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Denisova,southern Siberia

• Message 1. 

  Posted by henvell (U1781664) on Wednesday, 29th December 2010

  Additional genetic studies have been conducted on a ca 50-30 Ka old juvenile finger bone,which was recovered from the Denisova cave.D Reich et al [2010] contends that the Melanesian samples share 4-6% of their genetic genome with the Denisova individual.The latter is deemed to be distinct from modern humans and Neanderthals.

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Wednesday, 29th December 2010

  Henvell,
  
  thank you very much for the message. Can you give some further information to the article of D. Reich and all?
  
  Kind regards and with esteem,
  
  Paul.

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• Message 3

  , in reply to message 2.

  Posted by henvell (U1781664) on Thursday, 30th December 2010

  Paul,
  You can download the article and supplementary data at no charge from David Reich's website.If it has been remove,since I downloaded it,let me know and I will supply more data.
  All the best for 2011,
  Henvell

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• Message 4

  , in reply to message 3.

  Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Friday, 31st December 2010

  Re: Message 3.
  
  Henvell,
  
  thank you very much for the link and the one in the other thread too.
  
  All the best for 2011 and see you next year.
  
  Kind regards and with esteem,
  
  Paul.

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• Message 5

  , in reply to message 4.

  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Monday, 3rd January 2011

  Spectacular finding but far from being the last one. Already up to now we are having 4 human species living at the same time period i.e. around 50,000 to 10,000 years ago.
  
  1) Homo Sapiens (emerged around 300,000 years ago, first spotted in Africa)
  2) Homo Neaderdalensis (emerged around 500,000 years go spotted in Eurasia)
  3) Homo Denisovensis (emerged probably around 800,000 years ago spotted in Asia)
  4) Homo Florensiensis (emerged probably around 200,000 or 300,000 years ago spotted in Indonesia, being rather a localised evolutionary branch and being teated rather as a hominoid and not a human since it evolved directly from the last recognisable Homo Erectus).
  
  These speces also coexisted with a previous spece called Haldebergensis that lived around 800,000 to 200,000 and evolved into both Neaderdal and Sapiens while it seems that Denisovans might had evolved directly from Erectus.
  
  One has to put things under context.
  
  Anciently we spoke about Homo Erectus (first recognisable human, the inventor of fire and complex tools) - Haldebergensis - Neaderdal - Sapiens lineage. However, Homo Erectus, the prime human spece between humans and apes span between 3 million and almost down to 500,000 years and this classification posed a lot of problems for the single reason that early Homo Erectus were really ape-like while late Homo Erectus variations were much more human like. As such, there came new findings and new classifications and primarily the early Homo Erectus called Homo Habilis (2,5-1,2 million years ago) and the later Homo Erectus, perhaps the most well known one called, Homo Ergaster (1,5 - 800,000 years back). One can already spot that even in pre-human humanoids populations of different speces and evolutionary branches coexisted and interacted.
  
  Now in reality things are more blurred. In biology distinctions are not always clear. First of all, the prime distinction of a spece to another spece is their ability to produce fertile descandants. Eg. the horse and the donkey are not in the same spiece because their descendant, the mule is infertile. However, even there, rarely there are fertile mules that can pass on their genes to either the horse or the donkey but since this is not done on a standard basis, indeed the horse and the donkey are different species, albeit close sousins as even their external aspects tell us. Horse and pony are on the same specie because they produce fertile descendants. However what about the dog, the wolf, the fox, the dingo and the jackal which are all treated as different species but which in reality are all perfectly intermarriable with fertile descendants no matter if this in nature does not happen due to different lifestyles and behavours. Are they different species or not? And if they are treated as different species then why a Doberman and a Chihuahua are still treated as same specie when they cannot even intermarry naturally (due to extreme height difference so only laboratory artificial insemination can do the job). Or a 2 metres tall Serbian and a 1,2 meters Baka Pygmie that have not met up to intermarry since the advent of Homo Sapiens just like dogs, foxes, and jackals.
  
  Then, more often than not, one cannot speak of 1 spece clearly but rather of ring species - a notion very often found in birds where you have a round of some 10-15 species of similar looking birds out of which neighbouring (this most often not only biologically but naturally geographically too) ones can intermarry successfully while distant ones cannot as if they were a different specie : i.e. Specie n°1 can intermarry with n°2, n°3, n°15, n°14 and with difficulty with n°4 and n°13 while it cannot intermarry at all with n°5 up to n°12. Similarly n°9 can intermarry with n°7, n°8 and n°10 and n°11 but not with the rest.
  
  However, for some reason humans do not like to admit the above reality present in so many other species, many of them mammals and primates just like him and for too long it tended to regard the evolution as a race to the top (i.e. the modern human) and in that evolution the speech - at an almost religious level rather than scientific - was all about "evolutionary leaps", as if god or cosmos or something intervened to deflect the evolution towards the modern human. Unfortunately too much religious-like belief in these leaps. Evolutionary leaps do indeed occur from times to times but not as people think : in reality before and after the evolutionary leap pre-leap and post-leap populations do remain in the same specie and they are 100% intermarriable with healthy and fertile descendants. It is only time that diverges the group and that has to be at least a couple 100,000s of years - and in the case of human species it seems than not even 300,000 of years were enough to make them completely distanced species, i.e. so far so not to be able to reproduce amongthemselves like the distantly positioned species of a ring specie!
  
  Hence in reality evolutionary leaps should be seen only as regional evolutionary accelerations (that occur over several 10,000s of years rather than the usual 100,000s of years) and that in that sense this makes the first recognisable homo sapiens more close to the ancestral group of the homo haldebergensis rather than to us.
  
  Which means that if we take a late Haldebergensis, an early Homo Sapiens and a modern Homo Sapiens and try different variations we might have a more easy coupling of the late Haldebergensis and the early Homo Sapiens than the late Haldebergensis and the modern human. Because humans just like any other spece continue to evolve. Even in the most secluded areas were people supposedly did not cross-breed and supposedly maintained ancestral characteristics (Khoisian people, Melanesian people etc.), populations did continue to evolve and are not identical to their ancestors. Eg. ancestors of Melanesians might had been more close to something between Australian Aboriginals, Andamon island negrite tribes and Indian Tamil people. And so on.
  
  Under this linear motion of evolution one has really to keep things in context.
  
  We talk about times at 50,000 and 100,000 and 500,000 years back. I.e. at times that the global population of human speces together would not be anything more than a few millions. Just to give an example, the 2nd best known human spece after Homo Sapiens, i.e. Homo Neaderdalensis in its heyday - that was around 200,000 years ago, it spanned from western Europe until central Asia, it numbered possibly not much more ... 150,000 souls!!!! Ok, give it the double if you want but numbers are shocking, and if they do not shock you then they should be shocking to you.
  
  Just take a country like France which today has 60 million people. Start walking across it ignoring roads, rather taking it from the mountains and country side. You will find out that much of the space is still empty of humans and that at times you might walk some 30kms (i.e. a day's distance) without meeting a human settlement. Now divide this by 300... to reach a population of 150,000 people and say that was the whole population in France! That means that you could walk around several 100s of kilometers without meeting any human at all. And now take this number of 150,000 and strech it from France to Iraq and the Urals!!! Just count how frequently you would meet up with Neaderdals if you walk around. Chances are you would hardly see any of them.
  
  Same might had been for Denisovan humans, this newly discovered seperate human lineage. For Homo Florensiensis this was even more the truth as it had been an insular hominoid (rather than really a human) population but at the end it might had been in contact with the first homo sapiens colonists of Indonesia. And personally, if I use the comparison of another very successful mammal, the bear, which gave birth to several speces some existing some exinct includng animals as diverse as the
  polar bear and the panda, I think there had to be more human speces co-habitating in the the period 300,000 to 30,000 years ago when really homo sapiens started supplanting them all.
  
  And if homo sapiens started supplanting them all this has been by the thripple: genocide, expulsion, integration that usually follow each human contact. But in reality such contacts while it is today known that happened (since we find traces in our genetic material for both Neaderdals and Denisovans), they were not as widespread as people like to believe. Eg. when modern humans came into contact with Neaderdals their demise had long started and there were around a mere 30,000 souls remaining - effectively Neaderdals were hit more by climate change and most probably illnesses as well as their own social fragility living in extremely small societies of a few members all of them more often than not inbred. Denisovans could be also another such group that might had been driven to extinction or forced to integrate with the coming humans. And since in the 300,000 to 50,000 period Homo Sapiens did not really show much more than the Neaderdal and the Denisovan, obviously his main advantage being at the end his more complex language and his larger societies which enabled him in the competition against other human species, at best absorbing them (as a family of 15 absorbed Neaderdals or Denisovans would finally go as unoticed in a village of 300 Homo Sapiens as 15 Chinese would go in an Arabic village - at first they would be the "different" ones, after 2-3 generations descendants would go almost un-noticed).

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• Message 6

  , in reply to message 5.

  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Monday, 3rd January 2011

  In my above Haldebergensis - early homo sapiens - modern homosapiens example I forgot to conclude it saying that it might be the case that actually early homo sapiens could intermarry much more easily with late homo haldebergensis rather than modern humans. A viewpoint that contrasts the well sold idea of evolutionary leap that wants early homo sapiens identical in all aspects to us and different to their direct ancestors.
  
  You understand the implications of the above example. There is much that people are not ready to acknowledge unfortunately because things then enter both in the religious and political arena. And these arenas are not to my taste, at least not when we talk about anthropology.

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• Message 7

  , in reply to message 6.

  Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Saturday, 8th January 2011

  Nik - it's Heidelbergensis, surely, not Haldebergensis?
  
  see

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• Message 8

  , in reply to message 7.

  Posted by Nik (U1777139) on Monday, 10th January 2011

  Hehe... my accent betrays me...

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