We’ve had a Denisovan skull since the 1930s, only nobody knew | Hacker News Reader

We’ve had a Denisovan skull since the 1930s, only nobody knew

arstechnica.com

115 pointsBluestein44 comments

Actual paper link for those who are interested:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.040

For some broader context missing from the article, there's been a long-running "controversy" with certain people in the Chinese Academy of Sciences making an argument called the multiregional hypothesis that modern Chinese evolved in China out of archaic hominins. Every few years they'd dig up another set of bones with weird morphology, slap a new name on it, and claim it represents a new missing link. The Harbin skull was one of these.

These results firmly resolve that discussion on the side of the western consensus. They also support heretofore speculative ideas on how widespread Denisovans were, probably give us a couple other bones that are known to be similar (but lack genetics), and open a lot of research avenues going forward. Outstanding paper.

It’s not limited to hominins. There’s a bit of a trend among Chinese researchers to conduct extensive genome sequencing and then conclude that economically or culturally significant plant species from Africa or elsewhere in Asia actually originated or were first domesticated in China.

It would be useful to understand to what extent this has some basis in ground truth. If it's essentially unknowable, with any confidence, it's just a posture.

If there is significant evidence of domestication originating in China landmass, it fuels other theories of emergence of human cultures.

Your comment is helpful but I think incomplete. Certainly the jokes are rich in the field, "irish invented wireless communications since no glass or copper fragments found in field" type jokes. It used to be "soviets did it first" for a prior generation.

China has significant large landscapes littered with caves. Like parts of Indonesia, and in both cases they have been mostly undisturbed for eons. So it's a landscape rich in potential for preserved remains. I think thats why the hominid discovery in Indonesia was both fascinating and irritating, falling into local power politics and first-rights-to-analyse problems.

The cave systems found in Europe seem to me to point to later occupation and with the changes to the shoreline in Spain and France (and the Doggerland retreat with the north sea) it's arguable older remains are now seaborne and harder to find.

Believing the "out of africa" theory, emergence of these trends in the east prefigures a migration back to europe and down into Austronesia surely?

(not an archeologist but fascinated)

You need to understand that the power structure of the western society critically depends on the myth of the recent cognitive shift. Where people were little more than animals, until several thousand years ago, when modern thinking suddenly somehow emerged, and those chosen few worked tirelesly for the thousands of years to civilize everybody else.

Care to elaborate? Does this come from roman times/ post french Revolution/post industrialism?

I've been posting it repeatedly, but my posts are getting downvoted, and flagged (hidden).

It apears it only goes to back to the 19th century, and may be connected with the case of Phineas Gage, who miraculously survived massive brain damage.

Basically, it seems that we are ruled by a crazy cult.

What I claim is, that the cerebellum is a statistical machine, which is fundamentally limited by the fact that it gets overwhelmed by spurious correlations once it gets too powerful, and it begins to hallucinate.

Mammals evolved the neocoretex, a data reduction machine, which resolves this problem by reducing a large amount of inputs into a much smaller number of values that carry all the information. When the cerebellum acts only in this latent space, and is thus restricted by what can be represented within this latent space, it can be powerful, and avoid hallucination.

The more "counterintuitive" situations the creature has to deal with, the bigger neocortex/cerebellum ratio it needs to avoid hallucinating.

Thus when a person's neocortex gets damaged, they become what may seem like super smart, they make insane conclusions and appear to be able to understand anything, but none of it is actually real, and they are just insane.

What they seem to believe (which is not shared publicly, because it would get "misinterpreted, but allows to be acknowledged internally) is that as animals got too intelligent they failed to breed, but intelligence is still good for not dying. And the neocortex evolved to keep us dumb so that we could breed, and only lift its veil in times of dire need, so that we could use our intelligence to survive. And so, they concluded that they can create a supersmart race by destroying our neocortexes with various means, so that we can be smart all the time, not only in emergencies, and gigantic progress would result.

In reality, they made most people insane.

Can you go further on these theories? So our brain is like a demultiplexor. Where have you read these thingd? Where did it originate? How do they unleash our cerebellum?

Why was this downvoted

What is the alternative that you are suggesting?

More funding for DNA analysis, and a reduction in holotypes as we find these apparent sub-speciations are actually just the same. I don't think there is much we can do about national pride: when individual economies decide to declare a find is culturally significant for their global view, the best science can do is help them overcome the mindset, by applying science.

That said, genuinely new finds are exciting no matter what. If it takes a decade for the family tree logistics to settle down, so be it.

I like Gruber. Lots of people hate Gruber because he was abrasive. It's not that dissimilar to astrophysics where people have love and hate relationships with the scientists and the theories. Historians do a better job than me untangling this in 50 years time.

Sorry that’s not my question. What is the alternative hypothesis here that you are suggesting we be open to?

That Chinese arguments about the emergence of modern human culture in their territory be accepted. The tenor of the arguments are "that's bullshit"

Without being ad hom, the Chinese view is culturally informed for domestic political reasons. My view is to ask if even after reduction of (sub) speciation labels their view remains tenable, and there is a case to be made for East West cultural dispersion before historic time. Given out of Africa, at least some ground state of flow is west east.

> ad hom

Hilariously ironic usage. ("to/against the human/person")

Well, the archeological evidence doesn’t line up with the Chinese propaganda story. I’ll step it up a notch even: the archeological record directly contradicts that narrative. People have given it serious consideration, and found it lacking.

Yet they refuse to test the first emperor.

> For some broader context missing from the article, there's been a long-running "controversy" with certain people in the Chinese Academy of Sciences making an argument called the multiregional hypothesis that modern Chinese evolved in China out of archaic hominins.

It is appealing because it justifies racism. It is just the contemporary version of polygenism of racial science.

That said, even if human evolution is more complex than simple out of Africa, all of humanity has a lot of shared ancestry and genetics do not support the concept of race.

It always reminds me of the Japanese attempts to diminish the status and history of the Ainu, a caucasoid racial group from their northernmost islands.

Extensive research and data now point to the Ainu having lived on those islands from long before Chinese people first sailed to Japan and populated it - making the despised Ainu the true, actual Native Japanese.

This is like trying to hide neanderthals because they seem to point to some of the differences in european populations traits such as white skin or blue eyes. If theres evidence I dont think it benefits anybody to discredit it under the racism label

Note this is a different paper from that discussed in the article. The new one is https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu9677

This reminds me of the day I found an old storage disk, an ancient "floppy disk", in my dad's attic. It had a label that said: "Tommy’s bookmarks". My mum doesn't remember any of his friends or colleagues named Tommy. In Uruguay, that's a common nickname for Tomas. They were probably website URLs, all long extinct by now (I'd guess).

Funny to imagine how (indeed) such floppies 'intersected" - technologywise - with the early web ...

Sounds like this was pre search engines, so Tommy's bookmarks might just be a collection of cool sites that was spread peer to peer. I remember getting CDs of curated games and demos in the late 90s (and not just licensed demos from computer magazines, but also cracked versions of games that went around).

Any rare games that you remember that stood out?

Not many that would stand the test of time unfortunately. I remember sinking lots of hours into a racing game I found like that, I think it was called Breakneck. And an RTS called Tzar. Those are the two I remember the most.

This Breakneck? https://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?q=Breakneck

And Tzar? https://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?q=Tzar

Indeed. As I expected, they didn't stand the test of time very well.

"Hot Death UNO" was a standout for me.

Its half-dozen or so robo-players made the game come to life.

They all bantered back and forth, made pop culture references, etc., got vindictive...

I printed physical cards, made a Geocities website for it (still zombie-mode on "oocities"!), learned Photoshop just so I could make my own higher-fidelity cards, and when I finally learned to program I started on a new version only to get a Cease and Desist from Mattel. Heh.

Meanwhile, I and a couple other fans tracked down the original authors via a Yahoo Groups channel and learned about the original game...

... good times.

Sounds like Craig’s list.

There was a point before search engines of course. And, there was a point before people outside of, say a university, had any real Internet access.

But via my personal experiences in the late 90s, I recall search engines working just fine (eg, Alta Vista) then slowly degrading, then one day they were just completely useless. I mean, any search term would just returned page after page of spammy links. You could find nothing, ever.

There was Yahoo's curated list, with lots of volunteers keeping it going, but it had dead links, and was always a tiny tiny fraction of what was out there.

Just a few years later Google appeared, which at the time was absolutely gob smacking insanely good. It was no contest. Yet even this nascent google didn't have a large portion of the web, I remember people trying to get their links on larger sites so Google could find them. I think Google even had a submit link page too? Not sure when that appeared.

So I can imagine in this time period, someone might have had a list of links they found and spread by email. I remember using the 'bookmark' function of my browser a lot, it was easier than searching.

Yahoo started as page of links.

Ooh! Memory stirred...

In primary school I was part of a team that developed our school website.

We used CuteHTML as our ""IDE"" and then the daily HTML was backed up to floppy and placed in a filing cabinet.

My first router ran off a floppy disk.

LRP?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project

There was Coyote Linux which may have been a fork: https://www.coyotelinux.com/ I ran it on an old Pentium with a cheap dual port 10Mb NIC off eBay.

Tommy is the standard nickname for Thomas in Britain too. We throw in an extra h in Thomas for no good reason 8)

Our soldiers were, politely, referred to as Tommies by German soldiers during WW1 onwards. The Wehrmacht had all sorts of other names for them too!

https://www.science.org/content/article/dragon-man-skull-bel...

However there are two bizarre facts: 1.Modern-day Chinese carry virtually zero Denisovan DNA, yet it accounts for over 5% in indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia and Oceania; 2.Modern-day Chinese possess 20% more Neanderthal DNA than contemporary Europeans.

But Tibetans have Denisovan dna.

That's interesting - perhaps the isolation of the high mountains meant less interbreeding ?

Same could be true for island chains (like where they were discovered in Indonesia)

Makes you wonder if there are any groups that contain both

I really don't like these clickbait titles

Dark truths are hidden in ancient dna

And light truths are visibly open in modern dna

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