
DNA from Neandertal relative may shake up human family tree - diodorus
http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/09/dna-neandertal-relative-may-shake-human-family-tree
======
hugh4
So let me get this straight. The whole of Eurasia was already inhabited by
human-like creatures as early as 650,000 years ago, but homo sapiens didn't
leave Africa until about 100,000 years ago?

~~~
ajuc
What's strange about this? Homo sapiens evolved later.

Also the dates depends on your definition of human-like. Homo erectus migrated
to Euroasia 1.2 mln years ago already.

~~~
hugh4
It's just weird to think that we drove them all to extinction so quickly and
so effectively in a relatively short space of time. Long before we had
agriculture or non stick-and-rock technology. How did we do it? A few Homo
sapiens wander into Eurasia, which already has a population of millions of
Homo, and all the other Homos die off?

I'm not advancing an alternative theory or saying its wrong, I'm just saying
its surprising.

~~~
mc808
It's also possible that Neanderthals prevented modern humans from leaving
Africa until their populations were already in decline for other reasons
(disease? inbreeding? infighting? overhunting?). In that case we may have just
sped up the inevitable.

------
deftnerd
I like it when things like this happen.

When a new discovery mucks up what was assumed to be established knowledge, it
causes a lot of scientists with a stake in either side to push themselves hard
to do more research.

Science and society itself benefits.

~~~
PopeOfNope
I'm surprised they were allowed to publish. This has been known in some
circles for at least a decade, maybe longer.

------
thatusertwo
It's funny that we humans think we know things about the ancient past,
everything is always a guess with data that we have no concept of how
incomplete it is.

~~~
WalterBright
That's true for history, as well. Archeological digs in the US have rewritten
colonial history, and even Civil War history. I've often wondered how much we
"know" about history is completely false.

For one small example, some years back, an office building had a natural gas
leak, and at one point the roof blew off. (I was a witness.) The fire trucks
came, the news choppers, and the reporters on the ground. That evening, I
taped each of the local news broadcasts.

Every one of them got the fundamental facts wrong (such as calling the office
building a warehouse), the timeline was wrong, etc. But those news reports are
probably the only record of the event, and will go down in history as what
happened.

Not that what happened there mattered, but it has made me suspicious of the
veracity of news reports ever since. It doesn't even have to be malicious, the
errors were just sloppy work in their desire to be done with it and move on to
the next story.

