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Recent discoveries that have changed how we think about human origins
- Bakary 4y agoIt's honestly pretty badass that we managed to smoke so many rival species.
- ncmncm 4y agoSeems to be we occupied more different areas, and so outlasted those with more limited range.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoThe article claims they died out due to climate change.
- BuckRogers 4y agoInability to adapt is a powerful way to select. If the government didn't support people these days, our society is so complex that at least 50% of the population would probably starve and die. Modern society just got too complex for most people to survive. They spent a million years just grinding corn or herding sheep, and most truly peasant grade people never got beyond that. Not being able to survive a winter is a good way for nature to select.
- dotancohen 4y ago12000 years grinding corn. 20000 years herding sheep.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jameshart 4y ago“Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.” ― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
- haswell 4y agoIf you find this article interesting, I highly recommend reading “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They also dig into these new archaeological discoveries, and start to reframe some aspects of the historical record in a way that is deeply compelling and perspective shifting. I’m still in the middle of reading it, but I can’t help but feel that it’s one of the more important books to come into existence in recent times.
- jhrmnn 4y agoI found it amusing how it just took them a few chapters to make me naturally think of 17th century Europeans as barbarians in light of native North Americans
- chasil 4y agoThere is some conjecture that Neanderthal ancestry brings a larger risk of schizophrenia. https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(21)00328-0/fulltext https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-32...
- ncmncm 4y agoFor us anyway. Doesn't mean neanderthals suffered from it. I.e., it could be just a neuromolecular incompatibility.
- svnt 4y agoAm I reading the paper incorrectly? The finding was the opposite (i.e. that increased NeanderScore is correlated with reduced schizophrenia diagnoses/symptoms), wasn’t it? The inspiration for the study appears to be to explore why humans do and animals don’t appear to have schizophrenia, and assuming Neanderthals are closer to animals. I agree about calling it conjecture though. The finding had marginal p-values in a study that appears to be hiding its sample size (it doesn’t disclose the ratio of schizophrenia cases to controls in its four case-control datasets) and so is quite possibly underpowered.
- feet 4y ago>assuming Neanderthals are closer to animals What does that even mean
- svnt 4y agoIn terms of neurological structure and function they seem likely to have had a more typical primate/mammalian appearance. This assumption is commonly made because they don’t appear to have worked with abstract symbols and may not have been able to develop language beyond animal communication.
- barbariangrunge 4y agoThe article describes them as a different species — but doesn’t that mean we should not have been able to create viable offspring with them? What am I misunderstanding?
- samatman 4y agoThis is two discoveries, and four treacle-soaked homilies on human nature.
- oofbey 4y agoRecent discovery: "We got lucky" -- did you know that evolution is a result of random chance!? Shocking clickbait below.
- ComplexSystems 4y agoApparently our fate is intertwined with nature.
- pstuart 4y agoThe article ends with the interesting question of "what next"? Idiocracy comes to mind.
- ramraj07 4y agoPeople always keep saying idiocracy is like the worst case scenario for the future. Are you kidding me? That movie is close to the best case scenario. Everyone in the movie is just having fun doing whatever they want, and importantly, quite literally everyone is actually nice and just trying to do the right thing. There’s literally no villain just some misunderstanding. Even the evil corporations actually turn out to be evil just because of incompetence (carls junior actually takes over child care if it deems their parents unable; the soda company genuinely was shocked that their soda shouldn’t be used to irrigate). Except the one genuinely evil person (the pimp) who turns out is not from that time, and thankfully only pops up in the end to set up the sequel. I would choose idiocracys universe to whatever we have even today, where a good fraction if not the majority of the world population has decided that selfishness and bigotry are the way to go.
- qbrass 4y agoI call it the Blade Runner problem. While waiting for the cool neon and chrome cyberpunk dystopia from the movies to show up, the boring, black and white with blue LED cyberpunk dystopia slipped in instead. We won't get the Hollywood version of Idiocracy, either.
- Auracle 4y agoThe real version of Idiocracy would be everyone back to tribal warfare. Which, I suppose, would bounce humanity back in the other direction. My hope for that not happening is that we’ll end up genetically altering our babies en masse, which sounds…not great, but it’s probably better than the alternative.
- mellavora 4y ago> a good fraction if not the majority of the world population has decided that selfishness and bigotry are the way to go. agree, this is an unfortunate Nash equilibrium. I will say it is much more present in US society than Europe. Also, it is an artifact of current society. It can be unlearned. People, as social animals, have a strong inner drive to take care of their clan. That won't fix the bigotry, but it sure can tamper down the selfishness. We've just split ourselves into atomic units instead of molecules and materials, and build so much of our world around our individualistic pods.
- causality0 4y agoSomething I think it's interesting to contemplate is that there's no reason to think an individual Neanderthal was any less intelligent than an individual human.
- ncmncm 4y agoAFAIU, the only consistent difference in behavior identified between H. n. and H. s. is the former has never been found to have traded with outgroups. That seems consequential.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoAnother thing to contemplate is that Homo Sapiens may not be the final hominid. There’s no reason why another can’t evolve between now and, say, 100,000 years from now. What will they be like? How big the brains?
- asdff 4y agoWhy should brains be getting bigger? We aren't selecting for intelligence.
- lliamander 4y agoGiven that intelligence tends to be correlated with overall fitness, I think IQ will always be something that will be at least somewhat selected for.
- scaramanga 4y agoAssuming intelligence and brain size correlates? Neanderthals had bigger brains than us.
- lliamander 4y agoI was just responding to this sentence: > We aren't selecting for intelligence. I wasn't really focused on the brain size aspect of the discussion.
- pid_0 4y ago
- verisimi 4y ago> Hybrid species of human, once seen by experts as science fiction, may have played a key role in our evolution. Evidence of the importance of hybrids comes from genetics. The trail is not only in the DNA of our own species (which often includes important genes inherited from Neanderthals) but also skeletons of hybrids. Made me think of this, alternative explanation: http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html
- UberFly 4y agoVery good article. I hadn't even heard about the Adams Event before.
- mkl 4y agoIt seems to be primarily known as the Laschamp Event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laschamp_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laschamp_event The "Adams" is after Douglas Adams, because it happened 42,000 years ago.
- diego_moita 4y agoEvery time I read about natural history and ancestral human species I feel some sort of epiphany. For thousand years all we had to fill up our ignorance was Adam & Eve and Noah's Ark and all those dumb religious fairy tales. Now we have evidences to understand what we really are. And all of that was discovered just in the last 150 years.
- Maursault 4y ago> For thousand years all we had to fill up our ignorance was Adam & Eve and Noah's Ark and all those dumb religious fairy tales. Myths are more than mere stories. Joseph Campbell illustrated four functions of myths: metaphysical, cosmological, sociological and psychological. Campbell also neatly summarizes in his 1949 work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamic of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions sown are directly valid for all mankind. An astute quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein is very applicable to your shallow description, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
- gpt5 4y agoTo give you some extra context, because I sympathize the OP's message, while acknowledging the wording is disrespectful - growing up in a religious environment you are taught that certain things are true, and can encounter strong opposition to basic questioning. This can lead to a state where eing exposed to an alternative truth is exciting and interesting.
- bigbluedots 4y agoWhy respect theories that can't be falsified?
- svnt 4y agoBecause not everything is science.
- hknmtt 4y agoPersonally I am subscribing to the Zecharia Sitchin's interpretation of Sumerian history and writings. Too many things just make sense.
- svnt 4y agoWhat are some examples of things in conflict with this article that make more sense to you as communicated by Sitchin?
- mjan22640 4y agoWe are largely, but not completely modern humans. We are hybrids between modern humans and neanderthals. All the human sub/species throughout history existed on the werge of extinction, or were at best insignificant from the Nature point of view as a whole. We on the other hand took over the Earth in a few 10000s of years. There seems to be synergy in backmixing of populations that underwent the opposite specialization trajectories, group specialization vs individual skill specialization, where each specialization on its own would have likely death spiralled.
- jcynix 4y agoHete's Svante Pääbo (recent nobel prize winner) on "The Neandertal in Us" https://www.mpg.de/914714/Neandertal https://www.mpg.de/914714/Neandertal