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Homo erectus

I'm no expert. It's just a theory I've read. Actually Chinese are mostly light skinned; their chief concession to the Sun is the extra fold in the eyes that give them a slightly slanted expression. In the deep past people were less likely to move over large areas. But as we all know, they did occasionly migrate to new areas. Skin color is primarily an adaptation to the Sun Vitamin D. Lighter skinned [people take in vitamin D more easily than dark skinned people. In the tropics the dark skin protected people from the intense Sun, but still gleaned vitamin D from it. In the extreme north skin became light to better facilitate the obsorbiing of vitamin D.
Except the Inuits who got a pretty dark skin even though they have lived in the northern region for at least 20-30 thousand years, perhaps even before migrating to North America.
 
DOH! The comic side effects of dyslexia (and i had to double check on how to spell dyslexia).

I have to admit that in my response I first spelled hear as here and had to edit it.

Be nice to think of both species (?) sitting down to enjoy a meal together.
 
Perhaps a nice romantic candlelit dinner.
 
I have to admit that in my response I first spelled hear as here and had to edit it.

Be nice to think of both species (?) sitting down to enjoy a meal together.
It was probably more primal than that.
 
Vardoger: Hey, it's a theory. I didn't claim it to be gospel, Give em another 30,000 years and see if it changes their complexion.:nods:
 
Knowing humans as I do, being one more or less, I'd say they cross bred every chance they got.
 
Vardoger: Hey, it's a theory. I didn't claim it to be gospel, Give em another 30,000 years and see if it changes their complexion.:nods:
This is the reason Inuits have dark skin. They get their vitamin D through fish and don't need to change their skin tone to create vitamin D through sun light.
 
Interesting point. Most interesting, indeed.
 
Here's the abstract of the paper concerning the Philippine discoveries ...

Earliest known hominin activity in the Philippines by 709 thousand years ago
Naturevolume 557, pages233–237 (2018)

Abstract
Over 60 years ago, stone tools and remains of megafauna were discovered on the Southeast Asian islands of Flores, Sulawesi and Luzon, and a Middle Pleistocene colonization by Homo erectus was initially proposed to have occurred on these islands1,2,3,4. However, until the discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2003, claims of the presence of archaic hominins on Wallacean islands were hypothetical owing to the absence of in situ fossils and/or stone artefacts that were excavated from well-documented stratigraphic contexts, or because secure numerical dating methods of these sites were lacking. As a consequence, these claims were generally treated with scepticism5. Here we describe the results of recent excavations at Kalinga in the Cagayan Valley of northern Luzon in the Philippines that have yielded 57 stone tools associated with an almost-complete disarticulated skeleton of Rhinoceros philippinensis, which shows clear signs of butchery, together with other fossil fauna remains attributed to stegodon, Philippine brown deer, freshwater turtle and monitor lizard. All finds originate from a clay-rich bone bed that was dated to between 777 and 631 thousand years ago using electron-spin resonance methods that were applied to tooth enamel and fluvial quartz. This evidence pushes back the proven period of colonization6 of the Philippines by hundreds of thousands of years, and furthermore suggests that early overseas dispersal in Island South East Asia by premodern hominins took place several times during the Early and Middle Pleistocene stages1,2,3,4. The Philippines therefore may have had a central role in southward movements into Wallacea, not only of Pleistocene megafauna7, but also of archaic hominins.

SOURCE: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0072-8
 
Yes, but this seems to be people similar to what we have today. Not a sub-species like the denisovans or so.
 
Why would they live at that Latitude, and How could they live at that latitude?

We would be talking about permanent ice sheets, or, at the least, Tundra during summer...surely it occured to them as a group that the further south they went, the less ice/warmer temperatures there were.

The only idea that comes to mind is their connection to that land, both spiritual,and ancestral prevented them from leaving.
 
In cold climates, mammals grow larger, to conserve heat; any hunter that can kill an elk, or a mammoth, or a grey seal, would have enough meat to feed a small group of friends and relatives. Also fish are surprisingly abundant in colder waters, partly because the cold water can support a greater oxygen load. The curious and inspiring aspect is that humans did not evolve in cold climates; they have adapted by inventing clothes and shoes, and the use of fire.
 
maybe people further south wouldn't let them?
Yes. Hostile tribes and modern humans chased them up there.
Might explain the troll legends of Nordic countries - people encountered relict hominids and turned the tales into legends.
In America, many native tribes ended up in the North.
 
Yes. Hostile tribes and modern humans chased them up there.
Might explain the troll legends of Nordic countries - people encountered relict hominids and turned the tales into legends.
In America, many native tribes ended up in the North.

Interesting point Mytho.

The first time I came across Beowulf, with the description of Grendel and his Mum, my first thought was some form of archaic homo sapien. (Grendel and his Mum that is)
 
In cold climates, mammals grow larger, to conserve heat; any hunter that can kill an elk, or a mammoth, or a grey seal, would have enough meat to feed a small group of friends and relatives. Also fish are surprisingly abundant in colder waters, partly because the cold water can support a greater oxygen load. The curious and inspiring aspect is that humans did not evolve in cold climates; they have adapted by inventing clothes and shoes, and the use of fire.

Yes, that's true Eburacam, but the cold! Nothing on gobs planet is worse than being extremely cold, except for being extremely cold and extremely hungry.

And fire - where would they get a decent amount of wood from, to throw out enough heat? Dung fires are nowhere near hot enough for Glacial Maximums, and it would've also been within the Arctic Circle...which brings to mind that the calorific conversion of any foodstuffs that these large beasties would've required, would've been exceedingly low.

The alternative is that mastodon et al, would've trekked north in summer and the inhabitants of that perishing place would've hunted them then...


It certainly is a mystery.
 
Perhaps it was not as cold when they lived there as it is today?

There are beliefs that the earth's axis has not always been fixed on it's current tilt...plus there are the "mini ice age" theories.
 
Why would they live at that Latitude, and How could they live at that latitude ...

An October 2018 preprint edition of the cited publication can be accessed at:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/448829v1.full

Paleoclimatic data and evaluations of Siberian habitability are given in Figure 8.

The two samples upon which most of the study is based date from 31,000 y BP - prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM).

Figure 8 indicates ascribed habitability for extreme northeastern Siberia prior to, and during, the LGM. Habitability was evaluated to decline in that area following the LGM.
 
Perhaps it was not as cold when they lived there as it is today?

There are beliefs that the earth's axis has not always been fixed on it's current tilt...plus there are the "mini ice age" theories.

True.

In fact it is constantly wandering.

Be that as it may, according to the majority of studies, that area is/was 'unattractive' to humanity. I can't see humans wanting to live there, 30,000 years ago, and yet, they did. I'm sitting here thinking how 4C/39F is rather uncomfortable (winter on the inland Australian Plains), and having worked in -25C/-13F where you breathe through your nose rather than your mouth, and you don't rub your nose because every nose hair is a rapier, my mind focuses on childbirth and the neonatal period and can't for the life of me understand why...

Humanity. We're a weird mob.
 
Yes, but this seems to be people similar to what we have today. Not a sub-species like the denisovans or so.

Of all the Homo line : Homo Ergaster, Homo Erectus, Homo Habilis, Homo Rudolfensis, Homo Antecesor, Homo Heidelbergensis, Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Floresiensis, Homo Denisova and Homo Sapiens, only the latter is still extant. But does the prefix Homo suggest we should regard all of these as "people"?
We know that all those variations of Homo overlapped each other by millennia and that a hell of a lot of interbreeding went on. Some of the recent documentaries about Neanderthals have stressed that their similarities to us far outweigh any trivial musculoskeletal differences.
 
The concept of other species is becoming fluid. Gone are the times of Linnaeus.

If Neanderthals are another species, what sections of their genome are doing inside us? Yes, I know their genes linked to XY chromosomes are notoriously absent, showing some degree of incompatibility; this whole story of species has the stench of old concepts about human races. Clusters of genes might have had some meaning in the past, but this is, for humans, completely irrelevant today.

In the future I hope clades, not classes, become the basis for taxonomy.
 
A summary sketch of the 2019 research publication(s) can be found at:

https://www.earth.com/news/human-ancestor-neanderthals-denisovans/

As I understand it, the 2019 news involves making better sense of results from earlier studies if one includes interbreeding with an even more archaic line (than Neanderthals and Denisovans) circa 700,000 years BP.

The earlier work from which this new report emerged seems to have been published in 2017, and it can be reviewed at

https://www.pnas.org/content/114/37/9859.full
https://unews.utah.edu/new-look-at-archaic-dna-rewrites-human-evolution-story/
 
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