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Comment by bradley13 | Hacker News Reader

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Please don't start nationalistic flamewars on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

But the analytics were not made in China or by a Chinese researcher. So unless they tampered with the skull's age somehow, they would have little influence here.

Twelve of the paper's thirteen authors (all except Chris Stringer) are shown as working in China according to https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado9202 (click "Authors Info & Affiliations" near the top), and the research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

someone call Joe McCarthy

To be clear I don't mean to imply anything about possible biases or ulterior motives or whatnot. I was merely responding to "the analytics were not made in China or by a Chinese researcher" (which seems factually incorrect, unless I misunderstood something).

Dismissing out of hand because it's from China is ridiculous but speaks to the jingoistic times we are living in, particularly when this is a Denisovan skull.

Legitimately saddens me to see such a low-info reply at the top. Highly recommend people read "who we are and how we got here" - it provides a lot of great context to discoveries like this.

I have to admit I thought it might be "like that" before I read the article. But I don't think Chris Stringer would be a co-author on the paper if there was an issue of bias.

While this work is impressive, it is just one skull and, as the article points out, seems statistically anomalous, and therefore interesting.

> I'm not convinced that this is any sort of neutral analysis

Did you actually read the article? Nowhere does it suggest that anyone is claiming that China is the origin of Homo Sapiens. This million old skull discovered in China is not Homo Sapien, but related to Denisoven. It’s scientifically interesting since it suggests two things

1. Homo sapiens have existed longer than we previously thought.

2. Homo Sapiens may have come out of Western Asia, not Africa. But China is not in West Asia…

Please find other articles to fit into your the-Chinese-are-supremacist narrative. This one is not relevant.

I mostly agree. Direct link to the paper https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado9202

I'm not an anthropologist and not even close, so a lot of uninformed opinions:

It has a few nice photos of the skull. It looks quite complete. 90%? And the reconstruction look accurate for my untrained eye, because there are few parts to guess, specially if you assume the skull is (almost) symmetrical.

I'm not sure if it's possible to cheat and give it an additional 1% or 2% of brain volume, but I guess it's not possible to give it a 10% more brain volume. Anyway, the volume is quite small compared to modern humans, that is not surprising because it's quite old.

IIUC figure 4 shows 3 big branches: Neanderthal (Europe???), Longi (Asia???) and Sapiens (Africa???). (Add a fee "???" here if necessary.) And the new fossil is in the "Longi" branch.

So as you say it may be an older than expected side chain, or something like that.

[Happy to get any corrections or more details.]

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It's really not particularly anti-China imho, as indeed the West has its own brand of this in American Exceptionalism in general. We from smaller countries sometimes call this Big Country Syndrome.

It's true that China has a lot of affection for the Out of Asia theory of human origin, and to this day there are museums dedicated to the Peking Man that are at the very least heavily suggestive of this, or at least of China's population having a distinct origin.

Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_Man

Books and reams of sociology papers can and have been written about the relationship between CCP policy and the Peking Man and the CCPs difficulty with adjusting to today's generally preferred Out of Africa theory, and the effect on Chinese scientists working in anthropology. HN favorite Jimmy Maher (Digital/Analog Antiquarian) has a lovely line of free amateur history books including an excellent one on China that has a chapter on this:

https://analog-antiquarian.net/2022/01/14/chapter-2-origin-s...

I think it's a useful approach to contemporary Chinese identity. Nothing anti about that, any good-natured attempt to grok China would include this, just as no diatribe on America is complete without mentioning the 30-something % of Americans who state belief in some form of Creationism when polled.

I don't think less of China for containing a, shall we say, "patriotic" paleoanthropology community. Not any more than I think less of the US for the Book of Mormon being a thing. God knows we have these subcultures in Europe too.

But it is a thing and you need to be aware of it. A result from China which seems to support an out of China theory rather than an out of Africa theory, I am immediately suspicious of.

And you know, just because you and I don't bristle at the thought of descending from ancient Kenyans, lots of other people all over the world do. It's not just "regular" racists, also a lot of e.g. indigenous protected groups.

Given what we now know about backmigration and intermixing (particularly with Denisovans), it's really not coherent to say any "out of" theory is the Truth.

Sure, modern homo sapiens outside of Africa are all descendants of a founding group that left Africa, but they are also descendants of hominids who returned to Africa from elsewhere as well as local hominid populations that had left Africa far earlier (like Neanderthals and Denisovans).

Out of Africa has meaningful consequences even if people mixed back in. For example our closest evolutionary cousins should barring evidence to the contrary also tend to hail from Africa as well.

It’s that kind of reasoning that makes it important to try and be accurate here. Not a fact in isolation but everything else that it implies.

It's all a matter of how far back you look.

The time period you look at also informs what you can extract from that analysis. So it’s not an arbitrary choice free from consequences.

do Americans think higher about Europe just because ancestors of many of them came from there? Not happening.

I agree with you on the Sinophobia, but interest in the British royal family/British history generally and interest in Irish heritage are extremely common among groups of Americans. Most British visitors to the US can attest to how their accent is interpreted and affects treatment, in a positive sense, too.

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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you might well be right in most of this, but how do you get from OOA to "black Africans are more primitive"?

isn't the same nonsense debunked every time with "all living species are equally modern in that they share common ancestors, they didn't descend from one another"?

Maybe I missed the mark, but the point is that just because China makes a claim does not mean it should be automatically dismissed because they have a supposed superiority complex. I mean there are many on this planet who have superiority complexes, and far more consequential and imposing ones at that...by far...but that does not mean we should/can just dismiss what comes out of China. Test it, challenge it in a truly scientific manner...sure...but don't just apply ones own superiority complex to project a superiority complex on others. What if they are correct and accurate in their claim?

It is simply not a fair, honest, or decent thing to do and often comes from a superiority complex itself that seems to be projected on others in direct correlation to the degree of intensity of the superiority complex.

that seems unconnected to what I wrote?

(I agree with it, just seems like a non-sequitur...)

> The interesting and exciting thing about China and Asia in general is that it does not suffer from the diabolical and evil brainwashing and psychological abuse that the whole "west" has been subjected to for many generations now, but especially post WWII.

Hold on a second, China and Asia in general don't suffer from diabolical and evil brainwashing and psychological abuse, since when?

China doesn't even acknowledge its own Historical events, and this has been a recurring pattern of diabolical and evil brainwashing and psychological abuse. Should we even address Russia goofy propaganda of mystical creatures?

Why should it be expected that everyone shouldn't be cautious of claims coming from a place where Historical revisionism is part of their culture?

Have you even checked the rates of fraudulent paper submissions?

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

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