Hacker News Reader

Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

It may also not be a new species. And a lot of pop science reporting "may" be questionable.

On a side-note some Chinese anthropologists question the common human origin "Out of Africa" and instead suggest Chinese or East Asians had their own separate origin. And they seem to be really determined on finding evidence to this end, instead of looking at it from a neutral point of view. This sounds crazy but it's an absolute mainstream idea over there.

View on HN

While their motives are suspect, just because the current most common theory is that humans originated in Africa doesn't mean that we won't someday learn that this is not correct. Obviously whatever data they find should be treated skeptically, but so should all data. Maybe some day they'll prove their theory or more likely, they won't but a lot of other related data will be discovered and added to the body of human knowledge.

Yep. They need that narrative to push superiority. Genetic be damned I guess.

> some Chinese anthropologists question the common human origin "Out of Africa" and instead suggest Chinese or East Asians had their own separate origin

Where are those claims? Do you have some examples of such claims.

The idea that the modern Chinese are descendanded from Peking man from 770k years feeds the common myth that many people hold that their particular ethnic group is inherently different/superior.

I found this article on the topic very interesting.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-asian-stu...

Quite a large number of leading Chinese paleoanthropologists have been in this camp. Take Jia Lanpo or Wu Liu as examples.

> Quite a large number of leading Chinese paleoanthropologists have been in this camp. Take Jia Lanpo or Wu Liu as examples.

Which of Jia Lanpo's work claimed this? I couldn't google one.

Citations to Wu Liu's work would be great as well.

The issue you probably ran into is that Chinese academics don't always publish in English. Often what you get are press statements like [1] espousing a particular position. For Jia Lanpo the situation is a little easier. He was notorious for his position that Chinese humans originated in China. See [2] if you want a direct citation or [3] for context.

For Wu's work, [4]. I doubt it'll be clear to anyone unfamiliar with the literature how this differs from modern models so I'll attempt to explain it:

Way back in the 90s, we didn't have ancient DNA techniques and the idea of AMH-Neanderthal admixture in modern populations was still a bit fringe. The consensus model at the time was that Out-Of-Africa meant population replacement of archaic humans without admixture. A few months before this paper was sent for review, Green et al. [5] published the first Neanderthal draft sequence, which clearly pointed to admixture in Out-Of-Africa model. The consensus model went down in flames and everyone accepted admixture on some level. We're still fully working out the details though.

Liu's paper takes things a step further. Instead of just attacking the now-dead OoA replacement model, they point to Green et al. to say "AMH could have evolved from archaic humans in Asia and we have modern morphology that predates out-of-africa, even with admixture", thus remaining within assimilation theory without really remaining inside it. They also take a neat sideswipe at (modern) consensus with the phrase "imprecise inferences from extant genetic diversity".

[1] https://www.deseret.com/1995/8/15/19187840/chinese-scientist...

[2] Chia, L. P., & Jia, L. (1980). Early man in China. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

[3] https://doi.org/10.2307/2659506

[4] https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1014386107

[5] https://dx.doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.1188021

Reply on news.ycombinator.com