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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."
Nice to see that we came by our propensity to fornicate with anything in a natural manner.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
In the beginning, we were all fish. Okay? Swimming around in the water. And then one day a couple of fish had a retard baby, and the retard baby was different, so it got to live. So Retard Fish goes on to make more retard babies, and then one day, a retard baby fish crawled out of the ocean with its...mutant fish hands... and it had butt sex with a squirrel or something and made this. Retard frog-sqirrel, and then *that* had a retard baby which was a... monkey-fish-frog... And then this monkey-fish-frog had butt sex with that monkey, and that monkey had a mutant retard baby that screwed another monkey... and that made you!
So there you go! You're the retarded offspring of five monkeys having butt sex with a fish-squirrel! Congratulations!
...if any sheep genomes were found?
In my book, if you can breed with it, it's human. Maybe anthropologists are special.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Guess I don't need that subscription to ancestry.com anymore. Thanks AC!
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
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
So you say we all evolved out of a bunch of managers?
Sorry, but there I draw the line. When Darwin said we evolved outta monkeys, ok. I could dig that. But managers... YOU TAKE THAT BACK RIGHT NOW!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That may not be true. Cooperation is just as inborn a trait as assholism. I don't mean to paint a rosy picture, but please consider that most of the people still living on the planet under a tribal/primitive lifestyle are pretty calm and get along pretty well.
Natural selection works for the talkers as well as the fighters. Sometimes in the same individual.
please consider that most of the people still living on the planet under a tribal/primitive lifestyle are pretty calm and get along pretty well.
Bullshit.
Seriously, if you think that's even remotely true you've obviously never studied Anthropology to any degree, and especially never paid any attention to those particular groups.
As for this article, I'm getting really tired of people acting like this is some kind of startling revelation. It's not.
It IS important evidence which further validates Evolutionary Theory, which predicted this situation all along. In the past we didn't have any evidence for humans co-existing with other species, and that has long been a point the Anti-Evolution crowd has attempted to use to invalidate Evolution.
So hooray for the data, but please, spare us the "shock and surprise" because the only people who should be surprised are the ones who think Evolution says humans are the result of a monkey fucking a fish.
Did you read the same article I did?
This article described interbreeding between several (at least 3) different sub-specie. They were obviously close enough to interbreed and produce viable offspring.
That's not that uncommon with closely related species. And these were closely related back at that time. Evidence of the survives in the Gene pool today.
Look, this was only 30,000 years ago. Some fragments of oral history extend back that far (although time gets pretty muddled in oral history).
This isn't the first scientific study that showed homo sapiens and neanderthal may have interbred. One wonders about whether this knowledge was passed down in legend and incorporated in ancient texts.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
We also have compassion, cooperation and communication. Those are the "killer features" of human behavior, the things that make us the most adaptable animal species ever. These are such fundamental features of what it means to be human that it's easy to take them for granted.
You mention enslavement, pillage and plunder, and those make my point. Until you have built a society beyond small nomadic hunter-gatherer bands, slavery makes no sense. Pillage and plunder as well are meaningless until your species has at least developed agriculture, and the social ability to band together to attack people who have converted agricultural surplus into property.
But in the end it isn't about being nice, it's about being adaptable. Being nice -- the things that make others want to spend time with us and cooperate with us -- just happens to be the best basic pattern for building a species with maximum behavioral adaptability. But it makes sense that we ALSO retain the ability to be not-nice. From time to time it's useful for survival -- just less than the 100% of the time that social Darwinists would have us believe. There are times when turning on your neighbor at least ensures someone from the neighborhood survives.
It's a tautology: a behaviorally adaptable species manifests many different kinds of behaviors. So it seems plausible that our distant ancestors made both love AND war with the other human species on the planet.
Remember, though: it was a much less populated planet in the Early Paleolithic. Even in the more populated Late Paleolithic period there were fewer people in the whole world than there are in the Portland OR metropolitan area today. There were maybe 3000 in all of Europe. If in all that underpopulated land you happened to meet another band of humans, which would be better for your genetic legacy? Exchanging genes or exchanging attacks? Screwing or stoning?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What I'm getting at is that the only "pure human" seems to be the black African human. Everyone else is
There are larger genetic differences between different groups of the same "race", than between individuals of "different race".
Is that clearer for you? No? Black vs. white could be more similar than two similarly looking east asian people, or two similarly looking white people.
And ffs, there is NO SUCH THING AS "PURE HUMAN". Never was. Never will be. Just as there is no "pure monkey" or "pure snail". The entire theory of evolution completely contradicts such ridicules notions.
Actually, the contention was that the separate species was the same species because of the ability to interbreed which at one time the inability was key to denoting a deparate species. The though was same species but different races like we see today.
I don't care to get into an evolution verses creation argument. Just stating the argument as i heard it. I do agree this is no big news or anything novel as the concept has been around a while but not widely accepted. I guess the news to me is the concept of another unknown race or species being involved
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.
Butt sex doesn't you pregnant. What are they teaching in school these days?
Not enough English?
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".
Nope, survival is just one means among several.
What evolution is really all about is propagation of DNA.
Traits can rise to prominence or dwindle into nothingness without affecting survival at all, if they affect reproductive success in some other way.
A gene doesn't even have to be reproduced via the same individual to support its own propagation:
In multicellular organisms like ourselves, millions of cells self-sacrifice every day, having offloaded the task of propagating their genes to the other clones in in the same colony (i.e. body). Insect colonies display similar constructs at the level of complex individuals, to the point of the majority of individuals being intrinsically sterile.
Humans and other social animals display social contracts that are much weaker, but which still strongly affect behaviour, and probably for much the same reasons.
If humans were truly as asocial as lone-hunter-type animals, you and I would be out feeding or sleeping, not hanging out here on slashdot trying to impress each other with our insights.
sudo ergo sum
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
Man's insatiable appetite for midget porn. Or is that just me?
sounds like the same tired saw about "only humans wage war", "only humans murder" ....
snails rape each other to impregnate each other
several beetle and other insect varieties do the same thing
chimpanzees wage war on other chimp tribes
baboons will given the chance kill entire other tribes (genocide)
orcas and even dolphins kill for fun
lions kill each other regularly, particularly a new alpha male in a pride with cubs, will kill all the cubs
lions also have an instinctive hatred for hyenas (and vice versa) and will kill them just to kill them
cats (of many species) "play" (torture) their food
"defective human mutation" ??
Hardly. It's across the entire animal and even plant kingdom, to the extent that it's cant even be considered a mutation. IE, its the norm, not the exception. the exception is the opposite trait.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Europeans and Neanderthals, Africans and homo erectus ... demonstrates a principle that has been true since time immemorial, and all over the world. The modern situational implication is this: after 2AM there is no such thing as an ugly woman in a bar.
That may not be true. Cooperation is just as inborn a trait as assholism. I don't mean to paint a rosy picture, but please consider that most of the people still living on the planet under a tribal/primitive lifestyle are pretty calm and get along pretty well.
Natural selection works for the talkers as well as the fighters. Sometimes in the same individual.
Darwin actually said as much. He pointed out that humans weren't the strongest or the fastest or any of the "ests" and yet we rose to the top. People credit him for his "survival of the fittest" theory, but he actually rarely used that term and it contradicted his main theme that since humans were not the fittest on so many levels it was our ability to cooperate that allowed us to not only survive but to dominate.
We still see this today, for instance with hunting. Hunting a deer by yourself may or may not yield success. In a group, where others drive the deer towards the hunters, the success rate is much higher. Today, hunting is a sport, but back then, it was about survival. The whole clan or community benefited by the cooperation. Now hunting is a over simplified example, the reality is that in the wild, even today, the odds of a single human being surviving for extended periods is limited. Not that it can't be done, but it is extremely difficult. With a community, even a small one, there is division of tasks and even though there are more mouths to feed, more can be accomplished to secure food and shelter and ultimately the survival of progeny.
So while raping and pillaging were no doubt part of early human life, that is not what led to homo sapiens overtaking other competing hominids (as it is likely that they also raped and pillaged, too). It was that homo sapiens were much better at cooperating than their counterparts.
Classic problem of game theory, the prisoner’s dilemma. Yes, a few selfish people can get ahead if the majority and compassionate. Of course, if everybody is greedy then the whole system falls apart. Which is why there exist ideas like fairness and retribution. Abusers are identified and are kicked out of society at large.