> “It’s an excellent paper, and it looks quite convincing,” says Fred Spoor of the Natural History Museum, London. “It would have been ideal if there was more of the cranium, but I think they make a very good case that it’s Homo and that the closest affinities are probably with erectus. And that would make it quite likely the oldest Homo erectus-like thing.”
> “I have no doubt that they have something that is of the genus Homo,” adds Rick Potts, a paleoanthropologist and head of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program. But Potts notes that the incomplete skull doesn’t show all the telltale features that would characterize it as Homo erectus or some other relative. Furthermore, the cranium belongs to a 2- or 3-year-old child, for which comparisons are scarce. “I’m not 100 percent sure that they have Homo erectus. And that would be one of the really interesting parts of the study, because if they do have Homo erectus then it is the earliest known in the world.”
Having seen first-hand the powerful effect of excitement cause researchers to overlook important anti-evidence, I always like to read comments from qualified peers.
Living Together is a loaded term suggesting peaceful coexistence. I think it's much more likely each species/sub-species in turn drove each other out of a desirable habitat over a very short period of time, in geological time. But 10s of thousands of years is a long time for individuals and clans. The different species may have never even seen each other.
The actual paper Contemporaneity of Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and early Homo erectus in South Africa does not suggest any of this.
It's fascinating, reading how they figured all this out. Correlating data about magnetic field flipping, uranium decay, a dozen little things coming together to give an answer. I'm not sure what kind of implications this find has and the comments from from Mr. Spoor seem to be taking a cautious approach but just reading about the work of scientists is always exciting.
If all the data pans out, what kind of implications would it have? Just showing that different kinds of humans coexisted and cohabited? Or is it more about the migratory patterns of these different humans?
And Slartibartfast's signature in the Fjord? I think that it's best to think of our pre-history as waaay more complex than the silhouette of evolution picture leads us to. We almost certainly shared land with other apes as different dogs share parks today, but beyond that it does not fit it in my head. I feel this is an area of science that is fascinating but ultimately, like study of butterflies - yes it's science, yes we fund it, but the value to billions of humans will
likely come from other branches of science.
The lessons I need for today's living I can take more usefully from today, than hoping to extrapolate from a million year old bones.
Recommended reading David Reich: Who We Are and How We Got Here. This was my second exposition, in general, to ancient DNA. The first was several papers which have invalidated everything we knew or thought we knew of Hungarian prehistory. But, as A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber often attests, there is a hell lot more we do not know than we do even when textbooks claim otherwise.
Can you expound on why you think this? As someone with a degree in the area, who's worked in it, and attempts to keep up with literature even now that I'm in tech, I can't think of many/any areas where general knowledge is kept out of textbooks for PC reasons.
The textbooks are out of date simply because human evolution is a quickly changing field and unless you actively attempt to keep up, you're not going to be able to maintain expertise. Even if that weren't true, the general public would struggle because it's a deeply unintuitive subject that invalidates many of the common sense norms we're used to in society, like race realism.
A Brief History of Everything talks about how little we know about everything. Everywhere we look we just find more and more mysteries. Evolution is like this as well -- while you could explain it easily especially to someone with just a tiny bit of programmer knowledge using Tierra -- we have immense gaps , perhaps the biggest: how did it start? How did monomers become polymers in a sea when the peptide bond requires the removal of H2O?
Abiogenesis is not evolution. In fact, the whole messy bit at the base of biota, where an organism (or protobiont) was as likely to share material with a neighbour as to undergo any other process, can hardly be thought of as "evolution". For all intents and purposes, that part could all be frikkin' magic, and it wouldn't hurt evolutionary biology at all.
> “I have no doubt that they have something that is of the genus Homo,” adds Rick Potts, a paleoanthropologist and head of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program. But Potts notes that the incomplete skull doesn’t show all the telltale features that would characterize it as Homo erectus or some other relative. Furthermore, the cranium belongs to a 2- or 3-year-old child, for which comparisons are scarce. “I’m not 100 percent sure that they have Homo erectus. And that would be one of the really interesting parts of the study, because if they do have Homo erectus then it is the earliest known in the world.”
Having seen first-hand the powerful effect of excitement cause researchers to overlook important anti-evidence, I always like to read comments from qualified peers.