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Australian Aboriginal DNA Suggests 70,000-Year History
brindafella writes with a link to an abstract at the journal Science that says "Scientists have obtained a DNA genomic sequence from a 100-year-old, voluntarily donated hair sample from a full-blood Australian Aboriginal man. [Analysis of the hair] shows 'Aboriginal Australians are descendants of an early human dispersal into eastern Asia, possibly 62,000 to 75,000 years ago. This dispersal is separate from the one that gave rise to modern Asians 25,000 to 38,000 years ago. ... [Their] findings support the hypothesis that present-day Aboriginal Australians descend from the earliest humans to occupy Australia, likely representing one of the oldest continuous populations outside Africa.' A news story gives more detail."
out of africa!
It's interesting that 75ky is not enough time for a species to diverge into incompatible branches; successful mating between individuals from these branches creates perfectly normal offspring.
I wonder what would have happened if the above was not true; probably even worse extermination, just like the bushmeat thing in Africa.
Great! Now if us Australians can stop treating them like second class citizens...
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Not any credible anthropologists. There's way too much data showing symbolic thought to be older than that (to the extent it is present in other species, and thus likely dates back to a common ancestor). As for language itself, there is no good data on when that started--some have tried to estimate it based on approximate rates of phonemic change and how far back you'd have to go for all known languages to coalesce, but that approach is based on extremely specious assumptions (among them that language was created only once, and that it's creation was a distinct event instead of a gradual evolution from the less sophisticated systems of communication we see in other species).
No. The evolution of the hominid family is WAY more complex than that. Basically you have a set of inter-breeding semi-distinct populations from 4 million years ago all the way to circa 30,000 years ago (maybe even as late as 20,000 years ago based on some finds of neanderthal tools). All the way through most of the populations would have been genetically similar enough to interbreed successfully (especially after H. ergaster and H. erectus 2 million years ago). H. heidelbergensis, neanderthalensis, and sapiens likely all interbred. Neanderthals were Europeans descendants of an earlier H. ergaster or H. heidelbergensis exodus from Africa. Australian aboriginals, like all modern humans, would be predominantly H. sapiens, with differing traces from the interbreeding with earlier populations.
Moreover, you've misunderstood the data on the Cro Magnon man. Modern humans arrived in EUROPE (Cro-Magnon is the place in France where skeletons were found) 35,000 years ago (as best as we can tell). They appear in Africa almost 200,000 years ago, and in the Middle East before 60,000 years ago.
They're probably wrong. The evolutionary tree of Homo sapiens has four major branches: Aborigines, Eurasians, Africans, and Khoisan. The Aborigines and Eurasians are each other's closest relatives, Africans are more distantly related, and the Khoisan (bushmen) are the most ancient branch of our evolutionary tree. All four groups have the mental hardware to do things like use language, create artwork, and make sophisticated stone tools. While it's concievable that they each evolved that capability independently, Occam's razor says it's simpler to assume that it evolved once, than to assume it happened four separate times. And since Aborigines were around 70,000 years ago, this hardware package- what we'd called the "behaviorally modern" human- would have appeared by that time.
Consistent with this idea, you get cave paintings in Australia around 50,000 years ago, as soon as the Aborigines show up there. And you get cave paintings and sophisticated stone tools in Europe around 30,000 years ago, when the Eurasians move out of Africa. In this scenario, the reason sophisticated stone tools and cave art don't show up earlier is that advanced humans were restricted to Africa. If so, then we would expect evidence for similar behavioral complexity- cave paintings, Neolithic-quality stone tools- in Africa prior to 70,000 years. My guess is that it almost certainly exists, but we just haven't looked in the right places (because it's a lot easier to do fieldwork in Europe than in Africa) or we've found it but haven't recognized it for what it is because the artifacts haven't been dated yet.
Just read Guns, Germs and Steel and then shut the fuck up, please.
Is it less advanced to live in sustainable balance with your environment than to rape and conquer it (and other cultures)?
Let's see how our "advanced" culture looks 75.000 years from now.
What an utterly stupid comment. I've read a lot of dumb comments on slashdot, but ... wow, yours might just be the stupidest thing I've read on the Internet.
First, yes, a culture that never invented writing or the wheel is not advanced, and is markedly less advanced than ones that discovered electricity, writing, forms of societal representation beyond "tribe," compasses, sextants, printing presses, base 10, windmills, aqueducts, gunpowder (I'm trying to pick a wide range of innovations from around the globe here, in case it wasn't obvious) or ones that built pyramids, dams, palaces, walls, houses, etc. I honestly can't see how any remotely rational person would even try to claim otherwise.
Secondly, and what really makes your post stupid, what on earth makes you believe that the Australian aborigines "live[d] in sustainable balance with [their] enviromnent [and didn't] rape and conquered...other cultures"? It's widely believed that aborigines caused the extinction of many species! http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/990/aborigines-blamed-big-mammal-extinction! So much for sustainability! Likewise, not only was warfare between aboriginal peoples very common, so was cannibalism.
But really, why let facts stand in the way of your Green Religion that makes being an allegedly noble savage with a small carbon footprint the ideal human life?
Of course it's separate - one was from Cain, the other one from Seth. ~
Actually Africa was ahead in some key respects. The Iron Age began in East Africa, for instance.
But ultimately it's pure geography. Good chunks of the land area of the planet simply are not capable of supporting dense populations, which are a basic requirement for kick starting advanced civilizations. Those technologies can certainly be imported to less desirable areas (ie. the Great Plains) but obviously have to be developed in more favorable areas first.
While I recommend Jered Diamond cautiously, Guns, Germs and Steel does really lay out precisely why some areas spawned civilizations and others didn't. Most importantly, for the Eurocentric racist crowd, all the key technological developments that put Europe at the top of the heap came from elsewhere. The basic staple crops and animal husbandry were developed in Asia, and writing was developed (probably independently) in the Middle East, Egypt and China. Early metallurgy flowed out of the East Mediterranean and the Iron Age burst out of East Africa. Urban civilization was also an import from elsewhere. Hell, even pottery was apparently invented in Japan something like 16,000 years ago.
While Europeans were basically still at the "savage" stage, Mesopotomia, the Nile, the Indian subcontinent and China were spawning the first literate urban societies with the basic features of what we would call civilizations.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Let me guess: you are European, which means you come from a culture that never invented the wheel, writing, civilization, base 10, gunpowder. But European cultures were close enough to other massive cultures that were able to invent them. And you are going to use that fact to judge an isolated culture trapped in a desert the size of the US that even today with modern technology still only maintains a population of a few million. How many hunters and gatherers did it support. Less than 1 million? A hundred thousand?
And you find it surprising that they didn't match the accomplishments of a continent that spans half the globe and today supports 4 billion people.
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There's at least some limited evidence of modern behaviors in Africa something around 70,000 years ago. You're a few decades out of date here. In particular see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klasies_River_Caves
I think timelines are still fuzzy enough to suggest that modern behaviors evolved in Africa itself.
Well surely you need _some_ kind of language to be able to say to a bunch of your friends : "Hey! Fancy going on a beach trip ... to Australia?".
Watching this year's Republican debates makes me feel like we're living in the world of the Starship Troopers movie. Crowds cheering at things like the count of convicts put to death in Texas...what disgusting savagery.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
On the contrary - the record shows that when two groups of humans meet, mating tends to start within weeks or even days. This is regardless of loudly expressed disapproval from "authorities". There were many and widely bruited condemnations of the tendency of young white men to mate with their black slaves - but it didn't stop them. And recent evidence is that early Europeans interbred with Neandethals, from which they had been separated for hundreds rather than tens of thousands of years. After all, if men will mate with goats, dogs and horses - as some do - they will surely mate with a slightly different humanoid.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.