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Oldest Modern Humans Found
DrLudicrous writes "Anthropologists have reconstructed and dated three skulls from Ethiopia that they believe to be the oldest anatomically modern human skulls in existance. They date to 160,000 years ago, in agreement with genetic studies that pin the arrival of modern humans to at least 150,000 years ago. The skulls also demonstrate evidence of ritual burial." UC Berkeley has the original release as well.
It's time to revise the Bible again! Damn science, it makes my work so much harder.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Not that hominids, though, arrived considerably earlier than this... what's the latest figure? somewhere in the 4 million range? Some of them wren't exactly dumb either; neanderthals, in fact, are supposed to have had more brain mass than humans did/do.
along with the skulls are some tools, and their way of burial is more than a simple "covering up with dirt and let's move on", which sort of indicates these ancestors are pretty smart and know what they were doing.
are we going to discover even earlier "modern" human remains in order to find out how we really came from??
The Herto skulls were not found with other bones from the rest of the bodies, which is unusual, White said, leading the researchers to infer that the people "were moving the heads around on the landscape. They probably cut the muscles and broke the skull bases of some skulls to extract the brain, but why, whether as part of a cannibalistic ritual, we have no way of knowing."
I was rather surprised by the possibility of ritualistic brain-eating amongst the earliest ancestors of our species. Maybe they were extracting the brains not for appetizers, but for the same reasons Egyptians removed the brains prior to mummification: so that dead would not be encumbered by the useless grey gunk inside their head on the journey to the afterlife.
You think it's confusing now? Wait until we get the postmodern humans. I shiver at the idea of self-referential genetics.
Is that, Okay, Great^n Grandpawas around 160,000 years ago, complete with stone tools and burial practices.
Yet Civilization only 'started 6-10,000 years ago.
Why does this just not quite add up to me. I mean, our ancestors were not stupid, they posessed the same intuition and logic that we do today. Whay did it take so long to get where we are now though?
Just food for thought.
You say you want a revolution....
I think that the most important part of this discovery, though is that it pretty much rules out the descent of homo sapiens from homo neanderathalensis. I know that there was a lot of evidence of that, anyway, but this seems pretty conclusive.
Still, I think that more interesting discoveries would be from 5 million years ogo. In particular, I would like to see remains of the ancestors of Australopithecenes and Ardopithecenes which would support the evolution of modern chimpanzees and modern humans from a common ancestor.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Uhh, Homo erectus was not the first hominid. Not by a long shot. Try Ardipithecus ramadis at 5 to 8 million years ago, or arguably something earlier. A. ramadis is most likely bipedal however, which is typically the criteria for early hominids.
If you were refering to the first in the Homo genus, that would be (in my opinion) Homo habilis or possibly Homo heidelburgensis. These were characterized by the earliest confirmed tool use (Homo habilis means "handy man"). These fellas were around for several hundred thousand years before H. erectus and H. ergaster.
Sorry about the lack of italicised names, I'm lazy.
Jeremy
IANA geneticist, but I wonder whether some rapid evolution occurred amongst these small subgroups that gave modern humans the advantage over the Neanderthals?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Saw a show on something related to this, "The Journey of Man", difference was using mutations on X chromosomes, which are passed unchanged from father to son, aside from random mutations. Anyways, a researcher (Spencer Wells) analysed the mutations in the X chromosomes from people all over the world, and came up with a map of sorts on the way people branched out.
. html
In summary, we're all descendant of a man who lived in Africa about 50,00 years ago (~2000 generations), with genes basically the same as bushmen.
The researcher laid it out quite clearly and convincingly, so it's worth a watch/read:
http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7442
It really made me realize how related we all are, and silences the idiots who think blacks are closer to the apes, and whites are more advanced, etc.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Just a small nit-pick: I believe you mean Y chromosome, not X. All men get their X chromosome from their mother, and can only pass it on to their daughters. Y chromosome inheritance works as you described, though.
"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
--Henry David Thoreau
... that we're really the VHS of evolution, and killed out Betamax while it was still young? :)
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Or is this more of the overly simplistic logic that starts by assuming the Bible is false and then proceeds to construct some alternative scenario?
How do we know anything is true, we must and do on a daily basis make assumptions about the world around us from what we observe. I see a table, i walk up to it, touch it, i know it's a table. We use simple logic to assume things are right or wrong, true or false. If i am told something is true i do not believe it unless i can verify it for myself.
As such, i believe there is a book called the bible with many secular variations. Having read some of it, I know it contains some fascinating insights into human nature and accounts of historic events. But my wider knowledge allows me to put it in picture with the history of the roman occupation of the area, simultaneous Chinese philosophy, Mayan empires, etc. And my knowledge of human nature, culture, behaviour; to come to the simple logical conclusion that it is most likely that Jesus existed and was immensely insightful into human nature and further evolved a system of living by which humanity and all it's individuals could prosper. However i see no good evidence for divine intervention.
What your parents tell you to believe in ... isn't always right
My spelling isn't bad, I'm evolving the language
The artist's illustration in the Berkeley article (also used on the cover of the current edition of Nature) is misleading, in as much as it gives the figure kinky hair and thick lips, making for a more "African" look than is likely to have been the case.
The truth of the matter is that the earliest men almost certainly would have had straight hair, not curly or kinky but straight, and thin lips, just like most Europeans and Asians today. The wild-type for hair in primates is straight, and all of the great apes conform to that type. Similarly, no ape has thick lips, and our closest living relatives are pretty much lipless. Given these facts, why would any reasonable person expect the "first" men to look like modern day Africans?
Of course, it is logically impossible to rule out that our species evolved to gain the features of modern-day Africans only to lose them once again, but this flies in the face of both probability and Occam's razor - it is extremely unlikely that a feature, once lost, can then be regained down the line, simultaneously around all of the world outside Africa.
One mistake people tend to make is to assume that because our species originated in Africa, modern day Africans are somehow "closer" to what we must have originally been like, but this is nonsense. Africans are just as far removed from the original homo sapiens populations as any other population groups, so they've had just as much time to diverge from the original type. Africans, like any other populations, haven't stood still in evolutionary terms, contrary to the misleading notion that this article illustration propagates.