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

21–30 of 61 posts

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#21

Post by batbomb »

jrkelly wrote: post #3
batbomb wrote: post #2

They have more on this on the Nature podcast. I also highly recommend listening to the Nature podcast. It's free, and they usually interview authors of these articles, and it's presented in an elevated fashion that you won't get by reading the NYTimes. http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/

That NYT author, Carl Zimmer, is also pretty solid. He's doing a twitter Q&A now if you want to ask him Qs: https://twitter.com/carlzimmer/status/408327412250734592

Yeah this article is actually quite good, better than most science articles I've read from most major media outlets. I wasn't meaning to belittle this specific article, but I thought I'd point an actual interview with author Svante Pääbo.

Also, again, I think the Nature podcast is by far the best podcast for general science, so if "[people] fucking love science", I'd recommend listening to it weekly over liking a facebook page, especially as they cover their weekly publication on a slightly more accessible level. Also, Science (the periodical) has a pretty okay podcast too.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#22

Post by chris_mahan »

scott_s wrote: post #18
chris_mahan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Conversational noise? Does one consider things one does not like to be "conversational noise?" Oh well. One learns, someday, to welcome dissent.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#23

Post by scott_s »

chris_mahan wrote: post #22
scott_s wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Conversational noise? Does one consider things one does not like to be "conversational noise?" Oh well. One learns, someday, to welcome dissent.

There's a difference between "I do not like this, but it adds to the conversation" and "I do not like this, and it adds nothing to the conversation." The point of the moderation system here is to reduce noise and promote signal. One-liners and drive-by sarcasm do not add much to the conversation.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#24

Post by maxerickson »

leot wrote: post #19
gizmo686 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) Ou…

I think language works as a tipping point in that sequence. For technology to interact as you say, it has to spread easily.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#25

Post by DougWebb »

gizmo686 wrote: post #17
simonh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 to me to think that our ancestors, who were virtually identical to us much of those million+ years, required at-minimum hundreds of thousands of years to figure out what seeds are and how to make them grow. These are people who knew how to live off the land and were far more familiar with plants and animals than most of us could dream of being. These people invented astronomy, art, religion, clothes, tools, fire. They'd notice that plants produced seeds, that seeds wound up on the ground, and that new plants grew where the seeds fell.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#26

Post by stan_rogers »

gizmo686 wrote: post #17
simonh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Climate change is the working hypothesis at the moment. Specifically, general drought/desertification that drove the people at the origins of agricultural technology to a few great river valleys (notably the Nile and the Indus).

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#27

Post by DougWebb »

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…

What makes you think we've advanced in a straight line? We're surrounded by the ruins of lost civilizations, who often built things we would find very challenging to reproduce even with our modern machinery, if we could reproduce it at all. It seems much more likely that human civilization has advanced and been knocked back multiple times in multiple places, and we're currently at a high point.

We're probably the first ones to figure out how to use coal and oil to generate power and do far more work than can be achieved with animal and slave labor. I suspect that's the key to how high our high point is. But I also suspect that there are other sciences where we're not as advanced as our predecessors, and maybe even some we haven't discovered yet.

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#28

Post by VladRussian2 »

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…

> 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.

an exponential process (of life complexity in this case) looks the same at any scale. The Earth has existed for 4B years, life is ~3B years, life as a cell with nucleus ~2B (yea, 1B years to develop nucleus :)

http://www.caveofthemounds.com/geotimeline.htm

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#29

Post by coldtea »

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.

Dr. Peter Venkman: Ray, pretend for a moment that I don't know anything about metallurgy, engineering, or physics, and just tell me what the hell is going on.

Dr Ray Stantz: You never studied.

(I think the answer is simple: he has an interest in all those things, so he follows them).

Re: Oldest Human DNA Yet Found Raises New Mysteries

#30

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN