New human species found in Philippines | Hacker News Reader

New human species found in Philippines

bbc.com

192 pointsjnord71 comments

IMO might want to revise the title to something like "Remains of previously-unknown human species found in Philippines" -- I initially thought the headline was indicating some kind of super elusive secret species of humanoids was living in some hidden cave or something. :'D

That was my exact first thought. Well, I dunno if it was intended to be a clickbait of sorts, but it sure worked.

Cause that first title would have not made me click the story.

It's 2019. Of course it's all clickbait. :)

I thought the same. It was an exciting thought for a moment, but then I thought about how politically charged such a discussion would become. Sad states, regardless...

The emergence of these extinct human species from the fossil record raises a nagging question: what happened to them all?

Across the animal kingdom, single-species genera are somewhat uncommon. Why is there only one species of the genus Homo?

A related question. The extinction of the last surviving non-Sapiens coincides more or less with the retreat of the last glaciation period and the emergence of human civilization (see the chart midway into the linked article). These events also seem to have happened about the same time as the extinction of certain large land mammals such as the saber-tooth tiger and woolly mammoth.

Are these extinctions, large land mammals and species of Homo, connected in some way with the retreat of glaciers and/or the emergence of human civilization?

These questions are asked (but not really answered) in the first part of the book Sapiens.

Maybe they simply got merged into us? We all have neanderthal ancestry.

Isn't "merged" a nice way of saying that the men and children were likely murdered and the women taken for breeding? "Merged" conjures an image of living peacefully side by side and interbreeding for many generations.

Isn't this ultimately the origin of everything that we recognize as a modern ethnicity? We're all the products of amalgamations of conquered/extinguished tribes, states, empires, and cultures, most of which are lost to history forever.

> "Merged" conjures an image of living peacefully side by side and interbreeding for many generations.

That seems to be what happened with Neanderthals, at least at first.

Incidentally any violence may have been from the Neanderthals because almost all of the genetic data shows Neanderthal ancestry from Neanderthal males and homo sapiens females, and not the other way around.

Maybe the Neanderthal were more sensitive and alluring to Homo sapiens females, given their artistic side.

> "Merged" conjures an image of living peacefully side by side and interbreeding for many generations.

Even when this did happen[1], the record seems to show trickles of gene-flow from these populations entering a much larger stream of genes from a more recently out-of-Africa population.

[1] And in a big complex world, it certainly would have happened sometimes.

Women are people too, so that wouldn't be how such merging happens. Most likely homo sapiens greatly outnumbered the neanderthals, so any neanderthals (whether more or female) that mated with humans had their own DNA diluted and eventually absorbed into the homo sapien population.

All matings that resulted in Neandertal DNA in modern humans were by Neandertal male + Sapiens female.

All (non-african)

At this point, some Africans probably have some Neanderthal in them.

Subsaharan Africans have mated with for now unknown hominin cca 30kya.

As for your claim, you're mostly right. There was an incursion of non-African DNA into Subsaharan Africa around 3000kya, probably related to Bronze Age Collapse and migrations around it. Because of this, Africans can carry up to 25% Eurasian DNA, and part of that is Neandertal.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34479905

*around 3kya, I meant.

A asked a friend that asked one of their professors who nominally studies such things. He said probably same thing that happened to all the other mega fauna when modern humans showed up somewhere.

It's not lost on me what happened to Native Americans in North America when Europeans showed up. Disease, competition for resources, social disruption and war drove entire tribal groups to extinction. And Native Americans are Homo-sapiens not some random archaic Hominid.

Not a geneticist, but there is considerable genetic distance between various human populations due to pretty significant temporal separation between the populations of Sub-Saharan Africa, Eurasia, the Americas, and Oceania.

https://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/global-genetic-d...

There are also various degrees of admixture from other human species (Neanderthals, Denisovans, something similar to H. naledii) in different human populations which also contributes to our genetic diversity.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/Ho...

Some argue that these factors and others would suggest classification of humans as multiple subspecies, if not separate species. It should also be noted that the well-known definition of a species as "organisms that can mate to produce fertile offspring" is not the standard for all geni and families.

If there was ever any other terrestrial intelligent species much different from us, we probably killed them all.

Homo erectus had an amazing range, both spacial and temporal. It inhabited the whole of the Africa-Eurasia landmass, and did so for over a million years (from 1.8Mya to 800kya). It is no surprise we're finding evidence of island populations that managed to survive even later (such as Flores).

As for the later stages,:

Sapiens or proto-Sapiens interbred with Neanderthals even earlier than the widely accepted cca 40kya admixture date; somewhere between 430kya and 270kya Sapiens dna enters Neandertal genome. While most of it was eventually bred out, mtDNA remained and all later Neandertal populations carried Sapiens mtDNA, with their original mtDNA disappearing

The reason for noncongruent out of Africa migration dates is that at least two occurred; other than the generally accepted cca 70kya migration, there was an earlier one which was limited to coastal areas of Arab peninsula, Indian subcontinent and SE Asia until it reached the previously unpopulated area behind the Wallace line, where it resulted in PNG and Australian aboriginal populations.

The reason for coastal-only migration until PNG was that those areas were already inhabited by Neanderthals and Denisovans whom Sapiens was unable to outcompete.

Only after Toba eruption (75kya) do those populations become weakened enough for Sapiens to outcompete them and that's when we see first successful migration to Middle East.

Looks like this adds to the evidence that our ancestors left Africa in a diaspora much, much earlier than had previously been thought, especially as this is far from their original continent.

Maybe the out of Arica theory should be revisited? Post the Zanclean flood when the Mediterranean basin was subtropical it appears there were hominids "all over creation." That is to say Australia, Kenya, Philippines and even a Homo Erectus version in India. Due to the subtropical climate and the below sea Mediterranean basin who is to say that no proto-human in that basin did not run north-south, and east?

Just because there were hominins outside of africa millions of years ago doesn't mean modern humans descended from them. For example, we have long known that Homo Erectus left Africa millions of years ago. What we do not have evidence of are direct ancestors of anatomically modern humans originating outside of Africa.

The out of Africa theory has been overblown for a long time. See as just one example, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-the-out-of-afr...

To me, that article reads like it concerns the ancestors of Neanderthals. Am I misreading it?

Massive amounts of genetic evidence have been discovered since that article was published and the out of Africa theory still holds up.

Please cite some of the sources of the information that you claim is massively out there...

The out of Africa theory is overwhelmingly supported by genetic evidence. A multi-origin hypothesis is basically impossible to support at this point.

What is now happening is that the out of Africa theory is absorbing new facts:

- How many different migrations of homo sapiens out of Africa have there been? (probably several)

- Did any groups who spent time in Europe migrate back to Africa and contribute new genes to the African gene pool (likely)

- Did homo sapiens who left Africa encounter and breed with other hominin species? (definitely, and those other species also originated in Africa)

David Reich's book from last year, "Who We Are and How We Got Here", covers a lot of the recent discoveries.

I don't think everyone here is using the same definition of "out of Africa" here. There pretty much no doubt the hominids in general and modern humans came from Africa. But subspecies like denisova and neanderthal evolved outside of Africa (probably).

Most modern humans are from Africa with multi-regional mixins, those mixins themselves were African origin if you go back far enough. It's all a game of how far you want to go back.

There have almost certainly been multiple migrations out of Africa, per the Sahara pump theory.

Not really. There is no evidence that this homo sp. has any living decendants. It has been known for a long time that homo spp. left Africa millions of years ago.

The only unexpected finding here is that this homo sp. got to an island that is surrounded by water. I have a feeling that this species is a Denosovian, but unless they can get some DNA out we won't know. We do know that the Denosovian knew how to travel over open ocean as they made it to Australia and PNG.

> We do know that the Denosovian knew how to travel over open ocean as they made it to Australia and PNG.

This is incorrect. We know Denisovans only from one cave in Siberia. From there we have DNA sequences, and from those we can tell Denisovans interbred with some homo sapiens, including people now in Australia and PNG (up to 6% of their DNA is Denisovan). There is no evidence that Denisovans themselves travelled that far.

Well Denosovian DNA is basically absent on the Asian side of the Wallace line and at a very high frequency on the Australian side. On top of this there is physical evidence of homo sp. occupation of Australia as far back as 120K years ago which is before modern humans can be found outside of Africa.

There is one additional piece of evidence which is the modern Australian Aborignial and PNG population is descended from a founder population that appeared 15-30K years ago. Add all these up and the evidence is strongly in favour of the Denosovians being the first homo sp. that crossed the Wallace line.

Not really, that founding population could have mated with Denisovan before crossing the Wallace line.

Which is most likely what happened, IMO. Descendants of that population got outcompeted by later ooA migrations, other than small pockets such as Negritos, who also show high Neandertal DNA %.

*high Denisovan % I meant.

I am pretty sure there are no populations with high Denisovan ancestry on the Asian side of the Wallace line. Do you have a reference which describes such a population?

Philippine Negritos have high Denisovan %:

https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/9/8/2013/3952725

Malaysian and Andamanese Negritos don't.

The Philippines weren't ever connect to Asia via a land bridge and Huxley's modification of the Wallace line (Huxley Line) runs between the Philippines and Borneo [1].

This paper is very interesting though as it provides clues as to how the Denosovian spread through the Sahul. It adds even more support that the new homo sp. found in the OA are Denosovian.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Line

I finally read 1491 and it just reinforced my concerns that we are underestimating the boat building skills of our ancestors.

The making and using of stone tools leave a lot of refuse that shows up in the archaeological record. If hominids keep showing up in places only accessible by boat or Olympic class swimming then are we simply missing the evidence of the enabling technologies?

1493 is good too!

While archaeologists definitely do tend to underestimate the viability of sea voyages, don't consider 1491 a work of fact. It's rather fast and loose with its interpretation. Zheng He or members of some of his 7 voyages did get to the east coast of Africa, but any further movement is not supported by either evidence or literature.

You can check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co... for some debunking.

Most places on earth, America included, are or were reachable in small watercraft at certain times of the year, even without sail, given certain weather conditions. Only the remotest islands truly required advanced seafaring for repeat navigation.

Anyway, aside from isolated boating incidents there are far more impressive stories that are buried by popular history and its political supporters - the use of Persian as a lingua franca for trade and diplomacy as far away as China, various Indian Kingdoms throughout Southeast Asia and up to the Chinese border, entire civilizations whose expanse was extremely significant but virtually nobody has heard of, successful cultural genocides on grand scales, etc.

You seem to have confused 1421 with 1491. The latter is generally considered to be a well-researched book while the former is, as you say, merely a grand tale.

Perhaps, Bonaparte! But look at you resurfacing for articles on bony parts!

In order to have a stable population you need like 220 people, right? Or steady genetic trade with another civilization. So we’d be talking about more than a couple boat people making it to an island and having a ton of kids. In other words, I don’t think a fluke crossing establishes a civilization. It takes more order than that.

Unless the reason these early populations have been replaced by Polynesians is because they weren’t diverse enough and faded out...

>That could mean primitive human relatives left Africa and made it all the way to South-East Asia, something not previously thought possible.

Happy to dig up the source when I get home, but I remember specifically reading a paper not so long ago about a possible alternative to that hypothesis, namely that our current species might have originated out of Asia, not Africa. In which case it might not be so difficult to reconcile these outcomes.

Our species definitely originated in Africa. All the genetics point to this being the case (there is much greater genetic diversity in African populations vs. anywhere else in the world). The question is whether additional significant evolution (and even back flow into Africa) happened after we left Africa. And I think the answer to that question is, yes, it did (as evidenced by the significant admixture with Neanderthals and Denisovans).

If you're interested, there's a great episode of The Insight podcast with Milford Wolpoff that discusses a lot of this:

https://insitome.libsyn.com/multiregionalism-is-deadlong-liv...

I'd be really interested to read that source, if you were to dig it up. It's nice to explore hard-science based alternatives to prevailing theories.

Dumb question. How do we know it's a new species and not just humans with particular genetic traits?

For example, if a million years from now, someone was to dig up a bunch of bones from a dog kennel, what would they make of all the different bones from Irish wolfhounds down to sausage dogs?

> That could mean primitive human relatives left Africa and made it all the way to South-East Asia, something not previously thought possible.

Article is poorly researched:

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

The article mentions exactly that like, two paragraphs later

The headline is a bit deceiving. I thought there is a new human species currently in existence in the Philippines.

Yes "fossils" somewhere in the headline might clarify that.

I was expected a secret tribe of Neanderthals to have turned up.

Definitely, I'm not normally one to criticize headlines but this one is missing some pretty important context.

That would be some news, indeed.

I thought the same thing.

Obviously the intended effect, but you could tell it's not the case by the fact it's not the top story here.

Come on, guys, we've seen this kind of headline before about hominid species as well as other types of extinct animals. It may be a bit poorly worded but, if something like that really did happen, you wouldn't hear about it first on Hacker News.

Actually this is probably the first place many would hear about it.

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