn't that "all" people rather than "many" people? Neanderthals are believed to have gone extinct 40000 years ago. But there was an article here the other day about the genetic isopoint [1], which is the most recent time when every human alive then was either an ancestor of every human currently alive or had no descendants that are currently alive. Most researchers put the genetic isopoint somewhere between about 4000-15000 years ago. If both of these are true (or even if not, as long as the genetic isopoint is after Neanderthal extinction), then all my ancestors that descended from Neanderthals and were alive at the genetic isopoint are also your ancestors, and so you are also descended from Neanderthals through them. There seems to be a lot more uncertainty about when the Denisovans went extinct. It seems likely that they were probably also all gone by the isopoint and so "all" rather than "many" probably goes for them too. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24686904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24686904
- AlotOfReading 6y agoI'm not sure it's 'all'. Khoi-San peoples were pretty well isolated reproductively until recently and diverged before the Neanderthal introgression dates that I'm aware of. They're pretty much the reason the mt-MRCA and Y-MRCA dates are so old.
- inglor_cz 6y agoSubsaharan Africans are believed not to have any Neanderthal admixture, and the logistics of the spread out of Africa would be a good reason why.
- tzs 6y agoAdmixture is different from ancestry. Your kids only get half your DNA, their kids only get half their DNA, and so on. You can eventually end up with descendants who have none of your DNA. If the genetic isopoint really was after the Neanderthals went extinct than everyone in sub Saharan Africa has Neanderthal ancestry even if none of them have Neanderthal admixture.
- sradman 6y agoThe paper Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestors interbred with a distantly related hominin [1] suggests a simple model of hominid population movement > ...which involves only three expansions of humans from Africa into Eurasia: an expansion of early Homo at about 1.9 Ma ago, an expansion of neandersovans at about 700 ka ago, and an expansion of modern humans at about 50 ka ago. The “early Homo” or “superarchaics” are H. erectus and their DNA contribution is inferred since no sequences have yet been extracted. “Neandersovans” is the common ancestor of European Neanderthals and Asian Denisovans. Interbreeding occurred in Eurasia after the second and third expansion. [1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/8/eaay5483 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/8/eaay5483