An interesting approach.
Some important points to bear in mind when thinking about it. (A lot of discussion is too simplified.)
1. Modern populations have a wide variety of skull shapes within them. I presume ancient populations did too. So thinking of a single skull shape as represention homo antecessor (or whatever he's called) is most likely plain wrong. You need to thing of something much more interesting a kinda fuzzy representation of a full range of skul shapes.
2. We know modern populations have contributions from Neanders, Denisovans, San-Bushman and all sorts. (The fact that these types have interbred says something about the degree to which they are different species.) So thinking of a single ancestor species (let alone a single individual) also seems like a simplification.
Such things apply over our whole evolution and that of other species. It's a more interesting world than many imagine.
18
No chin?
Food sources differed?
Where were the continents drifting back then?
That's nothing. I have the head of St. John the Baptist as a child in my living room!
4
It would have been helpful to understand the DNA of these different skulls and whether or not that helped in determining age, location, and relationships. I’m surprised that it appears researchers only relied on computer modeling and DNA wasn’t even considered, unless I missed that in the quick read of the article. The original classification of life relied on visual inspection which was later upended in some ways by the ability to sequence DNA. It seems that DNA, over visual inspection alone, may a better way of studying ancient fossils but I’m just an armchair scientist.
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@left coast finch
I don't think these very old skulls yielded DNA.
13
I can't help but wonder. The conclusions that are posited based on very small samples. What if the individual's skull that was found was part of a society that practiced body modification such as skull binding? Would the scientist be able to tell that based solely on the skull?
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I imagine that anyone interested enough to read this article would also lie to read the book Sapiens, if they haven't already. IMO the best book on our species. This article continues the filling in of our knowledge about our common ancestors.
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@Douglas ritter
Agree that Sapiens is a great book. Easy to read, and Yuval Harari writes with a fierce 'attitude' in my opinion. Which I love.
But in this particular space, even a few years matter. The historical facts don't change of course, but our view of them certainly does.
A latest high-water book is David Reich's Who We Are and How We got Here. His lab in Boston is at par with 2 or 3 others around the world, in using the best tools in discovering human migration and the artifacts such migration left within our genome. Great stuff.
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Hmm...I'd be very careful of what might end up being just a digital approach to Piltdown Man. That one was mathematically based too.
1
@JustJeff No, Piltdown Man was not a mathematically-based forgery. It was just a forgery.
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Although I like computers and I use one myself...I don't believe that God didn't have our blueprint firmly in His heart and plans before He began His creation... Esp. the His crown creation, mankind. His wisdom is above all. Thank you.
@Elizabeth Just out of curiosity, at what time do you posit this Creation? It would be a useful thing for paleontologists to know.
20
Reading this article after reading Graham Hancock’s America Before reminds me why we need to change the way we fund our collective anthropological research. Instead of rewarding peer reviewed science that more often eliminates singular explanations for our human origins and coevolution we keep rewarding single-origin discoveries with grants and funding, creating bitter career battles based more on revenue resources than on broad scientific evidence.
No mention in this article of how many species of hominid existed on the planet 1, 2 or 3 hundred thousand years ago... no mention of the Denisovans, their origins or why the cave in Siberia has evidence of hominid tools dating back 300,000 years when we were supposed to all be in Africa; Or recent evidence in San Diego of hominids 120,000 years ago when no ape like creatures allegedly existed in the “New World.” I don’t deny we originate from the great continent of Africa as the fossil record continues to suggest, but I do worry that by focusing on finding that “one, single” point of origin we are missing a broader story of multi-hominid coevolution:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sciencealert.com/we-finally-have-some-idea-of-when-the-mysterious-denisovans-walked-the-earth/amp
To be fair, the evidence of our coevolving origins is unfolding rapidly. That’s largely due to brave investigative reporting in the face of rewarding fraudulent bullying from snake oil “archeologists” who insist they have the only original evidence.
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@Schedule 1 Remedy: This is an article about a specific study, not a comprehensive review of the history of our species. It does discuss multiple human populations (in both current and ancient times) and mentions another homo species (Neanderthals). It seems to be widely discussed elsewhere that modern humans have DNA from at least two other species (Neanderthals and Denisovans), and nothing in this article disputes the coevolution of modern humans with other species. Rather, it simply supports the idea that there was a common ancestor for modern humans--a long time ago, and prior to interbreeding with other species. I don't believe that there is anything about the later interbreeding of homo sapiens with other species that precludes an origin of the sort discussed in the research reported on here. Do you have a specific criticism about that?
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@Schedule 1 Remedy Long before some Homo Sapiens migrated from Africa, some Homo Erectus did so. In Africa they evolved into Homo Sapiens, in Europe into the Neanderthals, in Asia into the Denisovans (and perhaps other hominids). The tools found in the cave in Siberia would be of the Denisovans or another non-human hominid evolved from Homo Erectus.
Of the report of hominids in the area of San Diego: I'm going to put that in the same class of evidence as footprint casts allegedly of Big Foot. I think the consensus is that there were no humans (or other hominids) on the American landmass before about 14,000 years ago. I don't think I would have missed a report wildly revising that figure.
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@Stan Sutton
Yes. Specifically that even though denisovans, homo sapiens and neanderthals evolved from a common ancestor 300,000 years ago, that does not mean there were’nt other hominids evolving from an earlier common ancestor or even more from the same one.
I agree the article is a specific study, but it is trying to claim common ancestory for “all hominds” to 300,000 years ago. That’s a broad claim. But I applaud their efforts to reconstruct a skull, which is useful science regardless of the claim of the study.
3
So, did Homo (Sapiens) Neanderthalensis evolve from our line of Archaic Homo Sapiens (the Kenyan/South African blend) or did it evolve from the Moroccan variety? And how can this reconstruction help us know such things? Do the Neanderthal like features of the computer reconstruction tell us Neanderthals may have been able to come from our line? I suppose if they do that's only because the Neanderthal was included in the sources of the composite. So the presumption is already there that Neanderthals were in our branch. And if these distant populations interbred significantly, what does that tell us about travel at the time? Was there really a lot of migration? Clearly not enough to prevent divergence, but enough to allow revergence. (New word, feel free to use it.)
5
Darn, I thought it would be a six foot white guy from the Neander Valley.
4
I heard someone on public radio discuss the relationship between being able to make fire, cook food and brain development. Cooked meat is better utilized digestively and greatly increases protein utilization.
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@Kuhlsue
The relationship with cooking is central to our definition as coevolved, “self-aware” hominids.
The physical reason is our jaws were allowed to become smaller and less muscular as cooked food became easier to chew which immediately freed up resources and energy for our brains to evolve.
Emotionally we could rapidly develop languages and cultures as our tounges and mouths evolved for sounds and taste and we congregated around fires.
Spiritually we became human as we collectively brought so many varieties of plants, animals and psychoactive ingredients to share at the fire under the stars that we coevolved into human enlightenment and self awareness.
The scientific activity of preparing medicine for natural communion with Creation began around a fire and built the foundation for human civilization and identity. We are already discovering evidence of human cities in the Amazon more than 50,000 years old that were able to mix and cook ingredients to produce highly potent psychoactive drugs like DMT. It would not surprise me in the least that the earliest of these experiments began as soon as we made our first fires and fermentations... and that human civilization and our speciation is every bit as old as the campfire.
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@Kuhlsue
Didn’t many of those eons ago, select the “Paleo” or “Vegan” diet option before starting the fire?
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@Schedule 1 Remedy
Thank you for adding the psychoactive ingredient that, more than likely, jump-started the rapid evolution of human consciousness. That’s a key piece of the puzzle that’s been repeatedly stigmatized and excluded from the study of human evolution because “all non-pharmaceutical company derived drugs are bad”. Hopefully, with the new acceptance of the hope and reality of psychiatric therapy based on psychoactive substances, other fields of science will begin to accept the fact that psychoactive receptors in the human brain didn’t just end up there by accident and for no functional reason whatsoever.
10
The more we learn, the more we are going to realize we are a total mashup of different groups. It's truly fascinating, wish there were more articles on subjects like this. Instead of the never ending drumbeat of politics.
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Is anyone combining these fossil results with other disciplines such as geology (the fragmentation of Pangaea for example)? Another way forward into a unified theory might be through language:
"A hypothesis put forward by Professor Joseph Greenberg and his colleagues (Stanford University) holds that the original mother language developed in Africa among early Homo sapiens. Their ‘Proto World’ map would show how Homo sapiens spread across the world, taking their language with them."
Source:
https://www.angmohdan.com/the-root-of-all-human-languages/
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@Mr Toad Anthropological linguistics is a field of study, you probably know.
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@Mr Toad Pangaea didn't exist 300,000 years ago or even 3,000,000 years ago.
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@Mr Toad Woo! You know you have the reference resource of the internet at your fingertips - right? Pangaea began to break up about 180 million years ago!
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What confuses hominid species definition includes: 1.) The hybridization occurring in the expanding ranges of humans. Therefore, it is not surprising to see the elongated cranium of the African Neanderthal. 2.) The natural genetic isolation of gene pools that is an essential requirement of the definition of species remains untested. Therefore, we have a tendency that anyone who discovers a hominid fossil cranium will conclude it is different enough to declare it to be a "new" species.
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@J. Aliff
We let archeologists and various societal institutions get away with branding, publicizing and declaring speciation with impunity when we should treat the very definition of speciation as a peer reviewed continuing education in evolution itself. As Mr. Toad points out above in his post there are many avenues to checklist during the ongoing investigation of our origins; the etymology of our common language, ancient civilization, distinct bone patterns, plant consumption; our symbiotic relationships with other species and most importantly the places, climate history and depths which archeology ignores or dismisses as pseudo-science or unworthy of our attention.... are perhaps the places we should look the most.
2
@Schedule 1 Remedy Get a PhD and study a subject for thirty years.
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@Kuhlsue
I’m flattered. But I don’t need a PHD in one subject of analysis to link several threads of evidence together. In fact I would argue that the political process of a PHD and University funding often gets in the way of critical peer reviewed analysis.
3
Facial reconstructions would have been a nice touch for this article.
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@David I quickly scrolled through looking for the same.
3
My geologist father wanted to be an archaeologist before choosing the former but couldn't resist labeling his children with our mixed ethnicities of Yankee and Hungarian as either doliocephalic or mezocephalic, i.e., long or round-headed. Three of us were long, two other siblings round, or more Magyar. He also liked the phrase hybrid vigor as used in cattle breeding. Surely we are all the result of interbreeding, yet even in this more study is always good.
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@Katalina
I couldn’t agree more. I’m glad you mentioned hybrids... something paleontologists need to be prepared to discover all the time. One of the hardest things for us to keep in perspective concerning our human history is that we interbred before and after speciation... meaning that Denisovans and Neanderthals may have been geographically and genetically isolated enough from homo sapiens at one point to create non fertile offspring, or true hybrids... much like a horse and donkey create a mule, but mules cannot create more mules... but that doesn’t mean we remained speciated or that we didn’t interbreed prior to speciation.
Part of the confusion here, for example, is when Europeans claim to have %1 or %2 neanderthal DNA, when what we should really do is give those neanderthals and human ancestors who were still able to produce fertile offspring another name of subspecies of hominid.
It’s very frustrating when we don’t properly identify, name or differentiate between various species, hybrids or subspecies of hominids... especially when we have physical evidence of hybridization. How are we supposed to tell the story of our human origins if we don’t properly identify speciation with different taxonomical names?
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@Schedule 1 Remedy
One reason.
It aint speciation.
Unless you believe common chimps are many different species and so dog breeds as well.
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@In deed
I do not think that word means what you think I think it means.
3