Dating of bones from Indonesia confirm Homo erectus roamed planet for 1.8M years | Hacker News Reader

Dating of bones from Indonesia confirm Homo erectus roamed planet for 1.8M years

theguardian.com

76 pointsalberto_ol30 comments

I went to the Sterkfontein Caves [1] [2] recently and the most poignant thing for me was the diminutive size of Australopithecus. While larger huminoid species [3] were evolving, our direct (well, disregarding cross breeding) ancestors were tiny. Australopithecus is about the size of a 5 or 6 year old.

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

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

[3] That would be the precursors to Neanderthals and Denisovians.

Edit: The males were somewhat larger. Modern humans do not display the same degree of sexual dimorphism as Australopithecus appears to have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus

One thing I've always wondered about these early hominins is whether there was a large enough variety in any of them that we find different races within a species.

Maybe that is a dumb question, or just complex to answer. I've just always wondered because some homo sapiens look wildly different from each other. I know it's because we've spread out so much, and had a long time to do so. But I read things about the denisovans being here or there for a very long span of time. It's hard to imagine that they didn't at least have occasional mutations that lead to interesting features.

We have the same Australopithecus ancestors as Neanderthals and Denisovans though. The sapiens/neanderthal split is much more recent than that, "only" a few hundred thousand years, while Australopithecus became extinct two million years ago.

I think you are right, yes. I asked the guide (a professor) about this at the time. When specifically asked about Australopithecus and its small size, and about the contemporary hominids at the time, the remark was along the lines of: "The other contemporary hominids were much larger, but died out."

But you are right that these would then be a split prior to Neanderthals and Denisovians. Looking at Wikipedia's available articles, I guess the hominids that he was talking about don't necessarily have clear names and branches. I am not sure what those hominids would have been.

I wouldn't be surprised if the red hairy people of Australian Aboriginal mythology turn out to be the last stand of Homo erectus, it's just that no fossils have been found yet.

I always wonder about troll mythology and Neanderthals...

Yep, Australian aboriginal mythologies turn out to surprisingly accurate. Lot of their stories have checked out by evidence.

Make sense, Java was isolated dead end on the southeastern edge of the Eurasian landmass

Alternatively, they didn't come from Africa but from Asia.

I'm unclear that the verb 'died out' is helpful to understanding here.

'survived longest' makes more sense - the point is that Homo erectus died out everywhere else much earlier.

That's why they moved to Scala instead

There's always that one guy... you're him aren't you?

Or Kotlin Island - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotlin_Island

They'll surely find evidence h. erectus ran Android in an archaic app store up until 100k BCE. Tablet computing way back.

That would have been an even more dramatic place to die!

https://goo.gl/maps/U6rQAACYYmB7r1Bw9

stay away from Java

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20600357

Came for the Java jokes, was not disappointed

I almost die in Java too.

eventually we all will die, hoping that Java will die.

It would have been better to die in Java 2.

You are right. Sometimes I wish I were better at English.

2real4me

Wow, that is an annoying website to visit. I would rather have downloaded a text file than wade through all of that.

The first ad takes up half of my screen, and then I had to see a fullscreen amazon preview. When I tried to click the cookie policy it thought I clicked an ad that led to a pop-up.

Did they get garbage collected though?

i think that is was scientists are doing now :D

If they had not died, they would have told us to stay away from Java.

Meta: And as I often do when I read the Guardian I donated.

Why I write this?

1. Hopefully someone reading HN works for newspapers and can tell them that there exist a good number of people who doesn't want to subscribe but who want to pay for quality content[0].

I guess on average I pay $5 every time I glance over an article in the Guardian.

2. I want to urge more people around here to support companies and organizations that do the right thing. I guess many of you already do but many do not.

When we go to school or work in low paying jobs it is hard to pay and I guess it is easy for that habit to stick long after we cross into the richest 10 or 20% of the population.

[0]: I do also subscribe to two newspapers and one magazine and buy the paper from the kid who sell it every Sunday morning. Oh, and buy magazines and books. And pay my mandatory news tax (about $500 alone) that funds the national somewhat lopsided broadcasting channel. I'm happy to pay a bit more for individual articles but I cannot subscribe to every paper (and I wouldn't have a chance to read them all either)

(Feels extremely weird to brag like this. That's why I made a new account.)

I'm curious why you think the Guardian is a company doing the right thing? I don't know much about them apart from being a news outlet, but it seems at least as biased as the rest of them.

How is this not spam? Good for you being able to donate $5 when you glance at an article. Sounds like you can afford enough subscriptions for everyone.

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