
New species of ancient human discovered in the Philippines: Homo luzonensis - curtis
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/04/new-species-ancient-human-discovered-luzon-philippines-homo-luzonensis/
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Hnrobert42
I watched a documentary on an Amazonian tribe that had just initiated contact
with the outside world. accepted help from the government. It was endearing to
see how much they appreciated things like flip flops and a cooking pan. From
the “noble savage,” I thought pre-modern people understood and lived in
harmony with nature.

Now I see they live a hella hard life. They are often hungry. They sleep
fitfully in fear of being eaten. One guys told of his grandmother being
dragged away from dinner by a panther.

Their sustainable rate of consumption aside, they don’t really live in harmony
with nature any more than I do with city when I cross a busy intersection or
operate an elevator.

Then I think about what future humans will think of my primitive ass. Which is
why I hide photocopies of it in the stacks of libraries I visit. To help the
future researchers.

~~~
apo
For some thought-provoking insights into the scale of the changes ancient
American civilizations brought on the landscape, see the book _1491_ by
Charles Mann.

Maybe the most intriguing idea in the entire book is that the Americas were
ten times more populated at the time of European contact than they ended up
becoming in the 1500's (when most eye-witness accounts were written).

The "noble savages" we think of were remnants of a disease holocaust that
wiped out 90% of the population. It's almost as if we're trying to understand
European civilization by observing concentration camp survivors.

The recurring pattern: small group of Europeans makes contact with a native
group. They report a land teeming with people and trade. A hundred years go
by, and almost nobody is left. Those remaining live in small bands eeking out
a subsistence living.

The culprit: smallpox and a host of other diseases that jumped species in
Europe due to co-habitation with animals. The lack of such practices (or
animal domestication in general) in the Americas meant that the disease
transfer was destined to be one-way.

This dynamic may explain why there's only one genus of Homo left alive today.
Whenever two groups contacted each other, one inevitably succumbs to the
diseases carried by the other.

~~~
BurningFrog
The craziest thing is that this disease holocaust was entirely accidental. The
Europeans had as little clue as the Americans what happened, 300 years before
germ theory. I imagine both sides saw it as acts of God(s).

I count it as the biggest "random" event in all of world history. Had the
immunology lottery turned out otherwise, the world would be a _completely_
different place.

~~~
okmokmz
>The craziest thing is that this disease holocaust was entirely accidental.

Why is that crazy? I've never thought myself, or heard anyone imply, that the
"disease holocaust" was intentional. As neither nation had the
knowledge/science to understand diseases/germs at that time it seems
straightforward to assume it was accidental

~~~
eloff
I've heard stories of smallpox riddled blankets being gifted on purpose. But I
suspect if there's something to that, it came later when we had a better idea
of how disease spread.

~~~
will_brown
While the small pox/disease ridden blankets may or may not be factual, there
is plenty of historical records predating Europeans landing in the Americas of
using disease in warfare.

When sieging cities in antiquity water supplies would be contaminated. Arrow
heads be smeared with poison and otherwise feces to cause infections. In
Europe during Middle Ages corpses and feces of diseased would be catipulted
into cities to cause infection, notably this this even happened with corpses
that died of the bubonic plague.

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llbowers
I sometimes wonder what it would be like if another species had survived and
developed alongside us. They would be humans but....not quite what we conceive
of as human(basically our species). What would their culture have been like?
Music, art, language, etc.

As tribal as our own species is I imagine we would have gone to war eventually
and one exterminated the other (assuming no large difference in population,
technology, etc.). I think that might have been what happened to Neanderthals?

But still, the thought of going about day-to-day business alongside, let's say
homo floresiensis, has something intriguing to it. Perhaps it's the same
reason we imagine interaction with extraterrestrial life - it's really just a
reflection on us and our own humanity.

~~~
zawerf
There are still a few uncontacted tribes left. I remember reading about the
Sentinelese[1] last year when some guy snuck onto their island to try to
convert them to christianity and died.

I forgot where I read this but apparently they don't have a concept of gift-
giving as a sign of goodwill. I had a really hard time wrapping my head around
that!

Like how else could gifts be interpreted? Maybe as a sign of submission, like
cats who think it must be a god to people who feed it? But can it even be
possible for biological humans to not have a concept of reciprocal altruism?
Or did their culture evolve to a different point where they can get
(homicidally) mad at people for being too nice?

The fact that this simple gesture wasn't as universal as I thought really got
me thinking about how much of our actions only make sense within a narrow
shared context.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese)

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hoseja
Not sure if I am understanding you correctly but they didn't kill him because
he brought them gifts, they killed him because previous outsiders brought
disease and death, so they are rightly xenophobic.

~~~
jessaustin
ISTM we don't have the faintest clue as to why they killed him. That's kind of
the point. One doubts that any of them have studied public health.

~~~
gota
What does ISTM mean?

~~~
dogma1138
It seems to me.

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Abishek_Muthian
What's fascinating about the discovery of Homo luzonesis is that they're from
a location which wasn't known to be connected by land for past 2.5 Million
years.

Considering boat travel wasn't a possibility, their origins might shed us new
light on how early hominids migrated and even tell us about human settlements
in places like Andaman Islands, Sentinel Islands.

~~~
flukus
> The small-bodied hominin, named Homo luzonensis, lived on the island of
> Luzon at least 50,000 to 67,000 years ago.

That's pretty much when modern humans made it to Australia, boats definitely
existed by then. I'm not sure where the idea that pre-agricultural humans
didn't have boats comes from but it seems to be rooted in debates about when
migrations into North America happened. Rudimentary rafts aren't that big a
leap for anyone that's seen a tree trunk float down a river, from there you
can iterate pretty rapidly to something ocean going.

~~~
neuronic
And if the biological _Homo sapiens_ is 250,000 years old or even older that
leaves at least another 200,000 years for _sapiens_ or other _Homo x_ species
to have built a boat.

Just because the fossil record lacks evidence we are pretending that modern
humans weren't just as smart for 94% of their existence as a species (since
animal husbandry, writing etc. seemingly only developed in the past 15,000
years).

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qwerty9876
None of these species are really extinct.

Homo sapiens interbred with them and their genetics still live on in the local
populations. In fact this is a major reason how different human populations
around the world became so different looking in such a short time.

~~~
jmmcd
> a major reason how different human populations around the world became so
> different looking in such a short time.

Is it true? Any link for this?

~~~
qwerty9876
Yes, e.g light eyes and light hair in Europeans comes from the neanderthals.

[https://www.eupedia.com/europe/neanderthal_facts_and_myths.s...](https://www.eupedia.com/europe/neanderthal_facts_and_myths.shtml#genes)

"According to the Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost, the current level of
hair colour diversity in Europe would have taken 850,000 years to develop,
while Homo sapiens has been in Europe no longer than 45,000 years. This is
evidence enough that genes for fair hair were inherited from interbreeding
with Neanderthals."

~~~
Symmetry
Genes from Dennisovans, which had been living in Tibet for a very long time,
are also why modern Tibetans are better adapted to high altitudes than other
homo sapiens groups living in similar conditions.

[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/tibetans-
inherited-h...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/07/tibetans-inherited-
high-altitude-gene-ancient-human)

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perlgeek
> The hominin—identified from a total of seven teeth and six small bones

Whenever I read such things, I'm amazed at how much knowledge you can get out
of three handful of bones -- and on the hand I wonder if that's maybe still
too little to declare the discovery of a whole species of hominin.

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beardedman
This is awesome. Makes you wonder what else we haven't discovered yet.

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wallace_f
How would one go about making an educated guess as to how many species of
human in total existed, given what we know about the probabilities of
discovering evidence of one?

~~~
Baeocystin
You'd have to very closely define what precisely you meant by the word
'species', and go from there. It's a surprisingly slippery thing to do.

Even the commonly-accepted 'can have viable offspring together' isn't as cut-
and-dried as you might think: [https://www.sciencealert.com/darwin-s-finches-
evolve-into-ne...](https://www.sciencealert.com/darwin-s-finches-evolve-into-
new-species-in-real-time-two-generations-galapagos)

More looking at edge-case compatibility between germlines, in this case modern
human vs. neanderthal:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans#Neanderthals)

~~~
matt_kantor
Ring species
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species))
also throw an interesting wrench into the "viable offspring" definition.

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GershwinA
Nice, makro-history is interesting. Most of you probably know it, but
regarding ancient history Noah Yuval Harari is a master writer, apiens: A
Brief History of Humankind is a great book on this topic.

~~~
b5
I read it recently and have mixed feelings about it. I'd recommend it to
anyone, especially if you haven't read much on the topic and want an overview.

I think it does an excellent job of ancient, pre-historical humans -- the
various branches of _Homo_ and how they interrelate. He makes it clear that
'human' and 'Homo Sapien' and not absolute synonyms: _Homo Sapiens_ are _one
kind_ of humans, the last surviving, but humans encompass all of the _Homo_
genus that came before too. I liked that distinction and it changed the way I
thought about humanity as a whole.

I think it gets significantly weaker once it moves past the pre-historical
hunter-gatherer stage. Part of that is that the staggering complexity and
variety of human civilisation post-agriculture means he has to condense, but I
also feel like his real interest lies in pre-agricultural humans of all kinds.

