> In contrast, evolutionary theory puts humans (or hominins) last, just as does the biblical story of Genesis. Yet in all instances, the position confers on Homo sapiens a unique status, thereby separating us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Ha ha ha, no. That’s a wild misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, that humans are somehow “more evolved” than other current species. Modern apes are our siblings, not our ancestors. And nothing fundamental “separates” us from other animals: we’re yet another species, granted with some unique features that we ourselves consider very important.
It's also incorrect about the biblical story of Genesis. Because Genesis contains two creation stories (though biblical literalists prefer to brush away that fact).
Quoting a bit more from the article:
> Like other folk zoologists, the Lio put humans first, most notably as the origin of nonhuman animals, a sort of Darwinism in reverse. In contrast, evolutionary theory puts humans (or hominins) last, just as does the biblical story of Genesis.
Genesis 1 indeed puts humans last, but Genesis 2 puts them first. And Genesis 2 is the older story of the two. Maybe that explains why it's more in line with those folk zoologists? Genesis 1 (a poem, structured by the days of the week) was written later, possibly during the Babylonian exile, and may be more informed by the science of the Babylonians; it addresses not just the creation of the Earth and the creatures on it, but also the sun and stars, and the passage of time; topics that the Babylonians were very interested in.
Well, regarding the story of creation in the Bible, it's not clear that humans come "first" even in Genesis 2, if we follow the story. Here's how it goes: God creates Adam, then Eve, then they have two children, Cain and Abel. Then Cain kills Abel.
And then Cain says to God: "I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me." And God responds: "Not so; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over." And God "put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him." (Genesis 4, 14-15)
But who are they? (whoever, anyone, no one) At this point in the story there should only be three people on earth: Adam, Eve and Cain. And in the following verse it says that "Cain made love to his wife".
Where does she come from?
One possible explanation is that the story of creation talks about one specific tribe, among other tribes that would pre-exist to the family of Adam, or at least co-exist.
Which is kind of relevant to the debate of different species of humans.
That's true, but that's Genesis 4. A continuation of the story in Genesis 2, but not really that creation story itself anymore. My comment is more about the structural similarity of the creation in Genesis 2 story to those "folk zoologists", than about what it means in the context of the rest of Genesis.
The fact that according to Genesis 4 other people did exist is a very good but in my opinion completely different issue.
Genesis 2:5 begins with: "When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up...". "Bush of the field" and "small plant of the field" were not part of the list of vegetation created on day 3 in Genesis 1 ("plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit"). The explanation can be found in Genesis 3:18. As part of the curse for eating forbidden fruit, the Lord says to Adam: "cursed is the ground because of you [...] thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field." The bush/plants of the field were not created until after man was made. We can conclude that these plants did not produce food in the form of grain or fruit like the vegetation created on day 3. Because of man's sin these plants became thorns and thistles. There is no need to assume a contradiction between Genesis 1 and 2.
I'd be careful connecting anything from Genesis 1 to elements from Genesis 2-4. They're different and unrelated stories written at very different times. Reading too much into these sort of connections could easily lead you to completely different conclusions than what the authors intended.
Although it's certainly true that Genesis 3 suggests thorns, thistles and other nastier parts of nature weren't around at first, which again fits the "man came first" aspect of the Genesis 2 creation story.
Your point that the two creation accounts are different stories written at different times is well taken, and many people underappreciate that fact.
However, it is also important to recognize that they were brought together and redacted by an editor (or committee of editors, perhaps even spread out over time) that arranged and tweaked the stories. At the very least, it is easy to glean from the text that they are intended to form a whole "collection," with connections between the various myths. The textual evidence suggests that the connections are stronger than that.
So while it is the more common error to underappreciate the differences between the accounts, it is a less common but equally erroneous mistake to underappreciate the "unity" (of a sort) that they have.
What if we assume skilled authorship which made connections purposefully in order to emphasize important points? Genesis is full of such connections.
If we assume harmony between Genesis 1:11-13 (fruits/grains) and Genesis 2:5 (bush/plants of the field) then it is clear that fruit was the chief food in the garden and agriculture came later.
> If one of them was not correct nobody would have put them in the same bible.
Focusing on "correct" is the wrong approach to reading these old mythological parts of the Bible. People put these stories in the Bible because of their story and meaning, not because of any kind of historical correctness. (Because how could they know?)
"The population of brown bears that polar bears are descended from" are presumably dead, right? The current population of brown bears are likewise descended from the same population of brown bears.
> You'll hear people say things like "if evolution is real then why are there still monkeys?"
The only person I've ever met in my life who did not believe in evolution was a catholic priest. It's honestly bewildering to me that evolutionary sceptics are common enough to warrant a note in mainstream media or even just normal conversation. To me it's comparable to finding out there are still geocentrism apologists.
Although from what I've read it's more common in US. I'm in Europe so that may be the source of my bubble.
As nuclearnice1 has noted... "Catholics seem almost the same as the US population overall to believe in evolution." I am a practicing Catholic, happily formed and informed. There is nothing in Church teaching that prevents the faithful from studying and defending evolution(1) (or any of the natural sciences, for that matter--contrary to popular belief, the Church does not condemn science that is true to its discipline). Some will reject it (often out of ignorance of what evolution actually teaches(2) or simply as a matter of choice) while others will prayerfully accept it. Myself, I am fascinated by science and always in appreciation to those who genuinely "stick to the science."
(1) But there is an important provision to be considered by the faithful: the teaching of evolution cannot patently claim that there is no God. It is outside the scope of any science to disprove (or prove) the existence of God. And thus it is a misrepresentation of the science for any of the faithful to claim otherwise. The Church respects science in its endeavor to sincerely discover truth; Pope John Paul II once put it as such in his writings (I am paraphrasing here): "Faith forms reason, reason informs faith."
(2) Darwin's work was in fact not motivated by a sense of atheism [1]. In fact, I believe that I once discovered that in the Forward to On the Origin of Species, he references God in a positive note. The exact comment escapes me--perhaps someone with the actual text can verify this.
It is very common for "Christians" in the US to believe that evolution is not real. There have even been efforts in some schools demanding that "creationism" (the bible) be taught next to evolution as another scientific possibility of the Earth's creation with the scientific proof being the Bible.
I went to college at a public university here in the states. When we got to the evolution chapters of Biology, multiple kids walked out in the middle of class sessions.
One day the professor came in and very sternly told us something along the lines of "If you disagree with this and you want to walk out, that's fine - remember, you're the ones paying to be here, and you're adults and that's your choice. But I'd like to re-emphasis the 'you're adults' part - it is unacceptable for me to be receiving angry letters from your parents. If you don't pass this class because you walk out, that's on you and you need to own that consequence." ~ oof, it was a rough Monday.
People outright rejecting evolution I have met very few (I'm also outside the US). But I think it is a somewhat common view that evolution was kicked off and being shaped by a god. While the gist of evolutionary theory is simple to grasp for everyone, the results and involved timespans are mind-boggling.
I would ask both of you where you grew up Catholic, because I suspect that the prevalence of such beliefs is much more regional than strictly denominational.
Specifically, from what I've read, they're likely to be much more prevalent in the US Bible Belt and other places with strong concentrations of evangelical fundamentalists, because despite Catholicism being extremely different doctrinally, the actual Catholics in that area are almost invariably going to be more influenced by the culture around them, including the attitude toward religion and science.
I didn't grow up Catholic. I converted as an adult from a fundamentalist Evangelical background, and one of the criticisms well-intentioned friends had for me at the time was that "the Catholics believe in evolution."
And that's very much the case. Formal Church documents confirm the belief, and the very large majority of Catholics believe it. There isn't anything contradictory in believing evolution may have been the means by which God created people.
Whether that was the case when or where anyone else was growing up, I can't attest. I'm only speaking to the commonality of the belief in the present.
Catholics seem almost the same as the US population overall to believe in evolution. Evangelicals tend to express the opinion that humans have existed in the same form forever.
I think the important thing to note though, is this was not always the case? Catholicism and evolutionary theory have a rather strange history where it has changed stance several times. The recent Catholic church has not been opposed to it and has priests who work on evolution just at there are priests who work on physics and the large hadron collider.
It's kind of strange to say but if anything Creationists believe in a hyper evolution - for starters there is a complimentary geological theory which holds that most changes are catastrophic e.g. canyons, islands are the result of wildly destructive volcanos, primordial floods (think massive post iceage lakes breaking through a mountainside, or extreme and constant hurricanes and tidal waves).
As for evolution, the Christians literally believe man was made whole, along with every other living thing - a more sci-fi explanation would be massive viral and bacterial mutation, like a lichen growing legs and arms (bacteria and viruses both evolve at breathtaking speeds, so it is possible if unlikely).
Creationists do actually acknowledge evolution, they usually downplay its significance or spend a lot of time pointing the current scientific inconsistencies in mainstream evolutionary theories.
I think they are both a bit wrong - obviously Creationism is wildly optimistic about both an all powerful entity who creates things then mysteriously vanishes, never to be heard from again (discounting the delusions or child-exploitation of near death "I met god" accounts). There is a wide amount of expression our genes already afford us - it only takes a couple generations for most animals or plants to express very different visible traits. Couple that with invasive viral infections permanently mutating the gonad materials (eggs, sperm, spores) and wild environmental fluctuations (meteors hitting the ocean), you could experience evolutionary forces in a very short time frame. I don't know that you require billions or trillions of years in the margins of carbon dating.
Ignoring questions of whether the astrophysicists have it right with the age of the known universe (is the big bang truly the beginning of the universe or just an event in a multidimensional cosmos?), a middle ground where the evolutionists and Christians are both wrong seems more plausible to me - hominids have been around for a very, very long time, perhaps even coexisting hundreds or billions of years ago with dinosaurs. We just happen to exist post some set of climactic events, cutting us off from our history.
I should clarify - I am not pro Creationism, I used to appreciate having been taught a different theory, however apologist doesn't make for good science, especially when the mainstream theories have the easy out of calling anything else "Christian nonsense". E.g. in physics there is the standard model, and various competing alternative models, crucially there are no major appeals to authority and so competing theories can thrive. Evolution is almost political on the other hand, much the same as climate science.
I guess we had Christian physics, we called that witchcraft. Ironically, with some of the immoral things modern tech has enabled, perhaps the claims of beezlebub in your tech weren't off the mark wholly. They are plenty of angels in tech though too...
It doesn't seem far off to me to interpret evolution as meaning that specific lineages didn't go extinct.
The common ancestor between us and bonobos, chimps, gorillas, orangs is still around. They're just bonobos, chimps, gorillas and orangs and humans nowadays because some populations simply matched their environments over a (long) time and became more fit in their niche.
The question what constitutes a species, for sake of our classification desires, is also very relevant to this. Populations separating and changing until offspring isn't viable? Why do some of us have Neanderthal genes?
> Populations separating and changing until offspring isn't viable?
Generally, but then you have things like multiple canids being different species but able to produce viable hybrids (e.g. the large number of coywolves we have near me). Since "species" is a classification we made up which doesn't map to reality particularly well, it gets pretty fuzzy at the edges.
Monkeys are on the decline since clever and mostly hairless apes took over.
The latter might be too clever for their own good however, having invented carbon-fueled industry, super-powered AI, and various hyper-destructive weapons. Also Twitter. And NFTs.
This sort of teleological and "ranked" view where what we ourselves consider "most developed" we assume must also be "last" or "have undergone more evolution" reminds me of our some of our views of human social patterns too.
Like thinking a "culture" that some people have labelled/categorized as "hunter gatherer" therefore somehow is "less developed" or even has "less history" than other social groupings, and reveals the way humans were a long time ago -- whereas in fact any human culture on the planet at the same time has the same amount of history and development behind them.
Some of this is covered in Graeber and Wengrow's recent _The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity_.
We really want to impute a direction to changes over time (whether biological or social); to think that the changes always go in the same direction; that it's a direction of "better"; that the things we currently value as 'better' are that directional 'better'; and that therefore anything we think is 'not as good' is somehow "earlier" or "less developed". None of those are accurate ways to understand actual historical changes over time, whether biological/evolutionary or social or anything else really.
Well, at least we have 'undergone more evolution', possibly, arguably.
But if you want to deconstruct the argument fully, evolution actually isn't really anything at all - shifting genes in a shifting environment.
Like a rock rolling down a hill, bouncing off of other rocks.
It's not even a 'process' and it probably should be called:
'Species Drift' or something like that.
And taken even further - you and I are just 'lumps of material bouncing around'.
The term 'intelligence' has no scientific meaning either.
How can a bag of random particles be 'intelligent' or 'create'?
You're not 'reading' this, you're randomly bouncing through the universe. It just seems like you are 'doing' something.
But you're not 'doing' anything more than the chair you are sitting on. It's there, you are there. You both got there the same way.
But the matter of fact is, we do have metaphysical foundations:
Mineral, Vegetable, Animal, Human 'Kindgoms' in which we believe that the 'Human' condition is more evolved, at very least Han the 'Mineral' and likely 'Vegetable'.
We basically take that, and the presence of life as 'matter of fact' and a kind reality.
It just doesn't jive well with Scientific Materialism.
And if we do accept those basic principles, well, we are 'pretty much 'more' evolved than chimps', even though technically I do understand it's also reasonable to just say 'we are siblings with common ancestors' and that's that.
Every species in existence right now has the same number of years of evolutionary history, right?
So on what basis are you saying it makes sense to say humans have had "more" evolution than chimpanzees? What does it mean for one species to have "undergone more evolution" than another, if both have the same amount of evolutionary history?
Just on the basis that you believe the result of that evolution for humans is an organism you consider more sophisticated? That is, I'd think, dependent on the assumption that evolution always leads in the direction you consider "more sophisticated", and, I guess, that it takes so much evolution to get so much sophictiation so something that is "more sophisticated" just must be "more evolved". That is also not true.
You can make a "metaphysical" value judgement that humans are more sophisticated, sure! I'm not trying to say that is inappropriate to do. But "evolved" is the wrong word for this, if you think it means the same thing we're talking about when we're talking about biological species evolution as formulated by Darwin etc.
Oh yes, everything alive has the same level of evolution, that said, things evolve and adapt at different rates.
The term 'evolved' I think can be used in English to describe something 'more advanced' by the crude and arbitrary manner in which we generally apply it.
Maybe in a Scientific context it wouldn't be correct, I admit that.
Yeah, I mean the whole point I'm working on here (going off of codeflo who I was replying to, who was making much the same point) -- is that we believe that the biological process of evolution always leads in the direction of "advancement", and something that is "more advanced" (which is to some extent both subjective, and a value judgement rather than a descriptive one) has "more evolution" behind it (the biological kind).
Yes, the word "evolved" can be used in a non-scientific way that has nothing to do with the origin of species or natural selection or genetic change over time too. I don't know if this the cause of our confusion, or that it's the result of our confusion, because so many of us, since Darwin, have had these assumptions that "evolution" functions teleologically and in a certain direction at a certain rate.
So that leads the wrong idea that, as codeflo points out, "evolutionary theory puts humans (or hominins) last" over chimpanzees, or humans undergone "more evolution" than chimpanzeees.
When we understand the biological process of evolution more clearly, we can understand the natural world and the species in it and the relation between them more clearly.
There's a sharp difference between being more evolved and being better (e.g. smarter). We have "drifted" from a common ancestor for the same billions of years as, say, slime molds, so we cannot possibly be more evolved.
We are last in the sense that we are leaf nodes on the tree of life (at least for the moment)? But of course that is by no means a unique trait, the tree would have many many leaf nodes.
And all of them are currently "good enough", so roughly at the same level of fitness. Of course, models that have been relatively stable for 400M years, like sharks, are in some sense "better" than the fad of the day, like us.
To be more evolved, means to be more changed from the source. It means specialization for a specific scenario. Often "more evolved" can be "worse" once the environment changes, and that specialization becomes a disadvantage instead of an advantage. Or that a change brings one benefit but another potentially larger pitfall in the long run.
The amount of evolution should be measured in iteration cycles, how much change over how much time. It's also possible that something iterated many many times quickly long in the past and then stopped, vs something that just started making changes more recently.
I think you misunderstood parent. There is a natural order on the tree of life starting in the first living organism (the root node) and ending in organisms that are still around (the leaf nodes).
With 'last' parent meant 'last with respect to that order', not necessarily in the sense of 'older' and 'newer' (which correlates with this order, as you pointed out).
I think this is supposed to mean that humans appeared relatively late in Earth's history ("two minutes to midnight"), instead of being there from the very beginning. Or to put it in a different way: much more species appeared before humans existed than after they already existed.
I was with you until that statement. The concept of "importance" itself is also something we ourselves consider ie. you're not a monkey therefore you don't know if importance is even a thing for a monkey, or if it is and that it appears that they prefer bananas over AK 47's you're still not a monkey so you won't be able to be sure.
Therefore to attribute having the same concept of importance as us to another species is absurd.
Wonderful Life The Burgess Shale Nature of History does an excellent job explaining why the textbook visualization of the evolutionary tree reenforces this notion and why it needs to be done away with. It may be a wild understanding, but when every middle schooler is shown "The March of Progress" can it be any surprise that folks think we're more evolved?
In biblical terms this doesn't make sense to me because before they left the paradise Adam and Eve already had the task to step down to the animals and name them (step down as in: take care of them).
What separates us, in biblical terms, is that humans were made after the image of God.
If becomming conscious is what separates us, how do we know other creatures are unconscious?
I feel like the main difference is that we shape the world around us to a degree far greater than any other being, to the point where it affected our evolution tens, hundreds of thousands of years ago. I mean yeah, some animals use tools like sticks or rocks to get food, or build rudimentary shelters like nests, or even plant or store food for next year, but they don't build fires and cook their food, they don't produce more than they need for themselves and their immediate families, etc.
I mean you see a lot of human / societal traits in a lot of animals, but humans have perfected it to an extreme degree. "Top of the foodchain" is another one; sure, in a barehanded 1v1 we probably won't make it out of a bear fight, but as a group we can decimate all other creatures + each other + the whole world.
They can’t communicate with humans, and their thought patterns are likely very different to ours. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they are just as complex. Whales and dolphins especially.
How complex are a humans thoughts if not raised by other humans? How much of complex thought is transferred generationally through example and language. An octopus biology may be capable of extremely complex thought, but as a species they are limited by their inability to document and propagate information in written form, unless they have some kind of telekinesis and can beam and download memories from each other.
I'm not a big believer of thought complex thought patterns that fail to manifest in any meaningful way. If they are as sentient, they should have to make a difference.
The same attitude was shown by humans towards other humans a thousand years ago. If they couldn't understand the language of another tribe, they considered that tribe inferior and called them names signifying that.
The ancient Greeks called non-Greek-speaking peoples "barbarians", suggesting they are uncivilised, primitive. To this day, the name of Germany in Polish means "those-who-cannot-speak".
One of our major advantages against other animals are versatile hands with opposable thumbs.
I wonder what corvids could do if they had hands and not just beaks. They are fairly smart, I would expect them at least to build some more complex structures. Which would trigger a self-reinforcing cycle between improving tools and improving brains.
Now it dawns on me that it might be possible in the future to give them the necessary genes to grow hands ... wild.
To you. If someone doesn't speak to you and doesn't respond "meaningfully" to your input, does that mean they do not have complex thought patterns? With that philosophy, it's probably for the best that you don't take care of sick people :)
And we keep having original sins. The original sin of America is slavery. The original sin of the Internet is advertising. We ain't ever getting back in.
By some interpretations, sentience is the original sin (or at least the consequence of it.) Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, after all, and if you take the serpent at its word, the knowledge was to "be like God, knowing both good and evil."
Then again, the original sin is more likely to be disobeying God to begin with. Although that leads to a chicken and egg question of how it was possible for Adam and Eve to be talked into disobeying God to begin with if humans didn't have the capacity to sin at the time.
Yep, the two are intertwined. This is actually some deep philosophy related to the determinism/free will debate and how it relates to morality, embedded in religious scripture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis claims that the most recent fossils are about 50,000 years old. Without more recent bones, we have no reason to believe that they still exist.
That said, myths about both small human-like animals and large ones are practically universal. We have another universal myth that was fairly recently dated to be much older than you'd expect. https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom... shows that the myth about the Pleiades, aka "seven sisters", likely date back 100,000 years. Given that, would it be surprising that myths like the Sasquatch date back to folk memories of Neandertals? Who our ancestors knew much more recently than that?
An ancestor of mine, something like a great-great grandmother, woke up to see a family of very small, about knee-high, people driving their flock of very small cattle.
This wasn't very unusual. Everyone knew about småfolk (little people) and they were usually described in similar ways. On Sundays they could be seen on the forest pathways leading to church, wearing traditional Sunday clothes.
This fascinates me. Of course I don't think there's a parallel society of tiny humans living in the Swedish forests but I don't think that most people were lying either. I wonder what makes you experience something like that.
I remember, about 25 years ago when I was in the military, marching at night after a week of sleep and food deprivation, that I started seeing things. Just over the tree silhouettes I saw a circus tent, and I heard circus music and ruckus.
The mind does strange things when you are tired, bored, or stimulated to (eg flicker-induced hallucinations).
I also firmly believe tales of gnomes and such are a way to explain what cannot otherwise be explained. "I don't know what caused this, gotta be the rascal tomte again." Reasons have always been invented even when the invented reasons themselves raise more questions than what they should explain.
It’s even weirder when it’s shared. Also in the military, we stopped for an MRE break and my buddy’s MRE flew out of his ruck, held by some glowing creature and flew off into the woods. We both looked at each other and said, “did you see that?” His MRE was gone, we couldn’t explain it without seeming crazy and never spoke of it again.
This made me recall trip reports from erowid back in the day, apparently tripping on several grams of fresh ground nutmeg similarly was noted to result in hallucinations shared between tripping partners.
One time when I was camping late at night I took a piss out at this fence line facing a wide open field under a full moon. This freakin' huge owl flew right past a couple meters to one side of me, scaring the crap out of me. It was completely and utterly silent; no wing flapping noise. In the moonlight it did look like it was glowing.
Hahaha! On the topic, my wife did her thesis in Rwanda, researching the behaviour of monkeys living close to humans and how that affects eg food-gathering behaviour.
One night, when they were camping in tents out on the savanna, she had to go pee. There was no toilet of course, but a bucket. So she went, and as she sat there, she flicked the flashlight around and was met by the reflection of two eyes, wide apart enough and at a height that it certainly was no small animal. Probably a hyena.
They also had a hippo casually stroll through the camp. Hippos are really dangerous - fast, strong, aggressive. Kinda scary, but fun story!
That is certainly possible. We just dismissed it as being tired, hungry and seeing shit. I didn’t even remember it until being reminded of my own impossible military ruck experience.
those long periods of isolation and limited novel stimuli that were presumably common in pre modern times probably had a similar effect as the various mild hallucinations you experience during a long meditation session. Also, I don't have a source for this due to Google's fuzzy keyword matching and my efforts limited to about 90 sec but IIRC even Nietzsche had pondered if miracles were previously more common due to dietary deficiencies causing hallucinations.
I do agree though that it is interesting and even with a simple materialist explaination, the fact that people would see similar diminutive mythical people across cultures is fascinating. Hawaiians had menehune, etc etc. I tend to think of that in the Joseph Campbell collective unconscious sort of way.
Assuming the effects of ergot are similar to those of LSD (to which it is closely related) - it just doesn't work like that.
There are some drugs that cause you to literally see things that aren't there (Datura springs to mind) but most hallucinogens merely distort perceptions. There is a degree of pareidolia but the hollywood depiction of people tripping and seeing pink elephants is very far from the actual experience.
Good call. I can't imagine that it wasn't responsible to some degree. I wonder if cultures that grew rye/wheat/barley had a higher rate of attributable phenomena than those that didn't grow cereals that support Claviceps purpurea
The amount of Ergot tainted grain you would need to consume to have hallucinations would mean you would be very sick. It wouldn't be an otherwise healthy person hallucinating, but a very ill delirious person.
People in solitary confinement start having hallucinations, it's actually very common. After a summer in the woods with nobody but cows for company you might have similar effects
Sending kids into the woods for a summer by themselves to watch over livestock is a cool idea though, I wish I could have experienced something like that.
Sometimes, when my mind is tired, it switches to a state where it interprets things that are large and far away as being small and nearby. I wonder if that phenomenon could explain why so many people see little people doing the same things regular people do.
I have a similar effect with Cannabis. I can see things and recognize their distance but my mind distorts it and says "Hey, wait a second, these 10cm might also be 10m, you never know!"
All while I can clearly see it not being 10m. I know it's 10cm but my mind doesn't "accept" it. I wonder if the drug triggers pathways that might be triggered in 'natural' situations as well, such as fatigue.
Could just be midgets (I hope that term is not mysteriously offensive, if so, sorry), but who felt shunned, intermarried, thus strengthening the genes.
Look at how big, and how small dogs can be. Why not humans, too?
It's not just the one mutation that causes the size range of dogs. That's probably a factor, but I feel comfortable saying that we would have a much wider variety of cat sizes if they had had as much selective breeding for size and type as dogs.
There's evidence that the structure of the dog genome makes it easier to breed for various characteristics – the "slippery genome" theory [1]. It looks like the science isn't fully settled, however [2].
Thanks for the links. I'll read through them when I've got the time.
Having not read any of your references, I'd like to point out that the variation in domestic horses is right up there with dogs. You go from Shires to Miniature Horses, Arabians to Clydesdales. It's a huge spectrum because they were bred for specific tasks. I feel like even domestic rabbits and chickens see more variation than cats.
Maybe cats are just that stubborn or maybe we don't have many jobs for them besides pest control and snuggling.
Photos only go back 150 years, and were very rare.
In terms of adult human size, no way. There are little dogs, smaller than domestic cats, and dogs as big as an adult human male. EG, almost 200lbs, 5 to 6 feet on hind legs.
Have you seen many human adults, smaller than a baby?
Growing up 250m from where the Neandertals were found, I got to watch in real time as the common (or communicated) thinking on it evolved, from the image of the primitive brute to the model that, wearing a suit, wouldn't seem out of place sitting across the table from you at Starbucks. Assuming the later view to be closer to the truth, and also including the genetic evidence that quite a bit of mating happened between these branches, I believe the relationship would have been more familiar than the rare sightings of physically intimidating strangers that seem to form the core of the Sasquatch myth.
Given the evidence that Neandertals were not able to master things like sewing, and also lived an extremely active lifestyle (they were bigger, stronger, and had lots of broken bones that healed), the Sasquatch doesn't seem like that bad a fit.
As for quite a bit of mating, current estimates say a maximum of dozens of times over a period of 12,000 years. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC532398/ for verification. This is, "once every few hundred years someone got pregnant." This fits with rare enough encounters that interspecies sex only happened once every few generations.
> Given the evidence that Neandertals were not able to master things like sewing
Don't read too much into that. Native Americans (homo sapiens from the whole American continent) didn't master wheels for transport. Aztecs did have toys that used wheels, the concept wasn't foreign, but somehow they didn't see the need to upscale it for transport. Yes, we can argue that they didn't have draught animals, but there are plenty of human powered uses for wheels, and some regions did have horses, llamas or buffaloes.
> somehow they didn't see the need to upscale it for transport
If you weren't aware, the Aztec capital was built in the middle of a lake, a kind of larger version of Venice, so the most effective way to move goods around would by boat rather than any land-based transportation. The area outside of Lake Texcoco would have been quite mountainous, with lowland regions largely being dense jungles, both regions that are obviously poorly suited for wheeled transportation in general.
This is the kind of terrain where the modern US Army, with all of its technological access, will still rely on pack mules to move goods. Do you really think wheeled transport would have been a viable invention in such circumstances?
That's exactly the point that the GP is making. It's not that they were incapable of creating the technology, they just didn't see it as useful. Similarly, the Neanderthals may have been capable of sewing, they just didn't do it.
where the wheelbarrow is concerned the question then arises, is the wheelbarrow a primary wheeled invention of a secondary one, that is to say do people invent stuff like carts because they are really necessary for moving things around in their area and then afterwards think hey what if we had a smaller cart for moving things in smaller areas?
I think it's a secondary invention, and then if you are in an area where the primary invention just doesn't make much sense neither one gets invented.
But were those wheelbarrows invented in Venice to handle problems that they encountered moving things around their local environment or did they get theirs from some traveler who agreed to tell them where they could get their own?
But making a practical wheel out of wood would take some significant woodworking and joinery skills. They may have tried, and just gave up after the wheel would fracture after a few moments use.
I.e. the concept of the wheel and making a successful implementation of it are very different things.
Horses and humans i the Americas at the same time is a post-Columbus thing. Buffaloes can't be domesticated. Llamas are mountain animals and wheeled wagons in mountains are extra hard to do well. Even in the old world, wheels where primarily a steppe thing.
Edit: I was wrong about the horses, there is a overlap.
Before 12800 years ago, North America was home to both horses and camels, along with ~30 other now extinct genera including mammoths, mastodons, cheetahs, dire wolves, giant sloths, and a bear much larger than the grizzly. All of those were obliterated at that geological instant, along with the Clovis culture, apparently by a meteorite or comet strike. It also melted many cubic miles of glacial ice in an instant, scouring out the Scablands of eastern Washington state in a flood hundreds of feet deep, carving out the whole Columbia Gorge in only days. It ignited continent-spanning fires that destroyed everything anyone might have built.
Nothing would have prevented the people who lived before then from domesticating horses and using them to pull wagons. None has been found, but remarkable little remains of the people who were in North America for at least 10 millennia before then.
That happened in Eurasia. Events in the Americas were decoupled from Eurasia.
The fact is, we don't have any evidence for or against any domestication, or wheels, in North America. Any evidence that might have existed was burned up along with everything else, in the YD conflagration. So, any estimation of probability is 100% guessing, with a decorative and misleading frosting of "science".
What we do have firm evidence for is domestication of tree species in South America before 10,000 years ago. So, domestication did happen there before similar events in Eurasia.
Tree domestication takes a lot longer than for pulses and grains, which hints they might have started rather earlier. The Amazon basin was never as heavily affected by ice ages as temperate regions smothered under ice, miles deep, although of course it went through major climate shifts of its own. I would not be surprised to learn that, 20kya, much of it was savanna.
Where are you getting this theory that there was an impact event that.killed off both the megafauna and the Clovis people's off?
Everything (credible) I'm able to find suggests/theorises that the Clovis differentiated into different groups of Native American populations, and that gradual climate change did most of the megafauna in.
There have been many interglacials and only in one did the megafauna die out en masse. This is a good argument against it simply being from climate change.
Instead look to what was different in the most recent one. A weird species on 2 feet with hunting techniques that the megafauna had never encountered before. Such as using fire to drive whole herds of horses off of a cliff.
Not plausible. Humans at much higher density had been able to drive island populations to extinction, but had not succeeded on a continent. Furthermore, they had been in the Americas for many millennia already.
Horses and camels were all over Asia, coeval with humans, and did fine. Lions survived in in Europe well into recorded history. Africa, of course, retained about everything for hundreds of millennia, except for 3 genera right at 12800 years ago. The only notable extinction in Eurasia was the woolly mammoth, which survived only on Wrangel Island. Humans had been in the Americas for many millennia, but populations of these animals did not decline during that time.
Instead, the 30+ genera and the Clovis people all vanished at identically the same time, coincident with the layer of radically elevated platinum dust, shocked quartz, and soot.
Abstract: The Younger Dryas boundary (YDB) cosmic-impact hypothesis is based on considerable evidence that Earth collided with fragments of a disintegrating ≥100-km-diameter comet, the remnants of which persist within the inner solar system ∼12,800 y later. Evidence suggests that the YDB cosmic impact triggered an “impact winter” and the subsequent Younger Dryas (YD) climate episode, biomass burning, late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions, and human cultural shifts and population declines.
The cosmic impact deposited anomalously high concentrations of platinum over much of the Northern Hemisphere, as recorded at 26 YDB sites at the YD onset, including the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 ice core, in which platinum deposition spans ∼21 y (∼12,836–12,815 cal BP). The YD onset also exhibits increased dust concentrations, synchronous with the onset of a remarkably high peak in ammonium, a biomass-burning aerosol. In four ice-core sequences from Greenland, Antarctica, and Russia, similar anomalous peaks in other combustion aerosols occur, including nitrate, oxalate, acetate, and formate, reflecting one of the largest biomass-burning episodes in more than 120,000 y.
In support of widespread wildfires, the perturbations in CO2 records from Taylor Glacier, Antarctica, suggest that biomass burning at the YD onset may have consumed ∼10 million km^2, or ∼9% of Earth’s terrestrial bio-mass. The ice record is consistent with YDB impact theory that extensive impact-related biomass burning triggered the abrupt onset of an impact winter, which led, through climatic feedbacks, to the anomalous YD climate episode.
Toy wheels don’t scale. A solid piece of wood is too fragile, it easily splits into rings.
A good wooden wheel is harder than it looks.
You need planks that are crossed with each other, which require good quality saws and a tight fit. Secondly, you need good well fitted axels, which also requires precision tools.
> You need planks that are crossed with each other, which require good quality saws and a tight fit.
You don't need saws at all. Initial shaping with an adze, and subsequent flattening/fitting of the two pieces with friction and an abrasive like sand would give you closely fitted wood surfaces, though not necessarily all that flat.
Note that a somewhat similar technique was used to fit irregular stone blocks together with high precision by the Inca.
You could also create a flat wood surface by abrasion against a flat stone surface, but that is more labor intensive to produce.
The Aztecs and other South and Central American societies were capable of fine stonework so I think they at least had the potential to do fine woodwork.
Even a poor quality wheel and axle makes a useful wheelbarrow.
I (not an expert) checked him out for 10 minutes just now.. He wrote a book about bird hybrids, and seems to see hybrids everywhere. Check out his pages on all kinds of hybrids, which reads like a crank website. e.g. the very wacky page on cabbits (cat + rabbit)
But his pig+chimp theory is serious, and it seems it makes some sense in explaining numerous pig-like anatomical features of humans, but there can be no genetic evidence, so only he believes it, it seems.
First of all, the coincidences become a lot less coincidence when you look at convergent evolution. For example tooth shape is tied to what you eat. Since we and pigs are both omnivores, we wind up with similar teeth.
Second, only related species can form hybrids. Lions and tigers split probably a bit under 4 million years ago. Donkeys and horses split a bit before that. We don't know when humans and chimps split, but you can find estimates everywhere from 7-12 million years. The split between primates and pigs appears to be about 80 million years ago. And the result is that lions and tigers can interbreed and the child can be fertile. Donkeys and horses can interbreed and the child is usually NOT fertile. We have no evidence that humans and chimps can have children, and it has probably been tried. As for more distant than that, farmers have been having regular sex with farm animals since farms existed, with no babies.
"We have no evidence that humans and chimps can have children, and it has probably been tried. "
Indeed Ilya Ivanov spent a lot of time and money trying to do just that, with no success.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Ivanov
The liger is a hybrid offspring of a male lion (Panthera leo) and a female tiger (Panthera tigris). The liger has parents in the same genus but of different species. The liger is distinct from the similar hybrid called the tigon, and is the largest of all known extant felines. They enjoy swimming, which is a characteristic of tigers, and are very sociable like lions. Notably, ligers typically grow larger than either parent species, unlike tigons.
It's not a joke, but the evidence cited is being interpreted rather freely; the chromosomal and genetic evidence doesn't support the hypothesis at all.
I'd buy horizontal gene transfer via a viral vector (which is still damn unlikely for all those traits) over hybridization any day of the week.
not necessarily uncommon just the fertility of such mating and their decedents might have been lower than replacement rate. if a such mating pair were only able to produce 2 or less fertile children on average then their line would eventually die out. Its also possible that it was like mules where the offspring are starile 99.9% of the time but every once in a while one is able to reproduce successfully for some reason.
it seems there were very few Neanderthals or humans around in Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Population: “Like modern humans, Neanderthals probably descended from a very small population with an effective population—the number of individuals who can bear or father children—of 3,000 to 12,000 approximately. However, Neanderthals maintained this very low population, proliferating weakly harmful genes due to the reduced effectivity of natural selection”)
Given that Neanderthals were found from Spain to Libanon and even deep into Asia, chances are most humans never saw Neanderthals or vice versa.
Also, I don’t see how that article counts interspecies sex, pregnancies or even live births. It counts number of births who grew up to reproduce. I can easily see early humans stigmatizing or even killing kids of mixed descent or, even easier, children from such encounters being less fertile or even infertile.
It seems interesting that even that much of their (our?) DNA has been conserved. Do they have a guess at how much of it has been lost due to lack of benefit?
Pygmy populations are ordinary humans with conserved genetic mutations, due to inbreeding, that limit the expression of things like growth hormones. They are anatomically modern humans, just much smaller. The ease with which these mutations can occur is evidenced by the existence of unrelated Pygmy populations in different parts of the world. There is no evidence of speciation or material genetic divergence in these cases. While we can't say anything for sure, the genetic divergence between modern humans and these other hominid species is significantly larger.
I agree with 100% of what you said, but if we didn't have access to the genes and were merely going by fragments of a few fossils - what then? Can one quantify the magnitude of difference between H. nalendi and H. erectus fossils, and compare it to the magnitude of difference between hypothetical Polynesian and Pygmy fossils?
You'd still notice a difference between two lineages diverging for a few hundreds or thousands of years and a two lineages diverging for hundreds of thousands of years or more.
It's not just size or deformity, but other features that will diverge.
>At one time, in the distant past, the Sleestak were known as Altrusians. They were a very peaceful and intelligent race and eventually grew into an advanced civilization, mastering many (if not all) of the secrets of the Land of the Lost, creating cities and temples among other landmarks. Unfortunately, the Altrusians lost control over their emotions and destroyed their civilization becoming known as the Sleestak.
>In their decline, the Sleestak became are a degenerate warring race that lost much of their knowledge and culture. Now based on a distrust of strangers and struggle for survival, they have come out of the Era of Intelligence and into the Era of Solitude. The Era of Intelligence was the period in time when the Sleestak first arrived at The Land of the Lost. They built several temples now called Pylons which serve to regulate the life conditions, seasons and meteorological traits of the area. There was a period when there was only darkness before the Sleestak built the Time Pylon, which controls the light and dark cycles of The Land of The Lost.
>As the Sleestak moved into The Lost City they entered a more barbarian state as they reverted back to their more primeval conditions. They eventually became ruled by a Sleestak called Sol, who reorganized the Sleestak and taught them how to hunt and kill.
they ate ordinary amounts of meat, some sources say >70% of their diet was carnivore. Also they were sprinters rather than marathon runners and could outrun us and also had much more muscular build. Some theories suggest that they likely also consumed rotten meat if they had no choice.
There carnivorous lifestyle would mean different gut biome to us allowing their bodies to get away with eating rotten meat more often.
If you read a lot of ancient mythologies there is a pattern that the "gods" are regularly mentioned and read as a separate species or society that interacted with us.
Personally, I have a guess that it was interactions between Neandertals and early Sapiens that led to these myths. Two separate societies, viewed as independent.
I won't make any guesses as to which is which, but I think the possibility makes sense.
While the cited link is broken, the dating of celestial folk tales to remote antiquity is far from a fringe theory. The fact is that some of the earliest recorded information is related to celestial motions (whether for farming or rituals, who knows). Stonehenge is a gigantic calendar, along with MOST other megalithic constructions across ALL cultures. The history book keeps getting pushed further back, sites like Gobekli Tepe depict megalithic construction from around 11000BC (before agriculture) with hieroglyphs and depictions of celestial constellations. The cave paintings of Lescaux depict constellations and religious/magical divination acts. It would be more appropriate to refer to the fields of comparative mythology, theology, and art history as fringe fields :)
There is a huge difference between linking direct observations of the stars to things like Stonehenge, and looking at stories that are thousands of years old, and linking them to a single detail of an oral history that would have to be 100,000 years old to make any sense.
Gobekli Tepe is actually a good example: even though it's a mere 11-13k years old (Wikipedia says 9000BC,not 11000BC, but that's anyway irrelevant), and even though it was still being used maybe 8k years ago, we have no oral histories about it, and no other memories of it, except perhaps a vague idea that the hill it was on was sacred.
We also know that human cultures find certain numbers as especially meaningful - 1,2,3,7 are all numbers that hold special meanings in mythology all around the world. It seems way more plausible then to interpret a myth about six stars expressed as 7-1 as being a way to fit a 7 in the story.
Edit: note that in good viewing conditions, there are about 11 stars in the Pleiades clusters visible to the naked eye, though 6 of them are significantly brighter: https://www.naic.edu/~gibson/pleiades/pleiades_see.html
It's a cool idea. I hope it's right. On the other hand, the Pleiades are tricky to count. There are a lot more than just 6 or 7 stars in the constellation. Wikipedia claims that 14 can be seen with the naked eye (whatever that means exactly):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades#Composition
> Without more recent bones, we have no reason to believe that they still exist.
But you can say that about many mammals that are close to extinction now, we rarely find their bones, and if we do it's because we know about them and their habitat. We know nothing about hf. other than through the accidental discovery of their bones.
If they're like us, a marginally intelligent tool using ape, and still exist, it's entirely possibly that they bury their dead, and we'll never find bones.
I'm pretty sure that burnt remains have been found also, but I was just responding to the idea that we weren't finding any evidence of their existence because they buried their dead.
I remember reading somewhere about some explorer in like the 1600s or so describing a similar creature on I believe it was Flores. But I can't find the reference now.
It also mentioned some other accounts from around the same time that they were an unruly nuisance that couldn't be domesticated and would steal grain, pets and livestock so the locals killed them off.
I believe the ambiguity is whether the bones found on Flores are related to these stories (assuming they are accurate) or if they are describing say some irritating primate (the classic monkey causes very similar headaches for farmers, such as opening gates and letting an an entire herd of sheep wander on to a highway. In many places you can simply shoot troublesome monkeys without consequence)
People didn't really have vast zoological knowledge in the 17th century so it could have just been a fairly common regional creature that somehow made it to the island from a trading ship and was causing issues.
Of course more than the written word should be available as evidence here regardless of the integrity or intention of the source.
Also as an exercise, pretend some group of hominids were alive somewhere; wouldn't we expect them to come around and steal things? If you don't conceive of private property, a grove of evenly spaced easy to access fruit trees would look like an amazing find. I'd sure be excited to stumble across that.
I'd expect a farmer to shoot one of these creatures and a body to come up, right?
I wish I could find it. Google is being useless as usual
Irritating primates: in the town of Simla, in northern India, there are many monkeys - there's a monkey temple at the top of the hill, and monkeys are "revered". Revered or not, though, the locals throw stones at them to make them get out of the path.
I stayed there in a hotel. During the night, there were scratching noises - I assumed it was mice. It turned out to be a big alpha male, and he'd stolen all our chapatis and fruit from under the bed. He was very aggressive - he wouldn't back off when I confronted him, he really seemed to be up for a fight. I certainly wasn't - monkeys in that region carry rabies.
Right. "local culture has myth around mysterious secretive humanoid creatures" really shouldn't alter our priors at all.
If this investigation is justified, it's because of the fossil record. The folk story makes a cute human interest angle, and if the researchers do find anything, it will make a fantastic stick to beat them with: "the Lio people have known about this ape species for hundreds of years, why didn't anyone just ask them?"
Europeans maintained stories of ogres 10s of thousands of years after the last Neanderthal walked the earth, it’s plausible that the Lio in the article maintained myths about small humanlike creatures that fuelled the imaginations of the people who claim to have seen them in the same way.
"we have no reason to believe that they still exist"
In the article, he's asking why we give so much importance to the bones. If we have 40 eyewitnesses, that would be enough to win in any court. An eyewitness account is evidence, just like a bone is evidence. His essay raises the question, why don't we put more weight on the eyewitness accounts?
Could it not be that these people (like others elsewhere) have a folk tradition about "little people"? Could the tradition have its roots in a prior encounter with fossils of this hominid?
Hardly enough to surpass reasonable doubt, I think.
Their point is people get convicted on "not a shred of physical evidence", but plenty of eyewitnesses. Why are the rules for punishing someone so much more lax than the rules for whether or not something can exist?
I have always wondered with how prevalent dragons are in human myths did some kind of dinosaurs survived long enough for homo to have interacted with them.
We are still interacting with dinosaurs, we just call them birds. Seriously, though, I assume you refer to conventional dinosaurs, and those went extinct more than 60 millions years ago, at which point the thing closest to a human being was a small mouse-like mammal. It would be very, very improbable that a branch would survive for millions of years without leaving a single indication of its presence, either footprints, fossils, or eggs.
There is also more and more evidence that at least some of these dinosaurs actually had feathers, which mythical dragons very rarely have. To some extent we created a representation of dinosaurs similar to how we saw dragons, rather than the other way around. There are still a lot of things we do not know about how dinosaurs looked.
There are much less contrived explanations for dragons.
"The earliest stories (among Westerners) of a dragon-like animal existing in the region circulated widely and attracted considerable attention. But no Westerner visited the island to check the story until official interest was sparked in the early 1910s by stories from Dutch sailors based in Flores in East Nusa Tenggara about a mysterious creature. The creature was allegedly a dragon which inhabited a small island in the Lesser Sunda Islands (the main island of which is Flores). ... The Dutch sailors reported that the creature measured up to seven metres (twenty-three feet) in length with a large body and mouth which constantly breathed fire. It burnt them and so they could not continue the investigation. It was believed then that the odd creature could fly." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_(island)
"The Komodo dragon was the driving factor for an expedition to Komodo Island by W. Douglas Burden in 1926. After returning with 12 preserved specimens and two live ones, this expedition provided the inspiration for the 1933 movie King Kong. It was also Burden who coined the common name "Komodo dragon."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon
Your mention of dragons made me think of the Komodo dragon. I only noticed after pasting the first quote the strange coincidence that it mentions Flores! I thought it interesting that the very real Komodo dragon, 10 ft long with dragony teeth and nasty bite, produced traditional-dragon-like legends even into the 20th C.
There's a very interesting (but somewhat contrived) anthropological hypothesis that dragons are composites of various predator creatures that were a danger to our ancestors- birds of prey, great cats, and pythons:
The archetypal origin seems parsimonious to me. Consider that people that would never have interacted with large lizards still had dragony myths, see the mo'o among ancient Hawaiians.
Hominid: the group consisting of all modern and extinct Great Apes (that is, modern humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans plus all their immediate ancestors).
Hominin: the group consisting of modern humans, extinct human species and all our immediate ancestors (including members of the genera Homo, Australopithecus, Paranthropus and Ardipithecus).
See also canid vs canine, felid vs feline. The pattern also has caniform, feliform as a partition of extant carnivora; but no *homiform; alas, Wikipedia only gives simiiform, the higher primates.
The "Hall of Human Origins" at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. has a collection of hominim head sculptures titled "Meet your ancestors" [0]. They're definitely in the uncanny valley - super interesting to look at, but up close they're so lifelike and "almost human" that they're definitely a bit unsettling. [1] (sorry for the long google link - it was the best I could find online).
I find this claim hard to believe because of the location. Flores is not a huge wilderness. I've been there. I saw huge open fields of coconut, and rice plantations and population density is high. It is not some thick impenetrable jungle. The whole island (13,540 km2) is smaller than Connecticut (14,357 km2) and the population density in Flores is likely higher.
It is narrow and bounded by the sea on both sides. There's been ample researchers, workers, tourists going all over the island. I imagine that had it been present, any cryptid there would have been documented scientifically by now.
And there you have it. A vague, intrigue-producing story and a book. The book probably contains some folklore stories and an inconclusive conclusion that has lots of questions like, "What else may we find?".
When I visited Flores, the most surprising thing about it was that on a 130 km island the inhabitants spoke 5 languages and 80 distinct dialects. Most of the island is remote and has little connection to the modern world, and the various tribal groups are largely isolated from one another even.
> When I visited Flores, the most surprising thing about it was that on a 130 km island the inhabitants spoke 5 languages and 80 distinct dialects.
My understanding is basically there was the original indigenous people (who are closely related to the indigenous peoples of that whole island chain stretching from Indian islands in the West, Andamanese, and going all the way east to Papuans, and Australian aboriginals). The subsequent groups came due to economic-religious expansionary activity from East Asian peoples who had taken Java and Sumatera, and also Portuguese activity. This process is also happening in Papua, quite violently as one half of the island is pretty much an open pit mine occupied by East Asian Indonesian soldiers fighting off indigenous Papuan tribes. Doesn't get much coverage here though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMeYD-wFC1o I think recently the level of violence has flared up because Indonesia is sending more East Asian settlers into the area.
What was the population density 50 or 100 years ago? Could it be possible that they went extinct more recently than 50,000 years ago (the age of the most recent bones)?
> What was the population density 50 or 100 years ago?
I was responding to the author, Gregory Forth, who is literally claiming a cryptid is present there today but using a question to disguise his claim, presumably for profit motives. "Do members of Homo floresiensis still inhabit the Indonesian island where their fossils helped identify a new human species fewer than 20 years ago?"
> The author says he spoke with at least 30 natives there who may have seen them. A very small population of secretive homininins would fit that bill.
Lets do a thought experiment. If I went to CT and talked to 100 dudes in various bars, do you think I could get 30 of them to say they had seen bigfoot in their area?
Authors and journalists citing stuff like "30 natives" makes me uncomfortable.
In August 1895 Connecticut, a journalist with an imagination and a predilection for hoaxes named Lou Stone invented a story about a "wild man" who appeared to Town Selectman Riley Smith. The story spread like fire, appearing in newspapers all over the country and further igniting the imagination of the locals, who reported their own sightings of the Wild Man.
Residents attempted to explain the Wild Man, claiming it was actually not an unknown beast, but perhaps a gorilla, or an escaped mental patient. In many sightings, villagers swore to have seen details. Mrs. Culver describes a "savage face, almost brute in expression."
Eventually, the reporter admitted the truth: he just wanted to sell papers. And indeed he sold papers, and tourism, and put Winsted, Connecticut on the map.
Yeah I commented elsewhere, if 30 eyewitnesses to mythical little folk (from an island with pop: 2 million) is good enough evidence of their existence, keep the author away from Tasmania, where he could probably find 1000 people that have seen an extinct Thylacine.
The difference here is not the conclusive weight of the positive evidence, but rather the lack of conclusive negative evidence.
To me the possibility there still may be extant H. floresiensis around is very miniscule, but not entirely zero. Especially the possibility that they survived a bit longer than previously thought is not completely unlikely.
And chances are none of them were younger than 80, having lived at a time when there likely was far more wilderness. A lot of species have gone extinct within the last century, and the author seems to be very careful to include "survived into the recent past" in the hypothesis. A population practicing burial, but not in places that happen to facilitate bone conservation could, in theory, be more invisible to science than some of their ancestors who happened to leave their remains in a preservation hotspot like that cave.
But yeah, stories about almost but not quite humans seem to exist everywhere, perhaps fueled by occasional sightings of misfits who got thrown out by their communities and lived on as wandering hermits.
Considering "almost extinct" could mean a single family for multiple generations, that wouldn't be a lot of individuals. Depending on what burial rites they practice, or how their bones get chewed up by wild-life, they'd mostly vanish in the jungle (or even farmland). Even when they are found, they might not get recognized as such immediately or at all.
Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Extant Hominids are somewhat more likely than real leprechauns...
The existence of those eyewitness accounts is not positive evidence, but rather constitutes a lack of negative evidence. If tens of thousands of people going through those forests all said "nothing there", then that would be negative evidence.
I’ve long been fascinated by the wild man myths that emerge in most human cultures. Sasquatch is the most prominent example in the U.S. (a subject I devoured as an adolescent)
Having travelled to many regions of the world, I’ve consistently inquired about such stories from local people. These myths are everywhere all around the world. They are typically large and dangerous, or small and mischievous (but also dangerous). Most of the people who I spoke to truly believed the described creatures were absolutely real.
So the stories related in this article are variations on the same stories I’ve listened to around the globe. I won’t personally believe in such animals unless definitive proof is offered. But most people are quite animated around this subject which makes me wonder why such stories appear to be nearly universal.
The Māori, natives of NZ/Aotearoa, have legends of wild men, the Maero [0], who were displaced by the Māori, and accordingly angered. Their version of Ireland's Tuatha Dé Danann, I guess.
It's always been fun to tease tourist hikers with stories of the Maero when you're in a remote backcountry hut hearing the godawful screams of brushtail possums.
Speculation is that the myth derived from one or more of the "lost tribes" [1], Māori who fled into harsh wildernesses in the face of invaders. Given we've so little knowledge of archaic Māori culture following the extinction of the moa [2], maybe there were "lost tribes" back then that the Maero is based on.
Amusingly, as a redhead under the Southern Hemisphere ozone hole, they have a myth of a white skinned and red haired people [3] who find direct sunlight lethal, which is pretty correct if you look at melanoma rates in NZ Europeans.
Unless you live in Antarctica the ozone hole has little bearing on how much UV exposure you're getting. The stronger sun down in NZ and Aus is mostly due to Earth's elliptical orbit (closer to the sun during south hemisphere summer than north) and fewer pollutants in the air that absorb light, which is due to the fact that 90% of the world's population lives north of the equator.
Not saying it doesn't have an effect, just that it's vastly overstated and the real picture is more complex. As usual, the nature of things is difficult to convey in a tweet.
You probably are. Luckily, 15 minutes isn't too bad.
When I worked for a German company, we'd fly German colleagues out for important planning seasons (held over two - three weeks to justify the jet lag).
And we'd always warn those on their first trip about the NZ sun being considerably more fierce than any sun they were used to, yes, far more fierce than Lanzarote, Corsica, or "Blauhimmel Deutschland" (Blue sky Germany) aka the parts of Mallorca that sold Die Welt in local shops, and hotels that served white sausage and wheat beer on Sundays.
And invariably, they thought we were exaggerating, after all it was spring/autumn! They'd go spend a day at Sumner or New Brighton beaches, and then we got to watch their very red faces peel and gradually heal over the next fortnight. Our CEO managed to get sufficiently sunburnt on his first trip that his forehead blistered, which made it hard to maintain eye contact at times.
(He also managed to be on the New Brighton pier during the big Valentine's Day aftershock, which put a charge up him).
They always remembered to wear sunscreen and sun hats on their second trip ...
...conversely, it was lovely for me when I traveled to Germany in their summer, I could have a lunch outside for an hour, and not get burnt. My people are very much of the north.
People also believe in sapient preternatural forces and UFOs with wild abandon. The universality speaks more to the shortcomings of the human brain than any objective truth. Once you’ve studied all the cognitive biases we posses these phenomenon are incredibly banal.
I think the universality is basically because we are human, and identifying other humans is very important, so human shapes are a common target(?) for pareidolia.
I'm a little more interested in the curious consistency in details of stories of paranormal encounters. I've heard a handful of first-hand accounts of paranormal experiences that, despite the tellers having some pretty widely different interpretations (one conservative Christian who thought he was talking about demonic activity), described some very similar details, in ways that are at least trickier to explain than simple pareidolia, and not always part of the standard ghost stereotypes either. Assuming ghosts aren't real, there at least has to be something interesting going on.
You'd think having read "The Demon-Haunted World" would prepare me better for this but mostly what I remember from that book is about sleep paralysis.
Two people from distinct populations spot each other from afar. Both have more incentives to avoid each other than to meet, so they turn around. Because it's stressful and/or people are disappointed that they didn't do what they were supposed to do, some barely remarkable differences get exaggerated to rationalize their emotions.
50,000 years later, the gene pool has been mixed rather well and any remaining differences are skin-deep at most. But now the "other" also gets closer, possibly in some proportion that is constant across time, and homo sapiens sapiens, the thinking thinking man, thinks thinks those brown eyes look really frighting.
I think it's just when you retire, look back at the who enterprise of your discipline and decide life doesn't need to all be so grave, and decide it's time to have some fun with that one pet theory you heard about on field expeditions.
I mean it's cute if you phrase it like that but it becomes a problem when it is used as part of the narrative that established science is corrupt and hiding the truth, coupled with the profit motive getting book sales/podcast ads etc.
I'm being serious, I'm sure thats what happened here. I doubt the guy is just knowingly grifting for book sales, he probably just held onto this idea as a pet theory during his career and sort of compartmentalized it from his primary academic work. edit: considering he was an interpretivist cultural anthropologist, that appears to be the case, its not like he spent a career studying hominid fossils.
That said this is cryptozoology stuff is (relatively) harmless compared to the more common emeritus meteorologist/physicist that uses his credentials to explain to those primed to listen why anthropogenic climate change is bullshit
Jesus, despite his inartful way of expressing it, all he is saying is look around for more recent Florensis bones, and don't be surprised if you find they survived until relatively modern times. He is also implying that the oral/myth communication protocols of many societies will work across many millenia, as has been documented about indigenous people's stories about tsunamis, earthquakes, and meteorite impacts that happened many thousands of years ago. An island like Flores where modern hominids have lived continually for ~25-50K years or longer is a prime spot for those features to come together.
To save some of you the reading, this is what the very end of the article says:
> For reasons I discuss in the book, no field zoologist is yet looking for living specimens of H. floresiensis or related hominin species. But this does not mean that they cannot be found.
I don't know why I would think that their belief in human-like animals in the forest is any more credible than North Americans who think Bigfoot is real.
>We believe this movement of the stars can help to explain two puzzles: the similarity of Greek and Aboriginal stories about these stars, and the fact so many cultures call the cluster “seven sisters” even though we only see six stars today.
They only use that as an explanation for one of those two puzzles, and then by taking that explanation as a given, they formulate a second hypothesis for the other puzzle. That is, they posit the change in appearance of the star cluster as an explanation for why they story/myth has a hidden/lost seventh sister, and then use the timeline of that explanation to posit that, if this first explanation is true, then the commonality of the myth might be due to it dating from a common origin from when the star cluster looked like it had seven stars. But the first hypothesis being true doesn't imply the second hypothesis is true, because there are alternative explanations; e.g. that similar myths about the same changing star cluster were developed independently by different cultures, perhaps due to some common trends in human thinking and cultural conventions(which may themselves inherit from some prehistoric time, even if the myth doesn't).
Its an important distinction because claiming their observation about the stars explains two mysteries without recognizing this weak chaining of those explanations over-estimates the explanatory power of the hypothesis.
Your comment made me curious about the actual extent of this.
> However, the absence of Neanderthal-derived patrilineal Y-chromosome and matrilineal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in modern humans, along with the underrepresentation of Neanderthal X chromosome DNA, could imply reduced fertility or frequent sterility of some hybrid crosses, representing a partial biological reproductive barrier between the groups, and therefore species distinction.
> The genomes of all non-sub-Saharan populations contain Neanderthal DNA. Various estimates exist for the proportion, such as 1–4% or 3.4–7.9% in modern Eurasians, or 1.8–2.4% in modern Europeans and 2.3–2.6% in modern East Asians.
23andMe DNA tests claim to tell you what proportion Neanderthal you are. I, for example, have just under 2% Neanderthal DNA (allegedly), which they say is in the 47th percentile.
From what I understand they test for some fraction, like 1/4 to 3/8 ish of total number of known Neanderthal SNPs. Dunno quite how representative that is of the total but I imagine probably a decent correlation.
However, around 2013-14 they either changed the number of SNPs they considered Neanderthal origin or their algorithm changed, and I was PISSED because I went from 95th percentile to 47th-ish myself.
Ok, so what's the dividing line between human and a related hominin? We and neanderthals could and did cross-breed. Sure we could find a living example of something we've already classified as a different species, but are we certain that if we found living members of a kind we've never seen a fossil of we wouldn't just call them human and move on?
The specific name (second part) of a species is somewhat subjective, and is used to describe behaviour or properties a given species has that can be used to differentiate it from another related species.
That mostly works ok, but in some parts of the animal kingdom there are some areas where it really doesn't. If you discovered fossils of both a poodle and a mastiff would you categorise them both as canis familiaris?
Not just the name, but the whole biological species concept can break down at times. I mean look at the wholphin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wholphin which is a fertile hybrid between parents of different genera but it doesn't make much sense to call false killer whales and bottlenose dolphins the same species.
There is a prevalent pressure to say that "all humans are the same", and this article begins to dig at the roots of that pressure. The evolutionary history of Homo Sapiens is far more complex than: once there was ape, then there was man. But we don't want to recognize this complexity today because of the political heritage of the 20th century.
Is there really any radically isolated peoples stil on earth genetically? Any sources on this from non politcal authors? I know there was some interesting science being done by evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev about the aboriginals but as far as i remember the differences were still negligible - also he became good friends with the elders of these tribes and had great respect for them.
Actual supremacist racists really are the scum of the earth, too bad if science is still hindered by people who want to use it as a political tool to further themselves or their in-group.
Pretending that everyone is really the same creates unnecessary social pressure for those who are naturally disadvantaged. Spreading falsehoods in order to avoid atrocities such as racism and eugenics is probably not the only way to move humanity forward.
One aspect of basic biology that is almost invariably neglected when discussing the possibility of the continued existence of cryptids like Homo floresiensis is that there must be an isolated breeding population.
Plate tectonics puts a limit on the size and depth of caves. So how do you hide a breeding population?
Can't wait for the author's book on how the Thylacine (aka Tasmanian Tiger) is not only not extinct but facing overpopulation, after he interviews the 1000+ putative eyewitnesses from the past few decades.
I do wonder if visiting alien zoologists would classify all humans as the same species. I know we like to say we're all the same - but humans hailing from different parts of the world definitely have traits which are advantageous to those locations. Evolution never sleeps, after all.
Humans actually have very little genetic diversity. Compared to Chimpanzees we are all closely related. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2012-03-02-chimps-show-much-greate... Or dogs which are all one species despite having much more variation than we do. We are still a pretty young species with long generations, so genetic diversity is low.
>Labeled Homo floresiensis and dating to the late Pleistocene
Australian Aborigines allegedly migrated to Australia in late Pleistocene time. Taken together with their unique genotype and physiology, why aren't they classified as a separate hominid subspecies?
Australian Aborigines descend from modern Humans just as Europeans and Asians do. Genetically that is trivial to show. Also we interbreed easily. So there is no benefit for any use of the term "speciation".
Their "genotype and physiology" isn't that unique by the way. Genotypically there are tribes in Africa that diverge more from each other than Europeans diverge from Aborigines. People who think otherwise tend to overvalue skin color...
A lot of it probably comes down to politics and the terrible history of labeling groups of people as less than human. What is and is not a subspecies is already fairly vague and not necessarily of particularly high value (so you've labeled two individuals as different subspecies instead of the same species, so what?)
Let's imagine if Australian Aborigines were in fact extinct and we found fossils, DNA, bones, etc. Would science have considered them a separate species?
It's an interesting thought, although it's not very meaningful to take further due to a variety of reasons.
The big secret is that hominins like this mixed with what we consider modern humans and live on in some of our genes. Bring it up in public and be ready to lose your job.
Okay that’s hyperbole if I’ve ever heard it. I think most people view, for example, Neanderthal genes in the human gene pool, as an interesting factoid, and nothing more.
Right but Neanderthals are just the start. Stark contrasts between different human populations can be partly explained by hybrid mixing 50,000+ years ago
The Genomes of modern Humans only contain really small amounts of Genes from other Hominin species, for various reasons. Not enough to conclude those species survived in us.
A) It's anthropology. There is nothing concrete available; the entire field is an attempt to learn things by investigating human societies. In this case, the allegation is that a specific tribe have enough stories about human-like but non-human creatures in their region to be taken seriously (in conjunction with the established presence of non-human hominins in that region in the fossil record) as a record of recent history.
B) The article is promotion for a book, which I would hope would have a more cohesive presentation of evidence.
It’s easy to find “facts”, when I was 12 or so I got a book about the Bermuda Triangle and was thoroughly convinced that Atlantis was real and had advanced technology in ancient times.
Ha ha ha, no. That’s a wild misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, that humans are somehow “more evolved” than other current species. Modern apes are our siblings, not our ancestors. And nothing fundamental “separates” us from other animals: we’re yet another species, granted with some unique features that we ourselves consider very important.