[HN Gopher] 7k-year-old skeletons from the green Sahara reveal a...
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7k-year-old skeletons from the green Sahara reveal a mysterious
human lineage
Author : pseudolus
Score : 83 points
Date : 2025-04-12 12:11 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| begueradj wrote:
| > "despite practicing animal husbandry--a cultural innovation
| that originated outside Africa"
|
| Animal husbandry was a response to unproductive hunting. And
| since desertification - hence unproductive hunting- started long
| time ago in Africa, it makes sense that animal husbandry started
| there too before it appeared elsewhere.
| dani__german wrote:
| it is one logical pathway, but another is to simply move to a
| new area, rather than develop animal husbandry. Which one seems
| more likely?
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Both at the same time. If you repeatedly migrate _in order
| to_ maintain a foraging and hunting lifestyle, you are
| sufficiently aware of the undependability of foraging and
| hunting to make large R &D investments in experimental
| methods of agriculture and animal husbandry.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Depends on how many science points and settlers you have, and
| where you are on the rest of the tech tree.
| detourdog wrote:
| I think the development cordage(rope) and woodworking
| techniques would have a heavy influence on slowing down,
| noticing the surrounding abundance. Once a location becomes
| favorable more substantial and long lasting structures could be
| made.
|
| My question is what was the divide that kept these groups at
| 50kyo. Something kept them apart.
|
| I hope they get samples from different beings to analyze.
| mannyv wrote:
| "He majored in animal husbandry, until they caught him at it
| one day." - tom lehrer.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Animal husbandry did not start in Africa, though. It started in
| the fertile crescent and spread into Africa. This is very well
| attested in archaeological finds, and in the fact that the
| relevant animals were domesticated first there.
|
| The surprising news is that the spread of animal husbandry
| didn't seem to accompany the spread of human genes -- the
| subsistence strategy was adopted by learning, not by people
| moving.
|
| I don't think this is very shocking because the same thing
| seems to have happened elsewhere. While agriculture mostly
| spread by people moving, the culture that developed into all
| the pastoral cultures of the Eurasian steppe seem to have been
| hunter-gatherers living in close proximity to farmers.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| But how does that prove there was no animal husbandry in
| Africa in the prior hundreds of thousands of years?
| jjk7 wrote:
| Because there's no evidence of it until after it was
| developed outside of Africa?
|
| You don't have to prove something that doesn't exist. Find
| the evidence, and prove it does.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Animal husbandry leaves behind a lot of evidence, starting
| from different distributions of animal ages and sexes found
| in bones in refuse pits, to genetic evidence of artificial
| selection.
|
| This evidence is found everywhere. But it's dateable, and
| you can find the oldest instances of it in the fertile
| crescent.
| contingencies wrote:
| Paper @ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08793-7
|
| _" Our admixture dating analysis points to events far back in
| time, suggesting a more heterogeneous spread of pastoralism and
| food production in the Sahara compared to Morocco and East
| Africa"_
| mannyv wrote:
| What's interesting is that the population remained isolated for
| tens of thousands of years.
|
| Generally speaking, people move around and are promiscuous.
| Staying isolated for that long implies a physical barrier,
| because cultures generally don't survive for 40,000 years. But an
| isolated population means genetic issues - but if the population
| is big then they should have spread at least somewhat.
| vfclists wrote:
| What exactly is "mysterious" about it?
|
| Click-baity title?
| owlninja wrote:
| Curious how this post says '5 Hours ago' but if you search or
| click 'smithsonianmag.com' up there, you see this as a post that
| says 3 days ago?
| macintux wrote:
| The moderators keep an eye out for interesting content that is
| ignored on submission, and put the posts back into a queue to
| be published again.
| owlninja wrote:
| Thanks to both of you!
| marcellus23 wrote:
| The admins do this sometimes, it's called the "second-chance
| pool" or something like that. They'll look at stories from the
| past few days that deserved more attention than they got, and
| essentially re-submit them.
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| Please accept my critique to Smithsonian Mag made in good faith:
| never use the word 'mysterious' [a nod to the magical thinking]
| in a science context. Really looks like CNN-ish dark pattern. The
| URL slug has a better word choice:
|
| 7000-year-old-skeletons-from-the-green-sahara-reveal-a-
| previously-unknown-human-lineage-
| neaden wrote:
| I don't see the connection between mysterious and magical
| thinking. It just means it is a mystery and I don't see
| anything that implies magic about a mystery.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| mysterious: adj. difficult or impossible to understand,
| explain, or identify.
|
| While magic requires mystery, mystery does not require magic
| and they are not synonyms. It is perfectly valid to state
| something is a scientific mystery without implying magic is
| involved in some way.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Would you be able to explain the mystery = magic thinking
| connection? I've not heard it before. I've obviously heard
| magic being described as mysterious, but not that mysterious
| stuff implies magic.
| Carrok wrote:
| The skeletons are mysterious and important.
| Fg2Hj5mK wrote:
| It's fascinating how genomic analysis continually reshapes our
| understanding of human migration patterns. This discovery
| highlights that human evolutionary history is far more complex
| than our traditional "out of Africa" models suggest, with
| multiple lineages coexisting and interbreeding throughout
| prehistoric North Africa.
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