[HN Gopher] Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins...
___________________________________________________________________
Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern
humans
Paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado9202
Author : rjknight
Score : 118 points
Date : 2025-10-08 00:17 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| mikert89 wrote:
| Out of africa is basically false, there were decently advanced
| walking hominids in asia a long time ago. Then they migrated
| west, africa was the origination, but that origination was not
| the ~50k years ago like was frequently claimed
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| All the evidence we have points to the vast, vast majority
| (>90%) of non-african human ancestry originating from hominin
| populations that were in Africa around 60-80k years ago, and
| were anatomically modern about 300k years ago. This article is
| about an ancestral clade of archaic hominins that contributed
| around 2% of modern non-african ancestry globally, that we've
| known about for years.
|
| OOA (with minor admixture) is the consensus position for a lot
| of excellent reasons.
| milesrout wrote:
| It is also the consensus position for a lot of bad reasons
| though.
|
| There is an assumption that belief in, or even reasonable
| agnosticism towards, any other theory can only be motivated
| by racism.
|
| There are many people that believe OOA because they want to
| believe it, because they want to believe we are all more
| similar than we are different, etc.
|
| Multiregional hypotheses are perfectly plausible. We have
| very limited information one way or another. Out of Africa
| may be more likely but it is far from certain.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| _There are many people that believe OOA because they want
| to believe it_
|
| But, also, _There are many people that [do not] believe OOA
| because they [do not] want to believe it_.
|
| That's why we look at genetic evidence, to eliminate
| nonsense. That evidence strongly points to chimps,
| gorillas, humans etc all coming from the same place.
|
| If it makes you feels better, think of it this way:
|
| we don't believe OOA because the evidence says we're
| related to blacks. We believe it because the evidence says
| we're pretty much hairless apes. (And a lot of us aren't
| even hairless!)
|
| There, feel better about it now?
| mikert89 wrote:
| theres actually almost zero clarity around the common
| ancestor between apes and humans, and a lot of
| speculation that the common ancestor lived 6-8 million
| years ago.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > That evidence strongly points to chimps, gorillas,
| humans etc all coming from the same place.
|
| No. Non-African humans have genetic lineages that do not
| occur anywhere in Africa.
|
| This doesn't mean OOA is necessarily false, but does
| makes it _much_ less likely.
|
| Also, lumping in primates is a red herring. The
| resolution of our gene clade knowledge doesn't go that
| far back. Dreaming about some hypothetical ape ancestor
| is a vibe, not a science.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Just to be clear about what the term multiregionalism
| means, it's an argument that there's anatomical continuity
| between archaic hominin populations around afroeurasia and
| modern human populations. That is, anatomical modernity
| didn't evolve once in Africa, but multiple times all over
| the world in populations that are still extant today. A
| multiregional hypothesis might say that modern Chinese
| people evolved from archaic populations in Asia.
|
| This is completely and unequivocally rejected by the
| genetic evidence. The evidence is so absolutely
| overwhelming that even fucking Wolpoff came around and now
| says: It is broadly agreed that all
| recent/living human populations ultimately descend from
| Africans.
|
| Now, if you mean something _completely different_ to the
| commonly understood definition of multiregionalism, I 'm
| willing to hear it.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > OOA (with minor admixture) is the consensus position for a
| lot of excellent reasons
|
| It isn't really. Serious historians and geneticists take
| great issue with it.
|
| It's only really the pop-anthropologists (the non-rigorous
| social science ones) who think OOA is a settled issue.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| You're going to have to explain this one. The only thing I
| can figure is that you're making a distinction about
| "traditional" RAO vs modern hybridization models, but my
| comment already mentions those (albeit indirectly, given
| that I'm writing to an audience).
|
| But if you're genuinely trying to say that the broad
| strokes out of africa model isn't consensus, I have no idea
| what you're talking about. Just to make sure I haven't
| missed some momentous event since the last time I was doing
| fieldwork, I even checked some unpublished books, review
| papers, and actual research. They all talk about OOA as
| completely settled or instead simply assume it.
|
| Is this like a CAS thing? Truly baffled.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| OOA is extremely problematic. Lots of hoops are needed to
| make it work - a double exodus from Africa and a
| population bottleneck, etc. None of these hoops are
| needed if we just let go and assume a Middle Eastern
| origin for homo sapiens.
|
| Basically the only reason a Kuhnian paradigm shift isn't
| happening is because of American politics; OOA is needed
| to debunk some stupid 19th century American racial
| theories. (Theories that the rest of the world doesn't
| even know or care about.)
| selimthegrim wrote:
| But where's the evidence? I haven't heard Reich or Paabo
| go about this.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| A middle eastern origin presents obvious problems
| explaining the genetic diversity data and the serial
| founder effects we observe globally. These naturally fall
| out of African origin, whereas a middle eastern origin
| needs a back to Africa that somehow avoids founder
| effects.
|
| Which stupid racial theories do you think African origin
| is trying to debunk and why would the many European
| researchers working on human origins care?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| there were multiple out of africa migrations and
| backmigration into Africa, 60-80k is just the most recent and
| the prominent founder population for modern humans outside of
| Africa.
| octaane wrote:
| You are completely wrong. Out of Africa is correct. Out of Asia
| is incorrect, and is outdated sino propaganda. Even the modern
| Chinese state admits that DNA evidence pretty conclusively
| points to out of Africa.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| We know there were indigenous folks here in Australia ~50K
| years ago, and we know that we didn't evolve in Australia, so
| any origination must be further back than that.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm curious why humans evolved intelligence and chimpanzees,
| gorillas, orangutans did not.
| mikert89 wrote:
| Because we are farther way on the evolutionary tree then is
| commonly thought, there is a tree of common ancestors going
| much further back (5 million or more years) that links humans
| with monkeys
| dboreham wrote:
| More energy from the digestive system to power a bigger GPU.
| Theories abound that this is due to the harnessing of fire for
| cooking.
| intrasight wrote:
| And metabolizing alcohol, which also encourages reproduction.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Evolution doesn't have end goals like building the most
| powerful computer possible. If caloric excesses are a factor,
| it's because there was some _other_ selective pressure that
| made use of the energy to support more neurons. But even
| then, more hardware isn 't the same thing as more
| intelligence. Elephants and whales have bigger brains than we
| do. Shrews and birds have a higher brain/body mass ratio.
| None of them are intelligent to the degree humans are. An
| explanation for human intelligence has to explain _us_ , not
| just our brain mass.
| SamBam wrote:
| Sperm whales may have more massive brains, but they have
| fewer cortical neurons total, and of course a much smaller
| brain to body mass ratio.
|
| But more importantly for this conversation, our brains use
| up a staggering 20-25% of our resting metabolic needs. A
| whale brain uses something like 3%.
|
| For us to be able to devote 20% of our calories to our
| brains, we simply needed to have a huge excess in the
| number of calories we had available. This is why the
| cooking hypothesis makes sense. Once we were smart enough
| to get lots of excess calories, that opened the door to
| this new fitness landscape of organisms that could devote a
| ridiculous proportion of their food to their brains. It
| wasn't that we gave up something else, it's that this
| wasn't even a possibility before.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The point of my comment is that cooking doesn't explain
| "why". It explains "how".
| dlahoda wrote:
| we just got virus into heads(which mutated some cells)
| forcing us to eat more. we are vodoo dolls driven by
| craving for flesh.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| > More energy from the digestive system to power a bigger
| GPU.
|
| Is GPU already the metaphor du jour? I thought we were still
| aboard the steam engine ;)
| acchow wrote:
| "Why humans evolved intelligence but orangutans did not".
|
| There's a different way to think about this that is closer to
| how evolution actually works and will make the answer clear.
|
| Our common ancestor (common to orangutans and humans) _did_
| evolve intelligence (concurrently with harnessing fire,
| clothing etc.). Not all of them, but some of them. And they
| broke off from the group. We now call them humans.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I think their question is not about why humans evolved
| intelligence, but why one and only one single species did.
| Aachen wrote:
| Wouldn't the first ones always wonder that?
| mathgeek wrote:
| This led me on a tangent that eventually took me to this
| line on Wikipedia:
|
| "Humans have visited the Moon and sent human-made
| spacecraft to other celestial bodies, becoming the first
| known species to do so."
|
| How would we know if we're the first known anything? You
| don't know what you don't know, as they say.
| Aachen wrote:
| Ah, I meant on our planet. Of course, we wouldn't wonder
| if it's evident that there is aliens (other intelligent
| life from another object) at a similar time as when we
| evolve this level of intelligence. This would be far
| before we can make technological means to rule out
| intelligent life on nearby celestial objects, or someone
| would probably have come up with the question why we
| don't talk with (the equivalent of) apes and dolphins and
| such. The other intelligent life would have to be either
| among us, or visible from where we live (mountains, ocean
| surface, idk) with whatever we have for senses (like
| eyesight good enough to observe structures in orbit that
| are clearly not natural, as an example)
| HelloNurse wrote:
| It's the other way round: we are a species because we are
| the ones that evolved intelligence, which was certainly an
| enormous difference between intelligent humans and
| physically identical unintelligent apes.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > why humans evolved intelligence, but why one and only one
| single species did
|
| Well, that's false. But we killed off/interbred with all of
| the peer/near-peer species.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Intelligence was evolved millions of years after the most
| recent common ancestor. Harnessing fire, clothing, etc. came
| later still. The lineage that would ultimately give rise to
| humans split from the chimp/bonobo lineage as the human
| ancestors adapted to savanna life, likely due to
| aridification brought on by the formation of the Himalayas.
|
| It's possible that selective pressure towards intelligence
| was greater for the human lineage than for the others. It's
| also possible that the evolution of intelligence was equally
| likely across the different lineages and humans just happened
| to be the one where the mutation happened. Regardless, once
| human ancestors filled the niche, it would have been
| difficult for another lineage to get in on the game.
| _AzMoo wrote:
| Is there a specific definition for intelligence?
| dmbche wrote:
| Is there a specific definition of definition?
| dotancohen wrote:
| Like life, many sources define it differently.
| jjk166 wrote:
| What definition are you using to say chimps don't have
| human level intelligence?
|
| By any useful definition, the intelligence of human
| ancestors very closely resembled that of chimps for about
| 4 million years after the human and chimp lineages
| diverged. While it's impossible to say for certain,
| that's around the time that endocranial volumes started
| growing consistently beyond the range seen in chimps.
| That is also around the time of the first evidence of
| stone tool making.
| Arwill wrote:
| Substitute orangutans for Australopithecus. That is (one
| of) the branches that did evolve more intelligence, but
| didn't survive. I suppose there were lots of such branches,
| that either merged back into humanity (like the
| Neanderthals), or died out.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Australopithecus is essentially on the human branch, and
| likely was still several million years before the
| development of advanced intelligence. Our common ancestor
| with Australopithecus was not any more intelligent than a
| typical Australopithecus, as far as we can tell.
|
| As far as we can tell, no branch developed significantly
| increased intelligence after splitting off from our own
| lineage. That's not to say it definitely didn't happen or
| that our lineage was always the smartest, just that there
| isn't any evidence demonstrating a qualitative difference
| which has survived to the present. But it's weird that no
| such evidence exists.
|
| Conversely different primate groups did independently
| evolve similar levels of intelligence, like Capuchin
| monkeys (which are new world primates) developed their
| intelligence after splitting off from the old world
| primates some 40 million years ago. Baboons and Macaques
| likewise each evolved intelligence independent of the
| great apes. Likewise similar levels (if different
| specializations) of intelligence have evolved
| independently outside the primates, such as cetaceans,
| elephants, and corvids. For cephalopods, which likewise
| are highly intelligent, their common ancestor with us
| didn't even have a brain.
| SamBam wrote:
| It sounds like you're saying that the common ancestor of
| humans and orangutans harnessed fire and made clothing. I
| don't think that's correct.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Intelligence must surely be a cluster of evolved changes,
| let's say A-Z. Each of those letters must have appeared, and
| been advantageous on their own (or they wouldn't have
| persisted).
|
| So why didn't chimps get some of them?
|
| For example, chimps have hands, but do not exhibit anywhere
| near the dexterity and agility of human hands.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| It's more like A appeared and there was a split off. Then B
| appeared and another split off from the A group and so on
| until you get to modern day Z.
| WalterBright wrote:
| So why didn't other lines evolve X and Q?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| They did get some of them. Functionally, chimps are pretty
| smart compared to almost anything but a human. Only if you
| define intelligence specifically as the gap between humans
| and chimps (or whatever other reference) can you say chimps
| didn't get _any_ of the pieces. We can ask why humans have
| _more_ of the pieces, but that 's basically the same
| question as why any species diverges. So, some inscrutable
| combination of chance, path dependence, etc
| asdff wrote:
| Think less in terms of "this must be inherently better than
| that" and more in terms of the thermodynamics at play.
| Dexterous hands probably have some cost. Maybe they aren't
| as durable as a chimps hands. Maybe they take more calories
| to run. Maybe they need more brain power dedicated toward
| the hands and respective energy requirements. I'm not
| really sure what they may be, but there are usually
| tradeoffs between any A vs B in an organism.
|
| Now if these costs are indeed less than the fitness
| advantage of a chimp having more dexterous hands, and that
| is in biological fitness as in reproductive success not the
| colloquial 'fitness' as in going to the gym, and that
| mutation for dexterous hands is present among the breeding
| population, you will expect to see offspring with that
| mutation, having higher fitness, to increase in frequency
| in the population.
|
| There are a lot of potential edge cases to consider as
| well. Maybe the dexterous hands allele is very close to a
| very bad allele in chimps, such that through recombination
| it is likely that these two alleles are inherited together
| (called linkage). You'd see both these alleles purged from
| the population over time through purifying selection.
|
| There is the population history aspect to consider. Maybe
| you don't need dexterous hands if your population is still
| living in the jungle among plentiful calories like the
| chimpanzee. Maybe it is more relevant to comparatively more
| feeble humans that were pushed out of that jungle by
| physically stronger ape populations into more nutrient poor
| environments, where suddenly the increased fitness from the
| advantages dexterous hands might bring now pay for their
| energy costs.
| acchow wrote:
| > So why didn't chimps get some of them?
|
| The chimps that _did_ get them we now call humans.
|
| There were no chimps back then. We had a shared common
| ancestor, and subgroups gradually emerged and gradually
| became different enough that they stopped interbreeding (or
| were physically separated).
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Underrated point wrt intelligence is the extent to which it
| depends on fine motor control. Whether you're building
| tools, writing, or speaking a complex language, you need
| fine motor control to make that possible.
|
| So it's not _just_ brainpower, it 's likely a combination
| of potential brainpower - which many species have/had - and
| fine motor control, which set up feedback loop that
| translated a mind/body synergy into practical evolutionary
| benefits.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I always believed that it was the group that had first
| mastered fire. Cooking food fundamentally changed human
| energy budgets. And keeping a fire meant that the group would
| congregate and form a larger social group, which would then
| lead to greater communication.
|
| This of course changes the question as to why only/mainly
| homo erectus developed the capability.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| We don't know.
|
| All of the great apes are incredibly intelligent in comparison
| to most other animals. The basic roots of our intelligence are
| probably a common feature to the whole family, but there's no
| consensus on _why_ it 's so advanced in humans. Any
| paleoanthropologist can rattle off about half a dozen possible
| explanations, but we honestly don't have enough evidence to
| really distinguish if, when, and how these were factors at
| different points in human evolution. Here's a quick attempt at
| some broad categories, which each have multiple hypotheses
| within them:
|
| * Because intelligence had advantages for individual selection
| (e.g. mimetic recall hypothesis)
|
| * Because intelligence had advantages for group selection
|
| * Because intelligence had advantages for sexual selection
| (spandrel hypotheses often start here)
|
| * Because adapting to rapidly varying ecological conditions
| required so many adaptations that we crossed some kind of
| barrier and "fell into" intelligence
|
| * Because intelligence helped with foraging/hunting (exclusive
| of sociality)
| gyomu wrote:
| Didn't a lot of other great apes evolve intelligence similar
| to ours, but we more or less drove them all to extinction?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The jury is still out on exactly how intelligent other
| hominins were (and the extent of our involvement in their
| extinction). Regardless, the term human can apply to all of
| genus _Homo_ and that 's the sense that discussions of
| "human intelligence" typically use.
| nylonstrung wrote:
| The burial sites of _Homo Naledi_ suggest they had
| developed burial rituals and primitive art which would
| mean non-Sapiens hominids were likely smarter than
| previously believed
| david-gpu wrote:
| The subject of Homo Naledi is _very_ controversial. Take
| it with a grain of salt.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| it's interesting to think that since humans got
| established, becoming too intelligent became a
| disadvantage? Like there's a glass ceiling.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I like that theory although it is depressingly grim ...
| the top dog species will inherently see any alternative
| intelligence as a threat and eradicate it. Would
| definitely make one pause for thought about the wisdom of
| creating an AGI ...
| dsign wrote:
| Came here to say this, but you did it for me :-) . I
| truly believe there's a more than 50% chance the vast
| history of hominids ends this century.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think it might be just competition. Human brains are
| expensive in terms of energy expenditure. So at certain
| population scales having less energy to expend might be
| comparative advantage.
|
| And same really goes for other niches we do not even
| occupy. You need to get something out of those expensive
| to keep brains.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| > Human brains are expensive in terms of energy
|
| I dunno ... 10 bits/second ain't so lavish...
| dotancohen wrote:
| Perhaps, but 1/3 of your blood supply is expensive.
| energy123 wrote:
| Since the invention of contraception, intelligence seems
| maladaptive, although we may have already reached
| technological escape velocity so it's not clear to me
| that it'll matter.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| There are huge reserves of the population where
| contraception isn't a thing. There are so many people
| alive today, that evolving out intelligence is really
| hard to imagine. Perhaps in some kind of far future
| science fiction "robots spoonfeeding drooling humanoids"
| scenario.
| shakna wrote:
| Less than more. Most of the early hominids crossbred. For
| as much violence as there was, there was also a lot of sex.
|
| Less extinction, and more evolution.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Considering human intelligence is very social, I wonder if
| bias to focus on individual humans leads us to a wrong way of
| understanding why it arose...
|
| One of my pet theories is that it may be related to vocal
| cord development[0], where losing certain physiology that
| allows apes to be _louder_ allowed humans to be _more
| specific_ , if quieter, with enhanced pitch control and
| stability offering higher information density communication.
| This unlocks more complex societal interactions and detailed
| shared maps. (In Iain McGilchrist's terms, it let the
| Emissary--the part of the brain shown to specialize in
| classification and pattern recognition, the requisite
| building blocks for efficient communication--to take
| priority.)
|
| This is an example highlighting how it is not about
| individual humans "becoming smarter", evolving larger brains,
| etc., but rather about humans becoming capable of working
| together in more sophisticated ways. In fact, human brain
| _shrunk_ in the last few thousands of years, in concert with
| growing size of our societies and labour specialization[1],
| which in turn in no small part is helped by communication
| density offered by our vocal cords. Really, humans in this
| way are closer ants[2], where being part of human community
| is the defining part of our nature.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/aug/11/how-
| quirk-of...
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240517-the-human-
| brain-...
|
| [2] Ants that farm and have stronger division of labour have
| smaller brains: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-
| nature/how-ants-becam...
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Depending on which factors you weigh most heavily,
| sociality theories usually fit into either individual or
| group selection categories. They're sort of the default
| consensus, but not one that's firm.
|
| Your idea would be what's called a spandrel hypothesis,
| basically that language (or culture etc) is a side effect
| of other adaptive traits.
| strogonoff wrote:
| It is not my idea per se, of course... I only gathered
| (well, it seems sort of obvious) that, given the
| overwhelmingly social nature of human intelligence,
| communication with high information throughput is likely
| the key differentiator between HS and other apes; the
| rest was ~1 minute of googling.
|
| As to "side effect", given better communication and
| consequently cooperation and potential for more complex
| collectives lead to persistent survival of the species in
| the environment, they seem like a pretty straightforward
| evolutionary advantage that would be expected to be
| naturally selected for in the first place. If anything,
| chances are in long term the great larynx update is the
| real side effect, it just happened to be a trait enabling
| all the above evolutionary advantages.
| Rediscover wrote:
| > ... vocal cord development ...
|
| I've read, from a few separate sources that were not
| research papers, something similar that claimed the
| development was a result of existing in semi-aquatic
| environments such as home on land but swimming for
| food/safety. I neither agree or disagree (not my field, I
| don't possess appropriate background/information), but I do
| think of it when evolution of vocal cords is mentioned.
|
| I don't recall the sources ATM, possibly something out of
| CoEvolution Quarterly or Bucky Fuller. Again, not research
| papers.
| Mitochondriac wrote:
| Semi-aquatic environments make sense if you look at our
| brains dependency on DHA (seafood is a rich source) and
| the hypothesis that our fingers get wrinkly in water
| after a while to improve grip.
| usrnm wrote:
| Aren't we a lot more evolved for hunting animals on foot?
| The whole thing with us losing our fur and sweating with
| the whole body, adaptations to running and throwing
| stuff, all of this makes us better hunters, but not
| necessarilly fushermen.
| m0llusk wrote:
| The two go together. Living with water requires control
| of breathing. Hunting animals on land requires strong
| endurance and probably also an ability to carry water.
| ekianjo wrote:
| How about if we were the only apes to not fear fire as much
| and discovered that we get much more nutrients by cooking
| stuff?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Stone tools predate even the oldest suggestions of
| intentional fire use by at least a million years, so the
| cooking hypothesis isn't particularly compelling. Elsewhere
| in this thread I've also discussed how it's not really an
| _explanation_ either.
| Theodores wrote:
| The cooking hypothesis is not well known, however, from
| what I understand, this was when we went from having big
| guts and average brains to small guts and big brains. The
| fossil record of primates is far from complete, but
| roughly speaking, we have been eating cooked food for a
| million years.
|
| The stone tools that predate this by a few million years
| reinforce the cooked food hypothesis in this 'chicken or
| egg' situation.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I hadn't heard the term "spandrel" before, especially not in
| this context. Makes sense, though.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)
| rirze wrote:
| I personally dislike the definitions here-- traits and
| genetic changes are, by default, unattributed to external
| pressures. They don't "arise" from the environment, rather
| the environment selects for traits through
| survival/reproduction, if applicable.
|
| That means, if a trait is unaffected by the environment,
| then there's no attribution of why it developed; this is
| the default state.
|
| I feel often in biology, there's a mindset of figuring out
| why features developed and that's great for pushing the
| field but it runs into a limit. Not every trait developed
| from a environmental pressure.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Technically yes, kind of, but if a feature is truly
| unaffected by the environment, then there's no particular
| reason it _would_ get fixed, and you have to make the
| rather shaky assumption that it became widespread purely
| by chance. Most features have some cost, and the simplest
| explanation for that feature being widespread is that it
| has some counteracting benefit that leads to it being
| selected for. That 's a reasonable first hypothesis, to
| say the least, which means the "spandrel" hypothesis
| makes sense as the less common special case.
| bigbrained124 wrote:
| The only logical pathway is that some genetic mutation or
| plant-based hallucination allowed for lack of animalistic
| fear/true context generation within the brain. Understanding
| that bear/tiger/snake/etc won't kill you in certain
| circumstances, means you can expend exponentially less
| calories and focus on building tools etc. It allows for rapid
| growth across the species in many areas.
| KurSix wrote:
| This highlights just how little we really know, even with
| decades of fossil, genetic, and behavioral data. What's
| always struck me is how intelligence might not have been a
| linear "goal," but more like a byproduct of other traits that
| just happened to snowball...
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of the hypothesis that:
|
| 1. Survival is easier in groups
|
| 2. In order to survive in groups, we need to communicate
|
| 3. We communicate using language
|
| 4. Language is directly linked with intelligence
|
| See how computers started displaying intelligence when we
| taught them our language
| ChrisGreenHeur wrote:
| all of this applies to monkeys
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Yes but we were first
| nn3 wrote:
| chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans evolved intelligence too.
| They are smarter than most other critters in the jungle. Just
| all not as much as the lineage that leads to humans.
|
| It's actually quite difficult to define human intelligence.
| Every time we think we find something unique by humans
| eventually some animal turns up that can do it too. It may be
| all just a question of degree and how it's used.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Are there any other animals that have a system of writing?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Not even close.
|
| Some great apes can learn to use symbols for communication.
| Bees can use specific dances to indicate direction and
| distance.
| nradov wrote:
| Researchers have taught primates to communicate using
| sequences of simple symbols. It's sort of like a system of
| writing but very primitive.
| AngryData wrote:
| No, but humans didn't have writing up until pretty recently
| either so I don't think that is a great measure of base
| intellectual capability.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| I dont think any other animal even have language at all (at
| least not language like we use the word language)
| makeitdouble wrote:
| The interesting part is how do you research that.
|
| Starting from what should be considered "writing" to how to
| identify specific artifacts as abstract words.
|
| Some researchers spend years in the forest studying one
| animal to isolate one single word they're speaking.
| Understanding other kind of intelligences is a crazy
| complex task.
| yongjik wrote:
| From what I've heard, language is unambiguously unique to
| humans, if you consider grammar an integral part of
| languages. You can teach chimpanzees hand signs, but they
| could never make the leap to stringing them together under a
| coherent rule: something like the difference between "Mom
| give me cookies" vs "I give mom cookies."
|
| (I'm no expert, so take that with a grain of salt.)
| timschmidt wrote:
| Cetacean communication obeys Zipf's law:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11797547/
|
| As does house finches: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/d
| oi/full/10.1098/rspb.202...
|
| Sperm whale codas exhibit contextual and combinatorial
| structure:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8
|
| Ants have developed symbolic language:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10093743/
|
| Everywhere we look close enough, we find life doing smart
| things.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Those are interesting examples. Do you know of a species
| where ALL of those properties (and more) exist?
| timschmidt wrote:
| Likely all of the ones named, and more. These are just a
| sampling of papers and not at all exhaustive.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| proto-grammers are fairly common.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot) for example
| shows that parrots are capable of understanding English
| word order to some extent.
| rishav_sharan wrote:
| Don't think so. Whales and dolphins seem to have a fairly
| sophisticated language with regional dialects and accents.
| nylonstrung wrote:
| Bee "dance" communication is remarkably sophisticated and
| precise
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance?wprov=sfla1
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Unique to modern humans, maybe. But that's only because we
| outcompeted/killed all of our sibling species that also
| spoke language. Denisovans likely had language as well.
| azakai wrote:
| It might just be that we evolved it first. Someone has to (if
| anyone does).
| Razengan wrote:
| Who says they didn't?
|
| What would "intelligence" _look_ like WHILE it was evolving?
|
| A slightly more unsettling thought: How would newly-emerging
| intelligence FEEL like, internally?
|
| Also, how would humans fare if born and raised in the wild,
| without any language or tools taught to them?
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| I can extrapolate based on my toddler that a modern human
| dumped in the wild would invent language. He has made several
| phonemes that aren't in the language we speak at home. And
| he's clever enough that even though he's never seen us stand
| on furniture, he still climbs drawers and chairs if there's
| something he wants that's out of reach. I think that tool use
| and language are borne of some innate drive that's
| accelerated by culture.
| Razengan wrote:
| > _He has made several phonemes that aren't in the language
| we speak at home._
|
| No I mean absolutely zero contact with or help from modern
| (say since the last 10,000 years) human civilization.
|
| I mean literally giving birth in a forest and then raising
| the baby there without ever speaking a word around it or
| showing it any tools etc.
|
| (this assumes that it will survive to 1-2 years old without
| any fatal sickness etc. but let's say that the
| mother/parents will get just enough "outside" help to make
| sure it does, but the baby itself is not to come in contact
| with any tech or language)
| hmm37 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure there were children where the parents
| basically locked them in cages or chained them to a post
| in the basement, where they had almost no social contact,
| etc. And in these cases they were considered effectively
| mentally disabled by the time they were rescued.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| That's different. He's not saying to totally isolate the
| child, but that the child is born to modern humans
| without any language or culture or knowledge but who live
| in a wilderness. So not a place of deprivation but a
| place of danger and exploration. I would argue that kids
| are wired to explore, and that the parents would do their
| best to protect the child. It's kind of a useless thought
| experiment because our lineages stretch back unbroken to
| the beginning of life, and that includes culture and
| transmitted knowledge.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Given that the future human is different than you are today,
| they could ask you the same questions. How does it FEEL for
| you to communicate worldwide with an HN post, but not yet
| have the ability to (insert advanced capability here).
|
| Every one of our evolutionary ancestors was the best human
| yet, just like we are.
| Razengan wrote:
| > _Given that the future human is different than you are
| today, they could ask you the same questions. How does it
| FEEL for you to communicate worldwide.._
|
| No no no, I don't mean going from already
| intelligent/sentient/sapient to MORE intelligent....
|
| I mean, going from the levels of intelligence/awareness we
| see in insects - fish - chickens and cattle - monkeys/apes
| - what we consider "actual" intelligence as seen in humans.
|
| Evolution of anything is obviously not some simple boolean
| switch: It's not like one day you're a full fish and the
| next day you give birth to an amphibian with legs.
|
| But how would the gradual evolution of intelligence _look_
| and _feel_ like?
|
| Going from what we consider animals to be, to having
| awareness and introspective thoughts and future planning?
|
| Is it like, do you have just 1 thought per day at first,
|
| or can only count up to 3 for a few thousand years,
|
| only plan for up to 1 day ahead, and remember that plan for
| only a few hours...
|
| And when do all the clearly self-destructive things kick
| in, that we Modern Humans(tm) do that obviously harm
| individuals and the species? :)
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I guess I see it as a continuum. My cats are clearly not
| as smart as a human, but they remember and they have
| independent thoughts. Presumably they wouldn't feel
| inadequate compared to a human, since they get everything
| they could possibly want and we do the work. But it's
| highly unlikely that they are smart enough to have that
| self-reflective thought.
|
| Humans have the gift of understanding, but our lives are
| filled with things we either don't really understand or
| that we have an illusion of understanding. Of course, we
| wonder "why does evil exist?" whereas cats wonder "when
| is dinnertime?"
| hiatus wrote:
| I have no expertise in the field whatsoever but can't help but
| wonder if it is at all related to our consumption of cooked
| foods. At the very least it reduces the incidence of parasites
| but I am sure there are myriad benefits beyond treating foods
| for longevity through methods like smoking.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| I have zero expertise either, but I find this field
| fascinating. Cooking makes it easier to chew so we can devote
| less of our skulls to chewing muscles. At birth our skulls
| are barely small enough to fit through the birth canal in one
| orientation, and one of the prerequisites for a baby to be
| born is that it's facing head down and shoulders rotated into
| that orientation. Maybe cooking is beneficial because it
| allowed us to have a bigger braincase but also it gave us
| access to more nutrients from the same food.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| That question is analogous to asking why did some fish grow
| legs and become mammals.
|
| The answer is mutations sometimes specific members of a group
| will gain a mutation that will overtime cause that group to
| split off away from the ancestor group. It's all a matter of
| chance evolution doesn't have a direction.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Multiple lines of mammals have independently evolved back
| into being marine life. Whales, seals and manatees do not
| have a common ancestor, for example.
| mouse_8b wrote:
| They do have a common ancestor, it's just not a marine
| mammal.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > not a marine mammal
|
| which is the point. They were not evolved from the same
| species of land animal.
| naasking wrote:
| All apes are intelligent. Studies have shown that their causal
| reasoning is almost on par with humans. What they seem to lack
| is language for communicating sophisticated concepts and
| persisting them across generations.
| inavida wrote:
| Thank you. One person. One person is able to question the
| narrative of human intelligence and arrive at the essential
| distinction. Maybe a reflexive habit of mind that seeks to
| find differences between the human and the other and is
| incapable of seeing the other in the human.
| bigbrained124 wrote:
| I think everyone overlooks fungi/plant's impact of
| evolution/adaptation.
|
| Survival of the fittest never includes the gene impacts plants
| and fungi can force onto creatures.
|
| Also cyclical 12kyr catastrophic events leading to small
| condensation of species under stress.
| kouru225 wrote:
| I think this is actually an easy question to answer because
| you've accidentally preselected your demographics.
|
| Imagine this: among primates, there is an even distribution of
| species of differing levels of intelligence. All the primates
| who became intelligent have similar evolution paths because
| intelligence defines their evolution path (opposable thumbs,
| large heads, standing upright, etc.) Then because they all have
| similar evolution paths we put all those into the genus "Homo."
| Each of species of the genus Homo eventually either breeds with
| each other or genocides one another until there are only the
| Homo Sapiens left.
|
| So with an even distribution of intelligence among all
| primates, it's logical that, given enough time, all that is
| left are primates of sufficient intelligence enough to breed
| with each other or be genocided until there is only one
| species, or many species of primates who weren't intelligent
| enough.
|
| This is my guess (I'm not a biologist or ancient historian or
| anything)
| flohofwoe wrote:
| No other intelligent humanoids have survived besides us, so
| maybe just a really clever survival strategy ;)
| w10-1 wrote:
| They don't compete with us directly, so they survived.
|
| We destroyed the many other humanoid/intelligent species, who
| did compete with us.
| Agraillo wrote:
| It's an interesting question, but maybe more complex than it
| appears. We cannot get rid of the cultural passing of
| information (non-genetic) in humans. If we do, we get feral
| children [1] (also known as Mowgli in popular culture). But I
| doubt anyone would seriously want to compare this "pure"
| intelligence with that of other primates. There is a possible
| agreement that socialization is not an option for humans but a
| requirement. Maybe if by some bad luck feral children were
| grouped together for some time, this might be an approximation,
| but I'm not sure. Overall, using computers as an analogy, it's
| like humans are only functional after the software installation
| following the first power-on, which is more or less required
| for normal activity.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
| ViktorRay wrote:
| This may not be entirely accurate. Feral children are those
| that do not have interaction with other humans.
|
| If you had a bunch of human children together and provided
| them sustenance and all that without adult interaction they
| might still develop normally and form their own language and
| means of communication with each other.
|
| We don't know for sure because such an experiment would be
| horrible and extremely immoral. However I do remember reading
| a while back that a similar situation happened where a bunch
| of deaf children in a an environment without much adult
| interaction did manage to create their own sign language to
| communicate with each other.
|
| So it seems the feral child phenomena might be due to the
| fact that the child is alone rather than simply due to the
| child not having adult interaction.
| atbvu wrote:
| I'm just curious. Not all animals can evolve into humans. And
| many animals today have very high intelligence, we just don't
| know about it.
| tjs8rj wrote:
| Is an individual human raised alone significantly smarter than
| a chimp?
|
| How much of the intelligence gap is culture and communication
| that lets us educate ourselves and compound knowledge vs
| biology? Homo lived for thousands and thousands of years with
| the same level of development as other apes
| hollerith wrote:
| Since it is impossible to instill human culture into a chimp
| (and scientists certainly have tried) there must be some
| important biological differences between people and chimps.
| goodmunky wrote:
| Their biology simply filled a different ecological niche more
| effectively, it's the same for all life.
| nvlled wrote:
| A semi-serious tinfoiled answer:
|
| Humans are a protected species, carefully raised and nurtured
| by higher organisms that are hundred thousand times larger than
| us (in terms of space and time). The earth and solar system is
| just a vivarium of galactic scale. Several "glass wall"
| mechanisms were placed to ensure we are separated from the rest
| of the universe, like the oort cloud.
|
| Somewhere out there in the universe are humans living freely
| outside the glass wall.
| textlapse wrote:
| A curious-er question to me would be how did cephalopods
| (octopuses, cuttlefish) develop sophisticated intelligence a
| few hundred million years before 'we' did separately from us?
|
| And they still are alongside us right now. Which to me is
| fascinating.
| mouse_8b wrote:
| Why did birds evolve flight and people didn't?
|
| The other apes are intelligent enough for their niche. At some
| point in humanity's past, the environment was harsh enough that
| the less intelligent ones died.
| KurSix wrote:
| Always worth asking how much these reconstructions reflect
| reality vs the assumptions built into the models
| _petronius wrote:
| If a thought like this has occurred to you, a dilettante, after
| reading a headline and/or cursorily glancing over the article,
| then you should assume that a study conducted by people with
| substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field
| have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they
| perform their analysis.
|
| Drive-by anti-intellectualism like this is the death of
| interesting conversation, truly.
| like_any_other wrote:
| In an ideal world, you would be right. In this world, I just
| read a study (that passed peer review), where they took per-
| capita data from a district with 100 people, data from a
| district with 50.000 people, averaged them without weighing
| by number of people, then presented the result as the per-
| capita average for all districts.
|
| That is when they're not outright fabricating data, and
| having their colleagues cover for them (at _Harvard_ ):
|
| _In or before 2020, graduate student Zoe Ziani developed
| concerns about the validity of results from a highly
| publicized paper by Gino about personal networking. According
| to Ziani, she was strongly warned by her academic advisers
| not to criticize Gino, and two members of her dissertation
| committee refused to approve her thesis unless she deleted
| criticism of Gino 's paper from it._ -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino
| physicsguy wrote:
| I reviewed a paper recently that gave an incorrect
| definition for one of Maxwell's equations and then
| proceeded to use it incorrectly. It got moved to a lower
| ranked journal rather than rejected outright. That wasn't
| the only problem either, half the text was clearly AI
| generated.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Since the "people with substantial academic training and deep
| expertise in the field" can be bad at statistics or experts
| at academic fraud, doubting statements with obvious political
| motives is a prudent policy.
|
| Distrust is science, deferring to authority without a good
| reason is anti-intellectualism.
| goodmunky wrote:
| Have you not observed that science is very often politicized,
| filled with fraud or just plain mistaken? The anti-
| intellectual position is anti-skepticism.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Then come with proof or some shred of evidence, rather than
| asking an unsubstantiated question that undermines the
| scientific process unnecessarily by trying to insert doubt
| from a place of zero expertise in the field.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I think they call this the appeal to authority fallacy,
| it's the people without expertise in a field that often
| see the holes in something first, then the holes start
| glowing after they get hand waved away by smug narrow-
| minded experts.
| kalaksi wrote:
| > it's the people without expertise in a field that often
| see the holes in something first
|
| While it's obvious that everybody makes mistakes and has
| blind spots, I'd wager that, in general, being more
| knowledgeable gives you better tools to spot actual
| holes.
|
| And sure, experts too can be narrow-minded and smug. Just
| like everybody else.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| and what are you engaged in, appeal to nothingness?
| appeal to authority isn't a fallacy outside of formal
| logic, it is just everyday knowledgemaking.
| onraglanroad wrote:
| > the people without expertise in a field that often see
| the holes in something first
|
| No they don't. That never happens. Would you expect
| someone who knows nothing about programming to identify
| flaws in a computer language?
|
| Of course not. You expect it will be people who actually
| understand the field that can identify issues.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| it can even happen in software engineering but takes
| different forms, someone outside sees the problem first
| because they are looking from a different perspective or
| due to familiarity with some external factor or edge case
| of their environment
| whimsicalism wrote:
| welcome to hacker news :)
| physicsguy wrote:
| > then you should assume that a study conducted by people
| with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the
| field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how
| they perform their analysis.
|
| You should sit in some academic meetings and paper drafting
| e-mail chains! There's a degree of believing the best in
| people but in my experience that can unfortunately be
| misplaced in science.
| ebg1223 wrote:
| doctor banjo?
| bradley13 wrote:
| [flagged]
| kakacik wrote:
| [flagged]
| sho_hn wrote:
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| 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).
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It's all a matter of how far back you look.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| petercooper wrote:
| _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.
| dang wrote:
| 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
| curseofcasandra wrote:
| > 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.
| gus_massa wrote:
| 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.]
| slightwinder wrote:
| 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.
| matt_kantor wrote:
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| someone call Joe McCarthy
| matt_kantor wrote:
| 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).
| martinclayton wrote:
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| 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.
| hopelite wrote:
| [flagged]
| exe34 wrote:
| 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"?
| hopelite wrote:
| 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.
| exe34 wrote:
| that seems unconnected to what I wrote?
|
| (I agree with it, just seems like a non-sequitur...)
| libertine wrote:
| > 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?
| dang wrote:
| 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
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| z3t4 wrote:
| When the average life span was something like 30 years, why do
| all images look like they are 60+ years old? Is it a cognitive
| bias that we assume that people that are tens of thousands years
| old also look really old? :P
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| classic misunderstanding of avg
|
| avg of 30 usually just means higher child death rates
|
| once adult you would likely still get to 50+ on avg
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| I always felt Chinese.
|
| A lot of people here seem remiss to accept this but the claim was
| made, I think around 2018? And now the international community
| has gone and doubled checked - and it seems legitimate. 2025: the
| mainstream belief of descension changes.
|
| What other base beliefs do you hold that will likely be false?
|
| I can think of 5+. Our ancestors thought a lot of things for
| certain and died never knowing. Technological advancement is so
| fast nowadays, I hope we get to live through more.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| (Off topic) I'd like to think we get periodic impact events that
| put some new "code" on the planet and we get new species. That
| would be kinda dope.
| mouse_8b wrote:
| That's just creationism.
| tsoukase wrote:
| At every chronological estimation they should append 'at least as
| old as' while they present their results. You never know if
| something older comes up later.
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