Did Homo erectus linger in parts of Africa until as late as 35,000 years ago?

These findings simply do not imply in this conclusion. The archaic morphology of Iwo Eleru itself is already in the early sapiens range, Stringer compared it to Laetoli 18.

Sharing alleles with ancient diverged populations (or even species) simply doesn’t imply in recent episodes of admixture. Several lineages of alleles exist in a single population; that’s just “polymorphism”. And a species can have deeply divergent polymorphisms shared heterogeneusly along its populations (some humans having chimpanzee alleles, others having orangutan alleles, others having gorilla alleles – the deepest divergence there is about 13 million years, 130 million years of Broken Hill/rhodesiensis is the blink of an eye), with no need to posit cryptozoological theories or viable bestiality.

The complex farming trade systems of Papua and the giant longest lasting aquaculture trade farm of the Gundimartja people in Southern Victoria, (budji jim)8 000 years of constant production. Show that Aboriginal and Melanesia people developed farming without outside contact. Also there is an underestimation of the wild farming practiced by nomadic people’s.

A group than merely reduced the level of intra-group aggression could have less mortality and more numbers, and doom all the the other groups even if the the nicey- nicey group were relatively pacifistic toward other groups. Better to be genes of a cave wimp in the nicey-nicey (and hence flourishing) group that the genes of a big boss man in a relatively dwindling group (where only the strong are respected).

Maybe what C &H say is correct for early CroMagnons (who I believe are supposed to have used thrusting not throwing spears). But there is a lot of difference in the robustness of the skeleton between CroMagnons and Magdelenian hunters (and women and men).

I think the steppe tundra sexual selection hypothesis can be pushed further; tools get developed by paying attention to what others are doing and showing others what to do. To me that is intra -group communication, which is not only more like the bonobos’ than the common chimps’ behaviour, it’s more like women’s behaviour than men’s.

Animals in Europe may well have been a lot easier to hunt that the ones in Africa, which had evolved with human predation. The Falkland Islands wolf – ‘foolish dog o’ the south’ was easy to kill because in had no fear. Cro magnons were oversized bull necked thugs, and to me they look like they evolved where the main problem was not getting the groceries, but fighting for females.

Well thank you Sean not only for the ideas to chew on but the cite to some apparent authors to look into.

By my way of thinking, the hulking barrel chested Cro Magnons with their enormous heads seem adapted to being big boss man rather than fiddling about with tools, and they were not replaced–the later Europeans were their descendants. Brian Hare /Bruce Hood’s theory is that there was a process similar to wolf domestication into domestic dog or the Russian fox domestication experiment, and it made the Europeans progressively smarter. The sharpest reduction in size was during the Magdalenian.

I have read a modest amount about evolution (lots of the Gould books included), and with that reservation noted about it, as with this piece by Mr. Frost, one of the most interesting aspects of it doesn’t seem explored much, despite what appears (again, to me at least) to be its huge importance.

I’m not sure exactly how to define it, but that relatively unremarked upon aspect seems to me to be the lack of attention paid to the … social/cultural contribution to evolution in the form of intra-species aggression.

That is, while Mr. Frost here so typically talks so much (if not almost exclusively) about the evolution of physiological adaptations and how no doubt crucial they are to evolutionary success, look at what happened, say, to the neanderthals.

After all for a long long time they seem to have had plenty of adaptations to do well and spread wide.

But what seems to have happened to them? Did they lose their adaptations? No. Unlikely. Indeed the logic of natural selection would argue that if anything they gained some.

Instead of course their demise seems to be tied to the influx of more advanced humanoids, and its very difficult for me to believe that what happened to the neanderthals en masse wasn’t their being essentially massacred by their new neighbors. Just like Mr. Frost off-handedly mentions the reasonable proposition that archaic humans in Africa might have persisted longer than others elsewhere because of a better ability to “fend off” their more modern wanna-be new neighbors.

Or perhaps as another possible example the eradication of the Dorset arctic people with the influx of the more modern Innuit. With the former not even seeming to be in all that direct a competition with the Innuit for resources given that they seem to have been far more sea-based focused than the early Innuit at least.

Moreover this dynamic also seems to resonate with what we see in social animals, often to absolutely characteristic degree: One wolf pack gets too big for its territory and splits and one part moves elsewhere and there it doesn’t just compete “fairly” for the resources there, instead what does one inevitably see but fierce battles to the death. Genocidal in nature really.

Since this implicates matters of psychological mentality and instincts and emotions I suppose this ventures ultimately into the realm of socio-biology/evolutionary psychology. But, nevertheless, I can’t help but believe that it is *just*as important a part of the evolutionary story of what we see today as the story of the evolution of physiological adaptations to environment.

I.e., with many species, the reason they are here today is that not only because they are to some successful degree physiologically adapted to their environment, but also only because they were conquerers essentially. They didn’t just “outcompete” their relatives in the sense of being better hunter-gatherers or even farmers: They slaughtered out the others.

And again, that this is *just* as important a part of the story as the physiological adaptations to environment have been for many species.

If so seems to say something very deep and profound about our nature since one can hardly imagine that we are one of the species that this dynamic did not work its will with.

Anyway, maybe modern humans’ intelligence had something to do with them having less need to be fearful, or aggressive.

I doubt it. The first signs of human culture (cavepaintings, music instruments and sculptures) are from Europe, where humans and Neanderthals were competing with each other.

Hey Peter, its true that jews have a high rate of neanderthal genes?

There was someone a while back who posted a comment on E&P with a link to study of chimp society. It said the males had expanded chests and looked scared apart from the boss chimp. I have read the boss chimp tends to bash up females so he and his pals can mate with her. Chimps are known to make war on neighbouring chimps too. For chimps avoiding violence from rival males and rival groups seems to have been a salient problem.

Bonobos:”Bonobos are much more likely to keep the peace by offering a sexual favor, whereas a chimpanzee’s first instinct is to secure dominance through battle. In chimp groups, the highest-ranking male is the only one allowed to mate with the females, but in bonobo cultures, everyone has sexual freedom”.

So the adaptations of the archaic-ancestry humans might have been more like chimps (where there is ever present risk of violence adaptation to it would be useful), while modern humans were more like bonobos. There is a belief that bonobos would not be able to survive around chimps, but bonobo don’t have to deal with chimps as bonobos only live in the resource rich and isolated bend of the Congo basin. Bonobos are really smart Bonobo Stone Tools as Competent as Ancient Human?. Genius ape Kanzi.

Anyway, maybe modern humans’ intelligence had something to do with them having less need to be fearful, or aggressive.

Peter,

Is the Siberian image that van Deusen and yourself refer to as 'monkey' the same as, overlapping with or distinct from the 'chuchunaa' and 'mulen' images?

The Siberian 'wildman' image I am familiar with seems to represent anatomically and culturally modern human hunter foragers, not a monkey.

http://w11.zetaboards.com/bonesandbehaviours/topic/8937220/1/

Thought the fossils from Ethiopia of Homo Sapiens (IDATU?) were 200,000 years old.

Is there any chance that some homo sapiens evolved outside of Africa? and that they interbred with some line of modern homo sapiens sapiens?

The Soko

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9A04E5DB1E31EE3ABC4D53DFB466838B699FDE

Very late to the thread… but…

IF Hobbits survived on Flores long enough to overlap the modern humans (as described by the "Ebu Gogo" legends on Flores)…

AND Melanesians today have an exceptionally high level(8%)of archaic Denisovan DNA…

Could it be that the Hobbits of Flores, were simply insular dwarfed Denisovans… whose DNA introgressed into the founder population of Melanesia?

I saw that show on Hobbits, and they proved very clearly to me that the remains were Australopithecus Afarensis the same as LUCY our alleged missing link in Africa. Whats wrong? Not ready to admit all races and humans on earth didn't evolve from black africans in the shortest time span imaginable and then populated an entire planet in an incredibly short time span? Yeah because it didn't happen that way.

That documentary on 'the hobbits' also showed the find of SEVERAL Australopithecus skulls & almost completely full skeletons found in GEORGIA and were at least 2 million years old, that also proves that our common NON HUMAN ancestor was already out of Africa MILLIONS of years ago, which makes a hell of a lot more sense.

Inuits in Alaska have not changed in 10,000 years, they have not lightened or turned blonde or blue eyed or into a different race.

Because things like that take MILLIONS of years.

Even the monkeys in Asia have epicanthal FOLDS, and you think some blacks just walked over there and turned chinese ? BULL SHIT

Moreover, hominid fossils in China share the same facial features: comparatively flat faces, a larger angle between the nose and the forehead, a flat nose bridge, rectangular eye sockets and forward-projecting cheekbones. All these features are absent in Africans

http://johnhawks.net/explainer/laboratory/race-cranium

"Cranial features and race

Shape of the eye orbits, viewed from the front. Africans tend to a more rectangular shape, East Asians more circular, Europeans tend to have an “aviator glasses'' shape."

In terms of nose bridge flatness, African nasal bones are pretty flat compared to European nasal bones. Difference with Asians is that the flatness comes from very reduced depth and slightly reduced width, while flatness for Africans comes from increased width and slightly reduced depth. So Asian nasal bones look flatter in profile, despite having similar kind of angle (not sure who has a flatter nasal angle).

Be interesting to check whether the nose flatness of these hominids comes from having a shallow nose or a broad nose.

Not sure how to assess angle between nose and forehead – there is a trend in hominids across time to have a more vertical and less retreating forehead. Also "comparatively flat faces"? If you ignore the correlation with projecting cheekbones, then it seems like that's a reduction in prognathism, and that happens everywhere over time (someplaces more, some less) as well.

Yes an interesting subject. I've lived in China for 45 years and studied ancient Chinese skeletons, from the holocene to present time. I would say that the only difference between the Chinese (and most phenotypes from East Asia), relates to the emergence of the mongoloid body plan, and especially the unique features of the mongoloid skull. Of course, the dramatic effect of a dominant grain diet (rice) and 1,828 famines over the past 2,000 years, have turbocharged the effect of neoteny on the mongoloids and especially southern mongoloids, with expreme child like facial features, reduced stature, and in most cases a postcranial skeleton with a body plan of a 12 year old child. Surely such extreme selection pressure presents issues about the idea that modern Chinese evolved, as a different species, to that of Europeans and Africans. In this sense the initial "Multi-regional Theory" of modern human has a problem.

For anyone wanting to study the Chinese phenotype, I recommend Han Kangxin a retired physical anthropologist from Beijing, who has studied hundreds of Central Asian and East Asian modern human skeletons, and, with his wife (a paleoanthropologist) has a passion for Peking Man. In Prof Han's own words – The Chinese could not have evolved from Peking Man because of so many morphology differences, such as the chin, flat brow and small brain. Of course, the Peking Man fossils (in fact all Homo Erectus skeletons from China), are, real fossils, with no bone, and as such no DNA. Thus, unlike the Neanderthal and Denisovan, which although considered fossils, due to their age, are actually bone, there is no way of proving whether H. Erectus, through DNA, is related to modern humans.

Personally, I believe H. Erectus in China had a full body of hair and was not as erect, nor had the hand dexterity of modern humans, even our most archaic relatives. Basically, they were really archaic and as such maybe a little too different for mixed breeding to have occurred, with modern Homo sapiens. Of course, this does not mean that interbreeding did not occur with say H. Erectus and the Denisovans, or other homind species which arrived and made Central and East Asia home, 1 million to maybe 200,000 years ago.

By the way, the Denisovan finger used to extract DNA from, has not and will never prove, whether this species had a chin, thick eyebrow ridges or a flat face with a large frontal cortex.

Rather foolish comments I made there, thanks for setting me right.

"Instead, the data can be most parsimoniously explained if the Denisova gene flow occurred in Southeast Asia itself. Thus, archaic Denisovans must have lived over an extraordinarily broad geographic and ecological range, from Siberia to tropical Asia."

That entails accepting Denisovians were able to adapt to the challenges of survival over a huge north-south range. Siberia's climate was different back I believe, but it's still pretty far north. It suggests a highly troubling use of brainpower for technological innovation.

A 'parsimonious' explanation should not accept Denisovians could independently evolve advanced capacities not too different from contemporaneous modern human capacities. That is is half way accepting a key tenet of the multiregional hypothesis I think.

When should HBD Day occur?

Read the proposal and vote in the poll my blog.

The Chinese are very good at earth sciences and things requiring concrete observations. Carlton Coon noted that modern Asians have certain features, such as being flat faced and the plane of their forehead, in common with the archiacs of their region. Is Nanjing Man the ancestor of the modern Chinese? "One of the puzzles that the out-of-Africa theory needs to account for is the prevalence of shovel-shaped front teeth among the modern Chinese population. Dr. Xing Song says the distinctively-shaped teeth are prevalent in the Mongoloid race in East Asia. [...] According to Xing, these peculiarly shaped teeth were inherited in a continuous line from early Chinese hominids. About 80 percent of Chinese have such upper front teeth in contrast to only 5 percent of Europeans and 10 percent of Africans. Xing says this is strong evidence of the continuity of human evolution in China.

Moreover, hominid fossils in China share the same facial features: comparatively flat faces, a larger angle between the nose and the forehead, a flat nose bridge, rectangular eye sockets and forward-projecting cheekbones. All these features are absent in Africans"

100% independent evolution in China (which would make the Chinese a different species)is most unlikely. But I think when there are such notable archaic-modern similarities with only 4% Neanderthal admixture found, a rethink is called for. In relation to China at least.

"Denisovans must have lived over an extraordinarily broad geographic and ecological range, from Siberia to tropical Asia"
You sound a little doubtful. Could there have been still unknown archaics to the south of the Siberian Denisovans.

Also Peter…do you think there is any chances that oral transmission of neanderthal sightings could account for the constant references to 'giants' and inbreedings between giants and humans, in the nordic mythology?

hmm, right…it cannot look like a complete monkey either. I mean Neanderthals had tools, so i gave him a primitive spear, so people who witnessed him must have recognized that he was also somehow human. I don't know…you think he was very hairy on the face?
Lots of hairy monkeys are not very hairy on the face, proportionaly…

I had some fun with 3d renderings:

[IMG]http://i42.tinypic.com/2a8gga9.jpg[/IMG]

How I see an european neanderthal:
[IMG]http://i41.tinypic.com/14ilevp.jpg[/IMG]

"modern humans picked up archaic admixture as they spread out of Africa and into Eurasia."

What current population has the least amount of archaic admixture? Are there any realtively pure 'modern' human populations? Ethiopians?

GNXP: The evolution of the human face post says – "some of the individual loci have a strong enough effect that it’s visible by eye!" (It's interesting about pigmentation too.)

Xinzhi Wu says "There is a morphological mosaic between H. s. erectus and H. s. sapiens in China. The existence of common features and the morphological mosaic suggest continuity of human evolution in China."

For the features to be similar would that not take more than a few % ? Unless there is some advantage to a certain shape of skull and teeth. It seems unlikely 4% archaic ancestry led to regional archaic features coming though in modern population. If 4% was enough for the archaic features to show through, then why did that happen only in East Eurasia?

It at least reduces the size of the pool of people available to cheat with, to the extent that folks understood the heritability of such traits.

Off topic perhaps, but this harkens back to some of your earlier topics.

One effect of different hair colors and eye colors among Caucasians is that it is harder for Caucasian women to cheat, say, than it is for Asian women.

I am not saying that these differences evolved for that purpose, but they would have had an effect once started.

How much paleantology is done in places like Arabia, Persia and Iraq if Africa had so many Archaics perhaps the middle east is a more likely homeland of Sapiens that perhaps could be missed by a lack of digging. At the crossroads of the continents that region could also have more mutations available for selection.

So as I understand it, the theory in the Watson 1997 paper, supported as far as I can tell by Labuda 2000, is that two groups of anatomically modern humans separate in Africa, then stay separate for 20,000 to 100,000 years. Then one of the groups becomes the behaviorally modern humans and expands all over Africa in the Upper Paleolithic, and mixes with the previously separate (non-behaviorally-modern?) population (resulting in Watson's 13% admixture figure) and (less) some super-archaics (the 2%), and also expand all over the world and mix with archaic populations where they find them, like Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Is the 13% figure controversial? You describe them as "almost human." What do we know about the two separate groups? I notice this kind of admixture is not even mentioned on the Wiki for human-archaic admixture, and it's certainly the first time I've heard of it, fifteen years after the Watson study. Has anyone supported or refuted it? I probably don't have the right search terms, because I can't find anything more recent than the Labuda 2000 paper.

you people are a bunch of sperglords

Spandrell said…
13% of negroid genes are non-sapiens?Is this certain?

plus 2%

If a population stays put in one place, like those chimps, it will accumulate more and more "junk" variability. If, however, it buds off and adapts to a new environment, it will lose much of that variability…

2 Questions for Peter:

Do Europeans have more genetic variability than Euro-Canadians since the latter budded off to become a founder population?

One more question. Which group has more genetic variation, Europeans or Melanesians? Thanks..

10,000 YE says that introgresssing alleles were strongly selected when agriculture presented humans with new problems.

The West of Africa was where the archiacs were. West Africa is also where the Bantu expansion started.

"1. The estimated time of divergence between modern humans and Neanderthals is about 500,000 years ago. According to Hammer et al., the estimated time of divergence between modern humans and the unidentified "Afro-archaics" is about 700,000 years ago."

Thanks Peter.

I think other, deeper divergence times for Neanderthal are still in currency, and appear to me to be more common based on the recent genetic data, the Neanderthal genome (rather than the cranial data):

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5979/710

"Assuming an average DNA divergence of 6.5 million years between the human and chimpanzee genomes, this results in a point estimate for the average divergence of Neandertal and modern human autosomal DNA sequences of 825,000 years. We caution that this is only a rough estimate because of the uncertainty about the time of divergence of humans and chimpanzees."

The comparison here is a reference genome UCSC hg18 (which I believe is composed of anonymous donors of unknown ethnic origin – but I think may be CEU – White Utah).

older and mtDna only

http://fsu.academia.edu/PeterBeerli/Papers/632982/When_did_Neanderthals_and_modern_humans_diverge

"gene divergence time of 631-789 KY".

likewise

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

"The estimated average time of divergence between Denisovan and Neanderthal sequences is 640,000 years ago, and that between both of these and the sequences of modern Africans is 804,000 years ago. "

Of course, in the latter case divergence times are based on modern Africans, so perhaps could could be an overestimate for the reasons of archaic mixture into Africans…?

It seems that that Europeans may have significantly less archaic ancestry than other humans.

@ Aaronovitch,

I complained to PBS a few years ago about "Race the Power of an Illusion". I received an email from the producer Larry Adelman attaching a document explaining their position. He also queried why it would matter if race didn't exist.

Since smaller temporalis muscles cannot close as large a jaw, jaw size was reduced. East Asians average a flatter face than do Whites, who average a flatter face than do Blacks.

East Asians supposedly have a more prognathic (forward jutting from the face) and absolutely anterior-posterior larger jaw than Whites.

According to the physical anthropology.

See the index of prognathism on http://95.211.45.61/hanihara.flatness.pdf (page 112-113 in the document). East Asians are a little more prognatheous than Whites, but not much, and have the higher basion-prosthion lengths than Whites (i.e. larger jaws).

East Asians relative to Whites (and I think Blacks as well) also have a higher face, and consequently have the brain less above the face and more behind the face, like our recent ancestors (although I think recent Europeans have this quality compared to paleolithic Europeans as well, despite having a much more lightly built skull).

East Asians do have a flatter midface of course.

Prognathism may be due to gravity.

Well since the extra teeth are a derived feature, it seems more likely that we've always had them, and the human diaspora first lost them in Eurasia through natural selection. And I find Rushton's case here compelling:

"Fig. 4 illustrates that with increasing brain size there is decreasing prognathism and a flatter face (Cranial and Mandibular Traits 9, 11, 19). Muscles are no longer available to hold up a heavy forward jutting jaw. Since smaller temporalis muscles cannot close as large a jaw, jaw size was reduced. East Asians average a flatter face than do Whites, who average a flatter face than do Blacks. Consequently, there is less room for teeth, resulting in smaller teeth, shorter roots, and fewer teeth (Mandibular Traits 16–18, 23)."

I found this on the PBS website:

RACE – The Power of an Illusion

There's more genetic diversity within a group of chimps on a single hillside in Gomba than in the entire human species.

How is this possible? Is this just a noble lie? Or is this some sort of semantic shell game that is technically "true" while conveying incorrect information to people who aren't in on the joke?

13% of negroid genes are non-sapiens?
Is this certain?

To expand (probably unnecessarily) if it isn't already clear:

Lets say you have population A.

A splits so it leaves descendent B where it is, descendent C to the north and descendents D and E to the west and south.

All these populations drift from one another and there is an even rate of drift in each group. Theres no reason to assume any of these populations would be closer from drift than the others.

Let's say B mixes with D and E – would it become less close to C than B is? No, because B is mixing with groups which is no more or less dissimilar to C than B itself is.

Now, if B and C are either part of a breeding cline to the exclusion of D and E, or B and C share a more recent common ancestor, then for B to mixed with D and E will take it further from C.

Could it also be due to Sub-Saharan Africans becoming further removed from the Neanderthal genome through admixture with other archaic groups?

We, of course, would need some reason to think the early Homo Sapiens who expanded into Eurasia were Neanderthal shifted relative to other populations in Africa (the archaic groups) across their genome.

Would we really expect an East African African hominin to be more Neanderthal shifted than a South or West African one? That would require the East African hominin to either

- have been part of a breeding cline with Neanderthal populations, and for this to have been more the case than with the South and West African hominins. (note this gets us back to Neanderthal mixture again, just through intermediate species in North Africa and the Middle East)
- share a more recent common ancestor with Neanderthal than with the South and West African hominins

I find these totally unlikely propositions myself, but the fossil record is rather fragmentary.

It takes me days to collect my thoughts and so my comments are often the last ones posted. In response to Razib’s comment “until recently it was common to posit that modern humans, our own lineage, had some special genius which allowed them to sweep the field and extinguish our cousins.” I know you are referring correctly to the Out of Africa theory that has recently been proven incorrect. But later, aproximately 65,000 years ago there is a genetic indication of a population bottleneck of as few as 10,000 of our direct ancestors that occupied the planet. I never bought the theory that this population bottleneck was caused by disaster such as the Sumatra super volcano, I have always thought it illogical that mankind would verge on the cusp of extinction right when we were bordering on full modernity. I think the reason for the small population was that was this population bottleneck was the point in time when we developed some special genius which allowed us to sweep the field.

Shades of Cordwainer Smith. You write very poetically at times, Razib.

Since culture is the disembodied transmission of information, it would have been possible for the different human lineages to transfer information laterally, i,e. to learn from each other (and I believe the archaeological record does show overlap between Neanderthal and Modern cultural remains, though this is generally interpreted in favour of the Moderns).

Literacy is a further step change in the transmission of information, hence the acceleration of cultural change. Arguably as a result of literacy, we’ve had the unification of the earth, our environment, through exploration, including deep sea navigation. That allowed the body of scientific knowledge to be filled in – and perhaps, like doing a jigsaw, this has proceeded faster and faster as the picture has emerged.

As Francis Bacon said in his *De Augmentis Scientiarum* (Advancement of Learning,
1605, translated 1733): “this proficience in navigation and discoveries may plant also an expectation of further proficience and augmentation of all sciences … as if the openness and throughpassage of the world and the increase of knowledge were appointed to be in the same ages.”

To take the periodic table as an example, some of the elements are found only in particular deposits around the world, and couldn’t have been assembled without global travel.

I would definitely say at this stage, Razib, that Rome’s issues with all this are now definitely more than “possible”!

You won’t see culture in the genetic record as phenotypic differences. Once humans had the capacity of speech, of inheriting not only (almost exclusively) via genes, but when culture started to become another important pathway of heritage, you could imagine having different linages of humans with exactly the same phenotypic traits (cranial size, ability to speak, etc.) but different cultural heritage and therefore different cultural abilities. The genetic differences in these two lineages of humans (with different cultures) would arise in parallel with the culture, and they would be correlated but have no causative relation.

So is it culture that makes us human? But can we be humans without our genetic heritage?

I think people really need to think about how they are defining human and what is pure.

Basically to define *human* we should look at what people you want to call human and see what they have in common.

It seems that all humans have an element of that 80kya East African (EA) population but there is no reason to think that those closest to that population are the *most* human. That would just be pointless… It would be just as fair to blindly say those with only half EA are the *most* human. How much the EA element varies is trivial, apart from zero. The reason it would be strange to define those fully decended from EA as *most* human is because it would be using a trivial method and a method that fails to describe an important commonality between most humans, namely having some neandertal. If I wanted to I could call the proto eurasian as most human and closeness to them as closeness to most human.

And BTW, the fact that ME neandertal mixed with humans means they were human!!!

Just "wow" at the pictured skull. Seriously, someone had a gall to assign it to the same species as modern humans? Nothing is impossible in anthropology, it seems.

"It’s interesting that we have varying degrees of archaic admixture. But what does it all mean? Did these different admixtures make us different in different ways?"

One interperetation could be that Europeans are purer (ie relatively speaking). Melanesians have the most archiac admixture found so far and (IMO) all that admixture hasn't noticably helped or hindered them. So that leaves the challenge presented by the conditions of life as the key factor in driving evolution.

What fascinates me is that number, 4%. That's huge. To reach that number today, a high proportion of earlyer sapiens must have kept an even higher proportion of neanderthal genes for a very long time.

"la guerre du feu' from JJ Anauld, initially looking naivelly ireallistic with all its different looking people, seems more and more plausible:
At this time, all the tribes in your neighbourhood would look distinct from each other, with all sort of different atavisms in each of them.

Maybe the cherry picked genes have altered so that they are difficult to identify as Neanderthal.

The geneticists say the mtDNA of today's Europeans is totally different from Ice age North Europeans, conclusive proof that the Ice age people of Europe died out and were replaced by ME farmers. Well so much the worse for the geneticists! I know that they're wrong about that. And if mtDNA (which is said to not be subject to natural selection) can evolve over time in that way nuclear DNA certainly can too.

———————————–
Why were Neanderthals red haired, something to do with Vitamin D right ? No they were woodland ambush predators so evolved a furry camouflage suit . "Orangutans are greatly camouflaged in rainforests because of the little sunlight that filters through the dense canopy reflects green light and absorbs the red-orange light that is similar to the color of the Orangutan's coat"

GC & HH ' purely hypothetical' example of a mental faculty of Neanderthals which could have been useful in moderns is anticipating the movements of a prey animal so as to avoid getting stomped or gored.

I think Neanderthals lay in ambush and popped up to surround their prey. So if the Neanderthals possessed a special form of spatial awareness/(TOM) it would be to let them anticipate the escape route of the prey in order to deliberately get in the way of the animal in such a way so that the animal would run onto the Neanderthal's stabbing spear.
A Russian site (Here) claims that – The ancient hunter could have crawled towards an animal as close as possible, and then had run as fast as he could, throwing a javelin, while running. However, a heavy spear is much more effective at small distances, than a light javelin. Calculations show that Neanderthal men had been able to cover 15-20 meters within 1-2 seconds, which is enough for a unexpected and successful attack. This means that Homo neanderthalensis were fast and accurate hunters, not clumsy snails as some may think.

I think that is nonsense, even if the animals did not hear or smell the hunters approach. The final rush would immediately startle the prey into flight., No human could cover 15-20 meters fast enough to catch a wild animal stationary (if he could catch it at all, which I doubt). The lumbering Neanderthals certainly couldn't as they lacked the inner ear structure indecative of that kind of agility. An attempt to rush at and spear an animal which would be moving away from the hunter would result in a the spear strike with very little actual velocity.

The pattern of injuries in Neanderthals is support for the Neanderthals strategy having been to lurk around the game trails in wait for a prey animal to walk into a prepared ambush, then popping up to surround their prey and spear it as it tried to burst through the cordon.

The technological complexity of the steppe-tundra inhabitants, was it a big step up from previous human achievement ?

Chris Stringer was on BBC radio talking about the 13,000-year-old Iwo Eleru skull this morning. He did his Phd on it, now it has suddenly become apparent that it looks primitive.

It all depends how common hybridization was. A modern human who resorted to mating with an archaic would be one rejected as a mate by other modern humans and be of poor genetic quality. So the hybrid would have a lot stacked up against it. But if the dice were thrown often enough..

Few think that second-trimester abortions are late-stage murder. Your original statement was off in that respect.

Most people in the world will never meet a Bushman or a Pygmy or a Melanesian. Yet, they have an outsized share of human genetic diversity. The undertold story that is the necessary corollary of that is that the largest subpopulations of Africa and Asia are more closely related than intuition on the overall levels of diversity in those populations would suggest. West Africa, for example, is far more genetically homogeneous than the high level of political and linguistic fragmentation there would suggest, and the European-Asian gap is small indeed. The odds of a Greek man and a man from Northern Ethiopia having significantly overlapping genomes is much higher than most people would expect.

The psychological importance of the fact that a huge number of populations of the world have archaic admixture is probably greater than the fact that more populations have been discovered to have ancient admixture from different sources. The destructive ideologies of racism are caught up in the notion of purity, and deprived of that have a hard time reaching a boiling point.

http://www.calamitiesofnature.com/archive/?c=582

John,

I went back and looked over the comments, and I think the discrepancy arose because we are using “late-term” differently. My comment uses “late-term” to refer to abortions done in the second and third trimester. Yours defines “late-term” to mean abortions done 19 weeks after conception, which is toward the end of the second trimester. If your definition is the commonly accepted one then I apologize for using the term carelessly.

Gonzales v. Carhart is here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-380.ZO.html The exact quote is: “Between 85 and 90 percent of the approximately 1.3 million abortions performed each year in the United States take place in the first three months of pregnancy, which is to say in the first trimester.”

No link, Mark. Why did a right to life group use much smaller numbers? I smell a rat.

Razib,

I respect your blog and have no desire to show disrespect by bringing back up a subject whose discussion you’ve proscribed, but I also don’t want people to think I just make up inflammatory numbers. So, as my last comment on this issue and thread if you’ll permit it:

@Emerson – I got my figure from the Supreme Court’s holding in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007), which relied on figures from Planned Parenthood.

Again, my last comment here.

“I wonder if it is possible in a language using clicks to yell, shout, or warn other people at a distance? Is it only a viable language over small distances?”

Miriam’s voice disagrees(/d):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfZA4TkjbtE

At any rate, I think vowels are fine, we all raise our vocal range when shouting (especially over noise; while acoustically, lower tones are more appropriate over extreme distances). And I agree that click sounds are a bit more clandestine and have been used in the context of animals (but not as a full-fledged language) elsewhere for millennia. As such, I also highly doubt there are any specific genetic links for sound production: so far, research seems to show that any known language can easily be learned by newborns regardless of genetic background.

In the first episode of the BBC series Razib posted a while back, the presenter notes that a click language is very suitable for hunters to communicate quietly while stalking prey animals. Basically, all sound seems to disappear except the clicks, which are very quiet, and could be indistinguishable from insect sounds. As modern humans evolved as group hunters, this would have high utility.

For using at distance, shouting warnings, etc, I’d guess the vowels come into play much more.

It’s interesting that one of the San genomes had a non-standard FOXP2 SNP.

I am wondering if this can be a sequencing error? Because if it’s not, it’s huge. For it is not just some non-standard SNP but a full blown missense mutation, a potentially drastic one, too – L558P. That position is in the forkhead DNA binding domain, close to protein-DNA interface, likely to be critical for maintaining local structure. It seems to be absolutely conserved in mammals (I checked: monkeys, elephants, hamsters). All that in a protein that has only three amino acid residue differences between mouse and human and it’s either a sequence error or a mutation that ought to have huge functional consequences.

“But she [Tarzan's ape foster mother] was still an ape, a huge, fierce, terrible beast of a species closely allied to the gorilla, yet more intelligent; which, with the strength of their cousin, made her kind the most fearsome of those awe-inspiring progenitors of man.”
–Tarzan of the Apes, Chapter IV

For what it’s worth, Paul du Chaillu describes at least one “species” of chimp still not recognized by biologists in his 1861 Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (an interesting read). Burroughs relied on this and other accounts by early explorers for the backgrounds of his first Tarzan novels.

Just muse on how taxonomists should treat us.

Down with human exceptionalism! Chances are that if any wide-ranging species were to be studied as exhaustively as H.sapiens, all kinds of weird things would be found in its evolutionary history. This is life. Life is always complicated. And any taxonomy is always imperfect.

Is this title a play on Of Mice and Men? I saw the movie as young kid and was really enjoying it, and then it turned and cried my eyes out when they killed the handicapped guy. It blew my mind back then.

@26, the same thought occurred to me.

Dunno if it’s relevant, but plenty of people (self included) use click sounds when calling domesticated animals. Perhaps because (as @27 says) they travel further.

@27, interesting speculation. One thing to do would be to show that native South Africans do indeed have an easier time producing these sounds, controlling for whether an individual’s first language has clicks or not. (Tough experiment to perform, probably.)

@24,

I’d imagine that Clicks travel over larger distances?

The native Canarians used a whistling language called Silbo, with which they could “talk” from one mountain to another.

It’s interesting that one of the San genomes had a non-standard FOXP2 SNP. Which prompted me a year ago to speculate that the standard human FOXP2 introgressed from Neanderthals. But maybe it’s the case that some SAN have an archaic introgressed FOXP2. Or is this mutation confer some advantage in producing clicks?

I’ve wondered if the clicks in click languages were evolved by hunter-gatherers to signal one another while hunting because they better mimic background noises in the forest.

@22, click languages still have vowels, so it should be possible. (The clicks are just another type of consonant.) I have wondered if there’s some acoustic property that makes them more useful to hunter-gatherers in an open environment (e.g., San, Hadza, Sandawe), but I have no idea. (But I would think that clicks would usually be *louder* than other consonants.)

@23, see first comment. (Unless someone else had the same idea.)

Can’t remember who it was but somebody recently proposed “Mangani” for the clade including Homo and Pan but excluding Gorilla. You’ll have to fight it out.

Forgive the ignorance ( my field is Astronomy, and of no use here), but I wonder if it is possible in a language using clicks to yell, shout, or warn other people at a distance? Is it only a viable language over small distances?
I wonder if the loss of click sounds is promoted by a change in climate and environment as much as cultural transfer?
I can imagine one person in a rainforest saying to another, “Let’s go to the other side of the valley, the food is better.” However, “Look out for the lion!” on an open plain, into the wind, to another person 200 yards away seems more difficult. Can it in fact be done?

@14, on further thought, I can see your point. You’re taking a demographic and/or geographic viewpoint (there is a group of people living in a certain area which has continuously used click consonants, even if there has been admixture from invaders), while I suppose I was taking more of a linguistic viewpoint (there is a language family that originally had no click consonants, but now one of its subfamilies does via lateral transfer).

@18, clicks could still be transmitted even if there were language loss. For example, if all Khoisan languages die out in the next century, the clicks will likely persist in Xhosa and other Bantu languages. But your other point, about the difference between the Bantu-Pygmy and the Bantu-Khoisan relationships, makes sense to me (and maybe helps to explain why Pygmies lost their languages while Khoisan didn’t).

@18,

Right, there might have been many Pygmy languages, and Bantu served as a lingua franca – for trade or exchange purposes – which eventually became their primary language.

Just to be clear – that Ian (#6) isn’t me. (And, @Razib – why not just delete them? This is far too interesting a topic to close).

With respect to the loss of click sounds by Pygmy peoples, the fact that they lost their language is probably sufficient to explain the loss of clicks – assuming that they had any to begin with. You can’t transmit linguistic elements that you have lost. Why this happened is another question – but it’s worth noting that Pygmy groups are paired with adjacent villages of farmers in a way that Khoisan groups do not. A model for language loss by Pygmies but not by Khoisan groups based on these specific arrangements does not strike me as far-fetched.

So present-day Mankind is a big hybrid swarm resulting from several Homo species having sex with each other. A more interesting Origin than drab Adam and Eve tales. Just muse on how taxonomists should treat us.

Genetics is like music, not one note but a lot of them

As all these populations do descend from a common ancestor, does that not make the question of humanity moot? It seems more like increasing humanness over time toward, rather than from, a Platonic template.

Also I think we should drop the term ‘archaic’. When they were around were they any more ‘archaic’ than anyone else?

But my question is, when did the pygmies become pygmies, before or after the admixture event?

@14,

I don’t see the distinction. You just described HOW Khoisan consonants spread into some Bantu languages.

@13,

Xhosa probably has clicks as Bantu farmers married Khoisan women to form the hybrid Xhosa population, and so offspring naturally picked up clicks – so I don’t see that as spreading from Khoisan, rather some Khoisan (women) being assimilated by Bantu farmers.

Had an interesting thought: click consonants are only found in the Khoisan, Hadza, and Sandawe languages, and languages that have borrowed click consonants from those (e.g., Xhosa, a Bantu language, borrowed clicks from Khoisan languages). (Pygmies have lost their original languages, which were replaced by Bantu languages, so it’s unknown whether they had clicks or not.) It’s been hypothesized that click consonants are basal for the human clade, and lost in a major subclade that includes most Africans and all non-Africans. But what if click consonants were inherited from “population X”?

Just a thought — we’d have to show that Hadza and Sandawe also inherited DNA from “population X”. (Does the study look at them?) Even then it would be far from an open-and-shut case. One troubling difficulty is that, if Pygmies used to have click sounds, why did they lose them upon contact with Bantu peoples, while Khoisan not only kept them but in fact spread them into Bantu languages?

The religious objection to abortion is not about personhood, but about submission to God. If it were about the destruction of persons, religious people would be much more concerned than they are about preventing spontaneous miscarriages, which kill more fetuses than abortion.

The NRLC (anti-abortion group) estimates 18,000 late-term abortions a year, defining “late term” broadly as 19 weeks after conception (others say 24 weeks). That comes to ~700,000 since Roe v. Wade. I don’t know where the 3-4 million number comes from.

http://www.nrlc.org/news_and_views/Dec10/nv120210part3.html

It’s OK with me if Razib deletes this post along with the other abortion posts.

What Ian said.

One thing I don’t get about middle of the road pro-choicers, who are or are close to a plurality in this country, is that they will state that at some point, usually after the first trimester, the fetus becomes a person–but they don’t blanch at the fact that since Roe v. Wade, there have been about 3-4 million late-term abortions (murders, by their definition) in this country, relatively few of which were done for health/medical purposes.

@Bob Dole – bring it up with Razib, who broached the issue.

I think that the African attitude toward pyhmies isn’t so much that they’re less than human, but that they’re strange, fundamentally different people with occult powers that can be used for good or evil. People have had similar ideas about gypsies, Lapps, and all sorts of other marginal pariah groups elsewhere. Often the same people who are lynched and burned at the staka are, at other times are called on for their magic.

American PC looks a lot better once you have had a little contact with some traditional culture where almost everyone without exception believes that some other population is evil by nature and can’t be changed. In East Asia, for example, it’s not hard to find Japanese or Chinese who believe that the other group is evil, and usually they won’t like Koreans either.

America has been and still is more receptive to foreign immigrants than almost any other nation, even though there’s always been friction and trouble at first.

Of course, America’s receptiveness to (for example) Arabs and Filipinos and Jews is partly simply the result of the fact that we have our own hierarchy of Others: black, Native American, and Hispanic. (Prejudice against Native Americans has faded away in the general culture, but still is alive in places where they are concentrated, e.g. near Indian reservations.

Part of the

@Ian
I think we should debate abortion on the internet. I don’t think that’s been done before.

It’s interesting how we can have two people (5&zib) go about the same position with starkly different tacts to arrive at the same conclusion. There’s something, say “Platonic” , about the idea that hatred begets hatred.

You say “At some point the fetus becomes human in all the ways we understand to be human.”

So, what do “we understand to be human”? Is this a corporate “we”, or an individual “we”? Am I part of the “we”? Are you?

Surely science tells us that a human embryo, human fetus, human infant, human child, human adult is still human regardless of it stage of development.

To be blunt about it, if you judge by evidence, human races differ significantly in their capabilities. Archaic admixture may play a role in explaining that, but whether it does or not, the fact of the differences remains.

In my mind, that is no reason to mistreat anyone: but then my basic assumptions are very different from yours.
Christ died for all men.

As long as the artificial intelligence is housed in a hot looking robot, I’m cool with that.

There has been some discussion that these past admixture events must have yielded selective advantages for the evidence of them to have survived. (It seems reasonable to presume there were other admixture events of which there remains no evidence now because they did not yield particular selective advantages.) Consequently I don’t see any grounds for anyone to presume that any surviving people are any less modern human than any others.

In fact, the more evidence that emerges of archaic admixture in different populations, the less grounds I see for anyone taking this kind of view.