October 11, 2024
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The Origins of Humanity paints our ancestors as lovers, not fighters
Fossil and gene discoveries paint an increasingly confused history of humans, combining them with extinct species like the Neanderthals.
The reconstructed face of Krijnen, the oldest Neanderthal found in the Netherlands, went on display at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden on September 6, 2021.
Bart Maat/ANP/AFP via Getty Images
At the heart of scientific questions the origin of humanity questions about human nature lies. Even Wise man natural lovers or fighters, predators or prey, happy survivors or inevitable conquerors?
More palatable answers to these questions keep coming, as evidenced by the abundance of genetic discoveries and recent fossil discoveries. They also emphasize how hard life was for our prehistoric ancestors. However eight billion people On earth today, and counting, winning to survive was the majority of human history.
Not everyone did. Just 200,000 years ago, our ancestors lived on a planet full of many human relatives: Neanderthals He lived in Europe and the Middle East. in Denisovanwhich is known only today bone fragments, teeth and DNAHe lived throughout Asia and maybe also in the Pacific. “Hobbits” or Homo floresiensis, as a small species that lived in Indonesia another species of short staturecalled Homo luzonensis, he did in the philippines. Also The man stood upthe grandparents of the first human species, it was still walking not so long ago 112,000 years ago.
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Now they are all gone. Except in our genes. in Denisovan Crossed with Neanderthalsand both paired with modern humans. The genes “an Unknown hominin in Africa” also marks the genomes of modern humans. The initial discovery of these mixtures, starting in 2010he waved the usual of the time “Out of Africa” photo of human origin, saw a small and unique group of human ancestors develop language and then replace all others around the world in the last 100,000 years.
Instead, the emerging picture of our origins is nothing more than a family tree, and one more tangled bushwhose winding branches fused the various human groups into the wider human population of today. Today’s people are largely descended from a mixture of modern-looking humans from Africa and the various human populations littering the wider world. Those African expatriates first arose from scattered and occasionally mixed populations found throughout that continent.
Neanderthal genes shed light on the extent of this admixture. Instead of waging a war of extermination, modern humans and Neanderthals lived together for at least 10,000 years In Europe and Asia about 50,000 years ago. Or maybe even earlier, with evidence suggesting that Wise man He lived in Greece 210,000 years agothen left Europe to the Neanderthals. Genetic studies suggest this gene exchange peaked twiceabout 200,000 years ago and again 50,000 years ago. Even some bacteria in our mouthcome to think of it, they seem to be of Neanderthal origin. Because of this early admixture, the Neanderthals themselves were average between 2.5 and 3.7 percent Wise man DNA, the contribution that later messed up the family tree.
The disappearance of Neanderthals from the fossil record after 40,000 years ago appears to be more than a matter of demographics. In A 2021 surveythe paleoanthropological field largely agreed that it led to the extinction of small Neanderthal populations. A report from Summer Science confirms this. For this study, Princeton University researchers analyzed recurrent gene flow in the last 200,000 years between humans and Neanderthals. They found 20 percent fewer Neanderthals than expected. There weren’t that many. They mixed and merged into the larger populations of modern humans that arrived from Africa.
Neanderthal numbers were also successful their largest prey—woolly mammoths, bison, and woolly rhinoceroses—declined during the Ice Age. September report of a 100,000-year-old Neanderthal from France Nicknamed “Thorin”. suggests that our cousins were less likely to migrate than modern humans, leaving them vulnerable to climate and landscape changes. Thorin descended from a population that had been genetically isolated for tens of thousands of years, although they lived alongside other Neanderthals who later seem to have mated with modern humans.
A similar picture of mixed genes and small populations is emerging for Denisovans and others archaic human species. All this genetic mixing leaves humanity itself as a bit of a mess. July 2021 exam for example, they found that “only 1.5 to 7 (percent) of the modern human genome is unique to humans.”
That’s not much. In their review of humanity’s scattered genetic history, scientists, including Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum, were once champions. Of a sharp out of Africa view of human origins, he looked beyond the patchwork of human fossils and genes. Stringer and colleagues he concluded in nature in 2021 “It is currently impossible to identify a precise moment when the modern human ancestor was confined to a limited homeland.”
Our origins, therefore, do not appear to be particularly neat, but rather complex, involving a great deal of overlap in time and space. We were not so much wandering conquerors, and potential in-laws, in our new quarters. Something to consider the next time you hear someone talk about their family history, or how other people are unwanted outsiders.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily their own. American scientific
