5 ms·

First, let's be clear that the "ape mother" answer implies a distinction between humans and other apes, which is not true. We are all born of ape mothers, becau

First, let's be clear that the "ape mother" answer implies a distinction between humans and other apes, which is not true. We are all born of ape mothers, because humans are apes. Another issue is that "human" can refer to the Homo sapiens species, or it can also refer to any species in the genus Homo, depending on context and preference. With that out of the way, the biggest problem here is that "species" don't actually exist. There are several different definitions, and they each have arbitrarity and/or striking exceptions. Species are just an intellectual tool humans invented to help us organize our understanding of how different living things are related to each other, but evolution is gradual and messy and doesn't care much for clear separations. So the answer to "who was the father of the first human mother's children" depends on which definition of "species" and which definition of "human" you want to use. If you go with the common idea of "two things are different species if they can't have fertile offspring together" (and ignore all the asexual reproduction and fertile hybrid exceptions), and "human" meaning just Homo sapiens, then... well, you're screwed, really. Because by that definition, the only possible father of the first human's children would have to be one of their siblings, as they definitionally couldn't reproduce with any other existing creatures. I'm not ruling out that such inbreeding happened; however... as I said, to use that definition, you need to ignore fertile hybrids, which is a problem because we know Homo sapiens interbred with other Homo species -- we have the DNA in ourselves to prove it. We are all fertile hybrids in that regard. Meaning the actual father would probably have been a pre-sapiens human species. So perhaps you'd prefer to use the morphological definition instead: "humans are the creatures who look most like modern humans". Obviously, that gets messy and arbitrary, too, because different humans look different, and finding a "different enough" threshold is more preference than anything else. But ignoring that problem, the answer becomes the same: "the father of the first modern-looking human was a species that didn't look modern". Same goes for the genetic definition of species as well; the first human whose DNA was "different enough" for us to call it a modern human had children with someone whose DNA was "different enough" to call it "not a modern human". In the end, the answer is approximately the same: the father of the first modern human would have been a different hominid species.

trashtester 4y ago
> In the end, the answer is approximately the same: the father of the first modern human would have been a different hominid species. The question was not about the father if the first human (regardless of how you define human, as long as you use a sharp definition). I had already told my daughter that the mother (and implicitly father) of the the first human were belonging to the prior species in the chain. (For me "human" was used as Genus Homo, but it doesn't matter if one uses homo sapiens sapiens instead) The difficulty of the question came from my daughter asking who would be the father of the CHILDREN of the first human (assuming the first human was female). Either that male would have to still belong to the previous species, or have been born independently of her as human, somewhat after. Given that the second option is very unlikely. If we set sharp enough criteria for qualifying as human to be able to separate different members of the tribe these individuals lived into either human or non-human, the probability of the first two who qualified would arrive so close in time and independently, is probably near zero. In other words, we must assume that if we insist on splitting indivuals into the categoris of "human" and "not human" at that specific point in time, most likely the father of the children of the first human must have ben non-human. Also, it would be very likely that even the children may have been non-human (or it may be tha the first "human" didn't have any children at all). In fact, it could be a 100 or a 1000 years before another individual was born that qualified according to whatever definition of "human" we pick. And this is when I realized that: > the biggest problem here is that "species" don't actually exist. Not only is any definition of "human" in some way arbitrary, the very act of creating such a definition leads strange contradictions such as above. Intuitively, all members of the tribe that brought us the first humans, would have appeared to us as all being EQUALLY human, had we had some way to observe them directly. To draw some red line between individuals of that group makes no sense. (In fact, being in the same tribe, these individuals would be closely related, and so much more similar to each other than two randomly selected modern humans living today would be.) Also, it doesn't help to just create a new category, since the problems at the boundaries will be precisely the same. In other words, the only thing that makes sense, is to not assign categories of human vs non-human to these individuals at all. The closest thing that would make sense would be to assign some "degree of human-ness". Let's say that the first individual with such human-ness would have a human-ness score of more than 50% would have a score of 50.1%, while the average for the tribe would be 49.7% at the time. By thinking of this transition as a real (as in floating point) number, instead of as a boolean, the problem goes away.

trashtester 4y ago

> In the end, the answer is approximately the same: the father of the first modern human would have been a different hominid species. The question was not about the father if the first human (regardless of how you define human, as long as you use a sharp definition). I had already told my daughter that the mother (and implicitly father) of the the first human were belonging to the prior species in the chain. (For me "human" was used as Genus Homo, but it doesn't matter if one uses homo sapiens sapiens instead) The difficulty of the question came from my daughter asking who would be the father of the CHILDREN of the first human (assuming the first human was female). Either that male would have to still belong to the previous species, or have been born independently of her as human, somewhat after. Given that the second option is very unlikely. If we set sharp enough criteria for qualifying as human to be able to separate different members of the tribe these individuals lived into either human or non-human, the probability of the first two who qualified would arrive so close in time and independently, is probably near zero. In other words, we must assume that if we insist on splitting indivuals into the categoris of "human" and "not human" at that specific point in time, most likely the father of the children of the first human must have ben non-human. Also, it would be very likely that even the children may have been non-human (or it may be tha the first "human" didn't have any children at all). In fact, it could be a 100 or a 1000 years before another individual was born that qualified according to whatever definition of "human" we pick. And this is when I realized that: > the biggest problem here is that "species" don't actually exist. Not only is any definition of "human" in some way arbitrary, the very act of creating such a definition leads strange contradictions such as above. Intuitively, all members of the tribe that brought us the first humans, would have appeared to us as all being EQUALLY human, had we had some way to observe them directly. To draw some red line between individuals of that group makes no sense. (In fact, being in the same tribe, these individuals would be closely related, and so much more similar to each other than two randomly selected modern humans living today would be.) Also, it doesn't help to just create a new category, since the problems at the boundaries will be precisely the same. In other words, the only thing that makes sense, is to not assign categories of human vs non-human to these individuals at all. The closest thing that would make sense would be to assign some "degree of human-ness". Let's say that the first individual with such human-ness would have a human-ness score of more than 50% would have a score of 50.1%, while the average for the tribe would be 49.7% at the time. By thinking of this transition as a real (as in floating point) number, instead of as a boolean, the problem goes away.