Opinion: Another species of hominin may still be alive
the-scientist.com
the-scientist.com
Ha ha ha, no. That’s a wild misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, that humans are somehow “more evolved” than other current species. Modern apes are our siblings, not our ancestors. And nothing fundamental “separates” us from other animals: we’re yet another species, granted with some unique features that we ourselves consider very important.
What separates us, in biblical terms, is that humans were made after the image of God.
If becomming conscious is what separates us, how do we know other creatures are unconscious?
To you. If someone doesn't speak to you and doesn't respond "meaningfully" to your input, does that mean they do not have complex thought patterns? With that philosophy, it's probably for the best that you don't take care of sick people :)
I wonder what corvids could do if they had hands and not just beaks. They are fairly smart, I would expect them at least to build some more complex structures. Which would trigger a self-reinforcing cycle between improving tools and improving brains.
Now it dawns on me that it might be possible in the future to give them the necessary genes to grow hands ... wild.
The ancient Greeks called non-Greek-speaking peoples "barbarians", suggesting they are uncivilised, primitive. To this day, the name of Germany in Polish means "those-who-cannot-speak".
I mean you see a lot of human / societal traits in a lot of animals, but humans have perfected it to an extreme degree. "Top of the foodchain" is another one; sure, in a barehanded 1v1 we probably won't make it out of a bear fight, but as a group we can decimate all other creatures + each other + the whole world.
Well, they don't seen to have that great of a civilization
"Black Monolith"
I will email you royalty checks next week.
(Good point though.)
And we keep having original sins. The original sin of America is slavery. The original sin of the Internet is advertising. We ain't ever getting back in.
Then again, the original sin is more likely to be disobeying God to begin with. Although that leads to a chicken and egg question of how it was possible for Adam and Eve to be talked into disobeying God to begin with if humans didn't have the capacity to sin at the time.
As if anyone is claiming we're derived from modern chimps...
Meanwhile the ancient apes that we share as common ancestors with modern apes are long extinct.
Not to mention evolution doesn't require an extinction as far as I know. See polar bears
The common ancestor between us and bonobos, chimps, gorillas, orangs is still around. They're just bonobos, chimps, gorillas and orangs and humans nowadays because some populations simply matched their environments over a (long) time and became more fit in their niche.
The question what constitutes a species, for sake of our classification desires, is also very relevant to this. Populations separating and changing until offspring isn't viable? Why do some of us have Neanderthal genes?
Generally, but then you have things like multiple canids being different species but able to produce viable hybrids (e.g. the large number of coywolves we have near me). Since "species" is a classification we made up which doesn't map to reality particularly well, it gets pretty fuzzy at the edges.
The latter might be too clever for their own good however, having invented carbon-fueled industry, super-powered AI, and various hyper-destructive weapons. Also Twitter. And NFTs.
The only person I've ever met in my life who did not believe in evolution was a catholic priest. It's honestly bewildering to me that evolutionary sceptics are common enough to warrant a note in mainstream media or even just normal conversation. To me it's comparable to finding out there are still geocentrism apologists.
Although from what I've read it's more common in US. I'm in Europe so that may be the source of my bubble.
One day the professor came in and very sternly told us something along the lines of "If you disagree with this and you want to walk out, that's fine - remember, you're the ones paying to be here, and you're adults and that's your choice. But I'd like to re-emphasis the 'you're adults' part - it is unacceptable for me to be receiving angry letters from your parents. If you don't pass this class because you walk out, that's on you and you need to own that consequence." ~ oof, it was a rough Monday.
Source: I'm Catholic today.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/06/how-highly-...
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2013/12/30/publics-view...
Catholics seem almost the same as the US population overall to believe in evolution. Evangelicals tend to express the opinion that humans have existed in the same form forever.
Specifically, from what I've read, they're likely to be much more prevalent in the US Bible Belt and other places with strong concentrations of evangelical fundamentalists, because despite Catholicism being extremely different doctrinally, the actual Catholics in that area are almost invariably going to be more influenced by the culture around them, including the attitude toward religion and science.
And that's very much the case. Formal Church documents confirm the belief, and the very large majority of Catholics believe it. There isn't anything contradictory in believing evolution may have been the means by which God created people.
Whether that was the case when or where anyone else was growing up, I can't attest. I'm only speaking to the commonality of the belief in the present.
As for evolution, the Christians literally believe man was made whole, along with every other living thing - a more sci-fi explanation would be massive viral and bacterial mutation, like a lichen growing legs and arms (bacteria and viruses both evolve at breathtaking speeds, so it is possible if unlikely).
Creationists do actually acknowledge evolution, they usually downplay its significance or spend a lot of time pointing the current scientific inconsistencies in mainstream evolutionary theories.
I think they are both a bit wrong - obviously Creationism is wildly optimistic about both an all powerful entity who creates things then mysteriously vanishes, never to be heard from again (discounting the delusions or child-exploitation of near death "I met god" accounts). There is a wide amount of expression our genes already afford us - it only takes a couple generations for most animals or plants to express very different visible traits. Couple that with invasive viral infections permanently mutating the gonad materials (eggs, sperm, spores) and wild environmental fluctuations (meteors hitting the ocean), you could experience evolutionary forces in a very short time frame. I don't know that you require billions or trillions of years in the margins of carbon dating.
Ignoring questions of whether the astrophysicists have it right with the age of the known universe (is the big bang truly the beginning of the universe or just an event in a multidimensional cosmos?), a middle ground where the evolutionists and Christians are both wrong seems more plausible to me - hominids have been around for a very, very long time, perhaps even coexisting hundreds or billions of years ago with dinosaurs. We just happen to exist post some set of climactic events, cutting us off from our history.
I should clarify - I am not pro Creationism, I used to appreciate having been taught a different theory, however apologist doesn't make for good science, especially when the mainstream theories have the easy out of calling anything else "Christian nonsense". E.g. in physics there is the standard model, and various competing alternative models, crucially there are no major appeals to authority and so competing theories can thrive. Evolution is almost political on the other hand, much the same as climate science.
I guess we had Christian physics, we called that witchcraft. Ironically, with some of the immoral things modern tech has enabled, perhaps the claims of beezlebub in your tech weren't off the mark wholly. They are plenty of angels in tech though too...
(1) But there is an important provision to be considered by the faithful: the teaching of evolution cannot patently claim that there is no God. It is outside the scope of any science to disprove (or prove) the existence of God. And thus it is a misrepresentation of the science for any of the faithful to claim otherwise. The Church respects science in its endeavor to sincerely discover truth; Pope John Paul II once put it as such in his writings (I am paraphrasing here): "Faith forms reason, reason informs faith."
(2) Darwin's work was in fact not motivated by a sense of atheism [1]. In fact, I believe that I once discovered that in the Forward to On the Origin of Species, he references God in a positive note. The exact comment escapes me--perhaps someone with the actual text can verify this.
[1] https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-12041.xml
Gregor Johann Mendel - father of modern genetics and Catholic friar.
To be more evolved, means to be more changed from the source. It means specialization for a specific scenario. Often "more evolved" can be "worse" once the environment changes, and that specialization becomes a disadvantage instead of an advantage. Or that a change brings one benefit but another potentially larger pitfall in the long run.
The amount of evolution should be measured in iteration cycles, how much change over how much time. It's also possible that something iterated many many times quickly long in the past and then stopped, vs something that just started making changes more recently.
Who said that? There are tons of newer than us leafs (organisms that evolved after we did).
If you mean "but there are no futher evolved human ancestors", that's not an exception: that's the same case with almost all current animals.
With 'last' parent meant 'last with respect to that order', not necessarily in the sense of 'older' and 'newer' (which correlates with this order, as you pointed out).
I meant leaf nodes in the sense of the tree data structure, so I think we are saying exactly the same thing.
> If you mean "but there are no futher evolved human ancestors", that's not an exception: that's the same case with almost all current animals.
Yes that's exactly what I meant with the second part of my comment.
Quoting a bit more from the article:
> Like other folk zoologists, the Lio put humans first, most notably as the origin of nonhuman animals, a sort of Darwinism in reverse. In contrast, evolutionary theory puts humans (or hominins) last, just as does the biblical story of Genesis.
Genesis 1 indeed puts humans last, but Genesis 2 puts them first. And Genesis 2 is the older story of the two. Maybe that explains why it's more in line with those folk zoologists? Genesis 1 (a poem, structured by the days of the week) was written later, possibly during the Babylonian exile, and may be more informed by the science of the Babylonians; it addresses not just the creation of the Earth and the creatures on it, but also the sun and stars, and the passage of time; topics that the Babylonians were very interested in.
And then Cain says to God: "I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me." And God responds: "Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over." And God "put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him." (Genesis 4, 14-15)
But who are they? (whoever, anyone, no one) At this point in the story there should only be three people on earth: Adam, Eve and Cain. And in the following verse it says that "Cain made love to his wife".
Where does she come from?
One possible explanation is that the story of creation talks about one specific tribe, among other tribes that would pre-exist to the family of Adam, or at least co-exist.
Which is kind of relevant to the debate of different species of humans.
The fact that according to Genesis 4 other people did exist is a very good but in my opinion completely different issue.
If one of them was not correct nobody would have put them in the same bible.
Focusing on "correct" is the wrong approach to reading these old mythological parts of the Bible. People put these stories in the Bible because of their story and meaning, not because of any kind of historical correctness. (Because how could they know?)
Although it's certainly true that Genesis 3 suggests thorns, thistles and other nastier parts of nature weren't around at first, which again fits the "man came first" aspect of the Genesis 2 creation story.
If we assume harmony between Genesis 1:11-13 (fruits/grains) and Genesis 2:5 (bush/plants of the field) then it is clear that fruit was the chief food in the garden and agriculture came later.
However, it is also important to recognize that they were brought together and redacted by an editor (or committee of editors, perhaps even spread out over time) that arranged and tweaked the stories. At the very least, it is easy to glean from the text that they are intended to form a whole "collection," with connections between the various myths. The textual evidence suggests that the connections are stronger than that.
So while it is the more common error to underappreciate the differences between the accounts, it is a less common but equally erroneous mistake to underappreciate the "unity" (of a sort) that they have.
Like thinking a "culture" that some people have labelled/categorized as "hunter gatherer" therefore somehow is "less developed" or even has "less history" than other social groupings, and reveals the way humans were a long time ago -- whereas in fact any human culture on the planet at the same time has the same amount of history and development behind them.
Some of this is covered in Graeber and Wengrow's recent _The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity_.
We really want to impute a direction to changes over time (whether biological or social); to think that the changes always go in the same direction; that it's a direction of "better"; that the things we currently value as 'better' are that directional 'better'; and that therefore anything we think is 'not as good' is somehow "earlier" or "less developed". None of those are accurate ways to understand actual historical changes over time, whether biological/evolutionary or social or anything else really.
But if you want to deconstruct the argument fully, evolution actually isn't really anything at all - shifting genes in a shifting environment.
Like a rock rolling down a hill, bouncing off of other rocks.
It's not even a 'process' and it probably should be called:
'Species Drift' or something like that.
And taken even further - you and I are just 'lumps of material bouncing around'.
The term 'intelligence' has no scientific meaning either.
How can a bag of random particles be 'intelligent' or 'create'?
You're not 'reading' this, you're randomly bouncing through the universe. It just seems like you are 'doing' something.
But you're not 'doing' anything more than the chair you are sitting on. It's there, you are there. You both got there the same way.
But the matter of fact is, we do have metaphysical foundations:
Mineral, Vegetable, Animal, Human 'Kindgoms' in which we believe that the 'Human' condition is more evolved, at very least Han the 'Mineral' and likely 'Vegetable'.
We basically take that, and the presence of life as 'matter of fact' and a kind reality.
It just doesn't jive well with Scientific Materialism.
And if we do accept those basic principles, well, we are 'pretty much 'more' evolved than chimps', even though technically I do understand it's also reasonable to just say 'we are siblings with common ancestors' and that's that.
So on what basis are you saying it makes sense to say humans have had "more" evolution than chimpanzees? What does it mean for one species to have "undergone more evolution" than another, if both have the same amount of evolutionary history?
Just on the basis that you believe the result of that evolution for humans is an organism you consider more sophisticated? That is, I'd think, dependent on the assumption that evolution always leads in the direction you consider "more sophisticated", and, I guess, that it takes so much evolution to get so much sophictiation so something that is "more sophisticated" just must be "more evolved". That is also not true.
You can make a "metaphysical" value judgement that humans are more sophisticated, sure! I'm not trying to say that is inappropriate to do. But "evolved" is the wrong word for this, if you think it means the same thing we're talking about when we're talking about biological species evolution as formulated by Darwin etc.
The term 'evolved' I think can be used in English to describe something 'more advanced' by the crude and arbitrary manner in which we generally apply it.
Maybe in a Scientific context it wouldn't be correct, I admit that.
Yes, the word "evolved" can be used in a non-scientific way that has nothing to do with the origin of species or natural selection or genetic change over time too. I don't know if this the cause of our confusion, or that it's the result of our confusion, because so many of us, since Darwin, have had these assumptions that "evolution" functions teleologically and in a certain direction at a certain rate.
So that leads the wrong idea that, as codeflo points out, "evolutionary theory puts humans (or hominins) last" over chimpanzees, or humans undergone "more evolution" than chimpanzeees.
When we understand the biological process of evolution more clearly, we can understand the natural world and the species in it and the relation between them more clearly.
I was with you until that statement. The concept of "importance" itself is also something we ourselves consider ie. you're not a monkey therefore you don't know if importance is even a thing for a monkey, or if it is and that it appears that they prefer bananas over AK 47's you're still not a monkey so you won't be able to be sure.
Therefore to attribute having the same concept of importance as us to another species is absurd.
That said, myths about both small human-like animals and large ones are practically universal. We have another universal myth that was fairly recently dated to be much older than you'd expect. https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom... shows that the myth about the Pleiades, aka "seven sisters", likely date back 100,000 years. Given that, would it be surprising that myths like the Sasquatch date back to folk memories of Neandertals? Who our ancestors knew much more recently than that?
As for quite a bit of mating, current estimates say a maximum of dozens of times over a period of 12,000 years. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC532398/ for verification. This is, "once every few hundred years someone got pregnant." This fits with rare enough encounters that interspecies sex only happened once every few generations.
Don't read too much into that. Native Americans (homo sapiens from the whole American continent) didn't master wheels for transport. Aztecs did have toys that used wheels, the concept wasn't foreign, but somehow they didn't see the need to upscale it for transport. Yes, we can argue that they didn't have draught animals, but there are plenty of human powered uses for wheels, and some regions did have horses, llamas or buffaloes.
Maybe Neanderthals just weren't interested.
Edit: I was wrong about the horses, there is a overlap.
Before 12800 years ago, North America was home to both horses and camels, along with ~30 other now extinct genera including mammoths, mastodons, cheetahs, dire wolves, giant sloths, and a bear much larger than the grizzly. All of those were obliterated at that geological instant, along with the Clovis culture, apparently by a meteorite or comet strike. It also melted many cubic miles of glacial ice in an instant, scouring out the Scablands of eastern Washington state in a flood hundreds of feet deep, carving out the whole Columbia Gorge in only days. It ignited continent-spanning fires that destroyed everything anyone might have built.
Nothing would have prevented the people who lived before then from domesticating horses and using them to pull wagons. None has been found, but remarkable little remains of the people who were in North America for at least 10 millennia before then.
The fact is, we don't have any evidence for or against any domestication, or wheels, in North America. Any evidence that might have existed was burned up along with everything else, in the YD conflagration. So, any estimation of probability is 100% guessing, with a decorative and misleading frosting of "science".
What we do have firm evidence for is domestication of tree species in South America before 10,000 years ago. So, domestication did happen there before similar events in Eurasia.
Everything (credible) I'm able to find suggests/theorises that the Clovis differentiated into different groups of Native American populations, and that gradual climate change did most of the megafauna in.
Instead look to what was different in the most recent one. A weird species on 2 feet with hunting techniques that the megafauna had never encountered before. Such as using fire to drive whole herds of horses off of a cliff.
Horses and camels were all over Asia, coeval with humans, and did fine. Lions survived in in Europe well into recorded history. Africa, of course, retained about everything for hundreds of millennia, except for 3 genera right at 12800 years ago. The only notable extinction in Eurasia was the woolly mammoth, which survived only on Wrangel Island. Humans had been in the Americas for many millennia, but populations of these animals did not decline during that time.
Instead, the 30+ genera and the Clovis people all vanished at identically the same time, coincident with the layer of radically elevated platinum dust, shocked quartz, and soot.
Authors: Wendy S. Wolbach, Joanne P. Ballard, Paul A. Mayewski, [+24 others]
Journal of Geology, 2018, volume 126, pp. 165–184
http://sci-hub.se/10.1086/695703
Abstract: The Younger Dryas boundary (YDB) cosmic-impact hypothesis is based on considerable evidence that Earth collided with fragments of a disintegrating ≥100-km-diameter comet, the remnants of which persist within the inner solar system ∼12,800 y later. Evidence suggests that the YDB cosmic impact triggered an “impact winter” and the subsequent Younger Dryas (YD) climate episode, biomass burning, late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions, and human cultural shifts and population declines.
The cosmic impact deposited anomalously high concentrations of platinum over much of the Northern Hemisphere, as recorded at 26 YDB sites at the YD onset, including the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 ice core, in which platinum deposition spans ∼21 y (∼12,836–12,815 cal BP). The YD onset also exhibits increased dust concentrations, synchronous with the onset of a remarkably high peak in ammonium, a biomass-burning aerosol. In four ice-core sequences from Greenland, Antarctica, and Russia, similar anomalous peaks in other combustion aerosols occur, including nitrate, oxalate, acetate, and formate, reflecting one of the largest biomass-burning episodes in more than 120,000 y.
In support of widespread wildfires, the perturbations in CO2 records from Taylor Glacier, Antarctica, suggest that biomass burning at the YD onset may have consumed ∼10 million km^2, or ∼9% of Earth’s terrestrial bio-mass. The ice record is consistent with YDB impact theory that extensive impact-related biomass burning triggered the abrupt onset of an impact winter, which led, through climatic feedbacks, to the anomalous YD climate episode.
But making a practical wheel out of wood would take some significant woodworking and joinery skills. They may have tried, and just gave up after the wheel would fracture after a few moments use.
I.e. the concept of the wheel and making a successful implementation of it are very different things.
If you weren't aware, the Aztec capital was built in the middle of a lake, a kind of larger version of Venice, so the most effective way to move goods around would by boat rather than any land-based transportation. The area outside of Lake Texcoco would have been quite mountainous, with lowland regions largely being dense jungles, both regions that are obviously poorly suited for wheeled transportation in general.
This is the kind of terrain where the modern US Army, with all of its technological access, will still rely on pack mules to move goods. Do you really think wheeled transport would have been a viable invention in such circumstances?
I think it's a secondary invention, and then if you are in an area where the primary invention just doesn't make much sense neither one gets invented.
Toy wheels don’t scale. A solid piece of wood is too fragile, it easily splits into rings.
A good wooden wheel is harder than it looks.
You need planks that are crossed with each other, which require good quality saws and a tight fit. Secondly, you need good well fitted axels, which also requires precision tools.
The Aztecs and other South and Central American societies were capable of fine stonework so I think they at least had the potential to do fine woodwork.
Even a poor quality wheel and axle makes a useful wheelbarrow.
You don't need saws at all. Initial shaping with an adze, and subsequent flattening/fitting of the two pieces with friction and an abrasive like sand would give you closely fitted wood surfaces, though not necessarily all that flat.
Note that a somewhat similar technique was used to fit irregular stone blocks together with high precision by the Inca.
You could also create a flat wood surface by abrasion against a flat stone surface, but that is more labor intensive to produce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_... has some newer stuff and the trend seems to be progressively more archaic DNA being identified.
Interspecies sex happen a whole lot more often than that. Having viable offspring might have been the rare part.
Dr. Eugene McCarthy has a theory that humans are a hybrid between pigs and chimpanzees https://phys.org/news/2013-07-chimp-pig-hybrid-humans.html
https://www.macroevolution.net/mammalian-hybrids.html
https://www.macroevolution.net/cat-rabbit-hybrids.html
But his pig+chimp theory is serious, and it seems it makes some sense in explaining numerous pig-like anatomical features of humans, but there can be no genetic evidence, so only he believes it, it seems.
First of all, the coincidences become a lot less coincidence when you look at convergent evolution. For example tooth shape is tied to what you eat. Since we and pigs are both omnivores, we wind up with similar teeth.
Second, only related species can form hybrids. Lions and tigers split probably a bit under 4 million years ago. Donkeys and horses split a bit before that. We don't know when humans and chimps split, but you can find estimates everywhere from 7-12 million years. The split between primates and pigs appears to be about 80 million years ago. And the result is that lions and tigers can interbreed and the child can be fertile. Donkeys and horses can interbreed and the child is usually NOT fertile. We have no evidence that humans and chimps can have children, and it has probably been tried. As for more distant than that, farmers have been having regular sex with farm animals since farms existed, with no babies.
So I'm going firmly with "crank".
I'd buy horizontal gene transfer via a viral vector (which is still damn unlikely for all those traits) over hybridization any day of the week.
Given that Neanderthals were found from Spain to Libanon and even deep into Asia, chances are most humans never saw Neanderthals or vice versa.
Also, I don’t see how that article counts interspecies sex, pregnancies or even live births. It counts number of births who grew up to reproduce. I can easily see early humans stigmatizing or even killing kids of mixed descent or, even easier, children from such encounters being less fertile or even infertile.
I kinda prefer the short stint in the 60s and 70s where they were imagined / portrayed to be a sort of nature oriented flower children.
Fun how culture influences things.
https://landofthelost.fandom.com/wiki/Sleestak
>At one time, in the distant past, the Sleestak were known as Altrusians. They were a very peaceful and intelligent race and eventually grew into an advanced civilization, mastering many (if not all) of the secrets of the Land of the Lost, creating cities and temples among other landmarks. Unfortunately, the Altrusians lost control over their emotions and destroyed their civilization becoming known as the Sleestak.
>In their decline, the Sleestak became are a degenerate warring race that lost much of their knowledge and culture. Now based on a distrust of strangers and struggle for survival, they have come out of the Era of Intelligence and into the Era of Solitude. The Era of Intelligence was the period in time when the Sleestak first arrived at The Land of the Lost. They built several temples now called Pylons which serve to regulate the life conditions, seasons and meteorological traits of the area. There was a period when there was only darkness before the Sleestak built the Time Pylon, which controls the light and dark cycles of The Land of The Lost.
>As the Sleestak moved into The Lost City they entered a more barbarian state as they reverted back to their more primeval conditions. They eventually became ruled by a Sleestak called Sol, who reorganized the Sleestak and taught them how to hunt and kill.
I think my question boils down to - if these separate branches of humans existed today, wouldn't we just consider them as Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
It's not just size or deformity, but other features that will diverge.
Personally, I have a guess that it was interactions between Neandertals and early Sapiens that led to these myths. Two separate societies, viewed as independent.
I won't make any guesses as to which is which, but I think the possibility makes sense.
There carnivorous lifestyle would mean different gut biome to us allowing their bodies to get away with eating rotten meat more often.
I wonder if they told stories about those weird humans…
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/when-orcs-were-real?s=r
Europeans maintained stories of ogres 10s of thousands of years after the last Neanderthal walked the earth, it’s plausible that the Lio in the article maintained myths about small humanlike creatures that fuelled the imaginations of the people who claim to have seen them in the same way.
This is definitely a fringe theory, based on a very literal interpretation of a myth, and ignoring the importance of numbers like 7 in the human mind.
Edit: fixed link
There is a huge difference between linking direct observations of the stars to things like Stonehenge, and looking at stories that are thousands of years old, and linking them to a single detail of an oral history that would have to be 100,000 years old to make any sense.
Gobekli Tepe is actually a good example: even though it's a mere 11-13k years old (Wikipedia says 9000BC,not 11000BC, but that's anyway irrelevant), and even though it was still being used maybe 8k years ago, we have no oral histories about it, and no other memories of it, except perhaps a vague idea that the hill it was on was sacred.
We also know that human cultures find certain numbers as especially meaningful - 1,2,3,7 are all numbers that hold special meanings in mythology all around the world. It seems way more plausible then to interpret a myth about six stars expressed as 7-1 as being a way to fit a 7 in the story.
Edit: note that in good viewing conditions, there are about 11 stars in the Pleiades clusters visible to the naked eye, though 6 of them are significantly brighter: https://www.naic.edu/~gibson/pleiades/pleiades_see.html
People using modern telescopes seem to get somewhere around 1000 stars. https://www.space.com/pleiades.html#:~:text=The%20Pleiades%2....
None of this rules out the 100,000-year-legend idea, which is awesome if true.
I think it's very, very far from showing that.
Eyewitness accounts aren’t bones but they are still evidence.
"The Komodo dragon was the driving factor for an expedition to Komodo Island by W. Douglas Burden in 1926. After returning with 12 preserved specimens and two live ones, this expedition provided the inspiration for the 1933 movie King Kong. It was also Burden who coined the common name "Komodo dragon."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon
Your mention of dragons made me think of the Komodo dragon. I only noticed after pasting the first quote the strange coincidence that it mentions Flores! I thought it interesting that the very real Komodo dragon, 10 ft long with dragony teeth and nasty bite, produced traditional-dragon-like legends even into the 20th C.
There is also more and more evidence that at least some of these dinosaurs actually had feathers, which mythical dragons very rarely have. To some extent we created a representation of dinosaurs similar to how we saw dragons, rather than the other way around. There are still a lot of things we do not know about how dinosaurs looked.
There are much less contrived explanations for dragons.
It also mentioned some other accounts from around the same time that they were an unruly nuisance that couldn't be domesticated and would steal grain, pets and livestock so the locals killed them off.
I believe the ambiguity is whether the bones found on Flores are related to these stories (assuming they are accurate) or if they are describing say some irritating primate (the classic monkey causes very similar headaches for farmers, such as opening gates and letting an an entire herd of sheep wander on to a highway. In many places you can simply shoot troublesome monkeys without consequence)
People didn't really have vast zoological knowledge in the 17th century so it could have just been a fairly common regional creature that somehow made it to the island from a trading ship and was causing issues.
Of course more than the written word should be available as evidence here regardless of the integrity or intention of the source.
Also as an exercise, pretend some group of hominids were alive somewhere; wouldn't we expect them to come around and steal things? If you don't conceive of private property, a grove of evenly spaced easy to access fruit trees would look like an amazing find. I'd sure be excited to stumble across that.
I'd expect a farmer to shoot one of these creatures and a body to come up, right?
I wish I could find it. Google is being useless as usual
I stayed there in a hotel. During the night, there were scratching noises - I assumed it was mice. It turned out to be a big alpha male, and he'd stolen all our chapatis and fruit from under the bed. He was very aggressive - he wouldn't back off when I confronted him, he really seemed to be up for a fight. I certainly wasn't - monkeys in that region carry rabies.
An ancestor of mine, something like a great-great grandmother, woke up to see a family of very small, about knee-high, people driving their flock of very small cattle.
This wasn't very unusual. Everyone knew about småfolk (little people) and they were usually described in similar ways. On Sundays they could be seen on the forest pathways leading to church, wearing traditional Sunday clothes.
This fascinates me. Of course I don't think there's a parallel society of tiny humans living in the Swedish forests but I don't think that most people were lying either. I wonder what makes you experience something like that.
All while I can clearly see it not being 10m. I know it's 10cm but my mind doesn't "accept" it. I wonder if the drug triggers pathways that might be triggered in 'natural' situations as well, such as fatigue.
Look at how big, and how small dogs can be. Why not humans, too?
Search for photos of the shortest humans, they are proportionally as small as small vs big dogs.
In terms of adult human size, no way. There are little dogs, smaller than domestic cats, and dogs as big as an adult human male. EG, almost 200lbs, 5 to 6 feet on hind legs.
Have you seen many human adults, smaller than a baby?
Having not read any of your references, I'd like to point out that the variation in domestic horses is right up there with dogs. You go from Shires to Miniature Horses, Arabians to Clydesdales. It's a huge spectrum because they were bred for specific tasks. I feel like even domestic rabbits and chickens see more variation than cats.
Maybe cats are just that stubborn or maybe we don't have many jobs for them besides pest control and snuggling.
The mind does strange things when you are tired, bored, or stimulated to (eg flicker-induced hallucinations).
I also firmly believe tales of gnomes and such are a way to explain what cannot otherwise be explained. "I don't know what caused this, gotta be the rascal tomte again." Reasons have always been invented even when the invented reasons themselves raise more questions than what they should explain.
One time when I was camping late at night I took a piss out at this fence line facing a wide open field under a full moon. This freakin' huge owl flew right past a couple meters to one side of me, scaring the crap out of me. It was completely and utterly silent; no wing flapping noise. In the moonlight it did look like it was glowing.
One night, when they were camping in tents out on the savanna, she had to go pee. There was no toilet of course, but a bucket. So she went, and as she sat there, she flicked the flashlight around and was met by the reflection of two eyes, wide apart enough and at a height that it certainly was no small animal. Probably a hyena.
They also had a hippo casually stroll through the camp. Hippos are really dangerous - fast, strong, aggressive. Kinda scary, but fun story!
I do agree though that it is interesting and even with a simple materialist explaination, the fact that people would see similar diminutive mythical people across cultures is fascinating. Hawaiians had menehune, etc etc. I tend to think of that in the Joseph Campbell collective unconscious sort of way.
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/botanical-origin...
There are some drugs that cause you to literally see things that aren't there (Datura springs to mind) but most hallucinogens merely distort perceptions. There is a degree of pareidolia but the hollywood depiction of people tripping and seeing pink elephants is very far from the actual experience.
Sending kids into the woods for a summer by themselves to watch over livestock is a cool idea though, I wish I could have experienced something like that.
But you can say that about many mammals that are close to extinction now, we rarely find their bones, and if we do it's because we know about them and their habitat. We know nothing about hf. other than through the accidental discovery of their bones.
If they're like us, a marginally intelligent tool using ape, and still exist, it's entirely possibly that they bury their dead, and we'll never find bones.
>it's entirely possibly that they bury their dead, and we'll never find bones.
Ok but most of that accidental discovery of bones is accidental discovery of bones that were buried.
If this investigation is justified, it's because of the fossil record. The folk story makes a cute human interest angle, and if the researchers do find anything, it will make a fantastic stick to beat them with: "the Lio people have known about this ape species for hundreds of years, why didn't anyone just ask them?"
In the article, he's asking why we give so much importance to the bones. If we have 40 eyewitnesses, that would be enough to win in any court. An eyewitness account is evidence, just like a bone is evidence. His essay raises the question, why don't we put more weight on the eyewitness accounts?
"These include reports of sightings by more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom I spoke with directly."
That's a lot of people. This not comparable to the 90 year old granny who squints and says "Yes, officer, that's the man, I'm sure that is him."
About this:
"There’s not a shred of physical evidence?"
Why does there need to be physical evidence? As he asks in the article, why aren't the observations recorded enough?
Hardly enough to surpass reasonable doubt, I think.
Hominid: the group consisting of all modern and extinct Great Apes (that is, modern humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans plus all their immediate ancestors).
Hominin: the group consisting of modern humans, extinct human species and all our immediate ancestors (including members of the genera Homo, Australopithecus, Paranthropus and Ardipithecus).
Canine = dog,wolf,jackal,fox. Canid = [only canines are extant]. Feline = housecat, wildcat (very broadly), lynx, cheetah, puma. Felid = felines, remaining big cats. Selected caniforms: canids, bears, earless seals. Selected feliforms: felids, hyenas(!), mongooses.
I suppose we have humanoid.
https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/homonym-...
[0] https://humanorigins.si.edu/exhibit/exhibit-floorplan/exhibi... [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@38.8915842,-77.026796,3a,75y,16...
It is narrow and bounded by the sea on both sides. There's been ample researchers, workers, tourists going all over the island. I imagine that had it been present, any cryptid there would have been documented scientifically by now.
Not that it matters too much, but according to Wikipedia, the population density for Flores is half of CT.
a) Flores
The population was 2,039,373 in the 2020 Census 13,540 km²
2039363/13540= 150 humans per square km
b) CT 3.565 million (2019) 14,357 km²
3565000/14357=248 humans per square km
But yeah, stories about almost but not quite humans seem to exist everywhere, perhaps fueled by occasional sightings of misfits who got thrown out by their communities and lived on as wandering hermits.
Most people would not consider this to be serious evidence.
The existence of those eyewitness accounts is not positive evidence, but rather constitutes a lack of negative evidence. If tens of thousands of people going through those forests all said "nothing there", then that would be negative evidence.
Lets do a thought experiment. If I went to CT and talked to 100 dudes in various bars, do you think I could get 30 of them to say they had seen bigfoot in their area?
Authors and journalists citing stuff like "30 natives" makes me uncomfortable.
In August 1895 Connecticut, a journalist with an imagination and a predilection for hoaxes named Lou Stone invented a story about a "wild man" who appeared to Town Selectman Riley Smith. The story spread like fire, appearing in newspapers all over the country and further igniting the imagination of the locals, who reported their own sightings of the Wild Man. Residents attempted to explain the Wild Man, claiming it was actually not an unknown beast, but perhaps a gorilla, or an escaped mental patient. In many sightings, villagers swore to have seen details. Mrs. Culver describes a "savage face, almost brute in expression." Eventually, the reporter admitted the truth: he just wanted to sell papers. And indeed he sold papers, and tourism, and put Winsted, Connecticut on the map.
To me the possibility there still may be extant H. floresiensis around is very miniscule, but not entirely zero. Especially the possibility that they survived a bit longer than previously thought is not completely unlikely.
The whole thing is a scam to sell books and make money.
My understanding is basically there was the original indigenous people (who are closely related to the indigenous peoples of that whole island chain stretching from Indian islands in the West, Andamanese, and going all the way east to Papuans, and Australian aboriginals). The subsequent groups came due to economic-religious expansionary activity from East Asian peoples who had taken Java and Sumatera, and also Portuguese activity. This process is also happening in Papua, quite violently as one half of the island is pretty much an open pit mine occupied by East Asian Indonesian soldiers fighting off indigenous Papuan tribes. Doesn't get much coverage here though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMeYD-wFC1o I think recently the level of violence has flared up because Indonesia is sending more East Asian settlers into the area.
I was responding to the author, Gregory Forth, who is literally claiming a cryptid is present there today but using a question to disguise his claim, presumably for profit motives. "Do members of Homo floresiensis still inhabit the Indonesian island where their fossils helped identify a new human species fewer than 20 years ago?"
Having travelled to many regions of the world, I’ve consistently inquired about such stories from local people. These myths are everywhere all around the world. They are typically large and dangerous, or small and mischievous (but also dangerous). Most of the people who I spoke to truly believed the described creatures were absolutely real.
So the stories related in this article are variations on the same stories I’ve listened to around the globe. I won’t personally believe in such animals unless definitive proof is offered. But most people are quite animated around this subject which makes me wonder why such stories appear to be nearly universal.
It's always been fun to tease tourist hikers with stories of the Maero when you're in a remote backcountry hut hearing the godawful screams of brushtail possums.
Speculation is that the myth derived from one or more of the "lost tribes" [1], Māori who fled into harsh wildernesses in the face of invaders. Given we've so little knowledge of archaic Māori culture following the extinction of the moa [2], maybe there were "lost tribes" back then that the Maero is based on.
Amusingly, as a redhead under the Southern Hemisphere ozone hole, they have a myth of a white skinned and red haired people [3] who find direct sunlight lethal, which is pretty correct if you look at melanoma rates in NZ Europeans.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maero
[1]: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Gov10_09Rail-t1...
I spent about 15 minutes under the south island sun without a hat today, and I'm kind of worried I'm sunburnt.
When I worked for a German company, we'd fly German colleagues out for important planning seasons (held over two - three weeks to justify the jet lag).
And we'd always warn those on their first trip about the NZ sun being considerably more fierce than any sun they were used to, yes, far more fierce than Lanzarote, Corsica, or "Blauhimmel Deutschland" (Blue sky Germany) aka the parts of Mallorca that sold Die Welt in local shops, and hotels that served white sausage and wheat beer on Sundays.
And invariably, they thought we were exaggerating, after all it was spring/autumn! They'd go spend a day at Sumner or New Brighton beaches, and then we got to watch their very red faces peel and gradually heal over the next fortnight. Our CEO managed to get sufficiently sunburnt on his first trip that his forehead blistered, which made it hard to maintain eye contact at times.
(He also managed to be on the New Brighton pier during the big Valentine's Day aftershock, which put a charge up him).
They always remembered to wear sunscreen and sun hats on their second trip ...
...conversely, it was lovely for me when I traveled to Germany in their summer, I could have a lunch outside for an hour, and not get burnt. My people are very much of the north.
Now he knows how women feel: "Hey buddy, my eyes are down here!"
https://niwa.co.nz/our-services/online-services/uv-ozone
(Ozone "holes" form over Antarctica, but then migrate northwards)
50,000 years later, the gene pool has been mixed rather well and any remaining differences are skin-deep at most. But now the "other" also gets closer, possibly in some proportion that is constant across time, and homo sapiens sapiens, the thinking thinking man, thinks thinks those brown eyes look really frighting.
homo homini lupus est (quom qualis sit non novit)
I'm a little more interested in the curious consistency in details of stories of paranormal encounters. I've heard a handful of first-hand accounts of paranormal experiences that, despite the tellers having some pretty widely different interpretations (one conservative Christian who thought he was talking about demonic activity), described some very similar details, in ways that are at least trickier to explain than simple pareidolia, and not always part of the standard ghost stereotypes either. Assuming ghosts aren't real, there at least has to be something interesting going on.
You'd think having read "The Demon-Haunted World" would prepare me better for this but mostly what I remember from that book is about sleep paralysis.
https://aeon.co/ideas/investigating-homo-floresiensis-and-th...
https://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-space/article/2001-...
That said this is cryptozoology stuff is (relatively) harmless compared to the more common emeritus meteorologist/physicist that uses his credentials to explain to those primed to listen why anthropogenic climate change is bullshit
> For reasons I discuss in the book, no field zoologist is yet looking for living specimens of H. floresiensis or related hominin species. But this does not mean that they cannot be found.
They only use that as an explanation for one of those two puzzles, and then by taking that explanation as a given, they formulate a second hypothesis for the other puzzle. That is, they posit the change in appearance of the star cluster as an explanation for why they story/myth has a hidden/lost seventh sister, and then use the timeline of that explanation to posit that, if this first explanation is true, then the commonality of the myth might be due to it dating from a common origin from when the star cluster looked like it had seven stars. But the first hypothesis being true doesn't imply the second hypothesis is true, because there are alternative explanations; e.g. that similar myths about the same changing star cluster were developed independently by different cultures, perhaps due to some common trends in human thinking and cultural conventions(which may themselves inherit from some prehistoric time, even if the myth doesn't).
Its an important distinction because claiming their observation about the stars explains two mysteries without recognizing this weak chaining of those explanations over-estimates the explanatory power of the hypothesis.
> However, the absence of Neanderthal-derived patrilineal Y-chromosome and matrilineal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in modern humans, along with the underrepresentation of Neanderthal X chromosome DNA, could imply reduced fertility or frequent sterility of some hybrid crosses, representing a partial biological reproductive barrier between the groups, and therefore species distinction.
> The genomes of all non-sub-Saharan populations contain Neanderthal DNA. Various estimates exist for the proportion, such as 1–4% or 3.4–7.9% in modern Eurasians, or 1.8–2.4% in modern Europeans and 2.3–2.6% in modern East Asians.
From Wikipedia:
However, around 2013-14 they either changed the number of SNPs they considered Neanderthal origin or their algorithm changed, and I was PISSED because I went from 95th percentile to 47th-ish myself.
That mostly works ok, but in some parts of the animal kingdom there are some areas where it really doesn't. If you discovered fossils of both a poodle and a mastiff would you categorise them both as canis familiaris?
Actual supremacist racists really are the scum of the earth, too bad if science is still hindered by people who want to use it as a political tool to further themselves or their in-group.
Plate tectonics puts a limit on the size and depth of caves. So how do you hide a breeding population?
The short answer: it is impossible.
Can't wait for the author's book on how the Thylacine (aka Tasmanian Tiger) is not only not extinct but facing overpopulation, after he interviews the 1000+ putative eyewitnesses from the past few decades.
It feels like it would be something out of a fantasy novel, so I like it.
Australian Aborigines allegedly migrated to Australia in late Pleistocene time. Taken together with their unique genotype and physiology, why aren't they classified as a separate hominid subspecies?
"Survived until the late Pleistocene" and "Have been separated since the late Pleistocene" are very different things.
Their "genotype and physiology" isn't that unique by the way. Genotypically there are tribes in Africa that diverge more from each other than Europeans diverge from Aborigines. People who think otherwise tend to overvalue skin color...
It's an interesting thought, although it's not very meaningful to take further due to a variety of reasons.
B) The article is promotion for a book, which I would hope would have a more cohesive presentation of evidence.
It’s an interesting and fun subject, but I expect the book is as full of facts as this article.