Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries • Hacker News Board

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#51

Post by hcarvalhoalves » Thu, Dec 05, 2013, 5:17 AM UTC

SectioAurea wrote: post #46

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's a relevant book from 1715, which I discovered while researching the existence of "ever-burning lamps": The History of Many Memorable Things Lost Which Were In Use Among the Ancients - https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6961227M/The_history_of_many... I believe it does refer to Damascus steel, as well as many other lost Classical through Dark Ages inventions. It digresses into talking about bygone social customs…

Fascinating, albeit hard for me to read due to the language. Thank you very much for the link.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#52

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 05, 2013, 5:30 AM UTC

DougWebb wrote: post #25

gizmo686 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

10,000 years ago is the end of the last ice age, before which climates were shifted, sea levels were lower, and most of the land humans tend to like to live on (near sea level) are now deeply submerged. We think agriculture and city-building started around that time, but it's possible we just haven't found older evidence because it was destroyed when the ice age ended and sea levels rose. It seems incredibly arrogant…

[deleted]

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#53

Post by simonebrunozzi » Thu, Dec 05, 2013, 5:30 AM UTC

qubitsam wrote: post #11

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.

qubitsam, let me introduce you to my favorite commenter on HN: tokenadult :)

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#54

Post by simonh » Thu, Dec 05, 2013, 8:13 AM UTC

DougWebb wrote: post #25

gizmo686 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

10,000 years ago is the end of the last ice age, before which climates were shifted, sea levels were lower, and most of the land humans tend to like to live on (near sea level) are now deeply submerged. We think agriculture and city-building started around that time, but it's possible we just haven't found older evidence because it was destroyed when the ice age ended and sea levels rose. It seems incredibly arrogant…

I don't buy the atlantis "they're all under the sea" theory at all. We are expected to believe that they only built cities by the coast and none at all along rivers or round lakes? None of these civilizations spread to areas where the sea level has not risen so much? Far too contrived for my tastes.

Il flip your arrogance accusation around. These people developed agriculture and even cities tens of thousands of years ago, yet none of them managed to put together a sustainable survivable civilization? None of them managed to go from basic agriculture to even slightly more advanced agriculture that would have launched them on the track to specialization, even given hundreds of thousands of years in which to try? Why not? What was wrong with them?

To a hunter-gatherer, which is a nomadic lifestyle, cultivation in a fixed area for long enough to both sow and later reap a crop is not at all obvious.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#55

Post by agumonkey » Thu, Dec 05, 2013, 8:41 AM UTC

bumbledraven wrote: post #50

adamors wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Chauvet Cave there are cave paintings that are 32,000 year old[1]. But what's even more interesting, is that some of these paintings are only 27,000 year old. Meaning, that these people knew about the place for almost 5000 years. Can you imagine that kind of continuity? The documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams[2] presents the cave in a breathtaking detail, definitely worth a watch. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/…

[T]hese people knew about the place for almost 5000 years. Can you imagine that kind of continuity? They must have been members of what David Deutsch calls a "static society". These are societies which actively try to keep things the same, and stamp out any innovation or differences. Things change there so slowly that the change is not noticeable within a single generation. In a 2011 interview with Ken Rose ( https:/…

Isn't it that they were just close to the zero on the exponent curve (kurzweil accelerating returns). Constraints very high with little knowledge and little meta-knowledge (just knowing something exists and is possible) giving a very slow pace

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#56

Post by lmm » Thu, Dec 05, 2013, 11:16 AM UTC

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…

I've heard it suggested that language made the big difference. We bummed around for 998 million years, not able to improve our lot much - but somehow, 2 million years ago we developed language, and after that we were able to rapidly improve (and even co-evolve with our improvements - I've heard that the invention of the baby sling allowed our brains to grow larger than without it).

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#57

Post by reirob » Thu, Dec 05, 2013, 11:42 AM UTC

VladRussian2 wrote: post #31

gizmo686 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/01/030120100451.ht... "Fungus-growing ants practice agriculture and have been doing so for the past 50 million years according to research published in the Jan. 17 issue of Science. These ants not only grow fungus gardens underground for food but also have adapted to handling parasitic "weeds" that infect their crops."

Nice, but fungus is not a plant strictly speaking "[..] These organisms are classified as a kingdom, Fungi, which is separate from plants, animals, protists and bacteria. [..]" [1]

Which leads to an off-topic question: Is mushroom cultivation considered as agriculture?

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

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#58

Post by groupthinker » Thu, Dec 05, 2013, 11:54 AM UTC

simonh wrote: post #54

DougWebb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10,000 years ago is the end of the last ice age, before which climates were shifted, sea levels were lower, and most of the land humans tend to like to live on (near sea level) are now deeply submerged. We think agriculture and city-building started around that time, but it's possible we just haven't found older evidence because it was destroyed when the ice age ended and sea levels rose. It seems incredibly arrogant…

I don't buy the atlantis "they're all under the sea" theory at all. We are expected to believe that they only built cities by the coast and none at all along rivers or round lakes? None of these civilizations spread to areas where the sea level has not risen so much? Far too contrived for my tastes. Il flip your arrogance accusation around. These people developed agriculture and even cities tens of thousands of years…

It's not "they're all under the sea" so much as "glaciated into mud".

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#59

Post by SectioAurea » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 3:10 AM UTC

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #51

SectioAurea wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a relevant book from 1715, which I discovered while researching the existence of "ever-burning lamps": The History of Many Memorable Things Lost Which Were In Use Among the Ancients - https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6961227M/The_history_of_many... I believe it does refer to Damascus steel, as well as many other lost Classical through Dark Ages inventions. It digresses into talking about bygone social customs…

Fascinating, albeit hard for me to read due to the language. Thank you very much for the link.

You're welcome! It did take me some hours to get through most of it. The content is unique enough to make it worthwhile. I was especially intrigued not only by the excellent breakdown of "ever-burning lamps", which are a more or less real thing, but by a mention of ancient Greek water organs, a musical instrument which involved water inside some sort of tubes.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#60

Post by mgraczyk » Fri, Dec 06, 2013, 10:43 PM UTC

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…

I believe the prevailing hypothesis is that there was a tiny mutation in a human brain ~50,000 years ago that causes spoken language to be possible, but there are other ideas. It's a fascinating area of research:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity