Humans Interbred with Four Extinct Hominin Species, Research Finds
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That we know of. They might completely have complex language using different mediums (infra sounds, vibrations, movements, smells, etc.).
Now, from what I've learned/read about their behaviours, I have no doubt on the depth of their lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition#Elephant_so...
And I wouldn't call that "some sort of language". That's language. Species-specific. Not "human" language.
Even language that another species can grasp more or less perfectly. You can get that with minimal observation of dogs, cats, even birds. And obviously, animals read us as well.
Now, the complexity of an other species language may be partially out of reach because we do not have the same senses, abilities, history, memories.
So they might even engage in activities we cannot grasp or identify (and reciprocally) but for great patience, observation, study, understanding, and luck.
Kind of makes me think if we ever were to encounter extraterrestrial intelligence we might have trouble identifying them as intelligent, or, have trouble communicating with them, because we have trouble identifying and communicating with the terrestrial intelligence that surrounds us and is abundant.
Where No Wolf Has Gone Before.
This happened in a remarkably short period of time, and the running theory is that early dogs with more expressiveness were better cared for and received by human societies than similar dogs that were less expressive.
I agree that there may be a lot happening in this world we're unable to perceive, and then your whole argument can be summarized as "anything is possible, we don't really know for sure".
Which I now see is why scientists insist on sticking to things that can be measured, proven and quantified. Anything else is drifting into the territory of religion, superstition and imagination. Humans have been known to worship certain animals as supreme gods after all.
No. Science is a mean to an end, not an end in itself. And intuition, an open mind, imagination help a lot, without drifting into superstition.
Read some history, you'll find out that a lot of scientific (and engineering) discoveries were triggered by imagination servicing some more rational/rigorous practices.
I don't think that's what they mean when they say imagination: imagining things we can not imagine. And science starts with real imagination, then move on to practical, measurable applications.
See what i mean about pointless philosophical arguments?
Now, clearly humans have been able to adapt our intelligence to uses far beyond the behaviours it evolved to support. Our ancestors 50,000 years ago had more or less the same brains we do. Nevertheless their behaviours were highly complex. They broadly did what we do, crating art, manufacturing artefacts from multiple processed materials, ornamentation, social rituals such as burials. We just take those behaviours a lot further.
To argue that whales might have sophisticated intellectual capabilities, you’d need to show what behaviours they exhibit that require them. Otherwise that intelligence would serve no evolutionary purpose and might actually be a survival disadvantage. See the cognitive trade off hypothesis.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Cognitive-Tradeoff-hypothe...
But fascinatingly, those neurons aren't evenly distributed, and in fact humans have far more neurons in the cerebral cortex than elephants. Their extra neuron count is almost all in the cerebellum. Primates are skewed towards the forebrain, but elephants are far more cerebellum-heavy than e.g. rodents, which implies that a lot of their extra brainpower is being 'spent' on operating their larger bodies.
By forebrain neuron count, humans are beaten only by pilot whales - and all of the other close contenders are also cetaceans. No one quite seems to know why pilot whales have twice the neocortical neurons humans do, but it's still the number that tracks best with observed intelligence.
http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/the-paradox-of-the-elep...
You know how they say that insult “smooth brain”
We have more neuron surface area and thats how we pack a punch in intelligence ive heard...
Neuron count in the cerebral cortex seems to predict intelligence better than total neuron count (e.g. putting humans ahead of elephants, and chimps ahead of giraffes), with only one odd case (pilot whales) beating humans. So if we lost overall capacity but retained most or all of our cerebral cortex size, the change might be explained.
(Full disclosure: a quick look says most primate brains are right near 26% cerebral cortex, while humans are around 18%. It's possible intermediate hominids were even lower, but without knowing why the difference exists I can hardly assert that.)
Then why didn't the smart and strong Neanderthal males mate with the sexy Sapiens females?
In practice I don't think we have the sort of baseline sample it would take to work out which mitochondrial genes are neanderthal-derived. I suppose it might be possible to rebuild that list by looking at high-admixture populations and seeing where their mitochondrial DNA differs, then use that aggregate to compare an individual's mDNA to their DNA and see if it's is "more Neanderthal" (i.e. female line) or "more Sapiens" (i.e. male line)?
But realistically, I'm betting the answer is "admixture happened a bunch of times in a row, with different hominid groups in different places, even if there was a gender skew it's a mess that's impossible to discern".
That is, sperm have just one mitochondrion, and they almost always dump it as part of fertilization.
But not always, so there is nonzero male contribution of mitochondrial genes.
I think not, Homo Sapiens just starves better, Neanderthal superior athleticism came at a huge calorie cost, so when preys became rarer Neanderthal starved faster than Sapiens.
When the cold hit they ran out of options and resources quicker, they simply didn't have the required knowledge of how to survive.
Did neanderthals have this capacity? I don't know. But if their psychology did not facilitate large scale collaboration, a violent human tribe killing a bunch of them now and again would explain some part why they disappeared.
I'm not saying a human tribe hunted them - just that a violent human tribe would attack all hominids around them.
And if the Neanderthals did not have this capacity for mass violence, in time these conflicts would dwindle their numbers.
(Plot- the smartest people stop reproducing, only lower rings of society have kids. An average guy wakes up hundreds of years in the future and is a genius)
Well it does play a role, but in different ways. For instance modern humans are continuing to evolve even though natural selection, in terms of man against environment, is now playing very near 0 role. Instead the factor being selected for now is simple fertility. Humanity will tend to evolve along the characteristics of those families have 3, 4 and more children - while those having 2 or fewer children will gradually fade from the gene pool. So natural selection has in some ways become voluntary, which is quite paradoxical.
However in less developed areas, it's still alive in some ways. For instance if an individual in subsahara Africa somehow developed a genetically heritable mutation making him immune to malaria, it's reasonably likely that all subsaharan Africans would, gradually, become immune to malaria. We can only conclude, putting aside epigenetic factors once again, that such mutations are much less common than e.g. those to the shape of a bird's beak.
Yes, and this has already happened. The African jungle has its pygmies; the Southeast Asian peninsula and surrounding islands have their pygmies; and those two groups are totally unrelated.
This is a tricky concept. Could it be said over 50,000 years ago that Homo Sapiens' ancestors were the mainline? I wouldn't retroactively call it that because it presumes that it was clear at the time that it would be the definitive dominant subspecies.
I think a better phrasing would be "genetic divergences, some of which were preserved by the cross-merging with the only surviving genetic stream", or something of the sort.
Did you mean AND (A + C can breed)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebroid
Darwin's Origin of Species had a good section on this; the book is quite readable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liger
Or are there more significant differences?
Lions/tigers cannot.
They're completely different cats. Panthera leo and Panthera tigris split about 7MYA (est.).
Yeah, I recall Darwin discussing at length how there's no clear difference between a "species" and a "variety". It's a key point, so it's too bad that many people are still under the impression that "species" has an unambiguous definition.
Hell, there's a movement to ditch the current taxonomy structure and pick one of 2 other kinds that seem to follow evolution better than what we have right now.
Wasn't subfamily or tribe originally called race back in the day? I could have sworn when I was in school it was called race. But they changed it at some point without sending me a memo.
Major physical differences (such as wolf) or inability to interbreed or infertile offspring (such as mules) are all just rules of thumb. For instance zebras and horses are clearly distinct species yet they physically appear extremely similar sans their coloring, can interbreed, and there have even been instances of fertile offspring.
And I'm sad so many people just downvoted the comment without clarification. I thought too it was political correctness at first until I looked into the time-frame more closely. It merited a decent reply.
Many of the original work regarding Neaderthals was by 19th-century elite-school scientists with a publication history of eugenics and the confidence that comes from the knowledge of innate superiority of their own kind. Anyone who didn't look like them would be obviously inferior.
They didn't know what we know today -- Neanderthals were light-skinned fair-hared people who had survived for half a million years in the harsh conditions of glacial and inter-glacial Europe and Asia. They had a rich culture of decorative arts and ceremonial burials. They were as capable of vocal speech as we are (same pharyngeal constructs, highly developed Broca's and Wernicke's regions in the brain). They encountered waves of dark-skinned Homo sapiens coming out of Africa and about 10,000 years later vanished from the scene. That there are light-skinned fair-haired Europeans today is evidence that they didn't vanish completely.
The only evidence that H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens are separate species is the word of 19th-century French aristocrats who were concerned about maintaining racial purity.
This article suggests otherwise: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22308-europeans-did-n...
Again, I'm sure the real models get really complicated and are no doubt still a little controversial. But that's the basic idea.
I do think it's likely that H. sapiens intermixed with other hominins besides Neanderthal and Denisovan, but the models used to infer these results make a lot of assumptions and are at best a drastic simplification of reality.
[0] - http://insito.me
[1] - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-insight/id13247444...
I gotta wonder what people are thinking when they write this stuff. I mean, "Neanderthal mixing with the ancestors of modern humans occurred soon after they left Africa". Do they imply that those whose ancestors never left Africa are not "modern humans"? I doubt it. So they're just being sloppy.
It's obvious different cultural standards may have applied.
Or am I asking a stupid question?
Uglier Homo Sapiens found mates
Or the grandparent (1/2) and parent (1/4) just happened to be female (which is likely, see also: Haldane's rule) in which case they probably had little problem getting laid (side effects include pregnancy which if not treated can lead to children) no matter how stigmatized they were assuming modern humans behavior is any indication.
Having a kid is no guarantee they (and presumably their kid) weren't the lowest status person in the tribe (i.e. stigmatized) on account of who their parents were. That said, it's entirely possible the people in question were too concerned with month to month and year to year survival to care about that kind of thing.
Should modern humans be classified as something else, distinct from the original pre-interbreeding homo-sapiens?
If so, given how randy we have been, I propose Homo-Amatorius.
(The other two are nameless data ghosts at this point, due to lack of corresponding archeological records, but presumably Homo sapiens whateveris and Homo sapiens someotheris.)
It's kind of open to debate whether those should be independent species, or their own species, but basically we're all Homo sapiens of one sort or another unless you want to get into a long unresolvable highly technical argument about it, which revolves around what precise definition of "species" is useful in some arbitrary context.
So how much DNA of a species, in another, means it's "that" species. Or is it brand new and different? I mean, technically, we're more related to fungi than we are plants, by quite a bit. But it's easy to differentiate humans from fungi. Still, we're related, relatively speaking compared to plants. Does that make us fungi? Obviously that's bat shit absurd. But just because a lot of homo sapiens have 1%-3% neanderthal in them, that doesn't make them neanderthal. I don't think neanderthals should be taken off the extinction list. The same, we share 85%-92% of dna with mice (this number fluctuates depending on sources). Does that make us mice?
So, please stop relating this to dogs fucking or being surprised that different species can tango under moonlight. Please stop.
Yes, different species, of different genders, of the same genus can warm up at night and spawn little hellions 7-9ish months later.
There's plenty of evidence that these other homo species were sophisticated, like the neanderthal. As much, if not more, that ancient homo sapiens (at the time).
Does that make a new species? Maybe. Current taxonomy guidelines are not perfect. There are other taxonomy systems out there that would spell this out, just not considered the universal standard we all know today. The problem is, how do you draw sharp lines in a blurry distinction without just creating a new "species" for every sexual adventurous encounter that results in a screaming child.
At the end, this article was cool and we should all be excited over this.
Otherwise, so unprovoked.
>So, please stop relating this to dogs fucking or being surprised that different species can tango under moonlight. Please stop.
Hot take: we had a common ancestor with dogs just 60 million years ago; a human and a dog is just like a reunion for old times' sake!
With horrifyingly asymmetric power dynamics.
That there exist other similar species that we don't (yet) have a fossil record of is the interesting part here.
The traits that we’ve inherited from our archaic ancestors aren’t really the types of traits people use a distinguishing features between populations.
If anything it is more likely that the deninsovans aquired genes from the decedents of the groups of Homo Erectus that migrated throughout south east asia and quite probably remained in small quantities in remote areas (like Homo Floresiensis did) when the denisovans arrived.
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Edit: Then it is the question of: Say that the Denisovans acquired genes from other hominin through interbreeding, would these genes then be passed on to us when our homo sapien ancestors interbreed with the Denisovans? That is a question I have no confidence in answering and should probably be deferred to geneticist or a genetic statistician.
Would they be citizens or zoo animals? Either way, what if they want to interbreed? Do we determine this based on looks? What if the attraction is unidirectional?
Contrary to pop media, there is also literally no clear evidence they even engaged in the most basic of symbolic behavior such as self adornment or even primitive art. [1] Now mostly disregarded efforts to show such were highly optimistic. This included things like bird bones being laid near a corpse = self adornment, or scratches on a cave floor = art. Even in what they did do - hunt, despite engaging in hunting for hundreds of thousands of years there are extremely high rates of traumatic injury among neanderthal corpses which suggests they never even managed to refine their hunting ability.
And the brain size : intelligence correlation is just so broken in so many ways. If you go based on raw size sperm whales should be, by far, the most intelligent species there is. If you go based on the ratio of brain matter to mass, ants should be, again by far, the most intelligent species there is. Suffice to say you're probably not too worried about being put in zoos by sperm whales or ants.
The point is that even in a time frame of a single century you're looking at very radical changes in intellectual ability between populations that would appear, on the surface, to be practically 100% identical. When you start talking about tens of thousands of years ago, it's impossible to do even begin to intelligently speculate based on anything other than achievement. And what did we achieve? As you mention, not much. And so the only justifiable explanation is that we probably didn't have that much going on upstairs until relatively recently.
I think the most interesting question is a direct spin off of yours. What triggered the intellectual spike? Was it in any way related to whatever caused the more contemporary spikes in intelligence? Why are IQs now decreasing and can global intellect fade away as rapidly as it emerged? Probably the most depressing possible solution to the Fermi paradox!
"You don't get anatomically modern humans until 30,000-50,000 years ago."
And this is wild speculation without any basis:
"And so the only justifiable explanation is that we probably didn't have that much going on upstairs until relatively recently."
Economic development is complex, it depends on a lot more than IQ. As a point of comparison, we could ask why did the Industrial Revolution only happened 200 years ago? If, as you suggest, homo sapiens have had high IQ for 50,000 years, then why didn't we have the Industrial Revolution much sooner?
But more so, you seem to imply, in response to the original article, that the mixing of homo species helped us develop a certain kind of IQ. But according to that theory, the most advanced people on Earth should be the aborigines of Australia, as they were the first group to mix with all the different homo species, as sapiens moved from Africa to Australia. But in fact, the aborigines of Australia were quite content with their lives, and felt no need to build civilizations, even though they certainly have high IQ, and they have the mix of genes you'd expect of humans outside of Africa.
About this:
"What triggered the intellectual spike?"
There was no spike in IQ. You have no reason to believe that. The development of culture and civilization have nothing to do with IQ. Large parts of the world remained completely primitive until recent centuries, even though those regions were full of high IQ homo sapiens.
I can't tell if you are trying to build a racial theory of history, but if you are, that idea has been debunked many times. All I can do is recommend that you read some of that debunking.
But most importantly of all this is where you find the first clear evidence of intelligence which rapidly expand outward: art, ceremonial burials, clear evidence of fishing, and much more. Some time after that you start to see the beginning of modern civilization with bladed weapons, pottery, agriculture, and so on. This is also one of the most likely time periods for the development of language, though that is something that is hotly debated.
I'm going to dodge the second part of your post for the sake of trying to keep the conversation on the up and up. If you have some clear message you'd like to convey, I'd be happy to get into that. It's a fun topic. However, please do drop the ad hominem.
"There are some other types of argument, similar to yours, that I've run into online. Some people insist that humans were genetically engineered by aliens. That argument is based on no evidence, though it does have the nice property that is not raced based. Some other people make a religious and/or spiritual argument, arguing that there is a universal consciousness and that it spread across the world 50,000 years ago. That has all the problems of any religious argument -- it could be true, but there is no evidence and no way to prove it."
There is nothing ad hominem about trying to clarify what sort of argument someone is making. So I am curious why that previous comment was downvoted?
this is just preaching
> In 2004, Rohde, Olson and Chang showed through simulations that the Identical Ancestors Point for all humans is surprisingly recent, on the order of 5,000-15,000 years ago.
How can different populations of modern humans have interbred with different hominin species around 50k years ago when ALL of today's humans had the EXACT SAME SET OF ANCESTORS as recently as 15k years ago?
Differences in past populations, including the interbreeding at issue, can be inferred from modern genes for reasons actually laid out in your own link, in the paragraph after the one you quoted:
All living people share exactly the same set of ancestors from this point back, all the way to the very first single-celled organism. However, people will vary widely in how much ancestry and genes they inherit from each ancestor, which will cause them to have very different genotypes and phenotypes.
It doesn't really contradict this article, but there were a number of articles a couple of years ago about how Europeans had Neanderthal DNA that other ethnicities didn't share. In reality all modern humans are descended from the exact same Neanderthals, but Europeans still retain more of their genes.
Genes travel slowly, but in many directions at once. And there may be some advantage to the offspring of two people genetically "far" from each other, reinforcing via evolution whatever instinct lead to them travel.
15k years is more than enough time for all of us to share an ancestry.