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Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans

theguardian.com

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Re: Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans

#21

Post by dmbche »

_AzMoo wrote: post #20
jjk166 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence was evolved millions of years after the most recent common ancestor. Harnessing fire, clothing, etc. came later still. The lineage that would ultimately give rise to humans split from the chimp/bonobo lineage as the human ancestors adapted to savanna life, likely due to aridification brought on by the formation of the Himalayas. It's possible that selective pressure towards intelligence was greater for t…

Is there a specific definition for intelligence?

Is there a specific definition of definition?

Re: Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans

#22

Post by AlotOfReading »

dboreham wrote: post #9
WalterBright wrote: post #5

I'm curious why humans evolved intelligence and chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans did not.

More energy from the digestive system to power a bigger GPU. Theories abound that this is due to the harnessing of fire for cooking.

Evolution doesn't have end goals like building the most powerful computer possible. If caloric excesses are a factor, it's because there was some other selective pressure that made use of the energy to support more neurons. But even then, more hardware isn't the same thing as more intelligence. Elephants and whales have bigger brains than we do. Shrews and birds have a higher brain/body mass ratio. None of them are intelligent to the degree humans are. An explanation for human intelligence has to explain us, not just our brain mass.

Re: Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans

#23

Post by gyomu »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #16
WalterBright wrote: post #5

I'm curious why humans evolved intelligence and chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans did not.

We don't know. All of the great apes are incredibly intelligent in comparison to most other animals. The basic roots of our intelligence are probably a common feature to the whole family, but there's no consensus on why it's so advanced in humans. Any paleoanthropologist can rattle off about half a dozen possible explanations, but we honestly don't have enough evidence to really distinguish if, when, and how these we…

Didn't a lot of other great apes evolve intelligence similar to ours, but we more or less drove them all to extinction?

Re: Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans

#24

Post by bqmjjx0kac »

dboreham wrote: post #9
WalterBright wrote: post #5

I'm curious why humans evolved intelligence and chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans did not.

More energy from the digestive system to power a bigger GPU. Theories abound that this is due to the harnessing of fire for cooking.

> More energy from the digestive system to power a bigger GPU.

Is GPU already the metaphor du jour? I thought we were still aboard the steam engine ;)

Re: Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans

#25

Post by AlotOfReading »

gyomu wrote: post #23
AlotOfReading wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't know. All of the great apes are incredibly intelligent in comparison to most other animals. The basic roots of our intelligence are probably a common feature to the whole family, but there's no consensus on why it's so advanced in humans. Any paleoanthropologist can rattle off about half a dozen possible explanations, but we honestly don't have enough evidence to really distinguish if, when, and how these we…

Didn't a lot of other great apes evolve intelligence similar to ours, but we more or less drove them all to extinction?

The jury is still out on exactly how intelligent other hominins were (and the extent of our involvement in their extinction). Regardless, the term human can apply to all of genus Homo and that's the sense that discussions of "human intelligence" typically use.

Re: Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans

#26

Post by Razengan »

WalterBright wrote: post #5

I'm curious why humans evolved intelligence and chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans did not.

Who says they didn't?

What would "intelligence" look like WHILE it was evolving?

A slightly more unsettling thought: How would newly-emerging intelligence FEEL like, internally?

Also, how would humans fare if born and raised in the wild, without any language or tools taught to them?

Re: Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans

#27

Post by SamBam »

acchow wrote: post #11
WalterBright wrote: post #5

I'm curious why humans evolved intelligence and chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans did not.

"Why humans evolved intelligence but orangutans did not". There's a different way to think about this that is closer to how evolution actually works and will make the answer clear. Our common ancestor (common to orangutans and humans) did evolve intelligence (concurrently with harnessing fire, clothing etc.). Not all of them, but some of them. And they broke off from the group. We now call them humans.

It sounds like you're saying that the common ancestor of humans and orangutans harnessed fire and made clothing. I don't think that's correct.

Re: Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans

#28

Post by hiatus »

WalterBright wrote: post #5

I'm curious why humans evolved intelligence and chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans did not.

I have no expertise in the field whatsoever but can't help but wonder if it is at all related to our consumption of cooked foods. At the very least it reduces the incidence of parasites but I am sure there are myriad benefits beyond treating foods for longevity through methods like smoking.

Re: Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans

#29

Post by SamBam »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #22
dboreham wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More energy from the digestive system to power a bigger GPU. Theories abound that this is due to the harnessing of fire for cooking.

Evolution doesn't have end goals like building the most powerful computer possible. If caloric excesses are a factor, it's because there was some other selective pressure that made use of the energy to support more neurons. But even then, more hardware isn't the same thing as more intelligence. Elephants and whales have bigger brains than we do. Shrews and birds have a higher brain/body mass ratio. None of them are i…

Sperm whales may have more massive brains, but they have fewer cortical neurons total, and of course a much smaller brain to body mass ratio.

But more importantly for this conversation, our brains use up a staggering 20-25% of our resting metabolic needs. A whale brain uses something like 3%.

For us to be able to devote 20% of our calories to our brains, we simply needed to have a huge excess in the number of calories we had available. This is why the cooking hypothesis makes sense. Once we were smart enough to get lots of excess calories, that opened the door to this new fitness landscape of organisms that could devote a ridiculous proportion of their food to their brains. It wasn't that we gave up something else, it's that this wasn't even a possibility before.

Re: Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans

#30

Post by bilbo0s »

milesrout wrote: post #4
AlotOfReading wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the evidence we have points to the vast, vast majority (>90%) of non-african human ancestry originating from hominin populations that were in Africa around 60-80k years ago, and were anatomically modern about 300k years ago. This article is about an ancestral clade of archaic hominins that contributed around 2% of modern non-african ancestry globally, that we've known about for years. OOA (with minor admixture) i…

It is also the consensus position for a lot of bad reasons though. There is an assumption that belief in, or even reasonable agnosticism towards, any other theory can only be motivated by racism. There are many people that believe OOA because they want to believe it, because they want to believe we are all more similar than we are different, etc. Multiregional hypotheses are perfectly plausible. We have very limited…

There are many people that believe OOA because they want to believe it

But, also, There are many people that [do not] believe OOA because they [do not] want to believe it.

That's why we look at genetic evidence, to eliminate nonsense. That evidence strongly points to chimps, gorillas, humans etc all coming from the same place.

If it makes you feels better, think of it this way:

we don't believe OOA because the evidence says we're related to blacks. We believe it because the evidence says we're pretty much hairless apes. (And a lot of us aren't even hairless!)

There, feel better about it now?

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