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Mystery Humans Spiced Up Ancients' Sex Lives
ananyo writes "New genome sequences from two extinct human relatives suggest that these 'archaic' groups bred with humans and with each other more extensively than was previously known. The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a different archaic human group, the Denisovans, were presented at a meeting at the Royal Society in London. They suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups living in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet unknown human ancestor from Asia. 'What it begins to suggest is that we're looking at a 'Lord of the Rings'-type world — that there were many hominid populations,' says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work."
Far more likely the now dominant species were playing by pillage, plunder, rape and enslave rules. Which is why to this day, we still have problems with psychopaths and narcissists, our major contribution to the human genome pool and the main reason for the extinction of others human species, countless human societies and likely at the end of it all, our own. A defective human mutation whose greatest contribution to human society is war, rape and genocide (basically taking the humane out of human, -e self destructive ego).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
From the "Anthropology in a Nutshell" lectures:
Something that is often overlooked is that before the adoption of sewage systems, most groups of people had a strong incentive to move around a lot. And since it was not very pleasant to move into an area the neighbors had just vacated, groups tended to move into those areas where no other group had gone before. At least, not for a long time.
That meant they would cross paths with distant groups fairly frequently. When that happens, there are two things that can occur: either the groups fight, or they party. Fighting is hard work and often painful. Partying can be a lot of fun, and moves the genes around.
Probably everyone on slashdot knows somebody who has moved to get away from the sh*tty mess they made of the old place. It is an old gene thing that still expresses among the less evolved.
Will
There's no evidence from this story that the other groups weren't equally likely to pillage, plunder, and rape. That's a poignant and tragic idea, but it's less an evidence-based explanation than just wrapping together the idea of the 'noble savage' with some misanthropy. I'm sure you're fun at parties :)
Seriously though, there's other research showing that we do have an instinct towards teamwork, and that we often only become greedy when prompted to think rationally about our own self interest. It could just as well be that we developed that in response to marauding Neanderthals.
Lots and lots of things can interbreed and produce viable offspring, from what we call different species. The concept of species is poorly defined and the capability to interbreed and produce viable offspring is poorly understood. Its quite possible that evolution is far less of a directed, acyclic graph than would be good for computational genomics and evolutionary biology.
General graphs are a lot harder to deal with computationally than trees so theres a tendency to try to simplify a lot of things to tree like structures just to make it easier to deal with. Problem is that the reality may not be as directed as that and may have cycles, which really fucks up the algorithms.
So we have a world where many biologists are in denial and just stick their fingers in their ears and go "LALALALALAAA I cannot hear you LALALALAAA" when people start wondering about the potential for viable hybrids to occur in nature.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
A very insightful post, except for one line (so I found it quite odd that you started from/with it):
Nope. Not even them. The trap, which from reading the rest of your post you do recognise, is that the adjective "pure" is subjective, arbitrary and inapplicable - but we try to apply it anyway, arising from a desire to have life's infinite complexities fit into a set of simple, easily-understood boxes, preferably ones with dials and locks.
What I'm getting at is that humanity is a variable, not a constant.
More precisely, but not actually precisely, from an interactive ongoing perspective over time it's an evolving, um, multi-nodal continuum that... ah, cue Doctor Who excerpt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY_Ry8J_jdw
Or to paraphrase the Tao Te Ching: "The human that can be spoken of is not the constant human".
Wait a moment, did sub-Sahara Africans interbreed with something? No? Then they _are_ pure humans. And the others (me including) are different species, or sub-species at least. Unless we change the definition of pure human to some complex mix with archaic "animals". :) BTW, it depends how we look at it, probably they were in fact more advanced.
Second, about the distance, research I've seen last year showed that if we feed clustering software with different genetic material then it first separates blacks and whites, then asians. I don't know where did you get that Asians are more diverse group then the rest of the population. More over Africans themselves are more diverse group as whites ancestors were only a small group which left somewhere 100-70k years ago. But it was genetically (near)isolated for much longer. Remember at that time there was no UN, no continent wide trading, no railroads. Everyone was sitting within their tribe land.
The definition of species and subspecies has been fluid, and to some extent still seems to be a subject of debate. Google defines them like this:
species [ sp sheez ]
taxonomic group: a subdivision of a genus considered as a basic biological classification and containing individuals that resemble one another and may interbreed
organisms in species: the organisms belonging to a species
humankind: human beings or the human race
Synonyms: group, class, type, kind, genus, sort, variety, order
subspecies [ súb spsheez ]
plant or animal category: a category used to classify plants and animals whose populations are distinct, e.g. in distribution, appearance, or feeding habits, but can still interbreed
Synonyms: category, strain, genus, sort, class
Subspecies can interbreed and produce viable offspring. That means that modern human 'races' vaguely qualify as subspecies at best. Furthermore, according to this definition can be argued that Neanderthals were a human subspecies if we define 'human' as species Homo Sapiens. Neanderthals differed mildly in appearance, feeding habits and for a time, distribution but could still indisputably interbreed with modern humans and produce viable offspring (since some modern humans carry Neanderthal DNA). Now H. Neanderthalensis arrived in Europe 400.000 years before modern humans emerged in Africa about 200.000 years ago. Does that make Neanderthals more _pure_ humans than modern humans? Did Europeans and Asians become _purer_ humans than Africans by interbreeding with H. Neanderthalensis? IMHO the answer is no, it's more the case that the whole concept of some group of people being _pure_ humans is a steaming pile of BS.
Caveats: It is still debated whether H. Neanderthalis was a subspecies of Homo Sapiens or a species of the genus Homo, i.e whether it we should call it H. Sapiens Neanderthalis or H. Neanderthalis. Secondly recent discoveries have completely blown apart our previous picture of the entire genus Homo.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow