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Comment by AbrahamParangi | Hacker News Reader

There are a number of claims of unique Chinese hominids and they’re typically related to the “multiregional origin theory”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiregional_origin_of_mode...

This theory holds that humans in different parts of the world are primarily descended from local hominids vs the commonly accepted theory that humans are all primarily and recently descended from a population somewhere in East or South Africa with a small amount of admixture with local hominids.

Most people consider the multiregional origin theory highly motivated reasoning and also completely garbage science.

View on HN

It's interesting that it is the widely believed theory in China, or at least it was often stated to me as fact when I lived there.

Seems to stem from the discovery of the Peking Man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_Man

I can absolutely see certain groups refusing to believe their distant ancestors were from Africa and grasping at any alternative explanation.

I mean my family has lived for at least 300 years in a region close to where the neanderthals were first discovered. I assume I have some of those genes in me

IIRC every human population (possibly non-African?) has some Neanderthal DNA. I believe Asian and Oceanian groups also have Denisovan DNA.

All the non-African humans have a little Neanderthal DNA, and indeed some groups from East-Asia and Oceania also have a little Denisovan DNA.

Indeed, we all do! I don't think there is a single extent human population without some archaic admixture. If you're interested in further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_...

Apparently East Asians have more neanderthal DNA than Europeans so I'm not sure the region of initial discovery really matter that much. Also Neanderthal 1 is 40000 years old, your family may have arrived in the region even a 1000 years ago and be completely unrelated to it.

It works the other way too though. There's a good chance that at some point along those thousand years, somebody had kids with somebody else who had older ancestry in the area, and so on.

That assumes their family only bred with each other, which I very much hope isn't the case!

Most europeans do have significant amounts of neandertal DNA, but the likelyhood of your people 300 years ago being in the same place in europe that long ago, even a thousand years ago, is slim. There’s been massive migrations and demographic shifts. The most “ancient” population in Europe I believe are thought to be the Basques.

As I understand it, it's somewhat encouraged by the government. China's the sort of place where, if the government has a preferred wacky theory, one may be inclined to smile and nod rather than arguing.

somewhat similar to the demonization of communism that the west pushed for decades?

Apparently there are many people that are more incline to just smile and nod rather than arguing. Probably the geographical location of these is not really important. They're equally distributed across the globe

No, because the government doesn't need to demonize communism to make it sound dumb. Hell if anything, the contrarian nature of Americans caused many to entertain the idea after witnessing the demonization, which makes it basically the opposite of China's situation.

> No, because the government doesn't need to demonize communism to make it sound dumb

true, because the citizens of these countries are already uninformed enough about communism that they are indeed the one that make it sound dumb

As somebody who intimately saw on my closest ones and everybody else various horrible things that communism does to society and every single individual in it, and how the legacy of it can't be shed easily even after decades and multiple generations, you don't need to demonize communism a slightest bit .

Just point out well known facts, in balanced manner, and that's more than enough.

After a lifetime of being on the boot end of capitalism, I don't think communist systems are special in being full of horrors. I don't think the particular system humans use to justify those horrors is the issue.

This kind of whataboutery is an ignorant and insulting to people who’ve actually had to live through the horrors of communism, which are on a different order of magnitude to the horrors of capitalism, bad as they might be.

I have yet to see a single example of a horror done under any modern human system that wasn't done under every system before and next to it. If I'm ignorant, it's a failure to persuade on the part of people who have a special hatred of communism.

Sure, tell that to the relatives of the 4 million Ukrainians who died during Stalin's farming reforms, to the 2 million Chinese who died during the Cultural Revolution, or to the 2 million Cambodian victims under Pol Pot.

I could rattle off a list with similar numbers for capitalism (or proportional numbers for older systems), too. This does not persuade anyone who isn't already in the choir that your pet gripe is special.

Humans do horrible stuff to each other in the name of ideology. Systems are just one of the ways they rationalize it.

No, you really couldn't.

Pol Pot gained complete control because Kissinger and Nixon bombed Cambodia.

> 2 million Chinese who died during the Cultural Revolution

Heavens know how many died during the Great Leap Forward. Estimates are between 30 million to 55 million.

You don't think... well experiencing both systems would give you much better opinions to compare rather than just thinking about it. Unfortunately I had, and my opinions are clear.

You can see it yourself if you look closely enough, go to let's say Vienna, and then go to Bratislava or further east. Even after 34 years. I don't mean financial aspect of difference, I mean everything else that makes healthy society thriving.

In capitalism, you always have freedom of thinking, traveling, freedom to not have a job for example. You can bash it as much as you prefer, and its leaders. Your parents won't be put in gulag or uranium mines for 10 years because of that. My friend, you frankly have no idea what you write about...

I have lived in a country under communist rule until it fell apart in 1990.

If you haven’t experienced communism first hand, you have no idea how bad it is, even the watered-down communism of 80s.

it doesn't matter if I've experienced it or not. My comment it's not a praise to communism, perhaps just read it again (and read the context from which it started too)

> somewhat similar to the demonization of communism that the west pushed for decades?

I'm not sure what you mean with 'the west', but in Western Europe communist political parties were allowed just like any others. When I went to high school in the 80's it was even kind of fashionable to have communist sympathies. This was before the fall of the iron curtain though, once it went down it became clear how terrible communism had really been.

that doesn't make it less demonized. Unless you forgot the media campaigns on it and the plenty of wars that started in the attempt to stop the spread of communism.

If you’re talking about McCarthyism, then yes, similar dynamic. If you’re talking about today, then don’t be silly.

Yes I'm taking about that, you're the only one that understands it apparently.

The thing is that my comment couldn't be anyhow related to today's situation (I've used the past tense) since communist doesn't exist anymore (not the way it used to) and most of the country that implemented it widely abandoned it (probably the only exception is perhaps North Korea)

This is a wildly off-base comparison to make, I'd be impressed if your comment stays up for long.

I don't understand why people get so emotional when you mention the word communism

It was a simple comparison point on the previous comment that, by my standard was also wildly off base (given that he said dumb to a whole country basically)

the fact is that the west seems to be so attached (weirdly) to communism despite even those who implemented it already abandoned.

Are you scared of ghosts or what?

What an idiotic question. In my case, the sensitivities are familiar. My ancestors in Ukraine were starved to death by communists during the Holodomor. Is that something you're familiar with?

The West is "weirdly" attached to communism for many reasons, the foremost being that the past 50 years has been spent trying to clean up the mess left by communist regimes.

Do you ever stop and wonder what Russia could have been like had the Bolsheviks not terrorized it? Does it scare you to face just how badly your ideology has globally failed, and will be forever remembered as a point of shame in the grand story of human development?

It's not my ideology! It was an example just chill down instead of implying things that I never said

The "demonization" of communism is wholly deserved. Every communist country, ever has been am impoverished, totalitarian, shithole. The most successful "communist" countries are those that have given up on economic communism (China, Vietnam), though they'd be even more successful if they gave up on political communism too.

The track record of communism is so insanely bad that it is literally the second worst ideology of the 20th century, beat only by facism which caused the instant self-immolation of every country to ever try it (while inflicting terrible harm on their neighbors).

As opposed to the us or europe or canada or anywhere else? Also, don't you mean 'the ccp'?

In western democratic countries, the government doesn't typically exercise very much control over academia (and in fact academia is a huge source of criticism of the government and its policies in most such countries). There are exceptions (eg that thing recently where the government of Texas harassed an A&M academic over criticising His Holiness the Lieutenant Governor) but that was exceptional enough that it got significant news coverage, and the government of Texas is definitely on the dysfunctional end of western democracies.

Isn't that kind of true ? East-Asians have a minority contribution from Denisovans and Europeans from Neanderthals.

> primarily descended from local hominids

More like 'secondarily' descended from local hominids, but there was mixing for sure.

Well, it's true in that the predominate theory is "humans are all primarily and recently descended from a population somewhere in East or South Africa with a small amount of admixture with local hominids" but the multiorigin theory is pretty much always brought up in the context of implying that different human populations are actually different species.

Maybe it's a good thing to consider different races to be different species. I personally think it will cause people to be more open-minded towards the plights of animals. Acknowledging diversity doesn't mean we have to hate the other kinds.

I wish I was as optimistic as you. I personally think people would be too preoccupied planning the elimination of the other human species to consider animals with greater respect.

That being said, Noah Yuval Harari has very forward thinking writing along these lines. He uses the context of potential AI superior to our own intelligence, and how they will treat humans, to advocate for animal rights.

> two humans differ, on average, at about 1 in 1,000 DNA base pairs (0.1%). Human genetic diversity is substantially lower than that of many other species, including our nearest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee.

> Groups of chimpanzees within central Africa are more different genetically than humans living on different continents

> Our genetic homogeneity implies that anatomically modern humans arose relatively recently (perhaps 200,000 years ago) and that our population size was quite small at one time (perhaps 10,000 breeding individuals).

> approximately 90% of genetic variation can be found within [continents], and only about 10% of genetic variation separates the populations.

Calling us different species is laughable. We’re the genetic equivalent of putting 2 rabbits in a box and opening it up to find 300.

Didn't the human population drop to something like 2000 individuals at some point in history? Would be like dropping 2 rabbits in a box and opening it up to see 4 million.

Acknowledging diversity doesn't mean we have to hate the other kinds, but it's sure a convenient excuse if you're looking. And there are always people looking.

“I don’t hate that other species, we’re just biologically better, therefore they are naturally subjugated to us. It’s just science.”

(To be 100% clear, I’m just quoting what a person who thinks this way would say, just as slave holders in the US used to say)

I think the history of dehumanizing people generally shows more atrocities committed against people rather than better treatment for all.

Sadly, separating humans into different species would further delineate the "other". Opening up the asinine argument of genetic superiority, the "others" as a less evolved species, and just reignite eugenics.

The biological definition of species includes reproductive isolation. Two different species mean normally some kind of reproductive barriers. In this sense, if two diverging groups of animals X and Y mate and the offspring is fertile they are still in the same species and will split sometime in the future. How we define the splitting time is the problem. Neanderthals and sapiens are only partially fertile, so by definition were two different species that diluted into one. Red hair and green eyes are consider Neanderthal contributions. Modern sapiens is clearly an hybrid.

But the field has gained a lot of complexity in the last decades. There are ring species, and cryptic species, and sometimes the DNA of a parent is entirely discarded. Changing our point of view is possible with better data, except that we need to find this data first.

Entirely discarded? So the child is a clone of the parent of the corresponding sex?

For the most part, yes, they are clones of the mother [1] or father [2]. It gets way more complicated in some frogs though… [3]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gynogenesis

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgenesis

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybridogenesis_in_water_frog...

Is not usual, but can happen in some species

Not necessarily a clone because sometimes happens in several steps. For example, horse x donkey hybrids are sterile in principle, but if just by chance they produce an ovule keeping only the DNA of one of their parents, it can be fecundated. A female mule can deliver a foal that is either a pure horse or a pure donkey, never another mule.

East Asians have the most Neanderthal DNA left in them. [0]

Regarding Denisovans:

A 2011 study found that Denisovan DNA is prevalent in Aboriginal Australians, Near Oceanians, Polynesians, Fijians, Eastern Indonesians and Mamanwans (from the Philippines); but not in East Asians, western Indonesians, Jahai people (from Malaysia) or Onge (from the Andaman Islands). [1]

[0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23410836/

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

There are even outlier populations in East Asia who are >2% Neanderthal.

Way more then any known population in Western Eurasia, from what I've seen at least.

It does seem a bit odd as it's the opposite of the popular stereotypes.

Xi Jinping has been on a quest to strengthen the ethnic identity of China, specifically the Han Chinese ethnic group, and this is probably part of it. If you look at the immigration policies of China, you'll find that they are some of the most restrictive in the world[1]. It is almost impossible for a Non-Chinese person to become a Chinese citizen. From what I've heard from people who know people in the Xi Jinping administration, they are embracing ethno-nationalism with incredible zeal. There's also a lot of ethnonationalist propaganda in China right now and western commentators have taken notice[2]. From what I've heard through sources, they're preparing for a future where it's eventually a zero sum game between China and the rest of the world, especially with regards to dwindling energy and other natural resources. For example China built six times as many coal plants as the rest of the world combined last year [3]. There is a huge denial of this in the west as westerners believe that racism and communism are incompatible, and at least China says it's communist.

[1]https://www.crownrelo.com/intl/en/article/four-toughest-plac...

[2]https://thediplomat.com/2023/06/riding-the-tiger-ethno-natio...

[3]https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/npr/2023/03/02/1160441919...

> There is a huge denial of this in the west as westerners believe that racism and communism are incompatible, and at least China says it's communist.

I don’t think westerners put a lot of stock in China’s claim to be communist, nor do I think many westerners would deny that it’s an ethnonationalist country.

Westerners that are opposed to ethnonationalism are for the most part only really opposed to white ethnonationalism.

Speaking of weird ethno-nationalist paradoxes, is how could Israel and China be such allies when Judaism is completely illegal to practice in China?

I think that’s an over-generalization, but it also doesn’t really address what I said. Whether or not they’re opposed to it, westerners know that China defines itself as a country for Chinese people. Americans have all heard of the Uyghurs.

China is building coal plants because it needs more energy. It’s that simple.

It's not even that. Those coal plants are just backup, as their hydropower-plants had big trouble for some reason years ago.

Context from quick googling:

> China serves as home to 56 official ethnic groups. The largest group, the Han, makes up over 92% of China's vast population, and it is the elements of Han civilization regraded as "Chinese culture"

There is serious oppression of ethnic groups inside of China. Things have been changing fast under Xi.

>Xi Jinping has celebrated majority Han culture as the timeless “soul of the nation”, gradually shifting ethnic policy from formal inclusion of 56 ethnic groups to cultural nationalism. Influential political economist Hu Angang called fusion a means of making China a strong and prosperous state again, while anthropologist Ma Rong considers “teaching barbarians” a revival of imperial tradition. These arguments emerged following mass violence in 2009, sparked by the murder of Uighur labourers by Han colleagues in a Guangdong factory accused of using coerced labour.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/05/china-...

> Most people consider the multiregional origin theory highly motivated reasoning and also completely garbage science.

But I don't get it ~~ what's the motivation to branch off as distant rather than share some common ancestor?

Who and why would want to promote that? I don't get it.

supremacists

My bet would go to racism. China seems to very guilty on that regard, and racism against Africa and especially black people seem to have rose again on the last years.

I don’t really care about this issue but to clarify, “most people” (argumentum ad populum btw) means “most people in the West” I assume?

Isn't most science like this coming out of the west generally?

Most people outside of China. Not just "the West".

I'll take your word for it. Still doesn't address the logical fallacy in the first place.

Most people meaning most people who have an informed opinion, because the evidence (archaeological, genetic, etc.) is so ridiculously in favor of the out of Africa theory. You have to be at the denial level of “evolution is just a theory” to think otherwise.

From your wiki: "In its revised form, it is similar to the Assimilation Model, which holds that modern humans originated in Africa and today share a predominant recent African origin, but have also absorbed small, geographically variable, degrees of admixture from other regional (archaic) hominin species"

> Most people consider the multiregional origin theory highly motivated reasoning

As if the Out of Africa theory isn't highly motivated?

> and also completely garbage science.

But genetic evidence has proven that we all have different hominin dna. Science backs the revised multiregional model.

This reminds me of the clovis theory. The agenda driven people always front run any criticism of the clovis theory because they were on the wrong side of history and science.

My understanding, sorry for not having links at the ready for all this, is that many studying this currently think that Cro Magons, Neanderthals, and Denisovans all mixed to varying degrees at various times and emerged from a complex mix of pre humans like Homo Naledi. This makes the ancestry of Homo Sapiens more complex than simple lines of descent. Genetic analysis of these groups suggests that there was a third group that mixed with Neanderthals and Denisovans which has not yet been identified. None of this relates to the multiregion origin theory that you mention.

As populations from different regions have different levels of admixture from Neanderthals and Denisovans, the multi-regional origin hypothesis is validated.

That's the Assimilation Model. Both Multiregional and Out of Africa were wrong (or more accurately, incomplete), but Multiregional was probably a fair bit more wrong.

A counter-example within China's borders is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Deer_Cave_people which is both a recent discovery and has Australian scientists behind it.

There’s actually a decent amount of evidence that points to it. I’m too tired to find it now, but humans didn’t descend from apes, instead we have a common ancestor that goes way further back

You might want to debug your process for figuring out which information sources to trust because "humans didn't descend from apes" is about on the level of "birds aren't real"

Maybe reread the comment and ask yourself whether they may have meant humans are not descended from monkeys or any other primate living today.

We do share a common ape ancestor with chimpanzees. It lived between 8 and 6 million years ago.

I also, like the person above, heard we're not descendants of apes and, while it seems odd, took that as my best available knowledge.

I never considered that this makes a ton of sense: of course we didn't evolve from apes, after which the apes just stopped evolving and froze their DNA and never had mutations again. Of course they'll be different from their ancestors. But that doesn't mean that our common ancestor was an alligator or something and we developed all ape-like features independently of each other. That's what I took it to mean (when I heard this, idk, maybe as a teenager more than ten years ago), but your comment makes a lot more sense.

No drama, we've all written poorly phrased comments and|or read one too fast and gone for that [reply] like HN was a prize fight :)

We didn't just evolve from apes, we are apes. Just as we are animals. But obviously we also frequently use the words "animals" and "apes" with an implied "non-human" qualifier. And yes, almost certainly any common ancestor of both human and modern day non-human apes was likely to have been just as different genetically to us as it would be to our primate cousins, though obviously it's possible genetic change occurred more rapidly in one branch vs the other.

Wow a whole discussion based on semantics

Sometimes it feels like 90% of evolutionary biology is arguing about semantics and how to classify things.

I think you're misremembering. It's usually "humans aren't descendants of monkeys".

Could be. In my language, we don't differentiate between monkeys and apes. (Like how in English you call any lightness of blue blue, but not any lightness of orange (darker: brown) or red (lighter: pink). Russian would call the blues, sinii and goluboi, as different as orange and brown are to us.) I couldn't tell you the difference in English, so I probably wouldn't have remembered if it was one or the other ...if I got the information in English in the first place

It's just a weird argument to make because nobody is claiming that we are descended from chimpanzees, monkeys, etc. As far as I know from history, that same strawman argument was used extensively during the evolution debates of the 1930s in America.

It's a place to tread carefully in the context of discussing a multiregional human origin theory.

I can't read minds but they may have intended to point out that while humans did not evolve from any of our modern cousins (modern apes, modern monkeys) we all evolved from some common ancestor (generally classed | accepted as an 'ape' albeit not a modern one) and it's conceivable that common ancestor may have had its own diaspora from which various human groups evolved in differing regions of the world.

Not my argument, mind you.

This all being distinct from Snopes trial era memes, etc.

That widely dispersed ape we evolved from is already a well-established species called Homo erectus.

The conflict this thread is discussing is between the (strong) multiregional human origin model (MRO/MRE) that used to argue that these aboriginal are where modern dispersed populations come from. This view is now considered completely dead on the basis of genetic evidence alone, with dozens of other lines of evidence refuting it. Weaker versions still exist though.

The oppositional view was that humans evolved solely in a small part of Africa and spread from there, with no little/no admixture from other archaic humans, called the recent single origin model (RSO). This view is not widely held today either.

Modern anthropologists and evolutionary biologists usually believe that humans evolved out of a complex mix of archaic humans broadly distributed across Africa into anatomically modern humans (AMHs). Eventually AMHs left Africa and admixed with other archaic humans in a fairly minor way, forming modern human populations. Differences between academics usually come down to what they think of that within-Africa population structure, or thetiming/significance of archaic admixture. Chinese academics tend to follow in the footsteps of Xinzhi Wu, a prominent Chinese academic that was a strong MRO advocate before his death. That includes the authors of this paper.

I largely agree save I'd describe Homo Erectus as mildly dispersed (from my perspective and to the best of my current knowledge, admittedly a few years out of date), never having gone deep into Europe, Mongolian steppes, the Americas, Northern China, the Sahul (Meganesia|Oceania), etc.

These were all extended trips for the kids.

Given the reference to a common ancestor, I suspect that they means something more along the lines of "birds aren't reptiles", which is or is not true depending on what you mean by "reptile".

The term ape has being used traditionally in different ways with slightly different meanings.

This sounds like it was made up by some racists to try to explain why some races are better than others.

Race is a bad idea to begin with. There is no major difference, we are all human.

Eh, there are, but not sorted by skin tone or location. If you consider a situation as "home" (the species cycled through crisis/conflict every generation), certain neuro-types pop out as adaptions to this situation cycle parts. A shizophren might look out of place in SF, but he might call us out of place in a warzone.

Its not a good thing though and hardly something to claim pride from or for. Nobody wants to be on team wheel chair.

There’s no major difference between a chihuahua and a German shepherd in the same way there’s no major difference in “insert your X & Y breeds here” - it’s pathological to think that there isn’t a bred phenotype exposed within a population cluster.

Pure imbreds in dogs end into retardations and dangerous genetic illnesses. There's no 100% pure dog... with a good physical fit. Deal with it. The same with humans. Read about the "sleep illness".

Deal with it?

Human have no species. It's the same species all over the world.

These are political statements and as such they should not be made with the authority of science.

More like the reverse. There's no proof on being separate human species. The rest it's quakey science.

There’s no proof you exist but there’s proof you belong to a group by comparisons.

If we use the current definition of species, humans can reproduce with any other human in the planet, therefore we are at this moment the same species. We are probably too promiscuous to expect otherwise.

That's not the definition of species. In many cases different species can reproduce together, e.g. wolves and coyotes. In other cases, species are asexual so clearly there must be some other way of distinguishing them besides sexual compatibility.

The actual definition of species is essentially arbitrary and, when applied to humans and the possibility of different human subspecies or species, the question is essentially political.

It becomes even more obvious when you look into previous proto-human groups like neanderthals, denisovans, etc, as far back as you want; one can ask what counts as a subspecies, what counts as a species, and struggle to apply that in a self-consistent way today between Chinese, neanderthals, Australian aborigines, African pygmies, denisovans, native Americans, etc.

Don't let anyone trick you into thinking there is some clean science answer here - biology is far too messy.

This is false. Many animals have races, and they are different enough from each other genetically.

Human "races" are in not different enough to be called races from a scientific point of view.

What’s different enough? There’s clearly physical differences of magnitude and measurement.

I’m saying dogs have “races” - yes, just as humans do. Whatever you call that grouping it is based on the comparison I made on my original post which is logically correct.

Don't know much biology, but appears "modern human biological variation is not structured into phylogenetic subspecies ('races'), nor are the taxa of the standard anthropological 'racial' classifications breeding populations."

"'Race' is a legitimate taxonomic concept that works for chimpanzees but does not apply to humans (at this time)."

https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1455

You don’t need to be a biologist to know that when you bring a chihuahua to a dog park you go to the little fenced section compared to the bigger section for the bigger “breeds” and as a human you marvel at the sight and fact fact that they’re biologically the same species yet clearly with defined differences. Perception of reality allows you to infer boundaries and collections of similar things, words in a paper to justify what reality demonstrates physically and clearly is not only an appeal to authority and a fallacy of argument but it’s also meaningless as it’s out of context and can’t possibly refer to a shared experience of reality.

> What’s different enough?

Genetics. In case of humans the differences are tiny.

> There’s clearly physical differences of magnitude and measurement.

By that logic two brothers would be different races if one is tall and one is short.

If right now we found a weird island with a population identical to that "common ancestor that goes way further back", the general population would label that ancestor as an ape - while it's not the same as any of the modern species of great apes, they were morphologically similar to primates as such, not something totally alien or conceptually different.

Humans didn't descend from apes. We are apes. Taxonomically speaking we are in the Hominidae, or great ape family. It is comprised of 8 extant species of which we are one of them.

In many ways, we’re the naked mole rat of the Hominidae.

...Completely garbage science... When someone dismisses something because of political reasons outright, it make me believe the other guy

It is no skin off my back if you believe “the other guy” but you do yourself a disservice.

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