Possible New Human Species Discovered In China

BayaWeaver writes "These are exciting times in anthropology. Recent analysis of fossils first discovered in China in 1979 indicate that a human-like species may have co-existed with modern humans as late as 11,500 years ago. This presumably new species has been nicknamed Red Deer Cave people because of their apparent taste for the extinct giant red deer. Other species recently discovered include: the 'hobbits' on the Indonesian island of Flores which are also thought to have been around until 12,000 years ago and the Denisovans discovered in 2010 that co-existed with modern humans in Siberia about 30,000 years ago."

Comments

Fascinating!

[SultanCemil]

I, for one, think this is absolutely fascinating! The thought that, as recently as 10k years ago, there were other species of human is amazing - that's not far off of written history!

I wonder if we could think about cloning these people - is the DNA "fresh" enough?

Re:Fascinating!

[Sponge Bath]

...as recently as 10k years ago

4000 years before God created Earth? You can't fool me with your elitist education.

Re:Fascinating!

[Spy Handler]

written history only goes back to about 5000 years, I think ancient Sumerians (Iraqis) writing cuneiform on clay tablets.

To paraphrase a nerd, if the cro-magnons who left cave paintings 30,000 years ago in France could've written something, they would've written something.

Re:Fascinating!

[MightyMartian]

Hunter-gatherer groups do not have the population size, nor could they sustain the population size necessary to create sufficient specialization for something like scribes or a literate class. Writing had to wait until you had high enough populations and an economic system that could free some group from basic activities like food collection. In other words, you need an urban culture, and even with an urban culture it took a considerable length of time to develop writing. It wasn't an issue of intelligence, it was all down to economics.

Re:Fascinating!

[modmans2ndcoming]

And one of necessity....In a tribe, you can gather everyone together and talk to communicate to the population....in a city of thousands, you need something else. Sure town criers work but what bureaucracy needs a record to be maintained beyond what someone recollects a few months later....Who said a bureaucrat was worthless? I am it was a bureaucrat that invented writing in the first place.

Re:Fascinating!

[MightyMartian]

Some of the earliest examples of proto-writing in Sumeria appear to be tax records. It is both economies of scale and raw economic need of a large, complex state that drove the need for accurate record keeping. So you're right, it was bureaucrats that likely invented writing.

Re:Fascinating!

[tmosley]

30000 years from now, no paper or electronic writing produced by the current generation will exist. Just what little we have carved into stone.

Hard to say what a people were capable of when we know so very, very little about them.

Re:Fascinating!

[PapayaSF]

So you're right, it was bureaucrats that likely invented writing.

And yet it was Phoenician traders and merchants who spread a simple phonemic alphabet around the Mediterranean. Such an alphabet was easy to learn and could be used to transcribe many (all?) spoken languages. So thank business for that advance.

Re:Fascinating!

[buchner.johannes]

Cloning? To what end? Why did they die out in the first place? Ultimately, if they're genetically compatible do you really want to reintroduce their genetic lineage back into the modern human race? Relationships happen. That might be a step backwards for us even if the impact is negligible. Then you start talking about preemptive sterilization.

I can think of at least half dozen ethical issues so far. It's a can of worms I really don't think we should be opening. Just my 2 cents.

What kind of speciest talk is that? There is no direction and no step forwards or backwards in evolution. It is not directed, only adaptive. A concept of destiny is superstition. I don't mind mammoths being cloned, so what's the line?

You're right, of course. The ethical questions are staggering. I guess the geek side of me went "cool, I want to talk to these guys". Wouldn't it be cool to see if they were really like us? Haven't you always wondered if Neanderthals would see you as a fellow (albeit weird) "person"?

Neanderthals wouldn't stand out if you dressed them like us and educated them like our kids. The difference to them is smaller than the variety within homo sampiens. In fact, it hasn't been ruled out that there was mixing between Neanderthals and humans, so we might be all Neanderthals too.

Re:Fascinating!

[jd]

Possibly they did. By many of the paintings, there are symbols etched/painted. These are generally ignored, but it is entirely possible that this was proto-writing and new research is going into studying them.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/11/cave-painting-symbols-language-evolution

Re:Fascinating!

[Michael Woodhams]

Can we sequence DNA from them? Probably, but not certainly. Ancient DNA is a very tricky business. The preservation of DNA depends a lot on the conditions they've been in since death. Cold and dry is ideal. I know we've sequenced DNA over 30,000 years old, I'm not sure what the record is.

Ancient human DNA is even trickier. If you're dealing with ancient bison DNA, you can largely avoid contamination problems by keeping the remains away from any modern bison. Keeping your human remains (and DNA samples extracted from them) away from modern humans isn't so easy. In this case, the cat is already out of the bag - the samples have been exposed to modern human DNA for decades. All is not lost, but it makes the job harder, and the outcome more open to doubt.

Can we clone them? Absolutely not with current technology. We can't clone a cow from a fresh steak, yet alone 10,000 year old bones. It is conceivable that future technology would allow it. I don't think you'll ever get it past an ethics committee though.

Re:Fascinating!

[MightyMartian]

The alphabet was certainly the next big innovation, phonetic, easier to learn, could be applied to different languages without all the awkwardness one found in applying Sumerian systems to unrelated languages like Akkadian. In the history of writing it was the next big thing up until the printing press. Still, you have to give the earliest inventors of writing the credit, it still stands in my mind as the greatest single achievement of the human mind, from it springing pretty much everything we see today.

Re:Fascinating!

[IndustrialComplex]

Ultimately, if they're genetically compatible do you really want to reintroduce their genetic lineage back into the modern human race? Relationships happen. That might be a step backwards for us even if the impact is negligible

Backwards? That assumes that there is a forwards to evolution.

Re:Fascinating!

[Trogre]

Maybe not, but it will still be under copyright.

Ok, how many more are there?

[mfarah]

Besides Homo Sapiens, there are Neanderthals, Floresians (I ain't calling them "hobbits"), Denisovans and now these?

Pre-history is getting crowded with failed competitors. Yay us?

Re:Ok, how many more are there?

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> Homo Sapiens, ...Neanderthals, Floresians..., Denisovans

Also the Orange People of New Jersey.

Re:Ok, how many more are there?

[erroneus]

That's crap though. We know we have interbred with neanderthals... well, the people who left Africa did anyway. Unfortunately there aren't any really strong divisions because life in all of its forms and continuous evolutions doesn't easily fit within any given definition.

Re:Ok, how many more are there?

[Michael Woodhams]

The question "are these sufficiently different to be two species" is inherently a fuzzy one. We tend to be a bit more picky when dealing with our near relatives, so we might call these a different species when for two squirrel groups with a similar level of difference we might call them subspecies. I've seen it argued that an objective taxonomist would put humans, chimps and gorillas all in the same genus, we've classified this lineage into four - gorilla, pan, homo and (extinct) austalopithecus.

"Possible New Human Species Discovered in China"

[Tyrannosaur]

And I thought we got over scientific racism a long time ago...

Misleading title

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Based on the title, I thought that mankind has just made another evolutionary leap! But no, it's actually an old human species, not a new one.

Re:missing link

[Anonymous Coward]

The missing link was found. And the two new missing links on either side of that, and the new "missing links".

Please, if serious you need to accept that it has become so well studied of a field that scientists actually estimated based on previous research where a "crock-o-duck" should have existed, went there and found the bloody fossils. Same for whales. Your argument has devolved, pun intended, from something that could be respected to practically a parody of Xeno arguing that a runner could never catch a turtle.

If a troll, I may be feeding you, but feeding you is far worse than feeding people who actually use such arguments. Please, just stop.

Re:missing link

[jamstar7]

The link between /. commenters and intelligent human beings?

Why not study the modern, living pygmies instead?

[ace37]

We have Pygmies today across Africa. They've endured a lot of human rights issues over the years, and theories are out suggesting Iodine deficiencies are related to their short stature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmies

Why do we see papers about recent human evolutionary theory only when it pertains to extinct peoples? Are the currently living pygmies less studied simply because anthropologists aren't interested in living people, and nobody else is into these fields of science?

Re:missing link

[jd]

Then you need a better filesystem integrity checker.

Score one for open-access publishing

[damn_registrars]

The journal article that is being linked to is open-access. There is no paywall, regardless of where you are accessing it from. You can download it and print as many copies as you want, you can even download it and repost it in its entirety on your own website if you feel like it. You can do the same with every article in the PLoS journals as well.