Humans Migrated to Mongolia Much Earlier Than Previously Believed | Hacker News Reader

Humans Migrated to Mongolia Much Earlier Than Previously Believed

ucdavis.edu

55 pointshaditab9 comments

I love how the Denisovans were named after a guy named Denis who lived in a cave. Very Adamsist.

The time that humans arrived keeps getting pushed back as older artefacts are found - can we plot dates against discovery time to estimate when it asymptotes? (And when we will get there, within some ε.)

The date for Aboriginal Australians is 65,000 ATM. Mongolia seems a similar distance. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Australians#cite_note-...

I’ve gotten to the point where I suspect the “beginning of humanity” is actually the “first slot in the loop buffer of history” bounded by the erosion of the surface of the Earth.

Even stone tools only seem primitive because the plant and animal materials that completed them are gone, unlike metal tools which can be made of 100% durable materials.

My default assumption is that 50k years ago there were human civilizations every bit as rich and comfortable as ours, if not moreso on both counts. And that if you were transported there and taken in by a family you would feel quite at home.

I have never seen any material evidence to the contrary. History for political reasons has discounted the possibility of such civilizations but after many years I finally realized “we have existed roughly the same way for a hundred thousand years or more” is just the null hypothesis.

The downvoters don't realize that behaviourly modern humans seemed to emerge about 50k years ago (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity), dated by cave art. In a fundamental sense, those people were as smart as us. What did they do with their time?

I one took a trip to Mongolia in the dead of winter one year. -45 C at night, -25 C in the daytime. I hate cold, but I wanted to see life in such an extreme environment. Very eye-opening, but I was glad I had my winter hiking gear and ice climbing socks with me just to walk around town. I can't imagine how it was for people thousands of years ago.

A few photos here: http://dheera.net/photos/places/mongoliawinter

There's the possibility that the humans in that area at that time were migratory, i.e. only visited it in the summer.

Or that the local Mongolian climate was more mild at the time.

Are there any studies that check % Denisovian DNA versus living elevation? All I hear about Denisovians are that they were more adapted to higher elevation living. So if there were a mixing event or multiple mixing events however many tens of thousands of years ago - could it possibly be that the offspring naturally end up at different elevations based on what was optimal for their genetics?

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