Million-year-old skull rewrites human evolution, scientists claim

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Flyaway

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Blimey that doesn’t just put things back slightly but a heck of a long way into the past. Think of the creatures our ancestors co-existed with.

A million-year-old human skull found in China suggests that our species, Homo sapiens, began to emerge at least half a million years earlier than we thought, researchers are claiming in a new study.

It also shows that we co-existed with other sister species, including neanderthals, for much longer than we've come to believe, they say.

The scientists claim their analysis "totally changes" our understanding of human evolution and, if correct, it would certainly rewrite a key early chapter in our history.

But other experts in a field where disagreement over our emergence on the planet is rife, say that the new study's conclusions are plausible but far from certain.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdx01ve5151o
 
Not the Chinese skull I was expecting. I presumed it would be the Harbin/Dragon Man skull, found in 1933, which has recently been confirmed to be Homo Longi/Denisovan.
 
Still not quite old enough for them to have seen the Mediterranean fill up, I take it?

They may have seen Megalodon, if there is anything to the aquatic ape deal--which should be looked at once more in light of this discovery.

This *feels* right to me.

Longevity alone could have produced roads due to more time for foot traffic to exist...more time for early Man to look at paths he trod. Just having more time to just walk around could have made all the difference.

More time to build structures...even if they were just loose collections of stone. More time to look at what he had built. More time to see predators defeat those loosely piled walls

So help me--but this longer existence makes me speculate... maybe (low) architecture pre-existed farming!

More time to stare into the darkness...more time to know fear...more time to develop fire.

Where creationists all but think we were born yesterday, I suspected gradualists didn't look far enough back either.

One can honestly doubt that humanity would have survived at all without being older.

Plop me down in the Outback--I'll be dead before nightfall.

Lord Dunsany had a wonderful tale that should be required reading--THE SWORD AND THE IDOL.

This discovery gave me the same feeling I had when I first read that tale. When growing up I had a full three months of summer vacation. My Dad six weeks paid vacation from L&N because he was UTU.

I miss those long vacations, where you could just dream.
 
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It really is an interesting find and quite unexpected, we have a lot to understand about where we came from than we thought. And especially how many ancestoral species that we have.
 
publiusr said:
Still not quite old enough for them to have seen the Mediterranean fill up, I take it?
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You need to go back 5.33 million years for the Zanclean Deluge, so not even close.

There are suggestions for a Black Sea flood at 8-8,800 years ago, or 14-17,000 years ago, but there's no consensus there even was a Black Sea flood.
 
Well, phooey--I was thinking that an ancestor saw some type of inundation that would be the basis of widespread flood narratives.
 
publiusr said:
Well, phooey--I was thinking that an ancestor saw some type of inundation that would be the basis of widespread flood narratives.
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Plenty of Glacial Lake Outburst Floods, such as the one that created the English Channel c200,000 BCE, and tsunamis such as the one after the 2nd Storrega Slide that inundated the coasts of Norway, Scotland and Doggerland c6,200 BCE.

Lots of massive Glacial Lake Outburst Floods in North America at the end of the last Ice Age (eg from Lake Spokane or Lake Agassiz), c17,000BCE, but that's contemporaneous with the arrival of paleo-humans via Beringia, so whether anyone had got south enough to see them is open to question.
 
publiusr said:
Well, phooey--I was thinking that an ancestor saw some type of inundation that would be the basis of widespread flood narratives.
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As DWG said, there are plenty of plausible flood stories. Probably the best documented are Aboriginal oral traditions from Australia referring to 120 m increases in sea levels between 7-and-8k years ago.

As to the question of whether humans saw the Missoula glacial lake outpourings, those floods date to 13-15k BP. That is awfully close in time to the nearby Anzick-1 specimen (~12,600 BP) which has yielded the oldest whole genome from the Americas. Alas, no verifiable evidence, but it seems highly plausible that people witnessed the Missoula floods.

The possible Black Sea deluge fit nicely with Fertile Crescent flood myths but the gentler inundation on the Persian Gulf tend to get ignored. Certainly the flooding of the basin which became the Persian Gulf would have been less dramatic but, when it began (15k BP), there would have been plenty of human witnesses.

OT but the single-family angle of Fertile Crescent flood myths contrasts with some indigenous takes on the Lake Agassiz outflow. The flood legend of the Inuvialuit of the western Canadian Arctic involves a man, his wife, their son, and an orphan girl. I guess the thinly-spread Inuit have a better grasp on hybrid vigour and the dangers of inbreeding.
 
DWG said:
Lots of massive Glacial Lake Outburst Floods in North America at the end of the last Ice Age (eg from Lake Spokane or Lake Agassiz), c17,000BCE, but that's contemporaneous with the arrival of paleo-humans via Beringia, so whether anyone had got south enough to see them is open to question.
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It's possible that with the most recent glacial lake outburst floods from Glacial Lake Missoula may've been witnessed by the earliest ancestors of Native American Indians, these glacial outbursts are what formed the Channelled Scablands in Washington state. It would've been a terrifying event watching 500 cubic-miles of glacial-lake flood out with waves over 800ft high as they gouged out the land beneath forming those Scabland channels.

NOVA-Mystery of the Megaflood (2005)
 
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What a finding !
There was indication in analysis of DNA on Modern Humans, Neanderthals and Denisova Humans
That Homo Sapiens is far older that 300000 years

This discovery is sensational because, in that time the human population drop to 1200 persons,
because drastic climate change in Mid-Pleistocene and begin of Ice ages.
There not much human fossil from that period.

however on Human evolution there new question
are we successor of Homo Erectus ?
or we split from Homo Habilis and from two branches, one to Modern Human, the Other to Neanderthals ?
 
Michel Van said:
...
however on Human evolution there new question
are we successor of Homo Erectus ?
or we split from Homo Habilis and from two branches, one to Modern Human, the Other to Neanderthals ?
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Actually, I think erectus vs habilis is an old question. And I don't think there is any further serious consideration other than that H. erectus evolved from H. habilis (or similar). That process may have been via Homo ergaster (which is sometimes just folded into erectus).

The real complexity begins when the same species name lasts a million years as is the case with H. erectus. That brings up the age-old palaeontological tradition of 'lumpers' vs 'splitters'. However, most agree that Homo heidelbergensis (assigned various names depending on geography) was the common origin of Homo sapiens (in Africa) and 'Homo neanderthalensis' (in Europe and, perhaps, Asia).

I put 'H. neanderthalensis' in single quotes to emphasize the artificiality of designating species. DNA evidence suggests that modern humans and Neanderthal diverged from heidelbergensis (aka Homo rhodesiensis) some 350-to-400 kya. And yet, all modern humans with origins outside of Africa share some Neanderthal DNA. In other words, the two 'species' could both breed and produce fertile offspring.

So, how are we to define species and speciation? I would argue for sub-species - H. sapiens sapiens and H. sapiens neanderthalensis - but that is a whole new bag of worms!
 
Apophenia said:
DNA evidence suggests that modern humans and Neanderthal diverged from heidelbergensis (aka Homo rhodesiensis) some 350-to-400 kya.
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I was under the impression that the split occurred ~600,000 years ago.
 
NMaude said:
I was under the impression that the split occurred ~600,000 years ago.
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Permanent H. heidelbergensis sites in Europe were only established 500 kya. The so-called 'pre-Neanderthals' emerge 430 kya. The oldest Neanderthal remains are ~200 kya but DNA evidence suggests that interbreeding began around 250 kya.
 
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