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Homo sapiens and Their Cousins

Started by Recusant, October 31, 2015, 01:52:11 AM

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Dave

#45
Good link, Recusant. A means to convey ideas, about the concrete things at least, would seem essential in most forms of cooperative endeavour. I often wonder where the distinction between, "Hoo-oot!", or, "Gru-unt!",  and "Snake!" stops just being a warning noise and becomes a word. As I understand it some social monkeys have sounds that have specific meaning. Or "words". How many words do you need to qualify a means of communication as, "language"?

But, we went beyond that to expand our vocabulary, and that has so many implications in terms of social activity beyond the immediate needs of simply staying alive in the present moment - the future beckoned.

Emboldened sentence added in edit.
Tomorrow is precious, don't ruin it by fouling up today.
Passed Monday 10th Dec 2018 age 74

Recusant

I expect linguists and others have spent plenty of ink and paper, and used a fair amount of air arguing over the "how many words/how complex" question regarding what constitutes the minimum requirement for qualifying as "a language."  :)





Back to news: "Modern humans interbred with Denisovans twice in history" | ScienceDaily

QuoteModern humans co-existed and interbred not only with Neanderthals, but also with another species of archaic humans, the mysterious Denisovans. While developing a new genome-analysis method for comparing whole genomes between modern human and Denisovan populations, researchers unexpectedly discovered two distinct episodes of Denisovan genetic intermixing, or admixing, between the two. This suggests a more diverse genetic history than previously thought between the Denisovans and modern humans.

In a paper published in Cell on March 15, scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle determined that the genomes of two groups of modern humans with Denisovan ancestry -- individuals from Oceania and individuals from East Asia -- are uniquely different, indicating that there were two separate episodes of Denisovan admixture.

"What was known already was that Oceanian individuals, notably Papuan individuals, have significant amounts of Denisovan ancestry," says senior author Sharon Browning, a research professor of biostatistics, University of Washington School of Public Health. The genomes of modern Papuan individuals contain approximately 5% Denisovan ancestry."

Researchers also knew Denisovan ancestry is present to a lesser degree throughout Asia. The assumption was that the ancestry in Asia was achieved through migration, coming from Oceanian populations. "But in this new work with East Asians, we find a second set of Denisovan ancestry that we do not find in the South Asians and Papuans," she says. "This Denisovan ancestry in East Asians seems to be something they acquired themselves."

[Continues . . .]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


xSilverPhinx

I thought this was interesting:

Ancient climate shifts may have sparked human ingenuity and networking

QuoteDramatic shifts in the East African climate may have driven toolmaking advances and the development of trading networks among Homo sapiens or their close relatives by the Middle Stone Age, roughly 320,000 years ago.
I am what survives if it's slain - Zack Hemsey


Recusant

A parallel story to the navigating Neanderthals in the thread dedicated to them: It appears hominins were crossing sea barriers much earlier then Neanderthal. Whether intentionally or not in this case isn't clear, but I wouldn't discount that it was intentional.

"Humans were present in the Philippine islands as early as 700,000 years ago" | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

QuoteSince the Quaternary era (2.6 Million years ago), the string of islands that make up the modern nation of the Phillipines have been isolated from mainland Southeast Asia by deep sea straits. Previously, the oldest confirmed human presence in the Philippines was of Homo aff. sapiens and dated to 67,000 years ago. The Kalinga site, excavated since 2014 and dated to 709,000 years by several physico-chemical methods (electro-spin resonance, disequilibrium in the argon family and in the uranium family, palaeomagnetism), proves that the first colonization was actually ten times older, dating back to the early Middle Pleistocene.

The archaeological excavations have uncovered various animal remains, among which are the monitor lizard, the box turtle, the Philippine brown deer, the stegodon (a cousin of the elephant) and the rhinoceros, which has been extinct in the Philippines since at least 100,000 years ago. For this latter species, Rhinoceros philippinensis, an almost complete individual was recovered in association with dozens of prehistoric stone tools that researchers have determined were made on anvils. The rhinoceros skeleton further shows several butchery marks, such as cut marks on the ribs and on the foot bones and percussion marks to break the arm bones, allowing extraction of the marrow. These archaeological findings are indirect proof of a very ancient presence of early hominins on the island of Luzon.

How these animals and hominins would have reached the islands at this time is still unclear. While some herbivores are known to be excellent long distance swimmers and could have swum to the Philippines during one of the low sea level periods, this would not have been possible for humans. The researchers hypothesize that an ancestor of Homo sapiens could have mastered sailing skills, or that this colonization was accidental, perhaps thanks to natural rafts such as floating mangrove trees that are occasionally broken off by typhoons, a rare but well-documented phenomenon.

Abstract from the paper:

QuoteOver 60 years ago, stone tools and remains of megafauna were discovered on the Southeast Asian islands of Flores, Sulawesi and Luzon, and a Middle Pleistocene colonization by Homo erectus was initially proposed to have occurred on these islands. However, until the discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2003, claims of the presence of archaic hominins on Wallacean islands were hypothetical owing to the absence of in situ fossils and/or stone artefacts that were excavated from well-documented stratigraphic contexts, or because secure numerical dating methods of these sites were lacking. As a consequence, these claims were generally treated with scepticism.

Here we describe the results of recent excavations at Kalinga in the Cagayan Valley of northern Luzon in the Philippines that have yielded 57 stone tools associated with an almost-complete disarticulated skeleton of Rhinoceros philippinensis, which shows clear signs of butchery, together with other fossil fauna remains attributed to stegodon, Philippine brown deer, freshwater turtle and monitor lizard. All finds originate from a clay-rich bone bed that was dated to between 777 and 631 thousand years ago using electron-spin resonance methods that were applied to tooth enamel and fluvial quartz. This evidence pushes back the proven period of colonization of the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years, and furthermore suggests that early overseas dispersal in Island South East Asia by premodern hominins took place several times during the Early and Middle Pleistocene stages. The Philippines therefore may have had a central role in southward movements into Wallacea, not only of Pleistocene megafauna, but also of archaic hominins.
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Dave

Have not read srticle yet but . . .Thinking about intentionality it would seem strange to me that enough hominins could accidentally sail the high sesse, in a short enough period, to estsblish a biable gene pool population.

And thinking about "high seas" would the geology of the area provide "stepping stone" islands during ice ages? We have lost a lot of ancient archaeology due to rising sea level.
Tomorrow is precious, don't ruin it by fouling up today.
Passed Monday 10th Dec 2018 age 74

Bluenose

Yes Dave.  Observing that humans do not abide by the Wallace Line demarcation like other larger mammals, It would seem that intentionality is the big difference.  Other large mammals might accidentally cross the watery boundary on occasion but not in sufficient numbers to establish a breeding population.  Humans, and no doubt at least some of our earlier cousins, had the ability to deliberately cross such oceanic barriers and discovering unexploited resources on the other side they established successful "colonies" in the new lands.
+++ Divide by cucumber error: please reinstall universe and reboot.  +++

GNU Terry Pratchett


Dave

Annoyingly these sequences gives no indication of era, but looks like there msy have been shorter sea paths than at present.

https://youtu.be/H_wLmpkJ6Fw


Thanks, Bluenose, now I gave to see what the "Wallace Line" is - though it does ring a bell in a dim memory corner.
Tomorrow is precious, don't ruin it by fouling up today.
Passed Monday 10th Dec 2018 age 74

Bluenose

Hi Dave, I think this explains it fairly well.  The Wkikpedia page is also informative.

+++ Divide by cucumber error: please reinstall universe and reboot.  +++

GNU Terry Pratchett


Dave

Yeah, I had already looked it up thanks.

(Always feel a bit sad for Wallace, derserves more fame than he gets.)
Tomorrow is precious, don't ruin it by fouling up today.
Passed Monday 10th Dec 2018 age 74

Tank

Quote from: Dave on May 03, 2018, 08:56:32 AM
Yeah, I had already looked it up thanks.

(Always feel a bit sad for Wallace, derserves more fame than he gets.)
It's getting better. When I was a kid he was never mentioned.
If religions were TV channels atheism is turning the TV off.
"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt." ― Richard P. Feynman
'It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.' - Terry Pratchett
Remember, your inability to grasp science is not a valid argument against it.

Recusant

Perhaps this hypothesis is correct, but I'm inclined to think that the lacking component was imagination. Homo erectus travelled at least as far as Asia, and existed for considerably longer than Homo sapiens has been around.

"Laziness helped lead to extinction of Homo erectus" | ScienceDaily

QuoteNew archaeological research from The Australian National University (ANU) has found that Homo erectus, an extinct species of primitive humans, went extinct in part because they were 'lazy'.

An archaeological excavation of ancient human populations in the Arabian Peninsula during the Early Stone Age, found that Homo erectus used 'least-effort strategies' for tool making and collecting resources.

This 'laziness' paired with an inability to adapt to a changing climate likely played a role in the species going extinct, according to lead researcher Dr Ceri Shipton of the ANU School of Culture, History and Language.

"They really don't seem to have been pushing themselves," Dr Shipton said.

"I don't get the sense they were explorers looking over the horizon. They didn't have that same sense of wonder that we have."

Dr Shipton said this was evident in the way the species made their stone tools and collected resources.

"To make their stone tools they would use whatever rocks they could find lying around their camp, which were mostly of comparatively low quality to what later stone tool makers used," he said.

"At the site we looked at there was a big rocky outcrop of quality stone just a short distance away up a small hill.

"But rather than walk up the hill they would just use whatever bits had rolled down and were lying at the bottom.

"When we looked at the rocky outcrop there were no signs of any activity, no artefacts and no quarrying of the stone.

"They knew it was there, but because they had enough adequate resources they seem to have thought, 'why bother?'."

[Continues . . .]
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken


Dave

Imaginstion or innovation, did H.E. have the "smarts" to develop beyond those limits? Even a middling IQ is not needed to spread far and wide, many other mammals have done it - and insects, birds . . . It seems that intelligence vomes in varieties, chimps have enough to use a hsmmer and snvil to crack nuts or a stuck to extract termites, finding a sharp rock, recognising its usefulness (maybe finder #1 cut him/herself?) is only avtad sbovevtge chimps. Fashioning one for oneself is a bit of a leap but chimps "fashion" their termite extractor.

(I have an idea for a cartoon about how the wheel developed, now got the seed for one abiut how our early cousins discovered knapping - not being able to find a naturally sharp enough rock our hero threw one, hard, at the other rocks in frustration . . .)
Tomorrow is precious, don't ruin it by fouling up today.
Passed Monday 10th Dec 2018 age 74

xSilverPhinx

Quote from: Recusant on August 13, 2018, 05:48:55 PM
Perhaps this hypothesis is correct, but I'm inclined to think that the lacking component was imagination. Homo erectus travelled at least as far as Asia, and existed for considerably longer than Homo sapiens has been around.

"Laziness helped lead to extinction of Homo erectus" | ScienceDaily

QuoteNew archaeological research from The Australian National University (ANU) has found that Homo erectus, an extinct species of primitive humans, went extinct in part because they were 'lazy'.

An archaeological excavation of ancient human populations in the Arabian Peninsula during the Early Stone Age, found that Homo erectus used 'least-effort strategies' for tool making and collecting resources.

This 'laziness' paired with an inability to adapt to a changing climate likely played a role in the species going extinct, according to lead researcher Dr Ceri Shipton of the ANU School of Culture, History and Language.

"They really don't seem to have been pushing themselves," Dr Shipton said.

"I don't get the sense they were explorers looking over the horizon. They didn't have that same sense of wonder that we have."

Dr Shipton said this was evident in the way the species made their stone tools and collected resources.

"To make their stone tools they would use whatever rocks they could find lying around their camp, which were mostly of comparatively low quality to what later stone tool makers used," he said.

"At the site we looked at there was a big rocky outcrop of quality stone just a short distance away up a small hill.

"But rather than walk up the hill they would just use whatever bits had rolled down and were lying at the bottom.

"When we looked at the rocky outcrop there were no signs of any activity, no artefacts and no quarrying of the stone.

"They knew it was there, but because they had enough adequate resources they seem to have thought, 'why bother?'."

[Continues . . .]

:notsure: But...laziness is the law of the universe! :P

Seriously though, most systems exist in a state of lowest energy, biological organisms are no different. Maybe they didn't think there was a good tradeoff...why bother spending hard-earned energy walking a mile to quarry stones when you have stones that could more or less do the job lying around camp? That energy could be better spent looking for more food or mating and generating more descendants.

The archaeologists' conclusions are rather lazy, I think.
I am what survives if it's slain - Zack Hemsey


xSilverPhinx

Just to add, but taking this in a slightly different direction, I find it fascinating that evolution favoured a brain like ours in spite of it consuming a disproportionate amount of oxygen and energy. Of course to many of us with ready access to food these days we don't necessarily think of energy in those terms, but to a hunter-gatherer society, and to most other animals, energy is valuable. To have a brain like ours means having less energy to hunt or gather food, make babies and carry them to term and other necessary actions to keep the species going...it's analogous to having to sustain and nourish a huge parasite. There must have been a huge tradeoff. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out in what ways, too: more resourcefulness when it comes to seeking food and defending territory, more adaptability to change, better able to keep track of social interactions, etc.,   

The fact that we would be a rather pathetic species without our brains -- we have no speed, little physical strength, no fangs, no claws etc., -- also must have favoured that extra something in order for our species to survive.

But, as a species, we are relatively new. Definitely successful (perhaps overly so) but we're still the new kids on the block. Other hominids have lived and survived for way longer before being wiped out. Not that older hominids will necessarily outthink us but they must have had something special under the hood as well. It's a real pity we can't put a Neanderthal in an fMRI and investigate its thought processes.  :(
I am what survives if it's slain - Zack Hemsey


Recusant

A significant element in the process of evolution is happenstance. Or to use plain language, just dumb luck. The brains of our species have been our key to success, but I think that the extent to which evolution could be said to favor those brains may come down to luck as much as anything. At one point, our species nearly disappeared. It's certainly possible that it was our brains that made the difference and ensured our survival, but it's equally possible that it was something like an improvement in the weather.

What we're doing to our planet gives reason to doubt that our brains are useful for really long-term survival, as opposed to our close relatives who existed for relatively longer chunks of time than we've been around, and left the planet more or less as healthy as they found it. I think that there is potential in us to overcome the problems we've made for ourselves, though.
"Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration — courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth."
— H. L. Mencken