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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."
There is only one extant species of Homo, and that's Homo sapiens. People like you are what give Anthropology a bad name. The pressures on the minds of those who lived in Europe have been the same as those on people who lived in Africa have been the same as those who lived in Asia -- outwitting other human beings, and struggling against a hostile universe.
There are plenty of trivial physical differences between the different 'races', and that's just what they are -- trivial. Superficial. Unimportant. My mind is the same as the mind of a child growing up in China is the same as the mind of a woman in Europe.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Yes, they definitely extracted mitochondrial DNA (that's DNA that isn't in the nucleus but is rather in the mitochondria and is only passed down by your mother). Yes, the DNA looks different enough that they're pretty sure this isn't any form of contamination from modern samples (always a worry when doing this sort of thing). However, it is far from clear that this DNA is belonged to another species. There are multiple possible other explanations which could make this not another species. The details are a bit technical, but anthropologist John Hawks has a piece on his blog laying out the basic issues- http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/denisova-krause-2010.html. A slightly more lay-oriented piece by Carl Zimmer (the writer for Science Times and author of the very excellent book Parasite Rex) is also worth reading: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/03/24/the-x-womans-fingerbone/. The bottom line is that concluding that this is a new species is as of yet very premature.
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.
This is news for nerds. Science, including anthropology, is of interest to some of the nerds. Therefore, this story belongs here, even if you personally don't happen to find it interesting.
Since you have an UID, you could simply hide science stories in your settings rather than complain.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
From the linked article:
Most scientists believe there is insufficient data to resolve the contributions of heredity and environment.
Further, races are social constructs. As in "constructed by societies." As in "not based in actual biology." There are more genetic differences among members of any given ethnic group than there are between members of any two ethnic groups. If you ever actually acted on any interest in sociology, much less studied it, you would know this.
All this points to the argument that differences in mental aptitudes displayed in aggregate by various "races" in the U.S. are primarily a cause of each race's traditional socioeconomic status, i.e., how members of each "race" are treated and raised by agents of social control (esp. teachers) determines their evident mental prowess.
Not much you can do with half a finger.
You have far too little imagination.
Uh... credentials mean nothing. Refuting a statement with facts means more.
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.
The sheer ignorance of modern anthropology I see on Slashdot is unnerving. So many people on here assume that their enculturated worldview equals science.
Race is a social construct. Phenotypical differences are one axis along which race is constructed, but it is not the only axis, and in some contexts it is not even the most important. As an example, you can also tell the "race" of a person if you talk to them on the phone. This obviously has nothing do with biology.
Although race as a system of scientific categorization started in European thought during the Enlightenment, it has seriously decreased in scientific merit because of genetics. Today, physical anthropologists think in terms of "clines." Unfortunately, because of the impact of European empires and their hegemony, race as a system of categorization persists in various incarnations throughout the world. This system is perpetuated by a wide variety of structural institutions and the uneducated public.
You can tell races apart because you are conditioned to detect certain characteristics which you associate with an arbitrary categorization of people. These arbitrary categorizations gradually accrued social and cultural capital in YOUR culture. This does not mean they are based in any kind of genetic reality.