Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 61 posts

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#11

Post by qubitsam »

tokenadult wrote: post #7

As another comment says, the author of this New York Times article, Carl Zimmer, is a very solid science writer who knows a lot about evolution. I have occasion to discuss human population genetics with psychologists who study behavior genetics, and when population genetics issues come up in those discussions, some of the new discoveries are surprising even to them. It's hard for reporters, us, and even the working r…

Ok, I have to ask this, and I apologize in advance for it being out of topic.

How on earth are you well informed on so many topics spanning different fields of science and literature? Your comments are amazingly well informed, and I would like to know how you do it.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#12

Post by ajmurmann »

tokenadult wrote: post #7

As another comment says, the author of this New York Times article, Carl Zimmer, is a very solid science writer who knows a lot about evolution. I have occasion to discuss human population genetics with psychologists who study behavior genetics, and when population genetics issues come up in those discussions, some of the new discoveries are surprising even to them. It's hard for reporters, us, and even the working r…

There was actually a pretty good article about the Denisova human in one of the recent National Geographics. One of the researchers mentioned in the article made a similar point, that for him the most likely indication of the Desnisova find is that we currently are separating into sub-species where there aren't any and that what we are finding are differences between individuals and not new sub-species. I wonder when/if that will be the established view and some of these species will be consolidated.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#13

Post by simonh »

terabytest wrote: post #6

It's so mind boggling to think that the "Homo Erectus" existed as far back as 1.8 million years ago, yet most of our recent (and known history) happened in the last 5000 years, and we see that as a huge evolution. What the heck happened between 1 million years ago and now? The human race changed a lot and matured very much, but it's so incredible that such a big evolution only happened in the last few thousand years…

Agriculture. It's a several orders of magnitude improvement in the population density an area can support, which makes population centres possible, which makes specialisation viable, which makes everything else possible. If someone had developed agriculture 100,000 years ago, we'd currently be about 90,000 years more advanced than we are now.

Agriculture appears to have been developed independently in the Middle East, China and Americas about 10,000 years ago, but I and some others believe there was more dissemination of ideas, mainly via individual travellers or small groups of travellers, than conventional historians take into account.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#14

Post by jbattle »

tokenadult wrote: post #7

As another comment says, the author of this New York Times article, Carl Zimmer, is a very solid science writer who knows a lot about evolution. I have occasion to discuss human population genetics with psychologists who study behavior genetics, and when population genetics issues come up in those discussions, some of the new discoveries are surprising even to them. It's hard for reporters, us, and even the working r…

If the raw number of DNA differences don't scale with genealogically and morphological 'similarity' - does that imply that the number of genes that get expressed in ways visible to us (facial shape, hair, etc) are really few in number?

Either that, or the analysis you described was plain incorrect, or we are looking at DNA 'wrong' - seeing patterns in noise and noise in patterns.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#16

Post by gizmo686 »

leot wrote: post #9

The age of this DNA reinforces just how much of what we value today about "what makes us human" (creativity, intelligence, language, etc.) has lots to do with the knowledge accumulated via our culture, and relatively little to do with genetic differences. Whenever someone talks about how smart we are genetically, ask yourself if this is the kind of smart we were 10,000+ years ago.

The way I think about it is that there is a tipping point in intelligence where a species can build on its own discoveries at a much accelerated rate, similar to the concept of a singularity in AI. As 10,000 years is not that long from an evolutionary perspective, we are about the dumbest that a species could possibly be in order to reach that singularity point, otherwise we would have done it earlier.

Of course, this ignores factors such as non intelligence based adaptations (such as thumbs), antibiotic factors (climate). It also ignores the facts that intelligence is composed of many components, and our singularity might have happened after an improvement is some metric that does not contribute much to overall intelligence. For example, the ability to speak does not make an individual animal more intelligent, but it does facilitate the accumulation of intelligence through generations.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#17

Post by gizmo686 »

simonh wrote: post #13
terabytest wrote: post #6

It's so mind boggling to think that the "Homo Erectus" existed as far back as 1.8 million years ago, yet most of our recent (and known history) happened in the last 5000 years, and we see that as a huge evolution. What the heck happened between 1 million years ago and now? The human race changed a lot and matured very much, but it's so incredible that such a big evolution only happened in the last few thousand years…

Agriculture. It's a several orders of magnitude improvement in the population density an area can support, which makes population centres possible, which makes specialisation viable, which makes everything else possible. If someone had developed agriculture 100,000 years ago, we'd currently be about 90,000 years more advanced than we are now. Agriculture appears to have been developed independently in the Middle East…

This seems to beg the question of what caused agriculture to appear. Although given that it did appear, your explanation seems like a plausible explanation of how it spread and led to the rapid progress we have seen since.

A boring answer to this question is that it was simple incremental changes driven by random mutations and natural selection (eg. evolution). For example, we might have started to occasional plant the seeds of plants as we found them, which could become us regularly doing so. Then we might have started moving the seeds to more central locations, and eventually arrive at agriculture as we know it today. These adaptations may have started before homo-sapiens. If it happened long enough before (so that there is another species with a common ancestor that did this), we could check this by looking for agricultural tendencies in species related to us (If anyone is aware of research on this hypothesis, please post).

A more interesting hypothesis is that agriculture was the result of an abiotic change. Instead of gradually developing agricultural tendencies, we 'immediately' became agricultural following some other event, such as a change in climate. This seems to be consistent with my understanding of climate history, which puts us in a relatively short window of nice climate.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#18

Post by scott_s »

chris_mahan wrote: post #8
terabytest wrote: post #6

It's so mind boggling to think that the "Homo Erectus" existed as far back as 1.8 million years ago, yet most of our recent (and known history) happened in the last 5000 years, and we see that as a huge evolution. What the heck happened between 1 million years ago and now? The human race changed a lot and matured very much, but it's so incredible that such a big evolution only happened in the last few thousand years…

Nothing of interest, really. Just grunts and horrible screams. And lots of f*cking, of course, to compensate for the massive losses due to disease, wild animals, and famine cycles (which, thankfully, modern age shields us from--well, not the f-ing, I mean the rest.) Sadly, I must once more indicate that this post is sarcastic, for the humor-challenged ones.

It is possible for people to understand that you are joking, yet not like it and consider it conversational noise.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#19

Post by leot »

gizmo686 wrote: post #16
leot wrote: post #9

The age of this DNA reinforces just how much of what we value today about "what makes us human" (creativity, intelligence, language, etc.) has lots to do with the knowledge accumulated via our culture, and relatively little to do with genetic differences. Whenever someone talks about how smart we are genetically, ask yourself if this is the kind of smart we were 10,000+ years ago.

The way I think about it is that there is a tipping point in intelligence where a species can build on its own discoveries at a much accelerated rate, similar to the concept of a singularity in AI. As 10,000 years is not that long from an evolutionary perspective, we are about the dumbest that a species could possibly be in order to reach that singularity point, otherwise we would have done it earlier. Of course, thi…

Why do we need a tipping point?

Proposal:

1) Human progress arises from the development and improved use of tools/technology (and I'm including concepts like "if", as well as skills, as kinds of technology)

2) Our tool use abilities interact multiplicatively/geometrically. E.g., [what I can do with a hammer and a shovel] is not the sum of the [things I can do with hammers] and [the things I can do with shovels]

3) Our tool-use-abilities started meagre

4) Tool use is not uniquely human, but humans are better at it

5) Accidents of history and human development have allowed for the accumulation of tools (agriculture, e.g.)

... this "explanation" (or what have you) yields exponential growth curves that, I propose, would look very similar to those of humans. If there was a "tipping point" perhaps it was (5) -- the introduction of some substrate upon which cultural knowledge could grow.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#20

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

leot wrote: post #9

The age of this DNA reinforces just how much of what we value today about "what makes us human" (creativity, intelligence, language, etc.) has lots to do with the knowledge accumulated via our culture, and relatively little to do with genetic differences. Whenever someone talks about how smart we are genetically, ask yourself if this is the kind of smart we were 10,000+ years ago.

> Whenever someone talks about how smart we are genetically, ask yourself if this is the kind of smart we were 10,000+ years ago.

You want a more shocking thought?

Imagine how much knowledge spanning the 400,000 years since this specimen is forever lost to us because it was limited to oral tradition.

These people didn't had a wealth knowledge available one click-away to build upon, but I see no reason to believe they dramatically less intellectually capable than us because of genetics. They certainly possessed a lot of empirical knowledge about the things around them, necessary for survival.

Considering how some tribes knew for eons about the uses of medicinal herbs which are today used on our modern drugs, it's fascinating to think about what we might be missing. If even relatively recent knowledge (300 BC) gets lost [1], imagine how much science will "rediscover" things our descendants might have already known.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel

Post reply on HN