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210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia

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Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia

#71

Post by doubleunplussed »

zaat wrote: post #66
abathur wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not, though? Would how often, in 100, 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years would the complete chain of human intellectual lineage be broken, and a generation of people be raised with absolutely no input from the preceding generation? Look through Wikipedia's page on Indo-European vocabulary ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary#Kinsh... ), and see how recognizable some of the fundamental building bl…

I see the link you provided as evidence to the improbability of GP's premise. Consider that common daily used words can change to a degree that they at best resemble their origin, and that in just a single or two millenniums. Do you believe any oral tradition can survive and preserve anything from it's original meaning after 20k years? Do you know any story about your family from 300 years ago? Do you know anyone who…

We don't have strong oral traditions anymore, so I really have no way to guess how long things can be passed down by cultures that do.

There's evidence the indigenous Australians passed down knowledge of the end of the last glaciation period [1] 10000 - 13000 years ago.

[1] https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-prese...

Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia

#72

Post by maxlamb »

losvedir wrote: post #3

Can someone link to a kind of summary of the current best understanding of human evolution and dispersal? It's really fascinating to me. Until recently, I had naively understood "Out of Africa" to mean that homo sapiens evolved in Africa from some sort of ape like thing and then went out and conquered the world. But the idea that homo sapiens is just one of many kinds of human species, and that other ones like Neande…

You would probably want to read "The Journey of Man" by Spencer Wells, great book on this topic.

Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia

#73

Post by AnthonyMouse »

zaat wrote: post #66
abathur wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not, though? Would how often, in 100, 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years would the complete chain of human intellectual lineage be broken, and a generation of people be raised with absolutely no input from the preceding generation? Look through Wikipedia's page on Indo-European vocabulary ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary#Kinsh... ), and see how recognizable some of the fundamental building bl…

I see the link you provided as evidence to the improbability of GP's premise. Consider that common daily used words can change to a degree that they at best resemble their origin, and that in just a single or two millenniums. Do you believe any oral tradition can survive and preserve anything from it's original meaning after 20k years? Do you know any story about your family from 300 years ago? Do you know anyone who…

> Do you know any story about your family from 300 years ago? Do you know anyone who knows (leaving aside kings and the like, where the stories are again only known from canonical origins)? Do you know the name of any of your ancestors from 4,000 years ago? The name of the place they lived in?

We have writing now though. There is much less need to spend time memorizing the oral history of your family line when it can be written down.

At a time when anything you don't teach your children and grandchildren would be lost forever, it was much more important to pass on the stories of your ancestors through oral histories.

Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia

#75

Post by defen »

kenver wrote: post #59
Taniwha wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well they sort of did - modern Europeans are now acknowledged to carry some Neanderthal DNA (estimates go somewhere between 1.5-20% depending on how you count) People who think that Neanderthals/etc were "lesser" humans (for whatever bogus reasons) probably also need to conclude (for the same reasons) that Europeans are also lesser humans

You reminded me of this Sam Harris tweet https://twitter.com/samharrisorg/status/429007702803492865 One of his observations was imagining what a disaster it would have been if this finding had gone the 'other' way.

Poorly-aged tweet - in Who We Are and How We Got Here Robert Reich talks about the strong evidence for the existence of a "ghost population" that interbred only with the ancestors of modern sub-Saharan Africans. It's a ghost because we don't have any physical remains like we do with Neanderthals and Denisovans, but there is an ancient genetic signature that exists only in that population.

More generally - because people use motivated reasoning, you could just as easily spin the Neanderthal finding the opposite way. "Neanderthal ancestry is a secret superpower that makes Asian and European people special!" or whatever. Once you have your conclusion, you can spin the facts to fit your narrative.

Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia

#76

Post by abathur »

zaat wrote: post #66
abathur wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not, though? Would how often, in 100, 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years would the complete chain of human intellectual lineage be broken, and a generation of people be raised with absolutely no input from the preceding generation? Look through Wikipedia's page on Indo-European vocabulary ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary#Kinsh... ), and see how recognizable some of the fundamental building bl…

I see the link you provided as evidence to the improbability of GP's premise. Consider that common daily used words can change to a degree that they at best resemble their origin, and that in just a single or two millenniums. Do you believe any oral tradition can survive and preserve anything from it's original meaning after 20k years? Do you know any story about your family from 300 years ago? Do you know anyone who…

Heh. Heh.

So, AFAIR one interpretation of the relative ubiquity of ancient flood myths is that most established cultures had to live through a time of periodic glacial lake outburst floods as the climate warmed from the last glacial maxima, along with rising seas inundating some inland basins like the Persian Gulf.

I'm not sure about the probability or improbability of this premise in the grand scheme of all probable events, but it seems fair to call it a plausible premise. These events would mostly fit on a timeline of 15k years ago to 8k years ago. If this explanation holds water, it means that the origin events of these flood myths pre-date the earliest known forms of writing by at least as much as the writing of early known biblical texts predate the conversation we're having now.

I don't know if I "believe" it, but I definitely wouldn't bet against it. We're not talking about getting teenagers to faithfully memorize and repeat 100 generations of ancestral begats as read by Ben Stein. We're talking about compelling stories that were foundational to the mythos of who a people are and where they came from.

Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia

#77

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mc32 wrote: post #62
subdane wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given our propensity for war and genocide, I wonder if humans just killed off all the other near species?

Either we outcompeted them or they were more docile and we took advantage of that, or they kept retreating till they could retreat no more (if they feared interaction).

That's assuming homo sapiens were actually their undoing. They may have just died out on their own.

Or they haven't at all. Consider that people of European and Asian ancestry typically share some Neanderthal DNA, and the DNA difference between humans and chimpanzees is ~1%. Maybe they're just us.

Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia

#78

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Taniwha wrote: post #54
NeoBasilisk wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a darker note, one could almost see it as a form of mercy that none of the other species survived into the era of civilizations. Given our willingness to enslave other humans, I can only imagine what would have been done with "lesser" humans.

well they sort of did - modern Europeans are now acknowledged to carry some Neanderthal DNA (estimates go somewhere between 1.5-20% depending on how you count) People who think that Neanderthals/etc were "lesser" humans (for whatever bogus reasons) probably also need to conclude (for the same reasons) that Europeans are also lesser humans

> People who think that Neanderthals/etc were "lesser" humans (for whatever bogus reasons) probably also need to conclude (for the same reasons) that Europeans are also lesser humans

The strongest real inferiority argument is that we survived and they didn't. But if they/we are still here then that's right out the window.

Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia

#79

Post by hnzix »

zaat wrote: post #66
abathur wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not, though? Would how often, in 100, 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years would the complete chain of human intellectual lineage be broken, and a generation of people be raised with absolutely no input from the preceding generation? Look through Wikipedia's page on Indo-European vocabulary ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary#Kinsh... ), and see how recognizable some of the fundamental building bl…

I see the link you provided as evidence to the improbability of GP's premise. Consider that common daily used words can change to a degree that they at best resemble their origin, and that in just a single or two millenniums. Do you believe any oral tradition can survive and preserve anything from it's original meaning after 20k years? Do you know any story about your family from 300 years ago? Do you know anyone who…

Indigenous Australian oral history and cave paintings reference the "dreamtime"[0], which is plausibly the group's initial ocean crossing perhaps ~45k years ago.

More definitely, here[1] is an Australian oral tradition that records a catastrophe ~7k years ago.

The picture is super blurry but then so is Genesis.

[0] https://austhrutime.com/first_boat_people.htm

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/16/indig...

Re: 210k-year-old skull in Greece is earliest sign of modern humans in Europe, Asia

#80

Post by emanuensis »

war1025 wrote: post #48
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general consensus up until now is, roughly: Homo Erectus: 1 million B.C. to about 500,000 B.C. Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens split off from common ancestor: 500,000 B.C. Homo Sapiens dominate Africa until about 70,000 B.C. when they spread into Europe, Middle East, and Asia. Neanderthals dominate Europe, Middle East, and Asia, until 70,000 B.C. when Homo Sapiens return out of Africa. There are a few othe…

Sort of a tangent, but I've wondered before if the "Nephilim" mentioned in Genesis could have been some distant memory of when Humans coexisted with Neanderthals. From Wikipedia: When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, "My spirit shall not abide in m…

Genesis is but one example of an oral folklore. All cultures had them (before writing ... which invented forgetting, ref Socrates). i would not at all be surprised if their cladogram is pushed back in time to when we shared the earth with other Homo species

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_mythology

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