
Three kinds of early humans unearthed living together in South Africa - reedwolf
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/homo-erectrus-australopithecus-saranthropus-south-africa-180974571/
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freedomben
> _“It’s an excellent paper, and it looks quite convincing,” says Fred Spoor
> of the Natural History Museum, London. “It would have been ideal if there
> was more of the cranium, but I think they make a very good case that it’s
> Homo and that the closest affinities are probably with erectus. And that
> would make it quite likely the oldest Homo erectus-like thing.”_

> _“I have no doubt that they have something that is of the genus Homo,” adds
> Rick Potts, a paleoanthropologist and head of the Smithsonian’s Human
> Origins Program. But Potts notes that the incomplete skull doesn’t show all
> the telltale features that would characterize it as Homo erectus or some
> other relative. Furthermore, the cranium belongs to a 2- or 3-year-old
> child, for which comparisons are scarce. “I’m not 100 percent sure that they
> have Homo erectus. And that would be one of the really interesting parts of
> the study, because if they do have Homo erectus then it is the earliest
> known in the world.”_

Having seen first-hand the powerful effect of excitement cause researchers to
overlook important anti-evidence, I always like to read comments from
qualified peers.

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jackfoxy
_Living Together_ is a loaded term suggesting peaceful coexistence. I think
it's much more likely each species/sub-species in turn drove each other out of
a desirable habitat over a very short period of time, in geological time. But
10s of thousands of years is a long time for individuals and clans. The
different species may have never even seen each other.

The actual paper _Contemporaneity of Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and early
Homo erectus in South Africa_ does not suggest any of this.

~~~
Accujack
Awww... I was kind of hoping the three species would be Homo Rossus,
Paranthropus Chandlerus, and Australopithecus Josephus.

~~~
dntbnmpls
As parent noted, these species probably weren't friends.

~~~
mirimir
Well, are lions and tigers "friends"? Or wolves and coyotes? Or brown bears
and grizzlies?

With various human species, it could have been more complicated. Slavery would
arguably have been likely.

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twojacobtwo
The joke was that all the names GP listed were references to characters from
the television show "Friends".

~~~
mirimir
Huh. I know the show, but I managed to never see more than a few seconds of it
at any one time ;)

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WilTimSon
It's fascinating, reading how they figured all this out. Correlating data
about magnetic field flipping, uranium decay, a dozen little things coming
together to give an answer. I'm not sure what kind of implications this find
has and the comments from from Mr. Spoor seem to be taking a cautious approach
but just reading about the work of scientists is always exciting.

If all the data pans out, what kind of implications would it have? Just
showing that different kinds of humans coexisted and cohabited? Or is it more
about the migratory patterns of these different humans?

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d0100
Or that there is no such "different humans"?

I'm still hoping for some discovery of a pre-pre-historic man being found with
a metal pot

~~~
lifeisstillgood
And Slartibartfast's signature in the Fjord? I think that it's best to think
of our pre-history as waaay more complex than the silhouette of evolution
picture leads us to. We almost certainly shared land with other apes as
different dogs share parks today, but beyond that it does not fit it in my
head. I feel this is an area of science that is fascinating but ultimately,
like study of butterflies - yes it's science, yes we fund it, but the value to
billions of humans will likely come from other branches of science.

The lessons I need for today's living I can take more usefully from today,
than hoping to extrapolate from a million year old bones.

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chx
Recommended reading David Reich: Who We Are and How We Got Here. This was my
second exposition, in general, to ancient DNA. The first was several papers
which have invalidated _everything_ we knew or thought we knew of Hungarian
prehistory. But, as A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber often attests,
there is a hell lot more we do not know than we do even when textbooks claim
otherwise.

~~~
corporateslave5
A lot of the reason most people aren’t aware of what we don’t/do know with
regards to evolution is due to political correctness.

~~~
AlotOfReading
Can you expound on why you think this? As someone with a degree in the area,
who's worked in it, and attempts to keep up with literature even now that I'm
in tech, I can't think of many/any areas where general knowledge is kept out
of textbooks for PC reasons.

The textbooks are out of date simply because human evolution is a quickly
changing field and unless you actively attempt to keep up, you're not going to
be able to maintain expertise. Even if that weren't true, the general public
would struggle because it's a deeply unintuitive subject that invalidates many
of the common sense norms we're used to in society, like race realism.

~~~
chx
A Brief History of Everything talks about how little we know about
_everything_. Everywhere we look we just find more and more mysteries.
Evolution is like this as well -- while you could explain it easily especially
to someone with just a tiny bit of programmer knowledge using Tierra -- we
have immense gaps , perhaps the biggest: how did it start? How did monomers
become polymers in a sea when the peptide bond requires the removal of H2O?

~~~
stan_rogers
Abiogenesis is not evolution. In fact, the whole messy bit at the base of
biota, where an organism (or protobiont) was as likely to share material with
a neighbour as to undergo any other process, can hardly be thought of as
"evolution". For all intents and purposes, that part could all be frikkin'
magic, and it wouldn't hurt evolutionary biology at all.

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algon33
Anyone have a link to the actual paper? Couldn't find it on the author's page
and the article doesn't appear to name it.

~~~
gevz
I think this is the one
[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6486/eaaw7293](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6486/eaaw7293)

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itronitron
Is it too much to ask that the subtitle not have a major misspelling?

~~~
slimsag
Mistakes happen, especially with spelling and grammar. Is it too much to ask
that people be understanding instead of pedantic?

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redis_mlc
> instead of pedantic?

You must be new here, this is HN.

