Posted on 12/05/2013 11:46:56 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
An artist's interpretation of the hominins that lived near the Sima de los Huesos cave in Spain.
Scientists have found the oldest DNA evidence yet of humans’ biological history. But instead of neatly clarifying human evolution, the finding is adding new mysteries.
In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years.
The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a very different story. It most closely resembles DNA from an enigmatic lineage of humans known as Denisovans. Until now, Denisovans were known only from DNA retrieved from 80,000-year-old remains in Siberia, 4,000 miles east of where the new DNA was found.
The mismatch between the anatomical and genetic evidence surprised the scientists, who are now rethinking human evolution over the past few hundred thousand years. It is possible, for example, that there are many extinct human populations that scientists have yet to discover. They might have interbred, swapping DNA. Scientists hope that further studies of extremely ancient human DNA will clarify the mystery....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Giant gnomes?
In a hundred years....we will probably have evidence of several dozen human-like species that existed....mingled...had lusty relations....and one survived onto this point (mostly by luck).
Evolution? We will have proven that as each mingling took place....the tree of the human species took a piece or part from one species and put it into another. Some humans today likely have a protective DNA sequence to prevent various cancers....some likely are very susceptible to any disease. Some are born as a life-long liberal.
From the picture, two have slanted eyes, the old man looks like a Viking, the boy in the center has a flat nose, the one in the back loks more ape-like than the others while the one in the lower left corner looks like modern day man.
What’s with the dark skin? Is this because man is thought to have come out of Africa? Or does the DNA confirm skin color?
Do you really try to learn anything from “artists’ interpretations”?
“What’s with the dark skin? Is this because man is thought to have come out of Africa? Or does the DNA confirm skin color?”
Well, for one, it’s an “artist’s impression”, which means it really doesn’t have anything to do with the topic matter and only truly relates what some artist “felt”.
But moving beyond that for a moment, I’d like to ask, how hairy do you think Australopithecus was?
You see, many individuals working in anthropology are extremely leftist, and quite a lot of them have a pathological hatred of western civilization. This often translates as intellectually unsupportable knee-jerk interpretations that are consciously or subconsciously meant to denigrate white people.
As an example, I still recall one of my college instructors saying “Human beings are black, it’s white people that are the mutants.”
Naturally, that statement utterly ignores that modern Africans are generally as distant from our common ancestors as modern Europeans are. Further, it would be irrational in the extreme to assume that a modern African, whose ancestors most likely arose from the Bantu explosion that resulted in near total population replacement in Africa, is more morphologically indicative of a mythical “true” human prototype than any other population on Earth.
But back to my question of hairiness. Primates have no real need of melanin for protection from the sun, as they have fur coats. Aside from some small areas of the body that are usually hairless, most primates have light-colored skin under their coats. Early hominids would first have to lose their fur, and then evolve increased melanin concentration to deal with the loss.
Whether or not early humans possessed light or dark skin would reasonably be a function of when hominids started losing body hair. What’s more, even after losing body hair an early human population might not have experienced strong selection for melanin production - depending on the lifestyle and local environment there may have been little need, remember that ancient Africa was in terms of climate a great deal different than modern Africa. From a purely rational standpoint, assuming that the first humans were dark-skinned is just as wrong-headed as assuming they were light-skinned.
However, anthropologists as a general rule really don’t like light-skinned people, and so they take every chance they can get to denigrate, isolate, or ridicule light-skinned persons.
“What’s with the dark skin? Is this because man is thought to have come out of Africa? Or does the DNA confirm skin color?”
The further they lived from the equator, the less likely they were to have dark skin.
Well, for one, it’s an “artist’s impression”, which means it really doesn’t have anything to do with the topic matter and only truly relates what some artist “felt”.
That's true, and it's a New York Times article, so it's heavily slanted toward communism; other than that, it's very factual and informative.
That’s definitely Balin on the right. Looks like Fili and Kili at top left, and young Gimli and his sister at bottom left, but I can’t be sure.
If there were homo erectus, Neanderthals, and denisovans living among us today, would anyone know it? How different were these species of man?
If Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals were living together today, would we be treating each other as equals, or would one species dominate the other?
No, no - anything but that...
Not Gimli. And definitely not his sister. She was a blond, if I’m remembering right.
How do they know that applies to all Neanderthals and not just the subset for whom they've found DNA?
I'm never really see the point of all this study of the origin of Humans. I figure at some point God put a soul in us and then we stopped being apes.
Sorry, but I’m not falling for any of this. God created Adam and Steve... beginning and end of story.
Jumbo shrimp?
From a thigh bone artists were able to come up with a physical interpretation of what the rest of the bones, if they had them, would have looked like assembled with flesh and skin added. Amazing! /s
Dark skin is more likely than light skin.
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