New ancient ape from Türkiye challenges the story of human origins
phys.org
phys.org
If apes did evolve outside of Africa, why did they not radiate across Asia ? Getting over to East Asia would have been far more easier than migrating into Africa and continue evolving there after disappearing from Europe. Yes I know about orangutans, but I would think after 7 million years there would be more diversity of Apes in Asia than Africa.
So I really find this hard to believe. All I can think is more fossils in the now dry environment of Türkiye probably survived than the humid areas of Africa.
Homo Erectus/Heidelburgensis/Neanderthals/Denisovans were all widely distributed outside of Africa. Neanderthals and Denisovans in particular have no records of ever having their range include Africa (Neaderthals may have lived in parts of North Africa but they’re firmly Eurasian). Homo Floresensis only ever lived in Flores.
Gigantopithecus, a giant non-hominin Ape, only has evidence of living in China. It’s thought to be related to Orangutans. You probably are dismissive of Orangutans because they are only a single ape (actually multiple species) outside of Africa in the present day but the Ponginae subfamily including Orangutans and Gigantopithecus had many other species, they are just now all extinct, but all were Asian: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponginae
That said, I do think there is no evidence that Homo Sapiens “evolved outside of Africa” and I suspect most people who do push this are doing so for either nationalistic reasons (we found early hominin fossils in our country, we must be where humans evolved and are the “original” humans!) or racism (not wanting to be descended from “Africans”). But it’s definitely possible there was gene flow from Homo Erectus outside of Africa back into Africa in a way that made it into the human genome, and many people have non-African human ancestry from Neanderthals and Denisovans
It's just cultural egotism. It's especially meaningless if it goes as far back as 8 million years because even half a million is enough for hominids to spread across several continents and come back as different species.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Indonesia#Homo_ere...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeological_site_of_Atapuer...
And there are already 12.5 million year old Ponginae (Orangutan relatives) fossils from India. Since all Ponginae are Asian but none are in human ancestry, that’d imply even earlier radiation of early African apes - which have just as much a claim to possibly being early human ancestors if they were pre-Ponginae - into Asia than this would.
I misread that. :)
Lots of african land was humid before, but became arid or a desert as well.
It does however show that all these popular ideas about the origin of man are not rock solid.
For instance, homo erectus, the neandrathals, Homo floresiensis
Neanderthals and Homo floresiensis are not early ancestors and they lived at the same time as modern humans emerged. I believe that Neanderthals are a subspecies of Homo sapiens so they were able to interbreed with modern humans.
While the remains of early hominines are abundant in Europe and Anatolia, they are completely absent from Africa until the first hominin appeared there about seven million years ago.
Is there another explanation for why these fossils might have been missing despite early hominines inhabiting Africa?
Türkiye may have an environment that is very suitable for the preservation of fossil, and one where said fossils remain near the surface. Africa is huge, but may lack areas that both has those hominids and preserved their fossils well.
Fire example, there are very few footprints on sidewalks, but lots in the mud beside them - should we conclude people must prefer to walk in the mud?
Most biological and organic things decompose quickly. Every time we find a fossil, we are winning an insanely rigged lottery. We barely have significant remains from 10k year old towns, so you can't really take any info from a supposed lack of fossils
Does pinning down an origin help to fill-in gaps and reinterpret the (scarce) findings? I.e. use spatial proximity to infer biological relations?
Given the enormous timescales and the fact one can walk across eurasia/africa many times over in a lifetime it feels a bit odd that territory seems to be treated as a defining factor.
They probably spent their entire lives within a few tens of miles of their birthplace, possibly within mere miles. And the same applied to generations around them.
It's not perfect, but that's how paleontology has to work. They make their best guesses based on the data they are able to (literally) dig up. That means sometimes making substantial revisions based on one new, tiny piece of data.
While the land area required to support a single human or human ancestor might have been as little as a square mile in ideal conditions [0] that is very different from the range of a human or human ancestor over a lifetime. For simplicity we can consider hunter-gatherer humans who at least would have had similar caloric needs.
For one, humans come in groups, which during most of our hunter-gatherer past would have been 150-300. If one is strictly gathering, this means all the resources around base camp would eventually be harvested and the group would need to migrate their base camp to another location. The group's foraging strategy could form a circuit where they return to their original base camp, but it's unlikely that every foraging location is as good as every other one, so the circuit will likely change over time, extending the lifetime range of a single individual.
Secondly, there is a huge variation in hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Fishing communities are more sedentary while hunting communities are more nomadic and might travel hundreds of miles over a year. This is what one would expect from a generalist species like ourselves.
[0] [David Pimentel and Marcia H. Pimentel, ‘Food, Energy, and Society’, third edition, (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008), p. 45-46.]
Ofcourse here are talking about our greater family tree and its entirely possible that more confined lifestyles (like e.g. the great apes of today) where more typical earlier on.
I would think though bipetalism did not get selected just to increase the daily range from the home base. At some point some hominid species started roaming and reasons to do so would be abundand (overpopulation, drought, following animal migrations etc).
The trouble is (starting already with archeology) that the stuff that survives the aeons to be found today is always "special" in some way. Like being burried in certain conditions, being in a collapsed cave etc.
Nature is a great recycler and doesnt leave many traces of its pathways.
And yes, I would have the same opinion if the UK somehow forced Turks to drop "Birleşik Krallık" in favour of its English name.
Just like there were other countries that have changed their names over time for this or that reason, I figured same thing could have happened to Turkey while I was not paying attention. Or hasn’t. Hence the question.
I admit to still calling it Turkey.
Turkey insisting on using a name like is analogous to calling Germany Deutschland or China 中國.
However, that doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting case of an authoritarian trolling the west.
Some Turks I know seem to think this whole thing was mostly cooked up as a distraction from other issues that have come up or worsened under Erdoğan's leadership.
[0] https://www.state.gov/countries-areas/turkey/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/02/1102596510/turkey-changes-nam...
In any event, if the Turkish government wants me to stop using "Turkey" I'm more than happy to call it Anatolia instead.
I don't say Spain in Spanish i.e. "Espanya" (phonetically) I just say Spain.
No, part of the rationale for the change is to reflect the different pronunciation (Türkiye) has three syllables
> but as a native English speaker I don’t even know what the umlaut does to the sound of the u.
While there is a change to the first vowel sound, and I think an even more subtle change to the second, the biggest difference is the existence of the third syllable, which is pretty evident from the spelling, even to most native English speakers.
That works on Windows at least, don't know about other systems.
And if you are using Windows with, say, US-English QWERTY as your default keyboard layout, its easy to add US-International and switch between them with ctrl-shift; they have the same layout (so your keycaps are still write), but some of the punctuation becomes dead keys that can function either for the punctuation or diacriticals depending on the following keypress.
Because the relationship between the punctuation and the diacriticals they work for is mostly visually intuitive, I find it a lot easier than memorizing Alt-key codes. Especially when using keyboards that don’t have a separate numeric keyboard in the first place like small laptops, and big laptops with relatively powerful dGPUs (the former because of total space available, the latter because they use more space for venting).
possibly a populist move by erdogan, depending on who you ask.
It's fairly patchy ultimately.
Beijing/Peking, Mumbai/Bombay, Kyiv/Kiev, Czechia/Czech Republic.
Foods seem unaffected funnily enough Peking Duck, Bombay Mix, Chicken Kiev.
Right click > Add to dictionary
I don't adhere to it. It is old-fashioned, even a bit archaic. But it is still the preferred spelling in some style guides, and it is still used in some publications.
So “deer” has two e’s but no umlaut because they make the same sound but “coördinate” has the umlaut since the second o is a new sound.
I personally like them and wish they would come back if only as a small push back against the horrific ambiguity that is the English language
That's a somewhat naïve take.
...then again, even some Germans are using the diaeresis for this purpose, such as this guy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Ho%C3%ABcker - and you can't blame him, because usually "oe" is a transliteration of "ö", and then his name would mean "hump" (as in camel's hump).
The only place I've ever seen the diaeresis used like that is in the New Yorker.
But that's the only not-foreign not-name word from the list I've seen written with the ¨ in Britain. I have see Chloë and Zoë written with it too.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_spelle...
If a friend asked me to refer to them with a different name, I'd sure look like a jerk if I made a point to not do so, even though I know it's their preference. Just the same, I try to remember that the country formerly spelled Turkey is now spelled Türkiye.
Perhaps someday they'll say it doesn't matter, or they prefer the old way. Today isn't that day yet.
Exonyms have been a thing for longer than I can remember....
When I have friends like that (well, my brother too), I make a point of typing it the way it's supposed to be written, out of courtesy and fun and proudness, like I'm clever enough to type any character I want with my keyboard, because I master it and I master other languages. The day I'll learn how to type Chinese characters fluently, I'll be so happy ! Not to boast, but it will mean I unlocked a whole new world!
Now, there is nothing wrong with calling it Türkiye in your own everyday speech, but it is not any kind of sign of good manners - it's simply a matter of personal taste. You'd still probably call their language "Turkish", while they call it "Türkçe", and the people living there "Turks" or "Turkish people", when they call themselves "Türkler", and even if you didn't you'd probably use your own grammar to conjugate these words as necessary etc.
if you want to learn to use endonyms for countries cool! but most people aren't interested in that level of effort for the whole world. there are ten thousand other things that occupy their minds, every one jockeying for a spot, and this being a passion of yours doesn't change that.
idk why you think there should be any different rules from this, except the general sense of anti-Americanism that seems to pervade this discussion.
also: i will under no circumstances use a name that my keyboard cannot type with standard American english. no one besides the new yorker uses an umlaut in our language.
Darwin’s theory happens to be the kind of theory that is very well evidenced and consistent with all observations to date, so it would take a truly remarkable discovery to overturn - and this ape ain’t it.