Mystery Humans Spiced Up Ancients' Sex Lives 238
ananyo writes "New genome sequences from two extinct human relatives suggest that these 'archaic' groups bred with humans and with each other more extensively than was previously known. The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a different archaic human group, the Denisovans, were presented at a meeting at the Royal Society in London. They suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups living in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet unknown human ancestor from Asia. 'What it begins to suggest is that we're looking at a 'Lord of the Rings'-type world — that there were many hominid populations,' says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work."
Human Relatives (Score:2)
Re:Human Relatives (Score:5, Funny)
In the beginning, we were all fish. Okay? Swimming around in the water. And then one day a couple of fish had a retard baby, and the retard baby was different, so it got to live. So Retard Fish goes on to make more retard babies, and then one day, a retard baby fish crawled out of the ocean with its...mutant fish hands... and it had butt sex with a squirrel or something and made this. Retard frog-sqirrel, and then *that* had a retard baby which was a... monkey-fish-frog... And then this monkey-fish-frog had butt sex with that monkey, and that monkey had a mutant retard baby that screwed another monkey... and that made you!
So there you go! You're the retarded offspring of five monkeys having butt sex with a fish-squirrel! Congratulations!
Re:Human Relatives (Score:5, Funny)
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Enough about your parents.
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"had butt sex"
You Keep Using That Phrase, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means
Re:Human Relatives (Score:5, Funny)
Butt sex doesn't you pregnant. What are they teaching in school these days?
Not enough English?
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Leave him alone, he went to public school.
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I accidentally all the babby.
(Training for the meme density record.)
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It does if you're a reptile.
Re:Human Relatives (Score:5, Interesting)
Far more likely the now dominant species were playing by pillage, plunder, rape and enslave rules. Which is why to this day, we still have problems with psychopaths and narcissists, our major contribution to the human genome pool and the main reason for the extinction of others human species, countless human societies and likely at the end of it all, our own. A defective human mutation whose greatest contribution to human society is war, rape and genocide (basically taking the humane out of human, -e self destructive ego).
Re:Human Relatives (Score:5, Funny)
So you say we all evolved out of a bunch of managers?
Sorry, but there I draw the line. When Darwin said we evolved outta monkeys, ok. I could dig that. But managers... YOU TAKE THAT BACK RIGHT NOW!
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No, if you can tell the difference and you obviously don't socially align with them, well, you are just not evolved from them, you to put in bluntly, are just the latest evolution of victims of them. When it comes to them think inbreeding, think royalty and their flunkies, so from inbred royalty did corporate executives evolve (you know literally all those right royal bastards).
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I thought we are the descendants of phone disinfectors, advertisement agents, and someone searching for a soap mine.
Re:Human Relatives (Score:5, Insightful)
We also have compassion, cooperation and communication. Those are the "killer features" of human behavior, the things that make us the most adaptable animal species ever. These are such fundamental features of what it means to be human that it's easy to take them for granted.
You mention enslavement, pillage and plunder, and those make my point. Until you have built a society beyond small nomadic hunter-gatherer bands, slavery makes no sense. Pillage and plunder as well are meaningless until your species has at least developed agriculture, and the social ability to band together to attack people who have converted agricultural surplus into property.
But in the end it isn't about being nice, it's about being adaptable. Being nice -- the things that make others want to spend time with us and cooperate with us -- just happens to be the best basic pattern for building a species with maximum behavioral adaptability. But it makes sense that we ALSO retain the ability to be not-nice. From time to time it's useful for survival -- just less than the 100% of the time that social Darwinists would have us believe. There are times when turning on your neighbor at least ensures someone from the neighborhood survives.
It's a tautology: a behaviorally adaptable species manifests many different kinds of behaviors. So it seems plausible that our distant ancestors made both love AND war with the other human species on the planet.
Remember, though: it was a much less populated planet in the Early Paleolithic. Even in the more populated Late Paleolithic period there were fewer people in the whole world than there are in the Portland OR metropolitan area today. There were maybe 3000 in all of Europe. If in all that underpopulated land you happened to meet another band of humans, which would be better for your genetic legacy? Exchanging genes or exchanging attacks? Screwing or stoning?
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3000 is a bit low, that woiuld be 100 families/tribes with roughly 30 members.
But you are right, the population was very low. Some estimate around -10,000 (before christs birth) the population on the whole planet reached 1,000,000. Some other researchers believe it was more in the 4 - 10 millions range.
OTOH some researchers estimate around -70,000 (BC) the total human population was only 25,000 - 30,000.
I find that a bit low, but who knows. In our days with so many species at the edge of extinction we can h
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Hate to break it to you but there are lots of nomadic hunter gather populations that engage in war, rape and absolutely slavery. In fact the European and american slave trade was initially started by the nomadic berbers who basically ran the slave trade in north africa. Slavery always makes sense, there is always tedios or dangerous work that warrants slaves regardless of how primative. If you think nomadic people dont engage in slavery you clearly don't know anything about nomadic people, past or present.
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In nature there are no "bug". There are just things that *are*. But compassion works for our species, if not always for the individual.
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Compassion is one of those things needed if you are going to live in a society of over 50 individuals. Compassion is a form of trust, that any good deed you do today will be reciprocated to you or your offspring in the future. From a selfish standpoint it is a net gain to live in a compassionate society. And if you want to live in a compassion society you have to act compassionately.
Re: Human Relatives (Score:4, Insightful)
Classic problem of game theory, the prisoner’s dilemma. Yes, a few selfish people can get ahead if the majority and compassionate. Of course, if everybody is greedy then the whole system falls apart. Which is why there exist ideas like fairness and retribution. Abusers are identified and are kicked out of society at large.
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Single answer to all your questions: because we're adaptable. We don't *like* these things, because they violate our social wiring. But we can live with them.
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An alternative to sibling post:
Because these traits in us do not generally -- and were likely never meant to -- scale beyond our own family/tribal unit.
Re:Human Relatives (Score:4, Interesting)
There's no evidence from this story that the other groups weren't equally likely to pillage, plunder, and rape. That's a poignant and tragic idea, but it's less an evidence-based explanation than just wrapping together the idea of the 'noble savage' with some misanthropy. I'm sure you're fun at parties :)
Seriously though, there's other research showing that we do have an instinct towards teamwork, and that we often only become greedy when prompted to think rationally about our own self interest. It could just as well be that we developed that in response to marauding Neanderthals.
Re:Human Relatives (Score:5, Informative)
sounds like the same tired saw about "only humans wage war", "only humans murder" ....
snails rape each other to impregnate each other
several beetle and other insect varieties do the same thing
chimpanzees wage war on other chimp tribes
baboons will given the chance kill entire other tribes (genocide)
orcas and even dolphins kill for fun
lions kill each other regularly, particularly a new alpha male in a pride with cubs, will kill all the cubs
lions also have an instinctive hatred for hyenas (and vice versa) and will kill them just to kill them
cats (of many species) "play" (torture) their food
"defective human mutation" ??
Hardly. It's across the entire animal and even plant kingdom, to the extent that it's cant even be considered a mutation. IE, its the norm, not the exception. the exception is the opposite trait.
Re:Human Relatives (Score:5, Insightful)
That may not be true. Cooperation is just as inborn a trait as assholism. I don't mean to paint a rosy picture, but please consider that most of the people still living on the planet under a tribal/primitive lifestyle are pretty calm and get along pretty well.
Natural selection works for the talkers as well as the fighters. Sometimes in the same individual.
Re:Human Relatives (Score:4, Insightful)
please consider that most of the people still living on the planet under a tribal/primitive lifestyle are pretty calm and get along pretty well.
Bullshit.
Seriously, if you think that's even remotely true you've obviously never studied Anthropology to any degree, and especially never paid any attention to those particular groups.
As for this article, I'm getting really tired of people acting like this is some kind of startling revelation. It's not.
It IS important evidence which further validates Evolutionary Theory, which predicted this situation all along. In the past we didn't have any evidence for humans co-existing with other species, and that has long been a point the Anti-Evolution crowd has attempted to use to invalidate Evolution.
So hooray for the data, but please, spare us the "shock and surprise" because the only people who should be surprised are the ones who think Evolution says humans are the result of a monkey fucking a fish.
Re:Human Relatives (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the contention was that the separate species was the same species because of the ability to interbreed which at one time the inability was key to denoting a deparate species. The though was same species but different races like we see today.
I don't care to get into an evolution verses creation argument. Just stating the argument as i heard it. I do agree this is no big news or anything novel as the concept has been around a while but not widely accepted. I guess the news to me is the concept of another unknown race or species being involved
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You, on the other hand, write exactly like someone who has studied anthropology (and nothing else). Amazing.
Re:Human Relatives (Score:5, Insightful)
That may not be true. Cooperation is just as inborn a trait as assholism. I don't mean to paint a rosy picture, but please consider that most of the people still living on the planet under a tribal/primitive lifestyle are pretty calm and get along pretty well.
Natural selection works for the talkers as well as the fighters. Sometimes in the same individual.
Darwin actually said as much. He pointed out that humans weren't the strongest or the fastest or any of the "ests" and yet we rose to the top. People credit him for his "survival of the fittest" theory, but he actually rarely used that term and it contradicted his main theme that since humans were not the fittest on so many levels it was our ability to cooperate that allowed us to not only survive but to dominate.
We still see this today, for instance with hunting. Hunting a deer by yourself may or may not yield success. In a group, where others drive the deer towards the hunters, the success rate is much higher. Today, hunting is a sport, but back then, it was about survival. The whole clan or community benefited by the cooperation. Now hunting is a over simplified example, the reality is that in the wild, even today, the odds of a single human being surviving for extended periods is limited. Not that it can't be done, but it is extremely difficult. With a community, even a small one, there is division of tasks and even though there are more mouths to feed, more can be accomplished to secure food and shelter and ultimately the survival of progeny.
So while raping and pillaging were no doubt part of early human life, that is not what led to homo sapiens overtaking other competing hominids (as it is likely that they also raped and pillaged, too). It was that homo sapiens were much better at cooperating than their counterparts.
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Re:Human Relatives (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, survival is just one means among several.
What evolution is really all about is propagation of DNA.
Traits can rise to prominence or dwindle into nothingness without affecting survival at all, if they affect reproductive success in some other way.
A gene doesn't even have to be reproduced via the same individual to support its own propagation:
In multicellular organisms like ourselves, millions of cells self-sacrifice every day, having offloaded the task of propagating their genes to the other clones in in the same colony (i.e. body). Insect colonies display similar constructs at the level of complex individuals, to the point of the majority of individuals being intrinsically sterile.
Humans and other social animals display social contracts that are much weaker, but which still strongly affect behaviour, and probably for much the same reasons.
If humans were truly as asocial as lone-hunter-type animals, you and I would be out feeding or sleeping, not hanging out here on slashdot trying to impress each other with our insights.
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Psychopaths are treated like they have a disease, but in truth they're the next step of evolution.
You have just expostulated the Hitler hypothesis, however more modern thinking is starting to see things from a gentler and more humanistic point of view. Read Eric Fromm's Abnormal Psychology series and then after you get over the depression factor go on to read his little book The Art Of Loving.
Socially it all comes down to that one human trait that is not quantifiable or indeed understood, compassion and the intelligence to see beyond and suspend that which drives humans to act in a violent manner. A ma
Re: Human Relatives (Score:2)
A lot of text to say nothing. All you did was say that compassion and intellect are linked, which makes no sense since rational thought requires not being biased by emotions, and that compassion is morally good, an obvious religious belief. There is no universal truth, morals are entirely arbitrary.
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Are they first or second cousins and are we playing by North or South rules?
Safe to say they weren't geeks - they were getting some.
"human-like" (Score:3)
They suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups living in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago
So were the offspring of these 'human-like' beings capable of reproduction? If they were, wouldn't they be just "human"?
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Not exactly
The basic definition of a species is a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring (this does get a bit more complex but we'll go with it for now)
The way things work is like this.
Say you have a bird population, the population gets split in to 3 semi-isolated groups, one in Africa, one in Europe one in Asia.
So over thousands of years Africa and Europe can interbreed, so you can call them the same species, or maybe a sub-species.
Lets say Africa and Asia can still int
Re:"human-like" (Score:5, Informative)
Did you read the same article I did?
This article described interbreeding between several (at least 3) different sub-specie. They were obviously close enough to interbreed and produce viable offspring.
That's not that uncommon with closely related species. And these were closely related back at that time. Evidence of the survives in the Gene pool today.
Look, this was only 30,000 years ago. Some fragments of oral history extend back that far (although time gets pretty muddled in oral history).
This isn't the first scientific study that showed homo sapiens and neanderthal may have interbred. One wonders about whether this knowledge was passed down in legend and incorporated in ancient texts [kingjamesbibleonline.org].
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I thunk he took the " lord of the rings" comparison as ring species which he explained.
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Apparently they interbred quite a bit and continued for thousands of years.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25020958 [bbc.co.uk]
People roamed in those times, as settled farming hadn't come around yet.
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Lots and lots of things can interbreed and produce viable offspring, from what we call different species. The concept of species is poorly defined and the capability to interbreed and produce viable offspring is poorly understood. Its quite possible that evolution is far less of a directed, acyclic graph than would be good for computational genomics and evolutionary biology.
General graphs are a lot harder to deal with computationally than trees so theres a tendency to try to simplify a lot of things to tree
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So we have a world where many biologists are in denial and just stick their fingers in their ears and go "LALALALALAAA I cannot hear you LALALALAAA" when people start wondering about the potential for viable hybrids to occur in nature.
Um, biologists have been aware of the fuzziness of species boundaries for a very long time. It's non-biologists who remember the archaic "mate and produce fertile offspring" definition of "species" from high school science class who make comments like OP's.
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So we have a world where many biologists are in denial and just stick their fingers in their ears and go "LALALALALAAA I cannot hear you LALALALAAA" when people start wondering about the potential for viable hybrids to occur in nature.
Um, biologists have been aware of the fuzziness of species boundaries for a very long time. It's non-biologists who remember the archaic "mate and produce fertile offspring" definition of "species" from high school science class who make comments like OP's.
Never the less they still use the concept of species.
Christians will even point at the confusion around species and go "HA see? Where do species come from?? Must be GOD!"
Darwins 'origin of the species' is mis-named, it wasn't about origin of species and contains no useful ideas about how species come to be.
The whole idea of species is just unhelpful and the referent of the term probably doesn't even exist.
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The whole idea of species is just unhelpful and the referent of the term probably doesn't even exist.
The idea is very helpfull. If it was'n we had abandoned it and found a better taxonomy.
At some point you have to make a cut ... or how do you want to distinguish a lion from a tiger?
Biologists use 3 or 4 "definitions" to define species at the same tim, because they lack the idea for a better schema: like morphology, fertility of crossbreeds, do they crossbreed in nature (Tigers and Lions don't, but Horses an
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Umm, mules are sterile (mostly). They don't interbreed with anything.
Perhaps you meant "horses and donkeys"? Which is where mules come from....
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Erm, yes, sorry, mixed the two english terms up :D
I meant Donkeys.
Re: "human-like" (Score:2)
This only makes sense. (Score:3)
Groups probably were naturally isolated for long periods of time by geography and as intelligence increased so did the
ability to travel more and go into other enviroments. Once we became a "global" population all similiar species were
eventually assimilated.
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Traveling doesn't require much intelligence, basically it's just walking unless one happens to end up floating on a piece of wood. It's more about hunger. The basic needs drive innovation. Energy returned of energy invested has to be kept low (no use in running after the pray for days), which leads to more effective methods.
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no use in running after the pray for days ... that is exactly how humans hunt. ... nearly no animalà can do that. That means they overtime exhaust thei
Erm
They run after the prey until the prey collapses to overheating and exhaustion. (Most animals have no long term way to get rid of excess heat, like sweating humans. Also unlike humans they mostly use "100%" of their muscle mass, while a human muscle only uses ca. 40% of its fibres and the others are relaxing. When fibres get tired the others take over
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Traveling doesn't require much intelligence, basically it's just walking unless one happens to end up floating on a piece of wood. It's more about hunger.
Crossing an ocean, crossing a mountain, and surviving in the cold all require either intelligence or proper physical attributes.
Chimps, although highly intelligent, still aren't intelligent enough to cross a mountain and survive in the cold even though they
have the advantage of fur and put 1000 chimps on an island without food and it doesn't matter how hungry they get, they are
not getting off that island.
Hobbits (Score:2)
Lord of the Rings? Didn't we already hear [slashdot.org] about these?
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At 158cm and 90+kg, I'm more Hobbit than Elf.
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More Dwarf than either.
Is that 158cm your height or your circumference?
Nice to see (Score:5, Funny)
Nice to see that we came by our propensity to fornicate with anything in a natural manner.
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Apparently the ancients developed colleges before the wheel
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Well, I don't know about frat houses, but they sure invented the booze.
I wonder... (Score:5, Funny)
...if any sheep genomes were found?
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Yes, but ... only in New Zealand
What's a "different archaic human group"? (Score:3)
Re:What's a "different archaic human group"? (Score:5, Interesting)
From the "Anthropology in a Nutshell" lectures:
Something that is often overlooked is that before the adoption of sewage systems, most groups of people had a strong incentive to move around a lot. And since it was not very pleasant to move into an area the neighbors had just vacated, groups tended to move into those areas where no other group had gone before. At least, not for a long time.
That meant they would cross paths with distant groups fairly frequently. When that happens, there are two things that can occur: either the groups fight, or they party. Fighting is hard work and often painful. Partying can be a lot of fun, and moves the genes around.
Probably everyone on slashdot knows somebody who has moved to get away from the sh*tty mess they made of the old place. It is an old gene thing that still expresses among the less evolved.
Human-like? (Score:5, Insightful)
In my book, if you can breed with it, it's human. Maybe anthropologists are special.
Re:Human-like? (Score:5, Funny)
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There is a difference between "can't" and "won't".
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In my book, if you can breed with it, it's human.
If you can't, eat it.
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Even if it is not the literal Word of God it can still have value as a source of the knowledge and beliefs of the men who wrote it long ago. And they will naturally have different viewpoints since it is not the work of one singular author, but written by many at different times.
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I don't think anyone has a problem treating the Bible that was who isn't invested in the idea that they must adhere to certain tennents described in it lest they be smited by a divine being. It's when someone who is invested in that idea starts chiming in that the problems start.
mystery humans still spice up sex lives (Score:3)
thanks to craigslist, mystery humans still spice up my sex life.
(just kidding, I'm too fat to get laid)
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uh, that was no hominid.
It was a space station.
Now *this* is a story... (Score:2)
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That's okay. "Insightful" usually just means "I agree" anyway.
Captain Jack Harkness! (Score:2)
So basically, ancient humans and hominids would shag anything that moved eh?
Why does that sound familiar?
Where are more jokes to be found? (Score:2)
Hmm, I wonder what kind of memes this might spawn.
"Hot prehistoric Asiain Girls"
or some highly inapropriate LotR-fanfic..
Extinct? (Score:3)
If they have living descendants, then surely they didn't go extinct.
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If they have living descendants, then surely they didn't go extinct.
I'm seeing a new meme on Slashdot; "Did we really have to say this?"
Yes, we really did.
I'm seeing it more often as "sad but true" is trending downward as a meme, and I don't know if that's a sad thing, but it is ironic.
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Right, but considering they HAVE offspring, and yet you have a hypothetical.
Did you see what you did there?
Names and types, classification is arbitrary (Score:3)
Don't get me wrong, especially don't consider me a racist :D
I think the names for e.g. Neanderthals and Denisovans and the distinction between them is pretty arbitrary.
Lets look from an hobbyist or layman point of view on the phisiognomy and body on an australian aboriginee, a south american indian a chinese an african Ashanti or Bushman.
Now as we know they live all pretty isolated in a certain region of the world. E.g south america and australia.
Now lets assume one of them was completely extingued 10.000 years ago. And in that area only west european whites would live now.
If we would look at the bones of such extingued "species" we easy would assume they are a different species.
Sure, *I know* that classifying stuff by bones and teeth and age / aera they lived would in this case show many "similarities" while in the actual classification the "distinction" is in the foreground.
However I allready saw "living Neanderthals" ... people with a strange skull and thick ridges over the eyes, flat nose and with a strong build.
It also explains in evolutionary terms (Score:4, Funny)
Man's insatiable appetite for midget porn. Or is that just me?
Little people, huh (Score:2)
The ancient genomes
At first, I read that as "the ancient gnomes..."
First Men were from Mars and Women from Venus (Score:2)
Re:We keep dancing around it (Score:5, Informative)
What I'm getting at is that the only "pure human" seems to be the black African human. Everyone else is
There are larger genetic differences between different groups of the same "race", than between individuals of "different race".
Is that clearer for you? No? Black vs. white could be more similar than two similarly looking east asian people, or two similarly looking white people.
And ffs, there is NO SUCH THING AS "PURE HUMAN". Never was. Never will be. Just as there is no "pure monkey" or "pure snail". The entire theory of evolution completely contradicts such ridicules notions.
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This is called "Lewontin's fallacy" [blogspot.com] and has been debunked far and wide.
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This is called "Lewontin's fallacy" and has been debunked far and wide.
Calling something a fallacy does not make it fallacious, nor does claiming it has been debunked constitute a debunking. I recommend you follow the links from the Hsu article and learn some more about what is still a very active debate.
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Even assuming that Wikipedia and the paper it references by Witherspoon, et al, are the last word, what's the significance of it? "Measured genetic similarity over many thousands of loci" is a crude statistical approach that makes no attempt to take into account the significance of the polymorphisms. In other words it measures genotypic rather than phenotypic differences. Then, even to the crude and very poorly understood extent that genotypic variation corresponds to phenotypic variation, what is the signi
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Perhaps you should read the article you link and try to understand it :D
Your parent was right.
Hint: shimps and humans are 94% to 98.5% identically. Depending on what source (or research) you point.
So that 1.5% to 4% _difference_ is what makes us human. All humans can only vary in that range. ((Well, now it is up to you to figure my "fallacy" :D ))
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And ffs, there is NO SUCH THING AS "PURE HUMAN". Never was. Never will be. Just as there is no "pure monkey" or "pure snail". The entire theory of evolution completely contradicts such ridicules notions.
No, it does not.
ALL HUMANS are PURE.
ALL SNAKES are PURE.
ALL MONKEYS are PURE.
Especially there is no snake + monkey interbreed or snake + human interbreed and as far as we know also no human + monkey interbreed.
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You're not getting the point. There is no intellectually defensible definition for "pure" humans. None. Every lineage we are a part of are clouds of clouds of data points in a multi-dimensional space of genetic traits. Maybe you find a cluster somewhere. Fine. Look deeper and that cluster is composed of many mini clusters of tribes that interwove, separated for a while, and interwove again. Were those separate species? Why not? At any point time you choose, there will be divergence going forward AND backwar
Re:We keep dancing around it (Score:4, Interesting)
Wait a moment, did sub-Sahara Africans interbreed with something? No? Then they _are_ pure humans. And the others (me including) are different species, or sub-species at least. Unless we change the definition of pure human to some complex mix with archaic "animals". :) BTW, it depends how we look at it, probably they were in fact more advanced.
Second, about the distance, research I've seen last year showed that if we feed clustering software with different genetic material then it first separates blacks and whites, then asians. I don't know where did you get that Asians are more diverse group then the rest of the population. More over Africans themselves are more diverse group as whites ancestors were only a small group which left somewhere 100-70k years ago. But it was genetically (near)isolated for much longer. Remember at that time there was no UN, no continent wide trading, no railroads. Everyone was sitting within their tribe land.
The definition of species and subspecies has been fluid, and to some extent still seems to be a subject of debate. Google defines them like this:
species [ sp sheez ]
taxonomic group: a subdivision of a genus considered as a basic biological classification and containing individuals that resemble one another and may interbreed
organisms in species: the organisms belonging to a species
humankind: human beings or the human race
Synonyms: group, class, type, kind, genus, sort, variety, order
subspecies [ súb spsheez ]
plant or animal category: a category used to classify plants and animals whose populations are distinct, e.g. in distribution, appearance, or feeding habits, but can still interbreed
Synonyms: category, strain, genus, sort, class
Subspecies can interbreed and produce viable offspring. That means that modern human 'races' vaguely qualify as subspecies at best. Furthermore, according to this definition can be argued that Neanderthals were a human subspecies if we define 'human' as species Homo Sapiens. Neanderthals differed mildly in appearance, feeding habits and for a time, distribution but could still indisputably interbreed with modern humans and produce viable offspring (since some modern humans carry Neanderthal DNA). Now H. Neanderthalensis arrived in Europe 400.000 years before modern humans emerged in Africa about 200.000 years ago. Does that make Neanderthals more _pure_ humans than modern humans? Did Europeans and Asians become _purer_ humans than Africans by interbreeding with H. Neanderthalensis? IMHO the answer is no, it's more the case that the whole concept of some group of people being _pure_ humans is a steaming pile of BS.
Caveats: It is still debated whether H. Neanderthalis was a subspecies of Homo Sapiens or a species of the genus Homo, i.e whether it we should call it H. Sapiens Neanderthalis or H. Neanderthalis. Secondly recent discoveries have completely blown apart our previous picture of the entire genus Homo.
Re:We keep dancing around it (Score:4, Insightful)
Europeans and Neanderthals, Africans and homo erectus ... demonstrates a principle that has been true since time immemorial, and all over the world. The modern situational implication is this: after 2AM there is no such thing as an ugly woman in a bar.
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I'm only going to address one point; namely, your underlying thought seems to be that recognizing racial differences will allow us to "help" people more, or treat people more appropriately.
That is not what would happen.
The reality is that the customized "solutions" for different races would have as many errors as our initial assumptions, yet be equally capable of propagating injustice in the name of "science". At the very best, and it will never be the best because knowledge is imperfect, we could predict t
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"Science is unfair"? Is that what you're trying to say? I agree. But so too is the idea that it is fair to take away from one to give to another. If you agree with that, they you probably also agree that more white people are needed in the NBA and that we should lower the goal so that everyone can dunk equally. Additonally, we need more black physicians and lawyers and architects. We should lower the requirements for those professions so that we can better accomodate equality. (fun fact, we already d
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I have done much soul searching on the subject and I'm quite settled into the fact that I'm not racist.
If you had to think about it that hard, had to "settle into" it, and still feel you have to mention it...
What I'm getting at is that the only "pure human" seems to be the black African human.
Which black African humans are you referring to, exactly? Modern black Africans are just as distantly related to Mitochondrial Eve as the rest of us.
Everyone else is kind of based on that but also mixed with something else, or as suggested, mixed with several possible somethings else.
Where did these something elses come from?
Re:We keep dancing around it (Score:4, Interesting)
A very insightful post, except for one line (so I found it quite odd that you started from/with it):
Nope. Not even them. The trap, which from reading the rest of your post you do recognise, is that the adjective "pure" is subjective, arbitrary and inapplicable - but we try to apply it anyway, arising from a desire to have life's infinite complexities fit into a set of simple, easily-understood boxes, preferably ones with dials and locks.
What I'm getting at is that humanity is a variable, not a constant.
More precisely, but not actually precisely, from an interactive ongoing perspective over time it's an evolving, um, multi-nodal continuum that... ah, cue Doctor Who excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY_Ry8J_jdw [youtube.com]
Or to paraphrase the Tao Te Ching: "The human that can be spoken of is not the constant human".
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(indeed, even my use of the phrase "not even them" is wrong, because "even" implies they are closer to pure, when there is no "closer" because there is no "pure")
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And yet there is genetic code we all share and code that exists everywhere but with the more originals. I didn't quite mean to draw lines except to say that "these are homosapiens, and these are homosapiens+something(s) else." I wouldn't say they are just as distant. And it's true to say that some black African people are varied as well. But how much variation should be considered or counted? I find it much more convenient to identify what they don't have as a means ot identifying. And that was more o
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An obvious observation. But the opposite approach is actually needed. We are all individuals. We have much inherited though there is some individual potentials as well, though perhaps not as much as we like to think. Why does Johnny A get diabetes when eating exactly the same as Johnny B? Why does Johnny C have no trouble in test scores while Johnny D has problems even though they are in the same class with the same teacher and they live in the same neighborhood? It oversimplifies but I'm talking abou
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It's the fact that such attempts are verboten which is a problem. If research is done and it turns out it's completely false, the issue can be put to rest. But past research into the question had yielded some results but the results have since been pushed away and the careers of those who did the work trashed. Even older research (from nearly 100 years ago) is certainly not being considered as valid.
Would you agree that the effective prohibition of such research is a problem?
So instead of real research,
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I agree and I agree. But there is no compensation without first having some identification and acceptance of some reality.
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But from which group did we inherit more of our characteristics?