Will it conclude who the owner of Jerusalem is?
Homo Erectus, obviously.
Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave
#12As far as I can tell, the entire "Out of Africa" model taken for granted within the MSM is being treated with increasing skepticism/nuance by scientists actually studying the facts on the ground, leading to these odd & increasingly ancient "first modern out of Africa" stories which may be confusing the public more than they're illuminating the history of human populations. Razib Khan had a good short primer on this t…
Can you recommend a good primer on what we know about evolution and the history of our species, and the supporting evidence?
I thought The Selfish Gene would be this, but it seemed primarily focused on more abstract/philosophical questions, like group selection vs. gene selection. I'm more interested in concrete information about what our DNA and the fossil record can credibly establish. I want to know what facts are indisputably known, and which are more speculative.
Re: Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave
#13Every couple of months, we find new fossil evidence that "rewrites" the history of our species.
At what point is the theory just wrong?
Re: Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave
#14As far as I can tell, the entire "Out of Africa" model taken for granted within the MSM is being treated with increasing skepticism/nuance by scientists actually studying the facts on the ground, leading to these odd & increasingly ancient "first modern out of Africa" stories which may be confusing the public more than they're illuminating the history of human populations. Razib Khan had a good short primer on this t…
Can you recommend a good primer on what we know about evolution and the history of our species, and the supporting evidence? I thought The Selfish Gene would be this, but it seemed primarily focused on more abstract/philosophical questions, like group selection vs. gene selection. I'm more interested in concrete information about what our DNA and the fossil record can credibly establish. I want to know what facts are…
It's not out until March, but _Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past_ sounds like what you're looking for.
Re: Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave
#15Every couple of months, we find new fossil evidence that "rewrites" the history of our species. At what point is the theory just wrong?
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Re: Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave
#16As far as I can tell, the entire "Out of Africa" model taken for granted within the MSM is being treated with increasing skepticism/nuance by scientists actually studying the facts on the ground, leading to these odd & increasingly ancient "first modern out of Africa" stories which may be confusing the public more than they're illuminating the history of human populations. Razib Khan had a good short primer on this t…
Razib Khan is a shit source
Can you elaborate? What I've read from him seems fairly reasonable, but I am open to updating my model.
Re: Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave
#17Every couple of months, we find new fossil evidence that "rewrites" the history of our species. At what point is the theory just wrong?
This is a background issue in any study of the past: history, archaeology, genealogy. There's "true" in the absolute sense, as in what would you have seen had you been there. That's not really attainable. The kind of truth that's left in studies of the past is the consensus model reconstructed from the records, and that's always full of controversies.
Re: Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave
#18As far as I can tell, the entire "Out of Africa" model taken for granted within the MSM is being treated with increasing skepticism/nuance by scientists actually studying the facts on the ground, leading to these odd & increasingly ancient "first modern out of Africa" stories which may be confusing the public more than they're illuminating the history of human populations. Razib Khan had a good short primer on this t…
Can you recommend a good primer on what we know about evolution and the history of our species, and the supporting evidence? I thought The Selfish Gene would be this, but it seemed primarily focused on more abstract/philosophical questions, like group selection vs. gene selection. I'm more interested in concrete information about what our DNA and the fossil record can credibly establish. I want to know what facts are…
It sounds like there's precious little certainty to be had [1]:
So far, nobody has recovered ancient DNA from archaic human skeletal remains in Africa. The 2000-year-old Ballito Bay boy is not the oldest, but there are no DNA results from truly archaic specimens, like the Kabwe skull from Zambia. As a result, we don’t have the kind of record within Africa that geneticists have built for Neanderthals and Denisovans in Eurasia...
Morphology does not tell the story of modern human origins...Did short faces and rounded braincases really make a difference to the survival and success of modern humans? Maybe they were chance legacies of the population that gave rise to our gene pool. We don’t know.
Conclusion:
We have to discover more fossils. That’s the way that we will start to solve these new problems and shed light on old mysteries.
[1] https://medium.com/@johnhawks/the-story-of-modern-human-orig... via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16234903
Re: Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Razib Khan is a shit source
Can you elaborate? What I've read from him seems fairly reasonable, but I am open to updating my model.
I wouldn't have said "shit source", but I think he's better viewed as a reasonable populariser than a proper source. He is up with the literature (in the sense that the day after a new paper is published, he blogs about it), but he's not an authority in any way, and some of what he writes about e.g. the gendered aspect of IE migrations is a bit florid and unsupported by facts, as far as I can tell. You'd never find a reputable scientist in the field (lets say someone from Reich or Willerslev's labs) pushing lines like that.
Regarding the Out of Africa (OoA) model, that is definitely still the consensus model. What is becoming clearer is that subsequent to the OoA event, there was substantial admixture within OoA populations, backflow into Africa, and introgression from Archaic Humans (i.e. interbreeding with Neanderthals etc). Razib refers to this as the "Braided streams" model, rather than a model where populations split and then remained isolated.
The real revolution in understanding seems to me to be the role played by human migrations in hte formation of modern populations (i.e. the refutation of the "pots not people" view popular since the 60s.
Re: Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave
#20As far as I can tell, the entire "Out of Africa" model taken for granted within the MSM is being treated with increasing skepticism/nuance by scientists actually studying the facts on the ground, leading to these odd & increasingly ancient "first modern out of Africa" stories which may be confusing the public more than they're illuminating the history of human populations. Razib Khan had a good short primer on this t…
Every time I see someone talk about "the MSM" as a pejorative like this, I laugh, mostly at you, because the alternative is literally conspiracy theorists and, of course, the far right.
And, indeed, a quick search for Razib Khan brings up this: https://undark.org/article/race-science-razib-khan-racism/