5 ms·

Actual paper link for those who are interested: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.040 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.040 For some broader context

Actual paper link for those who are interested: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.040 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.040 For some broader context missing from the article, there's been a long-running "controversy" with certain people in the Chinese Academy of Sciences making an argument called the multiregional hypothesis that modern Chinese evolved in China out of archaic hominins. Every few years they'd dig up another set of bones with weird morphology, slap a new name on it, and claim it represents a new missing link. The Harbin skull was one of these. These results firmly resolve that discussion on the side of the western consensus. They also support heretofore speculative ideas on how widespread Denisovans were, probably give us a couple other bones that are known to be similar (but lack genetics), and open a lot of research avenues going forward. Outstanding paper.

transcriptase 1y ago
It’s not limited to hominins. There’s a bit of a trend among Chinese researchers to conduct extensive genome sequencing and then conclude that economically or culturally significant plant species from Africa or elsewhere in Asia actually originated or were first domesticated in China.
- ggm 1y ago
  It would be useful to understand to what extent this has some basis in ground truth. If it's essentially unknowable, with any confidence, it's just a posture. If there is significant evidence of domestication originating in China landmass, it fuels other theories of emergence of human cultures. Your comment is helpful but I think incomplete. Certainly the jokes are rich in the field, "irish invented wireless communications since no glass or copper fragments found in field" type jokes. It used to be "soviets did it first" for a prior generation. China has significant large landscapes littered with caves. Like parts of Indonesia, and in both cases they have been mostly undisturbed for eons. So it's a landscape rich in potential for preserved remains. I think thats why the hominid discovery in Indonesia was both fascinating and irritating, falling into local power politics and first-rights-to-analyse problems. The cave systems found in Europe seem to me to point to later occupation and with the changes to the shoreline in Spain and France (and the Doggerland retreat with the north sea) it's arguable older remains are now seaborne and harder to find. Believing the "out of africa" theory, emergence of these trends in the east prefigures a migration back to europe and down into Austronesia surely? (not an archeologist but fascinated)
  - Nopoint2 1y ago
    You need to understand that the power structure of the western society critically depends on the myth of the recent cognitive shift. Where people were little more than animals, until several thousand years ago, when modern thinking suddenly somehow emerged, and those chosen few worked tirelesly for the thousands of years to civilize everybody else.
    - amarait 1y ago
      Care to elaborate? Does this come from roman times/ post french Revolution/post industrialism?
      - Nopoint2 1y ago
        I've been posting it repeatedly, but my posts are getting downvoted, and flagged (hidden). It apears it only goes to back to the 19th century, and may be connected with the case of Phineas Gage, who miraculously survived massive brain damage. Basically, it seems that we are ruled by a crazy cult. What I claim is, that the cerebellum is a statistical machine, which is fundamentally limited by the fact that it gets overwhelmed by spurious correlations once it gets too powerful, and it begins to hallucinate. Mammals evolved the neocoretex, a data reduction machine, which resolves this problem by reducing a large amount of inputs into a much smaller number of values that carry all the information. When the cerebellum acts only in this latent space, and is thus restricted by what can be represented within this latent space, it can be powerful, and avoid hallucination. The more "counterintuitive" situations the creature has to deal with, the bigger neocortex/cerebellum ratio it needs to avoid hallucinating. Thus when a person's neocortex gets damaged, they become what may seem like super smart, they make insane conclusions and appear to be able to understand anything, but none of it is actually real, and they are just insane. What they seem to believe (which is not shared publicly, because it would get "misinterpreted, but allows to be acknowledged internally) is that as animals got too intelligent they failed to breed, but intelligence is still good for not dying. And the neocortex evolved to keep us dumb so that we could breed, and only lift its veil in times of dire need, so that we could use our intelligence to survive. And so, they concluded that they can create a supersmart race by destroying our neocortexes with various means, so that we can be smart all the time, not only in emergencies, and gigantic progress would result. In reality, they made most people insane.
hoseja 1y ago
Yet they refuse to test the first emperor.
graemep 1y ago
> For some broader context missing from the article, there's been a long-running "controversy" with certain people in the Chinese Academy of Sciences making an argument called the multiregional hypothesis that modern Chinese evolved in China out of archaic hominins. It is appealing because it justifies racism. It is just the contemporary version of polygenism of racial science. That said, even if human evolution is more complex than simple out of Africa, all of humanity has a lot of shared ancestry and genetics do not support the concept of race.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  It always reminds me of the Japanese attempts to diminish the status and history of the Ainu, a caucasoid racial group from their northernmost islands. Extensive research and data now point to the Ainu having lived on those islands from long before Chinese people first sailed to Japan and populated it - making the despised Ainu the true, actual Native Japanese.
- amarait 1y ago
  This is like trying to hide neanderthals because they seem to point to some of the differences in european populations traits such as white skin or blue eyes. If theres evidence I dont think it benefits anybody to discredit it under the racism label
shellfishgene 1y ago
Note this is a different paper from that discussed in the article. The new one is https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu9677 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu9677

transcriptase 1y ago

It’s not limited to hominins. There’s a bit of a trend among Chinese researchers to conduct extensive genome sequencing and then conclude that economically or culturally significant plant species from Africa or elsewhere in Asia actually originated or were first domesticated in China.

ggm 1y ago
It would be useful to understand to what extent this has some basis in ground truth. If it's essentially unknowable, with any confidence, it's just a posture. If there is significant evidence of domestication originating in China landmass, it fuels other theories of emergence of human cultures. Your comment is helpful but I think incomplete. Certainly the jokes are rich in the field, "irish invented wireless communications since no glass or copper fragments found in field" type jokes. It used to be "soviets did it first" for a prior generation. China has significant large landscapes littered with caves. Like parts of Indonesia, and in both cases they have been mostly undisturbed for eons. So it's a landscape rich in potential for preserved remains. I think thats why the hominid discovery in Indonesia was both fascinating and irritating, falling into local power politics and first-rights-to-analyse problems. The cave systems found in Europe seem to me to point to later occupation and with the changes to the shoreline in Spain and France (and the Doggerland retreat with the north sea) it's arguable older remains are now seaborne and harder to find. Believing the "out of africa" theory, emergence of these trends in the east prefigures a migration back to europe and down into Austronesia surely? (not an archeologist but fascinated)
- Nopoint2 1y ago
  You need to understand that the power structure of the western society critically depends on the myth of the recent cognitive shift. Where people were little more than animals, until several thousand years ago, when modern thinking suddenly somehow emerged, and those chosen few worked tirelesly for the thousands of years to civilize everybody else.
  - amarait 1y ago
    Care to elaborate? Does this come from roman times/ post french Revolution/post industrialism?
    - Nopoint2 1y ago
      I've been posting it repeatedly, but my posts are getting downvoted, and flagged (hidden). It apears it only goes to back to the 19th century, and may be connected with the case of Phineas Gage, who miraculously survived massive brain damage. Basically, it seems that we are ruled by a crazy cult. What I claim is, that the cerebellum is a statistical machine, which is fundamentally limited by the fact that it gets overwhelmed by spurious correlations once it gets too powerful, and it begins to hallucinate. Mammals evolved the neocoretex, a data reduction machine, which resolves this problem by reducing a large amount of inputs into a much smaller number of values that carry all the information. When the cerebellum acts only in this latent space, and is thus restricted by what can be represented within this latent space, it can be powerful, and avoid hallucination. The more "counterintuitive" situations the creature has to deal with, the bigger neocortex/cerebellum ratio it needs to avoid hallucinating. Thus when a person's neocortex gets damaged, they become what may seem like super smart, they make insane conclusions and appear to be able to understand anything, but none of it is actually real, and they are just insane. What they seem to believe (which is not shared publicly, because it would get "misinterpreted, but allows to be acknowledged internally) is that as animals got too intelligent they failed to breed, but intelligence is still good for not dying. And the neocortex evolved to keep us dumb so that we could breed, and only lift its veil in times of dire need, so that we could use our intelligence to survive. And so, they concluded that they can create a supersmart race by destroying our neocortexes with various means, so that we can be smart all the time, not only in emergencies, and gigantic progress would result. In reality, they made most people insane.

hoseja 1y ago

Yet they refuse to test the first emperor.

graemep 1y ago

> For some broader context missing from the article, there's been a long-running "controversy" with certain people in the Chinese Academy of Sciences making an argument called the multiregional hypothesis that modern Chinese evolved in China out of archaic hominins. It is appealing because it justifies racism. It is just the contemporary version of polygenism of racial science. That said, even if human evolution is more complex than simple out of Africa, all of humanity has a lot of shared ancestry and genetics do not support the concept of race.

IAmBroom 1y ago
It always reminds me of the Japanese attempts to diminish the status and history of the Ainu, a caucasoid racial group from their northernmost islands. Extensive research and data now point to the Ainu having lived on those islands from long before Chinese people first sailed to Japan and populated it - making the despised Ainu the true, actual Native Japanese.
amarait 1y ago
This is like trying to hide neanderthals because they seem to point to some of the differences in european populations traits such as white skin or blue eyes. If theres evidence I dont think it benefits anybody to discredit it under the racism label

shellfishgene 1y ago

Note this is a different paper from that discussed in the article. The new one is https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu9677 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu9677