[HN Gopher] When Humans Learned to Live Everywhere
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       When Humans Learned to Live Everywhere
        
       Author : pepys
       Score  : 41 points
       Date   : 2025-06-18 22:14 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
        
       | jdougan wrote:
       | https://archive.ph/cvPbc
        
       | mc32 wrote:
       | Still a lot of holes: When did the pop in Africa spread out
       | within Africa? When did the many 'Edens' happen and why?
       | 
       | Why were the previous expansions out of Africa dead ends?
       | Presumably they mean ones that ended up being Denisovans and
       | Florensis.
        
         | usrnm wrote:
         | > Why were the previous expansions out of Africa dead ends?
         | 
         | They were very successful, at least, some of them. Not as good
         | as us, but expanding to another continent and surviving there
         | for hundreds of thousands of years is not exactly a complete
         | failure. Unfortunately for this planet, our species is just too
         | good at procreating and killing everything on our way
        
           | yapyap wrote:
           | > Unfortunately for this planet, our species is just too good
           | at procreating and killing everything on our way
           | 
           | In a general sense it's more like unfortunately for us, the
           | planet will endure after we die as a species and then blossom
           | again eventually, just without us.
        
           | nkrisc wrote:
           | I do not believe that humans are capable of completely
           | sterilizing the planet, even if we wanted to. Life will
           | persist even after us, and if not, it won't be because of us.
           | We are absolutely not capable of destroying the planet
           | itself.
           | 
           | Barring some cataclysmic natural event beyond our control,
           | humans will cause the extinction of humans (or not).
        
         | netcan wrote:
         | >Why were the previous expansions out of Africa dead ends?
         | 
         | Richard Dawkins would say that descendants are common.
         | Ancestors are rare. Most populations of all species leave
         | little or no genetic trace.
         | 
         | The first human radiation was georgicus... 1.8mya. That is
         | arguably the original homo species. Arguably pre-homo, if not
         | for some long legged or large brained individuals in the tribe.
         | 
         | They may be ancestral to later Eurasian species of homo... even
         | the erectus lineage as a whole. But likely not.... because
         | ancestors are rare.
         | 
         | The recent/last great out of Africa population is one of those
         | rare ancestor populations. Most lineages are dead ends.
         | 
         | We don't know much about them. We don't know which bones are
         | theirs, or where they lived before dispersal. We don't know if
         | they had been a distinct population for long... or a recent
         | admixture homogenized before dispersal.
        
       | netcan wrote:
       | > Our closest living relatives -- chimpanzees and bonobos -- are
       | confined to a belt of Central African forests.
       | 
       | Gorillas are similarly ecologically constrained. But, the
       | ancestor of all African apes was (likely) more like us, adaptive.
       | At the least... they were a species or complex with a very large,
       | multicontinental range.
       | 
       | Neanderthals lived in a very wide range of habitats. Northern
       | Russia during an ice age. But also.. Israel. Gibraltar.
       | Denisovans also had an extremely varied range... including high
       | altitudes where most of the flora and fauna is specialized.
       | 
       | I'm not negating the idea that 70kya our ancestral African
       | "tribe" spread into new ecozones. They spread all over the world.
       | No surprise that this was an adaptive population.
       | 
       | But... I think humans as a generalist species that can specialize
       | using culture... I think this goes way back.
       | 
       | It explains how the earliest arguably-homo species (habilis-
       | georgicus) appears in the caucus so soon after evolving in
       | Africa. 1.8mya.
       | 
       | Gorillas aren't going to show up in europe.
        
         | nkrisc wrote:
         | So perhaps the other great apes evolved more into specialists
         | while out branch continued generalizing?
        
         | usrnm wrote:
         | It's the other way around: some apes left the jungle and
         | started our lineage. Erectus, who first left Africa, was a
         | species of early humans, not the common ancestor of all apes,
         | he lived long after we branched from chimpanzees
        
         | tombh wrote:
         | It reminds me of how our knuckle-walking ape relatives likely
         | evolved to do so _from_ bipedalism:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuckle-walking#Evolution_of_k...
         | 
         | Evolution has a quite different view of the "linearity" of
         | "progress".
        
         | IncreasePosts wrote:
         | It would be hard to explain orangutans in Indonesia if the
         | great ape common ancestor wasn't particularly good at moving to
         | new niches. Maybe pongo and homo independently developed the
         | skills though.
        
       | pfdietz wrote:
       | The ~70,000 year break is interestingly close to the Youngest
       | Toba Eruption, which occurred 74K years ago.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngest_Toba_eruption
        
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       (page generated 2025-06-22 23:02 UTC)