New species of ancient human discovered in the Philippines: Homo luzonensis | Hacker News Reader

New species of ancient human discovered in the Philippines: Homo luzonensis

nationalgeographic.com

152 pointscurtis84 comments

I watched a documentary on an Amazonian tribe that had just initiated contact with the outside world. accepted help from the government. It was endearing to see how much they appreciated things like flip flops and a cooking pan. From the “noble savage,” I thought pre-modern people understood and lived in harmony with nature.

Now I see they live a hella hard life. They are often hungry. They sleep fitfully in fear of being eaten. One guys told of his grandmother being dragged away from dinner by a panther.

Their sustainable rate of consumption aside, they don’t really live in harmony with nature any more than I do with city when I cross a busy intersection or operate an elevator.

Then I think about what future humans will think of my primitive ass. Which is why I hide photocopies of it in the stacks of libraries I visit. To help the future researchers.

This comment really took a turn at the end there.

It’s on to something. I think I am the target audience. I didn’t plan to confess this, but it happened more than once, that I upvoted a comment I didn’t read till the end. Alea dictur est

They lived in harmony with nature in every realistic meaning of the term. Being dragged away as somethings dinner, sleeping with one eye open, sometimes going to bed hungry, and so on, is part of natures harmony. That's how it works everywhere in nature for all living things. Sometimes you are the hunter, and sometimes you are the hunted. And that's okay, or no one could survive.

It's only when we change the game, like with our modern way of society, that we also have to change the rules. Like it's not okay anymore to go about killing others willy nilly if it's not necessary. Or should I say, one could hope the rules would reflect the change of the game, but not in all aspects has it yet at least.

Was the war, i.e. tribes fighting each other so fittest tribes survive, part of evolution process? Is aggression a nature of human being because of collective evolution?

> War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University Press, 1996) is a book by Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor of archaeology at the University of Illinois at Chicago who specializes in prehistoric Europe. The book deals with warfare conducted throughout human history by societies with little technology. In the book, Keeley aims to stop the apparent trend in seeing civilization as bad, by setting out to prove that prehistoric societies were violent and frequently engaged in warfare.

...

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

> How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

> The puzzling question is then how a world dominated by ultra social human cooperation can also frequently succumb to large scale war and conflict?

> Turchin’s answer, and one of the big ideas in the book, is that war between social groups is the mechanism by which cooperative behaviour develops “within groups”. It is a fundamental evolutionary process happening between societies at a large scale. He elevates war as a selection mechanism for cooperation, and values it above many of the technological factors like domestication of plants and the advent of agriculture.

http://evonomics.com/how-10000-years-of-war-made-humans-the-...

I guess implicit in this is that strife and warfare (in addition to new pasture/hunting grounds) led to expansion and exploration in pre history just as if did on later times. Some of it was just seeking avoidance.

I haven't read this book, but regardless of its ultimate correctness, it's worth recognizing that it too is interpretative mythmaking (about who we are based on a very small historical slice of our existence). It probably generalizes well enough to who we've been since the last glacial maximum, but I think there's enough evidence to be skeptical of interpreting any human group since the LGM as untouched by the processes driving what we call civilization.

"Civilization" is a relative measure, not an absolute one. It's shaped by what we're accustomed to, and vulnerable to unknown biases. (Is raising and slaughtering your own pig more or less civilized than modern factory farming? Is solitary confinement more or less civilized than exile?) Claiming to discuss war "before" civilization draws an arbitrary line separating very gradual change driven by many competing/interacting processes. What standard do we measure whether some group of people in some place and time were civilized against?

If you measure against the great apes, when did the relationships between hominid groups and their environments cross a rubicon? What technological and social markers count? Tool use? Language? Trade? Making objects and carrying them around with us over great distances? Art? Stories? Clothing? Religion? Cooking? Baking? Early agriculture?

AFAIK there's evidence for most of these back well into the stone age (and in some cases among pre-homo-sapiens hominids). We're also mostly limited to studying sites above modern sea levels and have vastly less access to evidence of hominid activity that may exist in areas now under water (including glacial refugia such as the potential "Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis" ).

> From the “noble savage,” I thought pre-modern people understood and lived in harmony with nature.

Also, remember that pre-modern people probably killed the most of the megafauna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafauna#Megafaunal_mass_exti...

Was it the country of Colombia? Do you know where i can watch that?

Not really disagreeing with the main thrust of your comment, but there’s also some selection bias at work. Uncontacted tribes will tend to live in the least productive spaces, since more productive spaces would have already been colonized by modern society.

I think this insight comes from Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday, but I’m forgetting.

For some thought-provoking insights into the scale of the changes ancient American civilizations brought on the landscape, see the book 1491 by Charles Mann.

Maybe the most intriguing idea in the entire book is that the Americas were ten times more populated at the time of European contact than they ended up becoming in the 1500's (when most eye-witness accounts were written).

The "noble savages" we think of were remnants of a disease holocaust that wiped out 90% of the population. It's almost as if we're trying to understand European civilization by observing concentration camp survivors.

The recurring pattern: small group of Europeans makes contact with a native group. They report a land teeming with people and trade. A hundred years go by, and almost nobody is left. Those remaining live in small bands eeking out a subsistence living.

The culprit: smallpox and a host of other diseases that jumped species in Europe due to co-habitation with animals. The lack of such practices (or animal domestication in general) in the Americas meant that the disease transfer was destined to be one-way.

This dynamic may explain why there's only one genus of Homo left alive today. Whenever two groups contacted each other, one inevitably succumbs to the diseases carried by the other.

The craziest thing is that this disease holocaust was entirely accidental. The Europeans had as little clue as the Americans what happened, 300 years before germ theory. I imagine both sides saw it as acts of God(s).

I count it as the biggest "random" event in all of world history. Had the immunology lottery turned out otherwise, the world would be a completely different place.

>The craziest thing is that this disease holocaust was entirely accidental.

Why is that crazy? I've never thought myself, or heard anyone imply, that the "disease holocaust" was intentional. As neither nation had the knowledge/science to understand diseases/germs at that time it seems straightforward to assume it was accidental

I've heard stories of smallpox riddled blankets being gifted on purpose. But I suspect if there's something to that, it came later when we had a better idea of how disease spread.

There are well documented instances and for example vaccination against smallpox was found a mere 35 years in 1798 after smallpox ridden blankets were intentionally used at the siege of Fort Pitt in 1763. And inoculation predates that so the disease itself was reasonably understood if not in a particularly accurate to reality manner.

While the small pox/disease ridden blankets may or may not be factual, there is plenty of historical records predating Europeans landing in the Americas of using disease in warfare.

When sieging cities in antiquity water supplies would be contaminated. Arrow heads be smeared with poison and otherwise feces to cause infections. In Europe during Middle Ages corpses and feces of diseased would be catipulted into cities to cause infection, notably this this even happened with corpses that died of the bubonic plague.

I see a lot of people claiming the Spanish conquistadors exterminated almost everyone.

And it's certainly true they killed a lot of the survivors, but most people just died of "natural" causes. Many before the Spanish even got to their areas.

Had the immunological playing field been even, there is no way the Europeans conquer the Americas in the 1500s. It took until the late 1800s until they could overpower the less developed Africa.

So think about what that world history could have looked like!!

Europe has been a brewing pot for disease for a really long time. Lots of people and animals crammed together in big cities, without much sanitation. Lots of opportunities for diseases to jump from animals to humans, and to also evolve with the populations.

I wonder what America would look like without the disease holocaust? Would the two cultures have traded, warred, and also blended? Would Navajo and Iroquois keyboard layouts be a thing? Would there be a totem pole on the Moon?

Being eaten by a panther occasionally is living in harmony with nature!

Something I read in my formative years that's stuck with me is "Typhoid is natural. Penicillin is artificial."

I very consciously and happily avoid being "natural" for its own sake.

Well it's a nice line, but Penicillin was discovered not invented. It's as natural as typhoid or panthers.

Penicillin the substance existed in nature, penicillin the medicine is a human invention. Is stretching to call it natural. It's like calling high-fructose corn syrup natural. It comes from nature, but it's hardly naturally occurring.

I don't see how - the whole of the world's early mass production was simply naturally growing the mould in tanks. That was a huge part of the challenge of producing enough volume, and how to accelerate that fermentation and extraction. It was very much a natural product that was effectively farmed, and not much different to producing beer.

That we have now found chemical means of production, and identified active ingredients doesn't change that history. You might not legally be able to label penicillin or opiates as a natural remedy any more, but in prescription medicine the production method is rarely or never labelled.

Panthers and typhoid aren't domesticated, fungus vats are.

Yeah, I've thought of that too. I think the vast engineering, scientific and industrial undertaking it took to cure the first patient in 1942, 14 years after the discovery qualifies it as an invention, but I can see the other side of the argument.

Either way, I enjoyed looking up the history of those 14 years: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry...

Are you making some equivalence between the Amazonian tribespeople and Homo Luzonensis? You understand Amazonians are Homo Sapiens, right?

You shouldn't be surprised. People all around the world are moving to the cities for a reason.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like if another species had survived and developed alongside us. They would be humans but....not quite what we conceive of as human(basically our species). What would their culture have been like? Music, art, language, etc.

As tribal as our own species is I imagine we would have gone to war eventually and one exterminated the other (assuming no large difference in population, technology, etc.). I think that might have been what happened to Neanderthals?

But still, the thought of going about day-to-day business alongside, let's say homo floresiensis, has something intriguing to it. Perhaps it's the same reason we imagine interaction with extraterrestrial life - it's really just a reflection on us and our own humanity.

It is not my domain but, as far as I know, before finding neandertal DNA in current humans we thought they probably had been exterminated but now the statu quo seem to be that they have been integrated and have mixed with our species.

I believe it would be a good bet that another human species living alongside us would have merged with us by know.

That's a rosy colored view of how we mixed. Maybe there was that, but one thing I would bet on is rape. Probably a mixture.

And that was out of the norm back then?

You're refuting his view as rosy, but positing that the real answer was horror. It's almost certainly something in between the two.

Personally, I think that the most likely explanation is that most mixing came through adoption of fertile women into the human tribes. Males of other tribes would probably not have been accepted so readily, and likely driven off or killed, but fertile females would have been more easily integrated. From there, you naturally get a mix of the two.

The relative percentages of Neanderthal and Sapien DNA in modern humans would indicate that Sapiens outcompeted the Neanderthals and relatively few interbred with us.

I’m not entirely sure that this was only one way.

Neanderthal mtDNA is fairly rare in humans while nuclear DNA is much more common. Oddly enough in population with higher percentage of nuclear DNA mtDNA is rarer so it’s not clear which side did the gene transferring.

It could be that there are other reasons behind this for example that Neanderthals and modern human female offsprings were less likely to survive or reproduce than males.

But overall it’s really not clear how the populations mixed and who did more of the pillaging and raping.

That's probably more a matter of natural selection. neanderthal y-chromosome DNA was also almost entirely eliminated from the human genome, as well as neanderthal genes in several other places.

When two different dog breeds have pups those mutts are just as fertile as any other dog. When a horse and a donkey have a mule that mule is almost entirely infertile. The first human/neanderthal descendants were probably significantly less fertile than their parents but generations of selective pressure seem to have purged the particular genes that were causing problems which you would expect to include mDNA.

Can you provide a source for human neanderthal mtDNA?

That's only true insofar as a massive proportion of all intercourse prior to civilized society was probably rape - interspecies or otherwise.

Rape was a valid reproductive strategy for humans for most of our history. Why do you think mongol DNA is so prevalent?

Reproduction through “love” is a fairly modern concept, while not all rape was at the hands of an invading army or by some serial predator in a dimly lit cave (or parking lot) the sexual dynamics were very different across the population and would be considered rape by most people today especially in the west.

Rape is probably behind at least 10% of human pregnancies throughout history, and it would have been much more without all extreme countermeasure people had to take.

I roll my eyes at people who talk about American "rape culture". But we definitely are a rape species!

We kind of have that with the animal species that have some intelligence level, are capable of using tools or do provide teaching to their children.

So far, it doesn't look like they get very positive actions from many of us.

It would be like it is now.

Even though everyone is very similar, people will figure out some differences and call that "race", positing that there's some fundamental difference why one group should be treated differently to another. And you'll get societies where some group is targeted, people will be forced to segregate public transport and schools, and so on.

But there's also going to be movements that focus more on the similarities.

Just finished reading Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, which deals with a theme related to that, about a terraformed planet where jumping spiders become a dominant, intelligent species. Good read. You might enjoy it!

Children of Time is excellent, and does a really good job of tracking the evolution and eventual ascension of the Portiid spiders. Tchaikovsky creates a really convincing civilisation based on the limits of the planet and the spiders: a technological civilisation without major metal use and with nearly perfect information transfer between generations.

The sequel Children of Ruin was a disappointment. It came out recently and I bought it straight away. I'm fascinated by octopuses, but I felt their civilisation was given short shrift to make way for the rest of the story he wanted to tell

Also see the brilliant anime Terra Formars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Formars

There are still a few uncontacted tribes left. I remember reading about the Sentinelese[1] last year when some guy snuck onto their island to try to convert them to christianity and died.

I forgot where I read this but apparently they don't have a concept of gift-giving as a sign of goodwill. I had a really hard time wrapping my head around that!

Like how else could gifts be interpreted? Maybe as a sign of submission, like cats who think it must be a god to people who feed it? But can it even be possible for biological humans to not have a concept of reciprocal altruism? Or did their culture evolve to a different point where they can get (homicidally) mad at people for being too nice?

The fact that this simple gesture wasn't as universal as I thought really got me thinking about how much of our actions only make sense within a narrow shared context.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese

Not sure if I am understanding you correctly but they didn't kill him because he brought them gifts, they killed him because previous outsiders brought disease and death, so they are rightly xenophobic.

ISTM we don't have the faintest clue as to why they killed him. That's kind of the point. One doubts that any of them have studied public health.

What does ISTM mean?

It seems to me.

A powerful person can feel humiliated by an outstanding gift.

It can also be seen as an temptation of evil.

Be careful: The Sentinelese and all other uncontacted tribes are Homo sapiens exactly the same as you or I. Just because they might have a very different culture doesn't make them alien in the way Homo neanderthalensis or Homo floresiensis might have been to our (and the Sentinelese peoples') ancestors.

They're not uncontacted, but if you're interested in very different cultures, the Pirahã are absolutely fascinating. There's a brilliant article in the New Yorker about them: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interprete...

Dan Everett, the subject of the New Yorker's article, wrote a book about his experiences with the Pirahã called Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes which is excellent. It's one of my absolute favourite books ever.

The wiki article include descriptions of several visits where they seem to understand gift giving as good will quite well:

> During a 4 January 1991 visit, the Sentinelese approached the party without weaponry for the first time. They collected coconuts that were offered but retreated to the shore as the team gestured for them to come closer. The team returned to the main ship, MV Tarmugli. It returned to the island in the afternoon to find at least two dozen Sentinelese on the shoreline, one of whom pointed a bow and arrow at the party. Once a woman pushed the arrow down, the man buried his weapons in the beach and the Sentinelese approached quite close to the dinghies for the first time. The Director of Tribal Welfare distributed five bags of coconuts hand-to-hand.

But even if they didn't, it's quite possible that there are other factors influencing their decisions than basing it purely on receiving gifts. As for the missionary that was killed, it seems disliking proselytizers turning up at your door is another universal human attribute.

I'm half way into a book by James C Scott "The Art of Not Being Governed, An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia"[1][2] where he makes a compelling case for why (hill) people/tribes evolve differently. Not because they are in some sense isolated (and backward). It's research mostly about the tribes escaping China and looking for safety by going to higher grounds. They chose not to have a written language, reject religion, or farming, etc out of necessity and to avoid the encroaching state (which means slavery, etc). He shows that despite the difference in geography and their scatteredness (Burma, Vietnam, Laos, ...) all have certain customs in common (and even they are not all from China).

they are not unaware of civilization or reject "culture" because they are "backward" but have been part of it at some point. And they have chosen to become outcasts either because of heavy tax collection, risk of enslavement or imprisonment. People who flee into higher altitudes and away from what the rest calls "civilization" (the rice growing padi states).

The Sentinelese and Jawari (despite not being hill people) are hunter-gatherers presumably because it allows them to stay independent (enslaved, taxed etc). Their customs and strange ways should be seen as having evolved out of necessity to avoid being absorbed by a different group.

[1] https://libcom.org/files/Art.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed

"The Sentinelese and Jawari (despite not being hill people) are hunter-gatherers presumably because it allows them to stay independent (enslaved, taxed etc)."

I don't know anything about the Jawari but this just seems like speculation w.r.t the Sentinelese. You're ascribing a single-liftetime conscious decision ("I know civilization, it is bad, so we should all just keep to ourselves in this isolated place and not develop technology") to groups of people who have been living in isolation for centuries, possibly even thousands of years. In the case of the sentinelese, it may not even be a type of cultural evolutionary trait to avoid people so much as a consequence of isolation, that people just don't go there because it's out of the way or they don't know about it. And their hostility to outsiders could have any number of explanations... it could be that they see civilization as a threat to their way of life, but it could also be that they are just scared of people who look different and use seemingly magical tools, or due to some pervasive myth/aspect of their religion.

I am at just shy of 4% neanderthal dna - more than 99% of other humans today, so don't count us as gone completely ;)

Neanderthals or denisovans encountering sapiens probably would have been much like sapiens encountering sapiens of a different culture/tribe. Fighting, trading, cultural exchange and some breeding. They would have registered as different tribes but I doubt that the "species" concept (all sapiens unite to defeat the denisovan threat!) would have registered.

They weren't that different to us biologically, but people can be pretty different from eachother behaviourally) culturally. One tribe is nomadic, eats a lot of elephants, does monogamy and lives in big hierarchical groups. Another is settled, clannish, matriarchal, polygomous and does a lot of fishing. Behaviourally, that's a lot of difference.

It's possible that neighboring neanderthal tribes we're culturally more similar (food, language, art..) to your sapiens tribe than some far off sapiens tribe.

Also, it can be little bit misleading to think of those two as separate species. It's more that the human gene pool was much deeper then than now. We are all very close genetically today, especially for such a populous and widespread species. Back then, even within groups classed as Sapiens or Neanderthals, the genetic (and to an extent, morphological) diversity that existed was much bigger.

The newly discovered species though... Homo Naledi, florisiensis and luzonensis. These guys do seem like different species. Hopefully, some DNA will be found and we'll know more about them.

Humans are already almost as diverse as canids (wolves, dogs, coyotes) as a whole. Until the Bantu arrived in Southern Africa (I think less than 300 years ago, definitely les than 500) the San has been reproductively isolated for at least 200,000 years. You don’t need to wonder what that world would be like, you live in it. All non Sub Saharan Africans are ~2% Neanderthal. Papuans are 5% Denisovan, from probably three different sub populations, likely as different from each other as the major continental ancestry groups of today. Tibetans have a high altitude adaptation from Denisovans at more or less ~100% fixation that is almost absent among the Han Chinese they otherwise closely resemble.

We fought with, killed and mated with the other kinds of human. They may not all still be here but there’s a lot of them in us. Humanity mostly comes from Africa around 200,000 years ago but there’s a lot of deep population structure that’s much older than that.

> You don’t need to wonder what that world would be like, you live in it.

Nah, there's a big difference between interbreeding, leading to a single species, and two non-interbreeding species living side-by-side.

But the species did very much interbreed

Speak for yourself buddy :)

That's my point.

My understanding was that the genetic diversity in humans is actually quite small due to a near-extinction event about 70,000 years ago.

What's fascinating about the discovery of Homo luzonesis is that they're from a location which wasn't known to be connected by land for past 2.5 Million years.

Considering boat travel wasn't a possibility, their origins might shed us new light on how early hominids migrated and even tell us about human settlements in places like Andaman Islands, Sentinel Islands.

Boat travel was not a possibility.. ?

No engines.

> Considering boat travel wasn't a possibility,

Why not?

From the article:

> “If rhinos can swim and get to places, certainly we can think of erectus, floresiensis, and luzonensis not necessarily just swimming but at least rafting, if not boating,” Petraglia says. “It's just pure speculation, but you could posit that and make some convincing arguments.”

> The small-bodied hominin, named Homo luzonensis, lived on the island of Luzon at least 50,000 to 67,000 years ago.

That's pretty much when modern humans made it to Australia, boats definitely existed by then. I'm not sure where the idea that pre-agricultural humans didn't have boats comes from but it seems to be rooted in debates about when migrations into North America happened. Rudimentary rafts aren't that big a leap for anyone that's seen a tree trunk float down a river, from there you can iterate pretty rapidly to something ocean going.

And if the biological Homo sapiens is 250,000 years old or even older that leaves at least another 200,000 years for sapiens or other Homo x species to have built a boat.

Just because the fossil record lacks evidence we are pretending that modern humans weren't just as smart for 94% of their existence as a species (since animal husbandry, writing etc. seemingly only developed in the past 15,000 years).

50,000-60,000 years ago there could have been another 2,000-6,000 period of near linear technological progression and trade and you would never know.

The conditions for fossilization are extremely rare. All we have is that people got there and then a hairdresser got fossilized in a mudslide and we are now elevating this person as a representative of their whole species.

Well, it depends on how far the progression got. The waste products we are covering the earth with will be around for a long time...

> depends on how far the progression got

plastics aren't a natural progression. it is just as likely that the social and survival pressures were very different, and that the innovations were very different

and its just as likely that people merely got lucky with primitive rafts and canoes for long distance travel

None of these species are really extinct.

Homo sapiens interbred with them and their genetics still live on in the local populations. In fact this is a major reason how different human populations around the world became so different looking in such a short time.

> a major reason how different human populations around the world became so different looking in such a short time.

Is it true? Any link for this?

Yes, e.g light eyes and light hair in Europeans comes from the neanderthals.

https://www.eupedia.com/europe/neanderthal_facts_and_myths.s...

"According to the Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost, the current level of hair colour diversity in Europe would have taken 850,000 years to develop, while Homo sapiens has been in Europe no longer than 45,000 years. This is evidence enough that genes for fair hair were inherited from interbreeding with Neanderthals."

Genes from Dennisovans, which had been living in Tibet for a very long time, are also why modern Tibetans are better adapted to high altitudes than other homo sapiens groups living in similar conditions.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/tibetans-inherited-h...

> The hominin—identified from a total of seven teeth and six small bones

Whenever I read such things, I'm amazed at how much knowledge you can get out of three handful of bones -- and on the hand I wonder if that's maybe still too little to declare the discovery of a whole species of hominin.

This is awesome. Makes you wonder what else we haven't discovered yet.

How would one go about making an educated guess as to how many species of human in total existed, given what we know about the probabilities of discovering evidence of one?

It's similar to the tank problem, but intuitively this should have additional constraints (also tree or rather graph instead of a sequence)

You'd have to very closely define what precisely you meant by the word 'species', and go from there. It's a surprisingly slippery thing to do.

Even the commonly-accepted 'can have viable offspring together' isn't as cut-and-dried as you might think: https://www.sciencealert.com/darwin-s-finches-evolve-into-ne...

More looking at edge-case compatibility between germlines, in this case modern human vs. neanderthal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_...

Ring species (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species) also throw an interesting wrench into the "viable offspring" definition.

Nice, makro-history is interesting. Most of you probably know it, but regarding ancient history Noah Yuval Harari is a master writer, apiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a great book on this topic.

I read it recently and have mixed feelings about it. I'd recommend it to anyone, especially if you haven't read much on the topic and want an overview.

I think it does an excellent job of ancient, pre-historical humans -- the various branches of Homo and how they interrelate. He makes it clear that 'human' and 'Homo Sapien' and not absolute synonyms: Homo Sapiens are one kind of humans, the last surviving, but humans encompass all of the Homo genus that came before too. I liked that distinction and it changed the way I thought about humanity as a whole.

I think it gets significantly weaker once it moves past the pre-historical hunter-gatherer stage. Part of that is that the staggering complexity and variety of human civilisation post-agriculture means he has to condense, but I also feel like his real interest lies in pre-agricultural humans of all kinds.

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