[HN Gopher] We've had a Denisovan skull since the 1930s, only no...
___________________________________________________________________
We've had a Denisovan skull since the 1930s, only nobody knew
Author : Bluestein
Score : 108 points
Date : 2025-06-19 06:42 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| adampwells wrote:
| https://www.science.org/content/article/dragon-man-skull-bel...
| pyman wrote:
| 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).
| Bluestein wrote:
| Funny to imagine how (indeed) such floppies 'intersected" -
| technologywise - with the early web ...
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| 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).
| absurdo wrote:
| Any rare games that you remember that stood out?
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| 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.
| eesmith wrote:
| This Breakneck?
| https://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?q=Breakneck
|
| And Tzar? https://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?q=Tzar
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| Indeed. As I expected, they didn't stand the test of time
| very well.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| "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.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Sounds like Craig's list.
| bbarnett wrote:
| 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.
| sitkack wrote:
| Yahoo started as page of links.
|
| See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-
| Internet_email_address
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Ooh! Memory stirred...
| protocolture wrote:
| 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.
| c22 wrote:
| My first router ran off a floppy disk.
| earleybird wrote:
| LRP?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project
| gerdesj wrote:
| 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!
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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.
| transcriptase wrote:
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| 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)
| Nopoint2 wrote:
| 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.
| amarait wrote:
| Care to elaborate? Does this come from roman times/ post
| french Revolution/post industrialism?
| adastra22 wrote:
| What is the alternative that you are suggesting?
| ggm wrote:
| 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.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Sorry that's not my question. What is the alternative
| hypothesis here that you are suggesting we be open to?
| ggm wrote:
| 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| > ad hom
|
| Hilariously ironic usage. ("to/against the human/person")
| hoseja wrote:
| Yet they refuse to test the first emperor.
| graemep wrote:
| > 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| 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.
| amarait wrote:
| 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
| shellfishgene wrote:
| 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
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Dark truths are hidden in ancient dna
| jmchuster wrote:
| And light truths are visibly open in modern dna
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I really don't like these clickbait titles
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-06-23 23:02 UTC)