12 ms·
Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans
Paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado9202 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado9202
- mikert89 1y agoOut of africa is basically false, there were decently advanced walking hominids in asia a long time ago. Then they migrated west, africa was the origination, but that origination was not the ~50k years ago like was frequently claimed
- AlotOfReading 1y agoAll the evidence we have points to the vast, vast majority (>90%) of non-african human ancestry originating from hominin populations that were in Africa around 60-80k years ago, and were anatomically modern about 300k years ago. This article is about an ancestral clade of archaic hominins that contributed around 2% of modern non-african ancestry globally, that we've known about for years. OOA (with minor admixture) is the consensus position for a lot of excellent reasons.
- milesrout 1y agoIt is also the consensus position for a lot of bad reasons though. There is an assumption that belief in, or even reasonable agnosticism towards, any other theory can only be motivated by racism. There are many people that believe OOA because they want to believe it, because they want to believe we are all more similar than we are different, etc. Multiregional hypotheses are perfectly plausible. We have very limited information one way or another. Out of Africa may be more likely but it is far from certain.
- bilbo0s 1y agoThere are many people that believe OOA because they want to believe it But, also, There are many people that [do not] believe OOA because they [do not] want to believe it. That's why we look at genetic evidence, to eliminate nonsense. That evidence strongly points to chimps, gorillas, humans etc all coming from the same place. If it makes you feels better, think of it this way: we don't believe OOA because the evidence says we're related to blacks. We believe it because the evidence says we're pretty much hairless apes. (And a lot of us aren't even hairless!) There, feel better about it now?
- mikert89 1y agotheres actually almost zero clarity around the common ancestor between apes and humans, and a lot of speculation that the common ancestor lived 6-8 million years ago.
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago> That evidence strongly points to chimps, gorillas, humans etc all coming from the same place. No. Non-African humans have genetic lineages that do not occur anywhere in Africa. This doesn't mean OOA is necessarily false, but does makes it much less likely. Also, lumping in primates is a red herring. The resolution of our gene clade knowledge doesn't go that far back. Dreaming about some hypothetical ape ancestor is a vibe, not a science.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoJust to be clear about what the term multiregionalism means, it's an argument that there's anatomical continuity between archaic hominin populations around afroeurasia and modern human populations. That is, anatomical modernity didn't evolve once in Africa, but multiple times all over the world in populations that are still extant today. A multiregional hypothesis might say that modern Chinese people evolved from archaic populations in Asia. This is completely and unequivocally rejected by the genetic evidence. The evidence is so absolutely overwhelming that even fucking Wolpoff came around and now says: It is broadly agreed that all recent/living human populations ultimately descend from Africans. Now, if you mean something completely different to the commonly understood definition of multiregionalism, I'm willing to hear it.
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago> OOA (with minor admixture) is the consensus position for a lot of excellent reasons It isn't really. Serious historians and geneticists take great issue with it. It's only really the pop-anthropologists (the non-rigorous social science ones) who think OOA is a settled issue.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoYou're going to have to explain this one. The only thing I can figure is that you're making a distinction about "traditional" RAO vs modern hybridization models, but my comment already mentions those (albeit indirectly, given that I'm writing to an audience). But if you're genuinely trying to say that the broad strokes out of africa model isn't consensus, I have no idea what you're talking about. Just to make sure I haven't missed some momentous event since the last time I was doing fieldwork, I even checked some unpublished books, review papers, and actual research. They all talk about OOA as completely settled or instead simply assume it. Is this like a CAS thing? Truly baffled.
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoOOA is extremely problematic. Lots of hoops are needed to make it work - a double exodus from Africa and a population bottleneck, etc. None of these hoops are needed if we just let go and assume a Middle Eastern origin for homo sapiens. Basically the only reason a Kuhnian paradigm shift isn't happening is because of American politics; OOA is needed to debunk some stupid 19th century American racial theories. (Theories that the rest of the world doesn't even know or care about.)
- selimthegrim 1y agoBut where’s the evidence? I haven’t heard Reich or Paäbo go about this.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoA middle eastern origin presents obvious problems explaining the genetic diversity data and the serial founder effects we observe globally. These naturally fall out of African origin, whereas a middle eastern origin needs a back to Africa that somehow avoids founder effects. Which stupid racial theories do you think African origin is trying to debunk and why would the many European researchers working on human origins care?
- whimsicalism 1y agothere were multiple out of africa migrations and backmigration into Africa, 60-80k is just the most recent and the prominent founder population for modern humans outside of Africa.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- octaane 1y agoYou are completely wrong. Out of Africa is correct. Out of Asia is incorrect, and is outdated sino propaganda. Even the modern Chinese state admits that DNA evidence pretty conclusively points to out of Africa.
- marcus_holmes 1y agoWe know there were indigenous folks here in Australia ~50K years ago, and we know that we didn't evolve in Australia, so any origination must be further back than that.
- WalterBright 1y agoI'm curious why humans evolved intelligence and chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans did not.
- mikert89 1y agoBecause we are farther way on the evolutionary tree then is commonly thought, there is a tree of common ancestors going much further back (5 million or more years) that links humans with monkeys
- dboreham 1y agoMore energy from the digestive system to power a bigger GPU. Theories abound that this is due to the harnessing of fire for cooking.
- intrasight 1y agoAnd metabolizing alcohol, which also encourages reproduction.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoEvolution doesn't have end goals like building the most powerful computer possible. If caloric excesses are a factor, it's because there was some other selective pressure that made use of the energy to support more neurons. But even then, more hardware isn't the same thing as more intelligence. Elephants and whales have bigger brains than we do. Shrews and birds have a higher brain/body mass ratio. None of them are intelligent to the degree humans are. An explanation for human intelligence has to explain us, not just our brain mass.
- SamBam 1y agoSperm whales may have more massive brains, but they have fewer cortical neurons total, and of course a much smaller brain to body mass ratio. But more importantly for this conversation, our brains use up a staggering 20-25% of our resting metabolic needs. A whale brain uses something like 3%. For us to be able to devote 20% of our calories to our brains, we simply needed to have a huge excess in the number of calories we had available. This is why the cooking hypothesis makes sense. Once we were smart enough to get lots of excess calories, that opened the door to this new fitness landscape of organisms that could devote a ridiculous proportion of their food to their brains. It wasn't that we gave up something else, it's that this wasn't even a possibility before.
- KurSix 1y agoAlways worth asking how much these reconstructions reflect reality vs the assumptions built into the models
- _petronius 1y agoIf a thought like this has occurred to you, a dilettante, after reading a headline and/or cursorily glancing over the article, then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis. Drive-by anti-intellectualism like this is the death of interesting conversation, truly.
- like_any_other 1y agoIn an ideal world, you would be right. In this world, I just read a study (that passed peer review), where they took per-capita data from a district with 100 people, data from a district with 50.000 people, averaged them without weighing by number of people, then presented the result as the per-capita average for all districts. That is when they're not outright fabricating data, and having their colleagues cover for them (at Harvard): In or before 2020, graduate student Zoé Ziani developed concerns about the validity of results from a highly publicized paper by Gino about personal networking. According to Ziani, she was strongly warned by her academic advisers not to criticize Gino, and two members of her dissertation committee refused to approve her thesis unless she deleted criticism of Gino's paper from it. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino
- physicsguy 1y agoI reviewed a paper recently that gave an incorrect definition for one of Maxwell’s equations and then proceeded to use it incorrectly. It got moved to a lower ranked journal rather than rejected outright. That wasn’t the only problem either, half the text was clearly AI generated.
- HelloNurse 1y ago
- ebg1223 1y agodoctor banjo?
- bradley13 1y ago[flagged]
- kakacik 1y ago[flagged]
- sho_hn 1y agoIt's really not particularly anti-China imho, as indeed the West has its own brand of this in American Exceptionalism in general. We from smaller countries sometimes call this Big Country Syndrome. It's true that China has a lot of affection for the Out of Asia theory of human origin, and to this day there are museums dedicated to the Peking Man that are at the very least heavily suggestive of this, or at least of China's population having a distinct origin. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_Man Books and reams of sociology papers can and have been written about the relationship between CCP policy and the Peking Man and the CCPs difficulty with adjusting to today's generally preferred Out of Africa theory, and the effect on Chinese scientists working in anthropology. HN favorite Jimmy Maher (Digital/Analog Antiquarian) has a lovely line of free amateur history books including an excellent one on China that has a chapter on this: https://analog-antiquarian.net/2022/01/14/chapter-2-origin-stories/ https://analog-antiquarian.net/2022/01/14/chapter-2-origin-s... I think it's a useful approach to contemporary Chinese identity. Nothing anti about that, any good-natured attempt to grok China would include this, just as no diatribe on America is complete without mentioning the 30-something % of Americans who state belief in some form of Creationism when polled.
- vintermann 1y agoI don't think less of China for containing a, shall we say, "patriotic" paleoanthropology community. Not any more than I think less of the US for the Book of Mormon being a thing. God knows we have these subcultures in Europe too. But it is a thing and you need to be aware of it. A result from China which seems to support an out of China theory rather than an out of Africa theory, I am immediately suspicious of. And you know, just because you and I don't bristle at the thought of descending from ancient Kenyans, lots of other people all over the world do. It's not just "regular" racists, also a lot of e.g. indigenous protected groups.
- z3t4 1y agoWhen the average life span was something like 30 years, why do all images look like they are 60+ years old? Is it a cognitive bias that we assume that people that are tens of thousands years old also look really old? :P
- jdthedisciple 1y agoclassic misunderstanding of avg avg of 30 usually just means higher child death rates once adult you would likely still get to 50+ on avg
- ineedaj0b 1y agoI always felt Chinese. A lot of people here seem remiss to accept this but the claim was made, I think around 2018? And now the international community has gone and doubled checked - and it seems legitimate. 2025: the mainstream belief of descension changes. What other base beliefs do you hold that will likely be false? I can think of 5+. Our ancestors thought a lot of things for certain and died never knowing. Technological advancement is so fast nowadays, I hope we get to live through more.
- Exklusivmarode 1y ago[dead]
- moomoo11 1y ago(Off topic) I’d like to think we get periodic impact events that put some new “code” on the planet and we get new species. That would be kinda dope.
- mouse_8b 1y agoThat's just creationism.
- tsoukase 1y agoAt every chronological estimation they should append 'at least as old as' while they present their results. You never know if something older comes up later.