Is the “million-year-old” skull from China a Denisovan or something else?
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I have my own doubts, but not from details of the study itself. I used to visit lots of museums in China while working there. One of the odd things they had in common were exhibits that ignored human evolution's connection with Africa and claimed humans evolved in China and radiated out from there. I could be wrong, but my gut feeling is the study is trying to fit facts to an official narrative.
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The term "species" is a human concept that Mother Nature feels no obligation to obey. For example:
- Ring species: A can mate with B and B can mate with C, but A cannot mate with C
- Cloners: Messor ibericus ants can clone Messor structor ants
- Bacteria conjugation: the pansexual zoophile's dream!
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Thanks for the excellent popular treatment of the discovery and associated controversy, non-click-baity and with plenty of relevant context.
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...dem bones, dem bones...they make a body walk,
...dem bones, dem bones... if they could only talk...
...dem bones, dem bones... if they could only talk...
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_Man
"Peking Man also played a vital role in the restructuring of Chinese identity following the Chinese Communist Revolution, and it was used to introduce the general populace to Marxism and science. Early models of Peking Man society were compared to communist or nationalist ideals, leading to discussions on primitive communism and polygenism (that Peking Man was the direct ancestor of Chinese people). This produced a strong schism between Western and Eastern interpretations of the origin of modern humans, especially as the West adopted the Out of Africa theory in the late 20th century, which described Peking Man as an offshoot in human evolution. Though Out of Africa is now the consensus, Peking Man interbreeding with human ancestors is still discussed...
Peking Man became an important matter of national pride, and was used to extend the antiquity of the Chinese people and the occupation of the region to 500,000 years ago, with discussions of human evolution becoming progressively Sinocentric even in Europe. In the 1930s, Weidenreich began arguing that Peking Man was ancestral to the "Mongoloid race", forwarding his polycentric hypothesis, where local populations of archaic humans evolved into the local modern humans, as opposed to every modern population sharing an anatomically modern ancestor (polygenism).[note 11] Other scientists working on the site made no such claims.[13] The sentiment that all Chinese ethnic groups—including the Han, Tibetans, and Mongols—were indigenous to the area for such a long time became more popular during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the occupation of China by Japan.[13] By the Mao era, Peking Man was ubiquitously heralded as a human ancestor in China."
I cannot say anything about how many Chinese people still believe the "Out of Asia" theory or how widely it is taught, but there was a time when "Out of Asia" was preferred and the Australopithecus species were viewed as an offshoot unique to Africa that went extinct long ago.
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When the Mormons come a-knocking on my door, I like to turn the conversation to archaelogy. According to Teh Book of Mormon, horse-riding, metal weapons and wheeled vehicles were all common in the pre-Columbian New World, and Native Americans were descended from ancient Israelites.
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ReadandShare
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
For a more 'official narrative', I googled up a page from China Academy of Science - which is about as official and scholarly as one gets in China. The article (using google translate) asked the question why humans migrated from Africa to East Asia and then answered with climate studies - which shows that Chinese scientists too understand/acknowledge that humans originated in Africa.
https://www.cas.cn/cm/202401/t20240124_5001463.shtml
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Yes. That was my first thought, understanding this pseudoscientific position of the out of china mythology that’s based on a sino-superiority principle than the data.
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I think people are reading too much into what my question means.
My question is this: What is the evidence that the scientists in this particular article is falsifying evidence to promote some sort of "Out of China" agenda?
There's nothing in the article to suggest this, and it's not even the scientific consensus in China anymore (as another poster mentioned).
It seems like it's just defaming somebody on a gut feeling.
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I had misgivings from the study itself, specifically the reconstruction. It SEEMED that they added more brain-case volume in the reconstruction than the bone suggested. Reconstruction of something a few hundred thousand years old smashed by sediment is going to have an enormous fudge factor. Add to that the lack of being candid about the likely age (they said a million years, but that's not based on any hard data as a specific number, and even if you averaged it based on the range of the sediment, it's still considerably LESS time than that on average), and I just got the sense something was rotten in Denmark. Or Hanjiang Normal University - take your pick.
It just seemed a bit too much of an outlier to be credible and with a very high fudge factor from the way the bits were put back together. And, yeah, I got the notion that they may have had some kind of bias in how they put it together.
They need a lot more evidence that supports their claim, and AFAIK, they don't have enough to even support the claim very well.
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Nah, it's totally elitism.
Just amazing how quickly the meaning of caveman has changed over the past 40 years.
No, species is about people not understanding the purpose and wanting things in simple, discrete little boxes. Mother Nature does indeed obey it or rather the rules stems from evolution. For the vast majority of organisms, it works fine and in other cases it is misusing terminology (especially avoiding using subspecies). Just you get into different species concepts like biological (breeding - species A and C) and ecological (niches - species A, B, and C) that get those ring species that are hybrids.
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I think words like "falsifying evidence" is a bridge or three too far -- but the failure to consider DNA evidence in favor of a purely morphological analysis based on our ability to simulate what undistorted bone would look like is a yellow flag.
My link / quotes were intended only to speak to the question of whether there was an "Out of Asia" angle that might be in play here. But I will say this: It is scarcely unusual for modern-day people to project their own importance backwards for one reason or another. There seems to be a bit of this playing out in the question of how Denisovans / homo longi is related to homo sapiens.
The fossil and genetic records are muddled enough to allow for a degree of motivated reasoning that doesn't rise to the level of bad faith, in my personal opinion.
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Perhaps this group just wants their taxonomic name made official, as Devosonian is an informal term, I think. That would make their promotion of H. longi more akin to Cope and Marsh in the bone wars, and less like Agassiz’ or Osborn’s polygenism.
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You do understand what a gut feeling is, right? If he had evidence that this specific paper is misrepresenting something or otherwise wrong, he wouldn't have to call it a gut feeling.
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As a chemist, I tend to go towards DNA evidence. However, the DNA evidence always relies on reasonable assumptions, which are not all guaranteed to be correct. And we may well have a lot more cross-breeding events in our past than we thought, and in a very sparsely sampled data set overall. So, I think it is perfectly reasonable to make as strong a case as one can based on morphology alone. New data will come in, and bad assumptions in both the DNA and morphology interpretations will be unearthed, often literally. And maybe one will give an impetus to the other to get out of a false minimum, and get a bit nearer to the truth. And in 25 years time we may well have a remarkable story of human migrations revealed. Meanwhile the pseudo-scientists will extract whatever mistruths they wish from the data, and feed their own agendas. For that is a universal human trait.
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Smith's fiction, while slightly better written than Hubbard's, was overtly derivative.
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If these Chinese scientists are getting influenced by the political and/or material benefits that come from associating a set of ancient fossils with contemporary identities, then they can join a long line of paleaoanthropologists before them. British scientists were very happy to claim Piltdown Man as 'the earliest Englishman' until it turned out to be a crude fake. The Daily Mail tabloid (clearly a festering pile of shit even back then) even flipped the symbolic value of such fossils upside-down by sneeringly declaring it the "New Woman" as a very tortured dig at the Suffragette movement of the time.
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Maybe. But maybe they thought it might help advance their career in the Chinese academic world. I can't speak to the motivvations of this particular group of scientusts. Having been in numerous Chinese museums you most definitely get the idea that there is a lot of the nationalistic skewing of information in the museums. The kind of thing Trump is now doing in National Parks, museums etc.
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Thanks for the links! I'm not particularly knowledgeable on the subject, but the idea that all these groups should fall under one species made me think of different types of dogs - genetically compatible for breeding, but varied enough where if you'd never heard of dogs you'd reasonably assume from the skeletons of a Chihuahua and a Great Dane that they were different species.
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That's exactly one of the examples on the link about ring species. A poor chihuahua trying to birth great dane pups sounds horrifying, and the opposite pretty funny, honestly.
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That's my read, and I'm pretty dang annoyed by it.
I cannot claim to read the papers, but in most contexts I see Neanderthals referred to as such rather than by H. nranderthalis or H. sapiens nranderthalis. That's for the better, because the actual population dynamics are more interesting than the lump or split debate.
And, as I understand it, the lump or split debate is still considered an open question for Neanderthals. If the question is still open with Neanderthals, then a case would need to be made on why it would not also be open for Denisovans/H. longi.?
The article suggests that no one is proposing that Denisovans/H. longi and anatomically modern humans branched both separately and before the branch with Neanderthals, so I would think a compelling argument would be needed to justify H. longi based on present evidence. That goes double for the limited number of confirmed specimens we have at this time.
It just feels like we are "getting" to discuss weak, motivated conclusions rather than the exciting science on offer. To be fair, weeding out such is a key part of science, but it is better when we filter them out before it gets to this point.
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By the by, the Shakespeare quote is "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio." (Ham is talking to his mate, Horatio.)Kiona N. Smith said:
It's interesting that several sites claim it's one of the most famous if not THE most famous line written by The Bard but many people mistakenly believe it's "I knew him well." In fact, some people are so adamant about it being "well" that they point to it as a Mandala Effect or evidence that the timeline has been tampered with.
More than that, I've heard there is a similar origin given for waterfowl! I haven't looked into it yet but I heard someone once mention Peking Duck, which I assume is along the same lines.
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Fred, did you confuse the new post box with the edit post box?
Yes, I did. Sorry. Deadline in six minutes.
Bad Fred; no tea.
Yes, I did. Sorry. Deadline in six minutes.
Bad Fred; no tea.
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Since the general thrust of Hamlet's speech is to show how well he knew the dearly departed jester, I've always just assumed someone summarized the sentiment and the summary stuck.
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Come for the slings and arrows, stay for the outrageous fortune?
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I see Turkish headlines in my feeds saying we started in Turkey (I know it has a new name but I don't feel like hunting through diacritics right this moment after 40 years of calling it Turkey and yes I know this tangent is taking way more effort than a long press on "e" but I'm in a grumpy mood so I don't care.)
It seems like there's some kind of strange pride attached to being the most "pure" descendants of the first humans as evidenced by your ancestors having lived on that piece of land and stayed true genetically/behaviorally to their origins and I suspect this has racist/fascistic roots and yet the funny thing is that if you've stayed "pure" as a people that would actually make you more similar to the common ancestor and yet to say that they're more similar to the common ancestor of all hominids would paradoxically be seen as an insult and they want to say that the faraway people are less advanced. Of course biologically everything's equally advanced to the extent that it succeeds in its environment. Genetics changes over time to meet the needs if the needs change slowly enough and changes which don't harm fitness arise and disappear regardless of "purity" or whatever. I mean to say that the coelacanth isn't exactly a primitive fish, it's been evolving as long as we have, the only difference is that its mechanical environment has barely changed until now but you can bet its immune system is very different from millions of years ago, and if there have been changes to water chemistry they would have gone through metabolic changes which may or may not induce changes in physical morphology. The point is it's very complicated but all currently living things are equally evolved or they wouldn't be living anymore.
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They even had a text messaging system from God installed in their boats which were like little wooden submarines, that's how they found their way from Israel, and it had two dials, one showed the way to go and the other one I'm not sure, maybe where to find water or food, not even lying
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This kind of argument about purity has absolutely been made by fascist and racist societies, but they didn't originate it. Arguments over whether or not being from Gaul counted as far as being truly "Roman" date back at least as far as the early Roman Empire. The Romans did not think about race as we understand the term, but the idea that other cultures represented metaphorical barbarians at the gate is much older.
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I doubt that. "To be or not to be?" has to be in contention. It is so ubiquitous that Gilligan sang a version of it set to Bizet
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Svante Pääbo discusses this in his book Neanderthal Man. He was initially ambivalent about it, because it was (and still is) unclear whether either Denisovans or Neanderthals should be considered a separate species. One argument in favor of assigning a species name was that if they didn't, then someone else might do it. That seems to be what Xiaobo Feng's group are trying to do now.
At one point Svante Pääbo's group decided to define Homo altaiensis as a provisional name already in their first paper, based only on the mitochondrial genome of the finger bone from Denisova Cave. A reviewer convinced them that this was unwise, and they removed all mentions of a new species from the final version of the paper.
Svante was glad that they hadn't assigned a species name when his group had sequenced the finger bone's nuclear genome, because that gave a different picture than the mitochondrial genome, revealing how complex the genetic history is. They decided to take no position on whether it was a species or a subspecies, and choose only a vernacular name. Thus we know that population as Denisovans.
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One of the best pieces of evidence of human origin in Africa is that Africa has the most diverse human genetic population. Regional purity is a sign of being colonized by a small group more recently. Or more unpleasant reasons, one of which Turkey would prefer not discussed.
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