4 ms·
Why it might be time to rethink the human family tree
- bibimsz 2mo ago[flagged]
- sokoloff 2mo agoOn a chart section spanning around 5 million years, are you asking about the millions of years where there was “all this diversity and branching” as contrasted with the last ten thousand years or so where there is less observed branching? Around 15 branches in 5,000,000 years and 0 in the last 10,000 years seems more likely statistical than ideological to me.
- jsbisviewtiful 2mo agoTotally agree. Unfortunately we are living in an age of mass stupidity’s volume overtaking critical thought and analysis by those who are truly educated. The amount of moon landing conspiracy theories I see online is deeply disturbing - some even going as far as suggesting space doesn’t even exist. Truly disturbing times.
- ThrowawayTestr 2mo agoAre you not aware of the multiple genetic bottlenecks homo sapiens have gone through?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- guywithahat 2mo ago[flagged]
- ryoshoe 2mo agoI feel like you're conflating race/ethnicity with species when the two are completely separate concepts. There's a great amount of diversity between dog breeds, including wolves, but little disagreement that they are the same species. Variation between members of a certain species is expected
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- sokoloff 2mo ago[dead]
- binaryturtle 2mo agoIsn't the general separation between species that they no longer can cleanly interbreed (generate fertile offsprings)? I'm no biology expert though, but I always thought this is how to separate things. Humans of all kinds can breed and make new humans easily. Same for dogs... easily can breed with each other and increase diversity. So in both cases same species. But humans and chimpanzees? Probably not (albeit there are rumours? :) ), so different species.
- guywithahat 2mo agoYes, but the difference also has to do with geography/preference. Brown and Polar bears can and do produce viable offspring, but because they're generally geographically separated we consider them separate species. Same for birds; many could mate but they choose not to (different mating calls, etc), and for that reason combined with different looks we classify them as separate species. Neanderthal, who are accepted as being a different species of human, interbred with humans before going extinct. It's my opinion that if aliens visited earth 30k years ago and used our definition of the word, they would classify us as different species. To be clear I'm not advocating that we should refer to humans as different species, just that because we're capable of such advanced thought we should abide by different rules than we hold other animals to.
- 2mo ago
- trollbridge 2mo agoIf a group of humans gets isolated in an island, the moon, etc., experiences a population bottleneck and bigtime selection pressures, a new species might emerge after 500 generations (about 10,000 years).
- m3047 2mo agoResearch is coming out specifically regarding the COVID genome which suggests missing sequence data was routinely filled in from baseline reference sequences. In turn, the reference sequences suggest during later analysis constant reversion back to the baseline. These gaps are the (dot) product of limitations of PCR * computer processing algorithms. No reason to believe the problem is limited to COVID.
- trollbridge 2mo agoDoes this explain the conspiracy theories about “insertions”? When I looked into it, many other virus species had similar “insertions” - the problem seeming to be the sequencing itself not being accurate (as opposed to every viral disease being cooked up in a lab for the last 5,000 years)
- SubiculumCode 2mo agoA conspiracy theorist misuse a term with no knowledge of it's context? Nahhh never /s
- BigTTYGothGF 2mo agoI haven't heard anything about this, could you drop a couple references?
- SubiculumCode 2mo agoI wonder if these are what was being referenced: [1]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11092452/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11092452/ [2]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-025-02932-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-025-02932-8 ChatGPT helped me identify likely articles: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a8a7e1c82308191be82762907a607de https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a8a7e1c82308191be82762907a607de
- lolokbro 2mo ago[dead]
- messe 2mo agoWhat does this have to do with the article?
- gradus_ad 2mo agoSo you're saying dark skinned people reside in the south and lighter skinned people predominate in the north?
- lolokbro 2mo ago[dead]
- applicative 2mo agoAs if to head them off, as if she could not bear the implications of their threat, Babette said pleasantly, “Why is it these UFOs are mostly seen upstate? The best sightings are upstate. People get abducted and taken aboard. Farmers see burn marks where saucers landed. A woman gives birth to a UFO baby, so she says. Always upstate.” “That’s where the mountains are,” Denise said. “Spaceships can hide from radar or whatever.” “Why are the mountains upstate?” Steffie said. “Mountains are always upstate,” Denise told her. “This way the snow melts as planned in the spring and flows downhill to the reservoirs near the cities, which are kept in the lower end of the state for exactly this reason.” I thought, momentarily, she might be right. It made a curious kind of sense. Or did it? Or was it totally crazy? There had to be large cities in the northern part of some states. Or were they just north of the border in the southern part of states just to the north? What she said could not be true and yet I had trouble, momentarily, disproving it. I could not name cities or mountains to disprove it. There had to be mountains in the southern part of some states. Or did they tend to be below the state line, in the northern part of states to the south? I tried to name state capitals, governors. How could there be a north below a south? Is this what I found confusing? Was this the crux of Denise’s error? Or was she somehow, eerily, right? The radio said: “Excesses of salt, phosphorus, magnesium.”
- mmooss 2mo agoHere's the paper: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13485234/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13485234/ Towle I. Clades, Grades, and the Genus Problem: A Case for Revising Hominin Taxonomy. Am J Biol Anthropol. 2026 Aug;190(4):e70344. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.70344. PMID: 42612121; PMCID: PMC13485234.
- tokai 2mo agoI know its petty, but I find it annoying you didn't link to the actual paper instead of the NLM copy. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.70344 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.70344
- mmooss 2mo agoTo me, the choices of names for clades seem like madness: All apes (superfamily): Hominoidea; great apes (family): Hominidae; African great apes (subfamily): Homininae; Pan‐Homo clade (tribe): Hominini; human clade (subtribe): Hominina. [0] The potential for error seems enormous, and also imagine speaking those words without creating confusion, or try forming singulars and possessives that, in text and speech, unambiguously identify the clade. Can anyone on the inside shed insight on why they do this to themselves, and to everyone else who has even less understanding? Is it self-hate? Imagine a large codebase that named variables like that - there would be a lynching late one night when the bug was found to be confusion. Despite my reaction, I guess there is some good reason that all these smart, experienced people make this choice. [0] From the paper the OP describes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13485234/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13485234/
- foxglacier 2mo agoHomie, no idea. [Sorry I never joke but surely the biologists were joking when they came up with that so it should be fair game]
- ompogUe 2mo agoIf we're joking: A Roman walks into a bar and says, "Can I have a martinus?" The bartender asks, "Don't you mean a martini?" The Roman responds, "If I wanted a double, I would have asked for it."
- macintux 2mo agoI become (irrationally?) annoyed when I find "cannoli" listed on a menu, especially at an Italian restaurant where they should know better, and it's a single cannolo.
- jjtheblunt 2mo agomaybe the idea is you get one of the many prepared
- contingencies 2mo agoClearly Homo idiotensis here is incapable of cultivating a factual ontology that would place it below the 'great apes' as the type species amongst amongst the 'asshole apes'.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]