Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

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It does raise the question of "us" versus "them". But who was "them" really?

It's clear there were some stupid humans:

homo habilis

home erectus

homo naledi

It's clear there are some smart humans:

homo neanderthal

homo denisovan

homo sapien

And it's clear there are some that we are not yet sure about, in particular:

homo heidelbergensis

But what about:

homo antecessor

If you could wave a magic wand, and summon them now, it's likely that Sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans could learn each other's language and have a conversation. But would we be able to have a conversation with Heidelbergensis?

So the question comes up again, as strong as ever, who was the first smart human? We used to think they were Sapiens, now it is seems likely the first really smart humans came before Sapiens, and we are just one of several smart humans.

There was a species of humans that was unique to southern easter Africa, they had the largest skulls of any known human species, a recent article in the New York Times quoted one scientist saying they all would have been as smart as Albert Einstein. (I just searched for the article on Google and NYT but could not find it, it was an article that ran within the last 2 years.)

In an ideal world we could find more DNA samples, and eventually figure out what the DNA is trying to tell us, but DNA doesn't last 2 million years, so we will never have the full DNA story of humans, going all the way back to homo habilis.

So we are left looking at the clues and wondering, "When did us begin?"

What makes you assume homo erectus was stupid? The neanderthals, denisovans, and sapiens are identified as separate evolutions from erectus because they evolved separate features which are considered markers of "anatomical modernity", but that seems to be a sapien-centric attitude that needlessly assumes appearance similar to sapiens corresponds to higher intelligence. The archeological evidence doesn't really suggest any one group from homo was smarter - all seemed to develop the same lower paleolithic and then middle paleolithic technology. The only difference archeologically happened when sapiens outbred and assimiliated the other groups ~50,000-80,000 years ago and then developed upper paleolithic technology.

We can put homo erectus in the ambiguous category, if you know of some argument to do so, but the early homo erectus (what splitters would simply call actual homo erectus) had a brain size of 900 cc, so you'd need to explain how modern intelligence works in that dramatically smaller brain.

Lumpers include later humans in the category of "homo erectus" when brain size is 1200cc. If you yourself are a lumper, you should say so, as that would resolve some confusion. I'm personally with the splitters, having been won over by the arguments that Ian Tattersall advanced, so when I say that homo erectus is stupid, I'm referring to people whose brains were 900cc.

Here is an article written from the lumper point of view, so perhaps this is what you were thinking of:

https://www.shorthistory.org/prehistory/brain-size-of-the-pr...

"Homo habilis, who lived approximately 2 million years ago, was 750 cc. Homo erectus shows this transition most dramatically, indicating that most of the evolutionary increase in brain size took place during the life of this species. Early Homo erectus in Africa (from about 1.7 to 1 million years ago) averaged 900 cc in brain size, but later Homo erectus specimens from .5 million years ago average 1100-1200 cc, which falls within the range of the brain size of modern humans. The earliest or archaic forms of Homo sapiens, the species to which we belong, dates to 300,000-400,000 years ago and averages over 1200 cc. The Neanderthal skull has a brain size of 1500 cc, which is actually larger than the brains of most modern humans. The average for ourselves, Homo sapiens, is around 1400 cc."

That is not the story I was working with when I wrote the above comment. Here is an article that suggests the splitter story:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/homo-heidelber...

"Between H. erectus and H. sapiens, intermediate species existed, variably named Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis or Homo antecessor, depending on a researcher’s views. Many anthropologists just call the whole bunch Middle Pleistocene hominins, after the geologic time period 130,000 to 780,000 years ago. One spectacular site, Sima de los Huesos in Spain, has yielded the most Mid-Pleistocene hominin remains. Excavations there since the 1980s have unearthed more than 7,000 fossils representing at least 28 individuals dated to 430,000 years ago."

In that story, homo heidelbergensis is in between homo erectus and homo sapien.

The evolution of ‘anatomically modern humans’ was almost certainly a continuous change over many tens of thousands of generations. The assignment of arbitrary cutoffs and categories doesn’t really map onto reality well, as you’ve shown.

Of course it’s difficult to accept that for every generation prior they were simply less ‘human’ and more ‘ape like’ all the way back to the first bipedal generation in sub-Saharan Africa. Because the implication is that our 10000th great grand parents were less human than we are, and their 10000th great grand parents were even less so, and so on until they were literally apes, or proto-apes to be more precise.

Can you have continuous change when you have isolated populations who are facing different environmental pressures, which are pushing them in different directions?

"Continuous change" suggests a story with a narrative, an outcome that grew naturally from the initial trends, rather than being frequently convulsed by contrary trends in a world that saw multiple reverses of global climate trends during various periods of glaciation interrupted by inter glacial periods.

So it’s true?!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUEN1ZuDSMg

I wasn't expecting to see this here...

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