Scientists Find the Skull of Humanity’s Ancestor, on a Computer
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I find this highly unlikely. The groups inhabited the same continent, potentially for thousands of years. There would almost certainly have been some degree of interbreeding, even if some groups didn't end up contributing very significantly to our modern genome.
"In the computer": https://youtu.be/L_o_O7v1ews
or
> A computer reconstruction of a skull that may have belonged to the earliest common ancestor of living humans.
The earliest common ancestor of living humans didn't have a skull, it would have been a single-celled organism.
In the sense that we have directly observed this organism and can directly trace all life to it? No.
However, the evidence for the LCA is pretty strong. All doubts in my mind were removed when I took molecular genetics of procaryotes in college. Without going into details of finding relevant citations, and hence a fairly lay (and several years divorced from me learning about this stuff), the fact that all domains of life (procaryota, eucaryota, and archaea) share common genetic code and operate similar RNA- and protein-based molecular machinery strongly implies that a single "master template" originated all subsequent life on the planet. Considering how complex a ribosome is, for instance, the fact that all domains of life have similar, but not identical, ribosomal structures seems exceedingly unlikely. Molecular machinery is as complicated as it is because it evolves randomly to fulfill specific tasks. It's highly unlikely that two organisms would evolve the exact same piece of machinery which similar construction and composition to solve a novel task. On the other hand, when evolving from common machinery (i.e. shared ancestors), it's feasible to imagine that two organisms sharing an LCA might independently evolve similar proteins to adapt to a common stimulus. Consequently, eucaryotic cells function broadly similarly to other eucaryotic cells, archaeal cells function broadly similarly to other archaeal cells, and prokaryotic cells function broadly similar to other prokaryotic cells. Finally, archaeal cells function more closely to eucaryotic cells than do prokaryotic cells. Thus, it implies that archaea and eucaryota are more closely related than prokaryota and eucaryota. Hence, the phylogenetic tree. This implies that the most elegant (but not necessarily correct) solution to the similarity between different domains of life is a single unicellular ancestor.
It also follows “Did you work on the computer?” Which asks if you used a computer to do something as well as “Did you work to fix the computer”. I however contend that in the context of the article “in” would be clearer. As in “ghost in the machine”.
Similarly, "reconstruct" would be less ambiguous the "find".
In the title’s structure it suggests to me that they found it physically on top of a computer.
Pheew, good to know it wasn't just me.
I had already imagined an ancient skull found in an abandoned room in the underground of some museum on top of a (as well abandoned) IBM mainframe terminal.