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Comment by jwise0 | Hacker News Reader

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jwise0·

These people are humans.

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The question is whether anything relevant has changed in 60,000 years of separation.

Given that humans only evolved around then, it's reasonable to ask about tribes that split off.

"modern humans evolved in Africa possibly from Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis or Homo antecessor and migrated out of the continent some 50,000 to 100,000 years ago"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution

I suppose this could be mostly answered with a DNA test, on further thought.

What makes you think they've been fully isolated for 60,000 years?

>Perhaps no people on earth remain more genuinely isolated than the Sentinelese, one of the few un-contacted people in the world, who have lived in the North Sentinel Islands of the Andamans for last estimated 60,000 years shunning any contact with the outside world.

I took this to mean they've been isolated at least in terms of not having genes cross over.

That's an ambiguous/misleading "and" in that sentence. Modern humans date back to around 200,000 years ago. And it's thought that there was a great migration from Africa roughly 50,000 years ago. Presumably the Sentinelese ancestors were part of that migration, since they are quite far from Africa. Though I agree that it's worth asking how much the population has diverged after 50,000+ years.

Thanks for picking that up, I had misread it as saying both happened then.

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