Slashdot Mirror
New Ancient Human Identified
krou writes "Working on a finger-bone that was discovered in the Denisova Cave of Siberia's Altai mountains in 2008, Johannes Krause from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and colleagues managed to extract mitochondrial DNA. They compared it to the genetic code of modern humans and other known Neanderthals and discovered a new type of hominin that lived in Central Asia between 48,000 and 30,000 years ago. Professor Chris Stringer, human origins researcher at London's Natural History Museum, said, 'This new DNA work provides an entirely new way of looking at the still poorly-understood evolution of humans in central and eastern Asia.' The last common ancestor of the hominid (dubbed 'X-Woman'), humans and Neanderthals seems to have been about one million years ago."
You are correct that there's evidence for there being correlation between mental abilities and race. But that doesn't mean it is at all genetic. Much of it is almost certainly cultural and environmental. For example, if you get less nutrients growing up you likely aren't going to be as smart as someone else who does get enough nutrients. That's because early brain growth is determined in part by how much resources the brain has available. Similarly, certain cultures have games and habits with young children that may encourage certain forms of mental development or practicing certain skills. Moreover, some types of intelligent tests are very culturally based (there are some fascinating cross cultural studies about how people naturally organize things into groups. While in most Western societies we consider organization into functional categories to be ideal and consider people not as bright if they have trouble, in many other societies and even some Western societies, given a set of objects they will try categorize by which groups of objects can be used together. The classic example of this is giving a bunch of tools and a bunch of possible things that the tools can modify. The "correct" Western response is to group into tools and non-tools. But in some cultures they instead group into which are connected to relevant processes). So yes, such correlation does exist, but there's no strong evidence that such correlation actually means much at all.
It's kinda late and I'm a bit brain-dead at the moment. But the first thing that came to my mind was...... The Abominable Snow Man. What are the chances that this ends up being the smoking gun for that oh-so-elusive cryptoid that has had people arguing about hairy wild apemen since time forgotten? Personally, I think it'll realistically end up being a case of contamination or something else mondan. But with the odd chance that this turns out to be scientifically investigatable, we can hang on to the slim hope that there are other samples out there waiting to be found.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.