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Yet Another Type Of Ancient Human?

lordmongrove

Justified & Ancient
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http://www.livescience.com/41679-ol...=10152925168941761&adbpl=fb&adbpr=30478646760

The oldest known human DNA found yet reveals human evolution was even more confusing than before thought, researchers say. The genetic material came from the bone of a hominin living in what is now the Sima de los Huesos in Northern Spain approximately 400,000 years ago during the Middle Pleistocene.

That article is from 2013. News was previously posted here:
forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/neandertals-new-findings-theories.27837/page-4#post-1374853
Link is obsolete. The current link is:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/neanderthals-new-findings-theories.27837/post-1374853
 
Last edited by a moderator:
It might. If it wasn't so obvious that Genesis tells us everything we need to know.
 
It might. If it wasn't so obvious that Genesis tells us everything we need to know.
Yeah, right! :rolleyes:

Genesis doesn't even tell us whether God created man or animals first. It just fudges two contradictory stories together. :mad:
 
Yeah, but your meant to use your imagination a bit aren't you.
 
Yeah, but your meant to use your imagination a bit aren't you.
Maybe the word Imagination hadn't been invented back in Old Testament times. ;)
It was all the Word of God back then - accept it or be damned!
 
And another Homo species https://www.trtworld.com/life/drago...w-human-species-is-our-closest-ancestor-47841

I think that there about 20 species of Homo now, it's really getting messy (fnar fnar), but no seriously, I think it's time taxonamists started thinking that our ancestors shagged just about anything vaguely similar to themselves. Would explain some peoples sexlives !.

Given the biological definition i.e. that species are reproductively isolated entities meaning they breed within themselves but not with other species, that would appear to be the wrong term here.
The evidence for extensive interbreeding surely confirms that modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and this latest discovery are all variants of one species - Homo.
 
Biology doesn't tend to feel restricted by our definitions.
 
Biology doesn't tend to feel restricted by our definitions.
Exactly and the rather imprecise word "species" is an invention of .... humans.

Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis could clearly interbreed and ought therefore to be considered the same species.

A Pug and an Irish Wolfhound on the other hand...
 
Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis could clearly interbreed and ought therefore to be considered the same species.
They are - at least by folks who use the three-part nomenclature you cited. This labeling connotes two subspecies under the species Homo sapiens.

There's an additional obstacle to simply concluding once and for all that Neanderthals and modern humans represent a single species. Recent genomic research suggests there would have been significant reproductive deficiencies among male offspring born of interbreeding. See, for example:

Sankararaman S, Mallick S, Dannemann M, et al.
The genomic landscape of Neanderthal ancestry in present-day humans.
Nature. 2014;507(7492):354-357.
doi:10.1038/nature12961
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4072735/

This would mean the offspring would be more accurately construed as hybrid crosses rather than descendants within a single species.
 
That's interesting re: birth defects.

When such defects occur amongst modern populations it can be due to inbreeding of (presumably) genetically very similar parents, whereas parents from genetically different backgrounds - say Greenlandic Inuit and Equitorial African, would produce perfectly healthy offspring.
 
That's interesting re: birth defects.
When such defects occur amongst modern populations it can be due to inbreeding of (presumably) genetically very similar parents, whereas parents from genetically different backgrounds - say Greenlandic Inuit and Equitorial African, would produce perfectly healthy offspring.
The reproductive deficiencies mentioned above aren't 'birth defects' in the colloquial sense of the label. A birth defect refers to an anomaly specific to a given birth, which may result from corruption or mutation in the genes received from one or both parents (or even some other cause).

The deficiencies cited above are suspected to be uniform / universal outcomes from interbreeding modern humans and Neanderthals - i.e., unavoidably resultant child genomes (at least for males) that would impair reproductive viability.
 
It's a relatively new scientific discipline, and there will likely be many varieties of human prototypes found.
 
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