Submitted via IRC for SoyCow7025
Modern humans' distant relatives left Africa earlier than previously thought—rewriting a key chapter in humankind's epic prequel, according to a discovery unveiled on Wednesday in Nature.
Nearly a hundred stone tools found at the Shangchen site in central China may push back the spread of our ancient cousins—hominins—out of Africa by more than a quarter million years.
The toolmakers lived at Shangchen on and off for 800,000 years between 2.1 and 1.3 million years ago, leaving behind tools that are unprecedented outside of Africa. The site's oldest tools are roughly 300,000 years older than Dmanisi, a 1.8-million-year-old site in the Republic of Georgia with the oldest known fossils of our extinct cousin Homo erectus.
Source: Oldest Tools Outside Africa Found, Rewriting Human Story
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Thursday July 12 2018, @11:19AM (4 children)
Let me guess, they were shanzhai of the African originals?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @02:31PM (1 child)
Free shipping
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday July 13 2018, @08:58AM
Didn't help much, neither Europe nor the Americas had come up with handwriting yet so they couldn't sign for delivery. The shipment was returned to the manufacturer in Shangchen.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Friday July 13 2018, @12:42AM (1 child)
More likely they were made before Africans came down the trees.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday July 13 2018, @02:56AM
I think you're exactly right. It looks to me like Africans are a relict population from a very early branch, not a source population for humans as a whole.
Did you see where Neanderthal artifacts were found on an island well out in the Mediterranean?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 12 2018, @02:13PM (4 children)
I am an amateur flint-knapper. My blades and points don't turn out very well (yet). But I am comforted to learn that at least I'm better than those homo erectus monkeys.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Thursday July 12 2018, @03:01PM (1 child)
Back in the day, of course, all flint-knappers were professionals. But then they unionized and ruined the industry, and the capitalists had to look for alternatives like bronze.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @04:49PM
Thank god the bronze sge came along!
(Score: 3, Funny) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday July 12 2018, @03:59PM
Flint? Pah! You should talk to Mr Hairyback of Tribe Who Have Lots Of Jewellery Suddenly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTLyXamRvk4 [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @05:45PM
Well, hell, homo erectus was just learning to get it up!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @02:27PM (3 children)
I'm rather disappointed in these comments. I was expecting old compiler jokes.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday July 12 2018, @03:13PM (1 child)
Unix came from New Jersey.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @04:22PM
I'm just a few miles from its old stomping ground. I've heard rumors that its ghost haunts the area with warnings about systemd. Like everything else in NJ, we just ignore it.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday July 12 2018, @09:10PM
Old compilers never die, they still sit there waiting for the printouts.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Thursday July 12 2018, @02:49PM (5 children)
Apart from the obvious chinese propaganda (origin stories are used to found most human BS i.e. religion, ideology etc....) The genetic evidence supports the hypothesis that we all (even the stupid ones) had common ancestors from Africa.
It is plausible, however, that in the continuous migration patterns of humans (and their ancestors), mixing between partial diverged groups may have arisen.
The modern world highlights this well , with the diversity now shown in the America's and some parts of Europe.
I'm not at all comfortable using stone tools to date *anything* and hope we improve our DNA recovery to even older samples...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday July 12 2018, @03:05PM (4 children)
More than "may have": Many modern humans are part Neanderthal, even though they are primarily descended from the main homo sapiens line.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday July 12 2018, @04:05PM (2 children)
He's found nothing that can't be adequately explained on the basis of both populations being closely related to begin with, and both undergoing similar evolutionary pressures.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 13 2018, @07:28AM (1 child)
you do know that african humans don't have the neanderthal heritage? (thereby solidifying the idea).
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday July 13 2018, @08:22AM
Only via circular logic.
Yes, the specific genes involved are not found in Africa today. Whether they actually represent 'neanderthal heritage' or not is still simply begging the question. Any genes which were found in modern African populations were excluded from the start as obviously not what he was looking for.
As far as I've been able to determine, they're all very minor variations on (i.e. plausible variations from) genes that ARE found in Africa. Remember that h.s.s. and h. s. neanderthalis share a very recent common ancestor, and further consider that this is all in the somatic DNA, which means it's subject to selection and cannot be relied on as an indicator of deep ancestry.
So this is all at best circumstantial and far from conclusive. Earlier anatomical studies from neanderthal and human populations that coexisted for tens of millennia in the middle east showed no sign of genetic drift, which is a rather surprising result unless we assume that there was some sort of basic sexual incompatibility which prevented mating entirely. It's difficult to reconcile all the evidence.
Arguably, the simplest and neatest explanation here is parallel evolution. Two closely related populations, after moving to a much colder climate, produced and selected for the same set of mutations in response. It wouldn't be at all unprecedented - you can find the same sorts fo genetic similarities between marsupials and mammals (many orders of magnitude more separated in terms of ancestry) who occupy similar ecological niches, so it's entirely plausible this could happen with two populations who shared a very recent common ancestor.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday July 13 2018, @12:32AM
of course. Just it's hard to find the remains - the natural world is pretty vigorous at reusing all molecular matter!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @04:46PM (6 children)
This could be a stunning new archeological find... or it could be a publicity stunt of bad science. I'm reminded of the rule of thumb that "when a new discovery overturns decades of established science, is it more likely that we've been wrong for decades, or that the new discovery is flawed somehow." (Remember that measurement that showed that particle traveling faster than the speed of light a few years ago?)
This announcement shouldn't be summarily dismissed, but I think the go-forward should be "verify before trusting."
This is especially true in that I remember hearing every so often China releasing a new finding that "no, we were really the first ones to do ____," every few months in an effort to bolster national pride. I vaguely recall that most of those don't pan out, although I haven't done the research so could be wrong here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @04:59PM (2 children)
Found the climate denier
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @05:42PM (1 child)
FTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @09:03PM
Wow, that word really has a lot of people just constantly triggered. Or were you not being sarcastic? Just trying to heap another insult on climate deniers? If you're just adding more insults then grow up!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @05:45PM
To be fair, the group that measured the neutrinos said as much (that the measurement was likely wrong), but the journalists didn't care.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 12 2018, @06:10PM (1 child)
Well, I don't follow that kind of thing, but people living in China/south-east Asia *were* the first in a number of fields. Many of the things they were first at they never bothered to develop much, and some were elaborated on first by others. This means that often whether they were "first" at something depends on just how you draw the boundaries around the field.
This is what should be expected as China has (one of?) the longest continuous civilizations on earth. Egypt, Babylonia, and the Indus Valley could give it competition there, but they suffered much more extensive periods of turmoil. In the case of China we don't really know how long a continuous period of civilization it had, because one of the early (in our records) emperors decided that anything that happened before his reign was an insult, and had it destroyed. But this didn't apply to useful technologies, astrology, a few other fields.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 13 2018, @07:35AM
uhm. I wouldn't call egyptian civilization continuous. I mean... europeans figured out hieroglyphs by themselves because the knowledge had been lost.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @05:41PM (1 child)
A couple million years ago, the capitalist pigs started making tools, to increase productivity. The socialists drove them out. Since most of Africa was already occupied, the capitalists moved on to Asia, then onward to Europe, and eventually to the Americas and Australia. Or, maybe not to Australia.
Anyway - the capitalists built kingdoms and empires all over the earth, while the socialists in Africa resisted any kind of progress. Which explains why today, socialists often insist on being called "progressives". They want everyone to forget that they resisted progress for millions of years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @10:45PM
No. Someone who is Anti-Capitalist wears the label Socialist proudly.
Now, the inverse is often true:
There are people who are -not- Anti-Capitalist who like to -call- themselves Socialist.
We refer to those folks as pseudo-left. [google.com]
the capitalists built kingdoms and empires
Nope. That's Feudalism.
It replaced slave economies and, in turn, was replaced by Capitalism.
Now that Capitalism has shown itself to be a system that also oppresses via its inevitible concentration of wealth and political power, it's time for the 99 Percent to embrace the next step in this evolution.
That's (egalitarian) Socialism.
...and hominids, with our small teeth, weak jaws, no claws, slow speeds, and poor climbing ability would have been extinct long ago if it wasn't for our acting collectively to ensure the survival of the community.
(Some have said that the part of the brain which supports socialization was weak in Neanderthal and that's why they aren't around any more.)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @05:43PM
Is SoyCow7025 part of our herd, or part of that herd down the road? She certainly has some nice mammaries!!
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday July 12 2018, @10:24PM (1 child)
See: they have Sock city now, they had Tool city then!
"Do you make socks?"
"No.... i handle all the big tools!"
"That's what SHE said?"
"Uh, er No. I'm a guy."
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @10:59PM
A tip here.
If you're going to use a rolled up sock in your swimsuit, put that in THE FRONT.
Anywhere else and it's just disgusting.
Blame Randy Kagen for that one.
...and Frazer Smith for having him on his show.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 13 2018, @07:39PM
stupid article makes sure to throw in some suck ass bullshit about africa and "our ancestors". Mainly they are just trying to run interference so that people don't know that OOA is falling apart.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 16 2018, @11:20AM
Tool as a concept is not exclusive to humans and hominids, and there is only so many ways to crack a rock to get an edge.
Now, we can choose which possibility is more sensational:
our ancestors older than previously thought,
or
another extinct specie had been more advanced than them much earlier?