At every chronological estimation they should append 'at least as old as' while they present their results. You never know if something older comes up later.
If a thought like this has occurred to you, a dilettante, after reading a headline and/or cursorily glancing over the article, then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis.
Drive-by anti-intellectualism like this is the death of interesting conversation, truly.
Since the "people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field" can be bad at statistics or experts at academic fraud, doubting statements with obvious political motives is a prudent policy.
Distrust is science, deferring to authority without a good reason is anti-intellectualism.
It's not that simple. It's true that a willingness to criticize and falsify established assumptions and skepticism toward arguments based on authority are part of the scientific ethos. It's also true that many scientists simply do what they've been taught to do, without questioning methods or taking an interest in the philosophy of science. But your last sentence is so sweeping that it would allow flat-earthers to be considered scientists and intellectuals.
What is being criticized here is an attitude that believes one is the only one capable of critical thinking and that everyone else is just an idiot who is already overwhelmed by the task of tying their shoelaces in the morning. This is simply arrogance and has little to do with constructiveness, let alone scientific ethos. You treat yourself to that little dopamine rush of saying “ackchyually” and then just carry on playing Bubble Shooter on your phone.
This is very common here on HN. And when this ultimately hardens into blanket skepticism toward institutions, you are closer to the flat-earthers than to the scientists.
In an ideal world, you would be right. In this world, I just read a study (that passed peer review), where they took per-capita data from a district with 100 people, data from a district with 50.000 people, averaged them without weighing by number of people, then presented the result as the per-capita average for all districts.
That is when they're not outright fabricating data, and having their colleagues cover for them (at Harvard):
In or before 2020, graduate student Zoé Ziani developed concerns about the validity of results from a highly publicized paper by Gino about personal networking. According to Ziani, she was strongly warned by her academic advisers not to criticize Gino, and two members of her dissertation committee refused to approve her thesis unless she deleted criticism of Gino's paper from it. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino
I reviewed a paper recently that gave an incorrect definition for one of Maxwell’s equations and then proceeded to use it incorrectly. It got moved to a lower ranked journal rather than rejected outright. That wasn’t the only problem either, half the text was clearly AI generated.
> then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis.
You should sit in some academic meetings and paper drafting e-mail chains! There’s a degree of believing the best in people but in my experience that can unfortunately be misplaced in science.
Have you not observed that science is very often politicized, filled with fraud or just plain mistaken? The anti-intellectual position is anti-skepticism.
Then come with proof or some shred of evidence, rather than asking an unsubstantiated question that undermines the scientific process unnecessarily by trying to insert doubt from a place of zero expertise in the field.
I think they call this the appeal to authority fallacy, it’s the people without expertise in a field that often see the holes in something first, then the holes start glowing after they get hand waved away by smug narrow-minded experts.
> it’s the people without expertise in a field that often see the holes in something first
While it's obvious that everybody makes mistakes and has blind spots, I'd wager that, in general, being more knowledgeable gives you better tools to spot actual holes.
And sure, experts too can be narrow-minded and smug. Just like everybody else.
> And sure, experts too can be narrow-minded and smug. Just like everybody else.
Being an expert always adds a big weakness: You get paid to do this so you are biased.
So no, they are not "just like everybody else", they have spent more time on it so they know some things better, but you can't get away from biases that comes from being paid to do something and that makes experts worse at some other things.
it can even happen in software engineering but takes different forms, someone outside sees the problem first because they are looking from a different perspective or due to familiarity with some external factor or edge case of their environment
All of the great apes are incredibly intelligent in comparison to most other animals. The basic roots of our intelligence are probably a common feature to the whole family, but there's no consensus on why it's so advanced in humans. Any paleoanthropologist can rattle off about half a dozen possible explanations, but we honestly don't have enough evidence to really distinguish if, when, and how these were factors at different points in human evolution. Here's a quick attempt at some broad categories, which each have multiple hypotheses within them:
* Because intelligence had advantages for individual selection (e.g. mimetic recall hypothesis)
* Because intelligence had advantages for group selection
* Because intelligence had advantages for sexual selection (spandrel hypotheses often start here)
* Because adapting to rapidly varying ecological conditions required so many adaptations that we crossed some kind of barrier and "fell into" intelligence
* Because intelligence helped with foraging/hunting (exclusive of sociality)
I personally dislike the definitions here-- traits and genetic changes are, by default, unattributed to external pressures. They don't "arise" from the environment, rather the environment selects for traits through survival/reproduction, if applicable.
That means, if a trait is unaffected by the environment, then there's no attribution of why it developed; this is the default state.
I feel often in biology, there's a mindset of figuring out why features developed and that's great for pushing the field but it runs into a limit. Not every trait developed from a environmental pressure.
Technically yes, kind of, but if a feature is truly unaffected by the environment, then there's no particular reason it would get fixed, and you have to make the rather shaky assumption that it became widespread purely by chance. Most features have some cost, and the simplest explanation for that feature being widespread is that it has some counteracting benefit that leads to it being selected for. That's a reasonable first hypothesis, to say the least, which means the "spandrel" hypothesis makes sense as the less common special case.
I don't agree and that's totally fine-- we have millions of gene edits from parent to child and not every change is environment-selected. Certain features can be dominant by the mechanics of genes, not due to selective pressure.
Blood types are an example of this-- they aren't major environmental pressures for why one blood type is more common than others, it mostly comes down to population mechanics.
My belief is that "spandrel" features are less selected for studies because they have a harder burden to prove; there exists no external reason they exist and this must be verified through proof by contradiction. Its a high bar to prove.
Blood types aren't fixed across the population. It's kind of a tricky question which of our points they make a better example for. :D
But also, I guess by "feature" I tend to mean "noticeable feature". You might be more right about that, at least as far as terminology goes. At the bottom end you have a point mutation to a codon for the same amino acid, and then eventually you get something like a slightly different color pattern. Those are probably free.
But as soon as you have to, say, add or increase the size of a physical feature, there's a metabolic cost. And when those features aren't used, that (small!) cost drives them to disappear in relatively short order (for instance, all the convergently legless lizards). That strongly implies that for those, there needs to be a persistent reason for them to keep existing.
Entirely aside, I wonder how long we need to have blood transfusions as part of society before blood type compatibility starts exerting selective pressure.
The jury is still out on exactly how intelligent other hominins were (and the extent of our involvement in their extinction). Regardless, the term human can apply to all of genus Homo and that's the sense that discussions of "human intelligence" typically use.
The burial sites of Homo Naledi suggest they had developed burial rituals and primitive art which would mean non-Sapiens hominids were likely smarter than previously believed
I like that theory although it is depressingly grim ... the top dog species will inherently see any alternative intelligence as a threat and eradicate it. Would definitely make one pause for thought about the wisdom of creating an AGI ...
I think it might be just competition. Human brains are expensive in terms of energy expenditure. So at certain population scales having less energy to expend might be comparative advantage.
And same really goes for other niches we do not even occupy. You need to get something out of those expensive to keep brains.
Since the invention of contraception, intelligence seems maladaptive, although we may have already reached technological escape velocity so it's not clear to me that it'll matter.
There are huge reserves of the population where contraception isn't a thing. There are so many people alive today, that evolving out intelligence is really hard to imagine. Perhaps in some kind of far future science fiction "robots spoonfeeding drooling humanoids" scenario.
Considering human intelligence is very social, I wonder if bias to focus on individual humans leads us to a wrong way of understanding why it arose…
One of my pet theories is that it may be related to vocal cord development[0], where losing certain physiology that allows apes to be louder allowed humans to be more specific, if quieter, with enhanced pitch control and stability offering higher information density communication. This unlocks more complex societal interactions and detailed shared maps. (In Iain McGilchrist’s terms, it let the Emissary—the part of the brain shown to specialize in classification and pattern recognition, the requisite building blocks for efficient communication—to take priority.)
This is an example highlighting how it is not about individual humans “becoming smarter”, evolving larger brains, etc., but rather about humans becoming capable of working together in more sophisticated ways. In fact, human brain shrunk in the last few thousands of years, in concert with growing size of our societies and labour specialization[1], which in turn in no small part is helped by communication density offered by our vocal cords. Really, humans in this way are closer ants[2], where being part of human community is the defining part of our nature.
I've read, from a few separate sources that were not research papers, something similar that claimed the development was a result of existing in semi-aquatic environments such as home on land but swimming for food/safety. I neither agree or disagree (not my field, I don't possess appropriate background/information), but I do think of it when evolution of vocal cords is mentioned.
I don't recall the sources ATM, possibly something out of CoEvolution Quarterly or Bucky Fuller. Again, not research papers.
Semi-aquatic environments make sense if you look at our brains dependency on DHA (seafood is a rich source) and the hypothesis that our fingers get wrinkly in water after a while to improve grip.
Aren't we a lot more evolved for hunting animals on foot? The whole thing with us losing our fur and sweating with the whole body, adaptations to running and throwing stuff, all of this makes us better hunters, but not necessarilly fushermen.
The two go together. Living with water requires control of breathing. Hunting animals on land requires strong endurance and probably also an ability to carry water.
Depending on which factors you weigh most heavily, sociality theories usually fit into either individual or group selection categories. They're sort of the default consensus, but not one that's firm.
Your idea would be what's called a spandrel hypothesis, basically that language (or culture etc) is a side effect of other adaptive traits.
It is not my idea per se, of course… I only gathered (well, it seems sort of obvious) that, given the overwhelmingly social nature of human intelligence, communication with high information throughput is likely the key differentiator between HS and other apes; the rest was ~1 minute of googling.
As to “side effect”, given better communication and consequently cooperation and potential for more complex collectives lead to persistent survival of the species in the environment, they seem like a pretty straightforward evolutionary advantage that would be expected to be naturally selected for in the first place. If anything, chances are in long term the great larynx update is the real side effect, it just happened to be a trait enabling all the above evolutionary advantages.
This highlights just how little we really know, even with decades of fossil, genetic, and behavioral data. What's always struck me is how intelligence might not have been a linear "goal," but more like a byproduct of other traits that just happened to snowball...
Stone tools predate even the oldest suggestions of intentional fire use by at least a million years, so the cooking hypothesis isn't particularly compelling. Elsewhere in this thread I've also discussed how it's not really an explanation either.
The cooking hypothesis is not well known, however, from what I understand, this was when we went from having big guts and average brains to small guts and big brains. The fossil record of primates is far from complete, but roughly speaking, we have been eating cooked food for a million years.
The stone tools that predate this by a few million years reinforce the cooked food hypothesis in this 'chicken or egg' situation.
The only logical pathway is that some genetic mutation or plant-based hallucination allowed for lack of animalistic fear/true context generation within the brain. Understanding that bear/tiger/snake/etc won’t kill you in certain circumstances, means you can expend exponentially less calories and focus on building tools etc. It allows for rapid growth across the species in many areas.
chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans evolved intelligence too. They are smarter than most other critters in the jungle. Just all not as much as the lineage that leads to humans.
It's actually quite difficult to define human intelligence. Every time we think we find something unique by humans eventually some animal turns up that can do it too. It may be all just a question of degree and how it's used.
From what I've heard, language is unambiguously unique to humans, if you consider grammar an integral part of languages. You can teach chimpanzees hand signs, but they could never make the leap to stringing them together under a coherent rule: something like the difference between "Mom give me cookies" vs "I give mom cookies."
(I'm no expert, so take that with a grain of salt.)
proto-grammers are fairly common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot) for example shows that parrots are capable of understanding English word order to some extent.
Unique to modern humans, maybe. But that's only because we outcompeted/killed all of our sibling species that also spoke language. Denisovans likely had language as well.
Starting from what should be considered "writing" to how to identify specific artifacts as abstract words.
Some researchers spend years in the forest studying one animal to isolate one single word they're speaking. Understanding other kind of intelligences is a crazy complex task.
"Why humans evolved intelligence but orangutans did not".
There's a different way to think about this that is closer to how evolution actually works and will make the answer clear.
Our common ancestor (common to orangutans and humans) did evolve intelligence (concurrently with harnessing fire, clothing etc.). Not all of them, but some of them. And they broke off from the group. We now call them humans.
Intelligence was evolved millions of years after the most recent common ancestor. Harnessing fire, clothing, etc. came later still. The lineage that would ultimately give rise to humans split from the chimp/bonobo lineage as the human ancestors adapted to savanna life, likely due to aridification brought on by the formation of the Himalayas.
It's possible that selective pressure towards intelligence was greater for the human lineage than for the others. It's also possible that the evolution of intelligence was equally likely across the different lineages and humans just happened to be the one where the mutation happened. Regardless, once human ancestors filled the niche, it would have been difficult for another lineage to get in on the game.
What definition are you using to say chimps don't have human level intelligence?
By any useful definition, the intelligence of human ancestors very closely resembled that of chimps for about 4 million years after the human and chimp lineages diverged. While it's impossible to say for certain, that's around the time that endocranial volumes started growing consistently beyond the range seen in chimps. That is also around the time of the first evidence of stone tool making.
Substitute orangutans for Australopithecus. That is (one of) the branches that did evolve more intelligence, but didn't survive. I suppose there were lots of such branches, that either merged back into humanity (like the Neanderthals), or died out.
Australopithecus is essentially on the human branch, and likely was still several million years before the development of advanced intelligence. Our common ancestor with Australopithecus was not any more intelligent than a typical Australopithecus, as far as we can tell.
As far as we can tell, no branch developed significantly increased intelligence after splitting off from our own lineage. That's not to say it definitely didn't happen or that our lineage was always the smartest, just that there isn't any evidence demonstrating a qualitative difference which has survived to the present. But it's weird that no such evidence exists.
Conversely different primate groups did independently evolve similar levels of intelligence, like Capuchin monkeys (which are new world primates) developed their intelligence after splitting off from the old world primates some 40 million years ago. Baboons and Macaques likewise each evolved intelligence independent of the great apes. Likewise similar levels (if different specializations) of intelligence have evolved independently outside the primates, such as cetaceans, elephants, and corvids. For cephalopods, which likewise are highly intelligent, their common ancestor with us didn't even have a brain.
I always believed that it was the group that had first mastered fire. Cooking food fundamentally changed human energy budgets. And keeping a fire meant that the group would congregate and form a larger social group, which would then lead to greater communication.
This of course changes the question as to why only/mainly homo erectus developed the capability.
It's the other way round: we are a species because we are the ones that evolved intelligence, which was certainly an enormous difference between intelligent humans and physically identical unintelligent apes.
Ah, I meant on our planet. Of course, we wouldn't wonder if it's evident that there is aliens (other intelligent life from another object) at a similar time as when we evolve this level of intelligence. This would be far before we can make technological means to rule out intelligent life on nearby celestial objects, or someone would probably have come up with the question why we don't talk with (the equivalent of) apes and dolphins and such. The other intelligent life would have to be either among us, or visible from where we live (mountains, ocean surface, idk) with whatever we have for senses (like eyesight good enough to observe structures in orbit that are clearly not natural, as an example)
Intelligence must surely be a cluster of evolved changes, let's say A-Z. Each of those letters must have appeared, and been advantageous on their own (or they wouldn't have persisted).
So why didn't chimps get some of them?
For example, chimps have hands, but do not exhibit anywhere near the dexterity and agility of human hands.
Think less in terms of "this must be inherently better than that" and more in terms of the thermodynamics at play. Dexterous hands probably have some cost. Maybe they aren't as durable as a chimps hands. Maybe they take more calories to run. Maybe they need more brain power dedicated toward the hands and respective energy requirements. I'm not really sure what they may be, but there are usually tradeoffs between any A vs B in an organism.
Now if these costs are indeed less than the fitness advantage of a chimp having more dexterous hands, and that is in biological fitness as in reproductive success not the colloquial 'fitness' as in going to the gym, and that mutation for dexterous hands is present among the breeding population, you will expect to see offspring with that mutation, having higher fitness, to increase in frequency in the population.
There are a lot of potential edge cases to consider as well. Maybe the dexterous hands allele is very close to a very bad allele in chimps, such that through recombination it is likely that these two alleles are inherited together (called linkage). You'd see both these alleles purged from the population over time through purifying selection.
There is the population history aspect to consider. Maybe you don't need dexterous hands if your population is still living in the jungle among plentiful calories like the chimpanzee. Maybe it is more relevant to comparatively more feeble humans that were pushed out of that jungle by physically stronger ape populations into more nutrient poor environments, where suddenly the increased fitness from the advantages dexterous hands might bring now pay for their energy costs.
They did get some of them. Functionally, chimps are pretty smart compared to almost anything but a human. Only if you define intelligence specifically as the gap between humans and chimps (or whatever other reference) can you say chimps didn't get any of the pieces. We can ask why humans have more of the pieces, but that's basically the same question as why any species diverges. So, some inscrutable combination of chance, path dependence, etc
Underrated point wrt intelligence is the extent to which it depends on fine motor control. Whether you're building tools, writing, or speaking a complex language, you need fine motor control to make that possible.
So it's not just brainpower, it's likely a combination of potential brainpower - which many species have/had - and fine motor control, which set up feedback loop that translated a mind/body synergy into practical evolutionary benefits.
There were no chimps back then. We had a shared common ancestor, and subgroups gradually emerged and gradually became different enough that they stopped interbreeding (or were physically separated).
It's an interesting question, but maybe more complex than it appears. We cannot get rid of the cultural passing of information (non-genetic) in humans. If we do, we get feral children [1] (also known as Mowgli in popular culture). But I doubt anyone would seriously want to compare this "pure" intelligence with that of other primates. There is a possible agreement that socialization is not an option for humans but a requirement. Maybe if by some bad luck feral children were grouped together for some time, this might be an approximation, but I'm not sure. Overall, using computers as an analogy, it's like humans are only functional after the software installation following the first power-on, which is more or less required for normal activity.
This may not be entirely accurate. Feral children are those that do not have interaction with other humans.
If you had a bunch of human children together and provided them sustenance and all that without adult interaction they might still develop normally and form their own language and means of communication with each other.
We don’t know for sure because such an experiment would be horrible and extremely immoral. However I do remember reading a while back that a similar situation happened where a bunch of deaf children in a an environment without much adult interaction did manage to create their own sign language to communicate with each other.
So it seems the feral child phenomena might be due to the fact that the child is alone rather than simply due to the child not having adult interaction.
> where a bunch of deaf children in a an environment without much adult interaction did manage to create their own sign language
You probably had Nicaraguan Sign Language [1] in mind. I think it’s a good example of the human brain’s ability to invent something and acquire knowledge easily. What I tried to show with my comment is that when human intelligence is discussed, it’s easy to refer to all instances of human achievements around us, but they are essentially accumulated cultural knowledge. Because of this, we tend to overestimate our intelligence, at least when comparing an individual human with an individual primate of another kind.
So, it’s also interesting why humans are probably unique in this ability to pass on and accumulate information, while other apes (and crows) limit this to skills like retrieving ants with sticks and breaking shells with stones.
I have no expertise in the field whatsoever but can't help but wonder if it is at all related to our consumption of cooked foods. At the very least it reduces the incidence of parasites but I am sure there are myriad benefits beyond treating foods for longevity through methods like smoking.
I have zero expertise either, but I find this field fascinating. Cooking makes it easier to chew so we can devote less of our skulls to chewing muscles. At birth our skulls are barely small enough to fit through the birth canal in one orientation, and one of the prerequisites for a baby to be born is that it’s facing head down and shoulders rotated into that orientation. Maybe cooking is beneficial because it allowed us to have a bigger braincase but also it gave us access to more nutrients from the same food.
Humans are a protected species, carefully raised and nurtured by higher organisms that are hundred thousand times larger than us (in terms of space and time). The earth and solar system is just a vivarium of galactic scale. Several "glass wall" mechanisms were placed to ensure we are separated from the rest of the universe, like the oort cloud.
Somewhere out there in the universe are humans living freely outside the glass wall.
Playing with this outlandish thought further, the idea that earth is an enclosure for research or preservation explains why the solar system is configured the way it is and why tiny adjustments could render it an inhabitable wasteland.
As time goes on, the glass walls tend to age and occasionally the "cracks" allows external lifeforms (aliens) to slip past the protection layer, much like how insects or parasites would occasionally slip past any opening.
With this in mind, there would be two types of aliens/visitors to our enclosure: (1) lifeforms that are similar to humans in terms of size and biological complexity but more technologically advanced and (2) our protectors who are incomprehensibly larger and more complex than any life on earth. This isn't as outlandish as it seems to be considering there are stars that are million times larger than our own sun.
This sheer difference in scale might as well make the protectors exist in a different dimension. This explains why people would say that aliens were here all this time, but from another dimension. Technically they are here, but more accurately to say the protectors surround us.
Occasionally protectors would step in to prevent mankind from destroying their own enclosure, much like a terrarium owner would reach into the enclosure to remove unwanted organisms. Frequent unidentified sightings on nuclear sites is the protectors' way of peeking and reaching a "hand".
It remains to be seen if humanity would one day evolve to outgrow the enclosure.
Is an individual human raised alone significantly smarter than a chimp?
How much of the intelligence gap is culture and communication that lets us educate ourselves and compound knowledge vs biology? Homo lived for thousands and thousands of years with the same level of development as other apes
Since it is impossible to instill human culture into a chimp (and scientists certainly have tried) there must be some important biological differences between people and chimps.
A curious-er question to me would be how did cephalopods (octopuses, cuttlefish) develop sophisticated intelligence a few hundred million years before ‘we’ did separately from us?
And they still are alongside us right now. Which to me is fascinating.
The other apes are intelligent enough for their niche. At some point in humanity's past, the environment was harsh enough that the less intelligent ones died.
That question is analogous to asking why did some fish grow legs and become mammals.
The answer is mutations sometimes specific members of a group will gain a mutation that will overtime cause that group to split off away from the ancestor group. It’s all a matter of chance evolution doesn’t have a direction.
Multiple lines of mammals have independently evolved back into being marine life. Whales, seals and manatees do not have a common ancestor, for example.
Because we are farther way on the evolutionary tree then is commonly thought, there is a tree of common ancestors going much further back (5 million or more years) that links humans with monkeys
Evolution doesn't have end goals like building the most powerful computer possible. If caloric excesses are a factor, it's because there was some other selective pressure that made use of the energy to support more neurons. But even then, more hardware isn't the same thing as more intelligence. Elephants and whales have bigger brains than we do. Shrews and birds have a higher brain/body mass ratio. None of them are intelligent to the degree humans are. An explanation for human intelligence has to explain us, not just our brain mass.
Sperm whales may have more massive brains, but they have fewer cortical neurons total, and of course a much smaller brain to body mass ratio.
But more importantly for this conversation, our brains use up a staggering 20-25% of our resting metabolic needs. A whale brain uses something like 3%.
For us to be able to devote 20% of our calories to our brains, we simply needed to have a huge excess in the number of calories we had available. This is why the cooking hypothesis makes sense. Once we were smart enough to get lots of excess calories, that opened the door to this new fitness landscape of organisms that could devote a ridiculous proportion of their food to their brains. It wasn't that we gave up something else, it's that this wasn't even a possibility before.
I think this is actually an easy question to answer because you’ve accidentally preselected your demographics.
Imagine this: among primates, there is an even distribution of species of differing levels of intelligence. All the primates who became intelligent have similar evolution paths because intelligence defines their evolution path (opposable thumbs, large heads, standing upright, etc.) Then because they all have similar evolution paths we put all those into the genus “Homo.” Each of species of the genus Homo eventually either breeds with each other or genocides one another until there are only the Homo Sapiens left.
So with an even distribution of intelligence among all primates, it’s logical that, given enough time, all that is left are primates of sufficient intelligence enough to breed with each other or be genocided until there is only one species, or many species of primates who weren’t intelligent enough.
This is my guess (I’m not a biologist or ancient historian or anything)
I can extrapolate based on my toddler that a modern human dumped in the wild would invent language. He has made several phonemes that aren’t in the language we speak at home. And he’s clever enough that even though he’s never seen us stand on furniture, he still climbs drawers and chairs if there’s something he wants that’s out of reach. I think that tool use and language are borne of some innate drive that’s accelerated by culture.
> He has made several phonemes that aren’t in the language we speak at home.
No I mean absolutely zero contact with or help from modern (say since the last 10,000 years) human civilization.
I mean literally giving birth in a forest and then raising the baby there without ever speaking a word around it or showing it any tools etc.
(this assumes that it will survive to 1-2 years old without any fatal sickness etc. but let's say that the mother/parents will get just enough "outside" help to make sure it does, but the baby itself is not to come in contact with any tech or language)
I'm pretty sure there were children where the parents basically locked them in cages or chained them to a post in the basement, where they had almost no social contact, etc. And in these cases they were considered effectively mentally disabled by the time they were rescued.
That’s different. He’s not saying to totally isolate the child, but that the child is born to modern humans without any language or culture or knowledge but who live in a wilderness. So not a place of deprivation but a place of danger and exploration. I would argue that kids are wired to explore, and that the parents would do their best to protect the child. It’s kind of a useless thought experiment because our lineages stretch back unbroken to the beginning of life, and that includes culture and transmitted knowledge.
Given that the future human is different than you are today, they could ask you the same questions. How does it FEEL for you to communicate worldwide with an HN post, but not yet have the ability to (insert advanced capability here).
Every one of our evolutionary ancestors was the best human yet, just like we are.
> Given that the future human is different than you are today, they could ask you the same questions. How does it FEEL for you to communicate worldwide..
No no no, I don't mean going from already intelligent/sentient/sapient to MORE intelligent….
I mean, going from the levels of intelligence/awareness we see in insects → fish → chickens and cattle → monkeys/apes → what we consider "actual" intelligence as seen in humans.
Evolution of anything is obviously not some simple boolean switch: It's not like one day you're a full fish and the next day you give birth to an amphibian with legs.
But how would the gradual evolution of intelligence look and feel like?
Going from what we consider animals to be, to having awareness and introspective thoughts and future planning?
Is it like, do you have just 1 thought per day at first,
or can only count up to 3 for a few thousand years,
only plan for up to 1 day ahead, and remember that plan for only a few hours…
And when do all the clearly self-destructive things kick in, that we Modern Humans™ do that obviously harm individuals and the species? :)
I guess I see it as a continuum. My cats are clearly not as smart as a human, but they remember and they have independent thoughts. Presumably they wouldn’t feel inadequate compared to a human, since they get everything they could possibly want and we do the work. But it’s highly unlikely that they are smart enough to have that self-reflective thought.
Humans have the gift of understanding, but our lives are filled with things we either don’t really understand or that we have an illusion of understanding. Of course, we wonder “why does evil exist?” whereas cats wonder “when is dinnertime?”
All apes are intelligent. Studies have shown that their causal reasoning is almost on par with humans. What they seem to lack is language for communicating sophisticated concepts and persisting them across generations.
Thank you. One person. One person is able to question the narrative of human intelligence and arrive at the essential distinction. Maybe a reflexive habit of mind that seeks to find differences between the human and the other and is incapable of seeing the other in the human.
Out of africa is basically false, there were decently advanced walking hominids in asia a long time ago. Then they migrated west, africa was the origination, but that origination was not the ~50k years ago like was frequently claimed
All the evidence we have points to the vast, vast majority (>90%) of non-african human ancestry originating from hominin populations that were in Africa around 60-80k years ago, and were anatomically modern about 300k years ago. This article is about an ancestral clade of archaic hominins that contributed around 2% of modern non-african ancestry globally, that we've known about for years.
OOA (with minor admixture) is the consensus position for a lot of excellent reasons.
there were multiple out of africa migrations and backmigration into Africa, 60-80k is just the most recent and the prominent founder population for modern humans outside of Africa.
You're going to have to explain this one. The only thing I can figure is that you're making a distinction about "traditional" RAO vs modern hybridization models, but my comment already mentions those (albeit indirectly, given that I'm writing to an audience).
But if you're genuinely trying to say that the broad strokes out of africa model isn't consensus, I have no idea what you're talking about. Just to make sure I haven't missed some momentous event since the last time I was doing fieldwork, I even checked some unpublished books, review papers, and actual research. They all talk about OOA as completely settled or instead simply assume it.
OOA is extremely problematic. Lots of hoops are needed to make it work - a double exodus from Africa and a population bottleneck, etc. None of these hoops are needed if we just let go and assume a Middle Eastern origin for homo sapiens.
Basically the only reason a Kuhnian paradigm shift isn't happening is because of American politics; OOA is needed to debunk some stupid 19th century American racial theories. (Theories that the rest of the world doesn't even know or care about.)
A middle eastern origin presents obvious problems explaining the genetic diversity data and the serial founder effects we observe globally. These naturally fall out of African origin, whereas a middle eastern origin needs a back to Africa that somehow avoids founder effects.
Which stupid racial theories do you think African origin is trying to debunk and why would the many European researchers working on human origins care?
It is also the consensus position for a lot of bad reasons though.
There is an assumption that belief in, or even reasonable agnosticism towards, any other theory can only be motivated by racism.
There are many people that believe OOA because they want to believe it, because they want to believe we are all more similar than we are different, etc.
Multiregional hypotheses are perfectly plausible. We have very limited information one way or another. Out of Africa may be more likely but it is far from certain.
Just to be clear about what the term multiregionalism means, it's an argument that there's anatomical continuity between archaic hominin populations around afroeurasia and modern human populations. That is, anatomical modernity didn't evolve once in Africa, but multiple times all over the world in populations that are still extant today. A multiregional hypothesis might say that modern Chinese people evolved from archaic populations in Asia.
This is completely and unequivocally rejected by the genetic evidence. The evidence is so absolutely overwhelming that even fucking Wolpoff came around and now says:
It is broadly agreed that all recent/living human populations ultimately descend from Africans.
Now, if you mean something completely different to the commonly understood definition of multiregionalism, I'm willing to hear it.
There are many people that believe OOA because they want to believe it
But, also, There are many people that [do not] believe OOA because they [do not] want to believe it.
That's why we look at genetic evidence, to eliminate nonsense. That evidence strongly points to chimps, gorillas, humans etc all coming from the same place.
If it makes you feels better, think of it this way:
we don't believe OOA because the evidence says we're related to blacks. We believe it because the evidence says we're pretty much hairless apes. (And a lot of us aren't even hairless!)
theres actually almost zero clarity around the common ancestor between apes and humans, and a lot of speculation that the common ancestor lived 6-8 million years ago.
> That evidence strongly points to chimps, gorillas, humans etc all coming from the same place.
No. Non-African humans have genetic lineages that do not occur anywhere in Africa.
This doesn't mean OOA is necessarily false, but does makes it much less likely.
Also, lumping in primates is a red herring. The resolution of our gene clade knowledge doesn't go that far back. Dreaming about some hypothetical ape ancestor is a vibe, not a science.
We know there were indigenous folks here in Australia ~50K years ago, and we know that we didn't evolve in Australia, so any origination must be further back than that.
You are completely wrong. Out of Africa is correct. Out of Asia is incorrect, and is outdated sino propaganda. Even the modern Chinese state admits that DNA evidence pretty conclusively points to out of Africa.
But the analytics were not made in China or by a Chinese researcher. So unless they tampered with the skull's age somehow, they would have little influence here.
Twelve of the paper's thirteen authors (all except Chris Stringer) are shown as working in China according to https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado9202 (click "Authors Info & Affiliations" near the top), and the research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
To be clear I don't mean to imply anything about possible biases or ulterior motives or whatnot. I was merely responding to "the analytics were not made in China or by a Chinese researcher" (which seems factually incorrect, unless I misunderstood something).
Dismissing out of hand because it's from China is ridiculous but speaks to the jingoistic times we are living in, particularly when this is a Denisovan skull.
Legitimately saddens me to see such a low-info reply at the top. Highly recommend people read "who we are and how we got here" - it provides a lot of great context to discoveries like this.
I have to admit I thought it might be "like that" before I read the article. But I don't think Chris Stringer would be a co-author on the paper if there was an issue of bias.
While this work is impressive, it is just one skull and, as the article points out, seems statistically anomalous, and therefore interesting.
> I'm not convinced that this is any sort of neutral analysis
Did you actually read the article? Nowhere does it suggest that anyone is claiming that China is the origin of Homo Sapiens. This million old skull discovered in China is not Homo Sapien, but related to Denisoven. It’s scientifically interesting since it suggests two things
1. Homo sapiens have existed longer than we previously thought.
2. Homo Sapiens may have come out of Western Asia, not Africa. But China is not in West Asia…
Please find other articles to fit into your the-Chinese-are-supremacist narrative. This one is not relevant.
I'm not an anthropologist and not even close, so a lot of uninformed opinions:
It has a few nice photos of the skull. It looks quite complete. 90%? And the reconstruction look accurate for my untrained eye, because there are few parts to guess, specially if you assume the skull is (almost) symmetrical.
I'm not sure if it's possible to cheat and give it an additional 1% or 2% of brain volume, but I guess it's not possible to give it a 10% more brain volume. Anyway, the volume is quite small compared to modern humans, that is not surprising because it's quite old.
IIUC figure 4 shows 3 big branches: Neanderthal (Europe???), Longi (Asia???) and Sapiens (Africa???). (Add a fee "???" here if necessary.) And the new fossil is in the "Longi" branch.
So as you say it may be an older than expected side chain, or something like that.
It's really not particularly anti-China imho, as indeed the West has its own brand of this in American Exceptionalism in general. We from smaller countries sometimes call this Big Country Syndrome.
It's true that China has a lot of affection for the Out of Asia theory of human origin, and to this day there are museums dedicated to the Peking Man that are at the very least heavily suggestive of this, or at least of China's population having a distinct origin.
Books and reams of sociology papers can and have been written about the relationship between CCP policy and the Peking Man and the CCPs difficulty with adjusting to today's generally preferred Out of Africa theory, and the effect on Chinese scientists working in anthropology. HN favorite Jimmy Maher (Digital/Analog Antiquarian) has a lovely line of free amateur history books including an excellent one on China that has a chapter on this:
I think it's a useful approach to contemporary Chinese identity. Nothing anti about that, any good-natured attempt to grok China would include this, just as no diatribe on America is complete without mentioning the 30-something % of Americans who state belief in some form of Creationism when polled.
I don't think less of China for containing a, shall we say, "patriotic" paleoanthropology community. Not any more than I think less of the US for the Book of Mormon being a thing. God knows we have these subcultures in Europe too.
But it is a thing and you need to be aware of it. A result from China which seems to support an out of China theory rather than an out of Africa theory, I am immediately suspicious of.
And you know, just because you and I don't bristle at the thought of descending from ancient Kenyans, lots of other people all over the world do. It's not just "regular" racists, also a lot of e.g. indigenous protected groups.
Given what we now know about backmigration and intermixing (particularly with Denisovans), it's really not coherent to say any "out of" theory is the Truth.
Sure, modern homo sapiens outside of Africa are all descendants of a founding group that left Africa, but they are also descendants of hominids who returned to Africa from elsewhere as well as local hominid populations that had left Africa far earlier (like Neanderthals and Denisovans).
Out of Africa has meaningful consequences even if people mixed back in. For example our closest evolutionary cousins should barring evidence to the contrary also tend to hail from Africa as well.
It’s that kind of reasoning that makes it important to try and be accurate here. Not a fact in isolation but everything else that it implies.
do Americans think higher about Europe just because ancestors of many of them came from there? Not happening.
I agree with you on the Sinophobia, but interest in the British royal family/British history generally and interest in Irish heritage are extremely common among groups of Americans. Most British visitors to the US can attest to how their accent is interpreted and affects treatment, in a positive sense, too.
> The interesting and exciting thing about China and Asia in general is that it does not suffer from the diabolical and evil brainwashing and psychological abuse that the whole "west" has been subjected to for many generations now, but especially post WWII.
Hold on a second, China and Asia in general don't suffer from diabolical and evil brainwashing and psychological abuse, since when?
China doesn't even acknowledge its own Historical events, and this has been a recurring pattern of diabolical and evil brainwashing and psychological abuse. Should we even address Russia goofy propaganda of mystical creatures?
Why should it be expected that everyone shouldn't be cautious of claims coming from a place where Historical revisionism is part of their culture?
Have you even checked the rates of fraudulent paper submissions?
you might well be right in most of this, but how do you get from OOA to "black Africans are more primitive"?
isn't the same nonsense debunked every time with "all living species are equally modern in that they share common ancestors, they didn't descend from one another"?
Maybe I missed the mark, but the point is that just because China makes a claim does not mean it should be automatically dismissed because they have a supposed superiority complex. I mean there are many on this planet who have superiority complexes, and far more consequential and imposing ones at that...by far...but that does not mean we should/can just dismiss what comes out of China. Test it, challenge it in a truly scientific manner...sure...but don't just apply ones own superiority complex to project a superiority complex on others. What if they are correct and accurate in their claim?
It is simply not a fair, honest, or decent thing to do and often comes from a superiority complex itself that seems to be projected on others in direct correlation to the degree of intensity of the superiority complex.
When the average life span was something like 30 years, why do all images look like they are 60+ years old? Is it a cognitive bias that we assume that people that are tens of thousands years old also look really old? :P
A lot of people here seem remiss to accept this but the claim was made, I think around 2018? And now the international community has gone and doubled checked - and it seems legitimate. 2025: the mainstream belief of descension changes.
What other base beliefs do you hold that will likely be false?
I can think of 5+. Our ancestors thought a lot of things for certain and died never knowing. Technological advancement is so fast nowadays, I hope we get to live through more.
At every chronological estimation they should append 'at least as old as' while they present their results. You never know if something older comes up later.
(Off topic) I’d like to think we get periodic impact events that put some new “code” on the planet and we get new species. That would be kinda dope.
That's just creationism.
Always worth asking how much these reconstructions reflect reality vs the assumptions built into the models
If a thought like this has occurred to you, a dilettante, after reading a headline and/or cursorily glancing over the article, then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis.
Drive-by anti-intellectualism like this is the death of interesting conversation, truly.
Since the "people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field" can be bad at statistics or experts at academic fraud, doubting statements with obvious political motives is a prudent policy.
Distrust is science, deferring to authority without a good reason is anti-intellectualism.
It's not that simple. It's true that a willingness to criticize and falsify established assumptions and skepticism toward arguments based on authority are part of the scientific ethos. It's also true that many scientists simply do what they've been taught to do, without questioning methods or taking an interest in the philosophy of science. But your last sentence is so sweeping that it would allow flat-earthers to be considered scientists and intellectuals.
What is being criticized here is an attitude that believes one is the only one capable of critical thinking and that everyone else is just an idiot who is already overwhelmed by the task of tying their shoelaces in the morning. This is simply arrogance and has little to do with constructiveness, let alone scientific ethos. You treat yourself to that little dopamine rush of saying “ackchyually” and then just carry on playing Bubble Shooter on your phone.
This is very common here on HN. And when this ultimately hardens into blanket skepticism toward institutions, you are closer to the flat-earthers than to the scientists.
In an ideal world, you would be right. In this world, I just read a study (that passed peer review), where they took per-capita data from a district with 100 people, data from a district with 50.000 people, averaged them without weighing by number of people, then presented the result as the per-capita average for all districts.
That is when they're not outright fabricating data, and having their colleagues cover for them (at Harvard):
In or before 2020, graduate student Zoé Ziani developed concerns about the validity of results from a highly publicized paper by Gino about personal networking. According to Ziani, she was strongly warned by her academic advisers not to criticize Gino, and two members of her dissertation committee refused to approve her thesis unless she deleted criticism of Gino's paper from it. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino
I reviewed a paper recently that gave an incorrect definition for one of Maxwell’s equations and then proceeded to use it incorrectly. It got moved to a lower ranked journal rather than rejected outright. That wasn’t the only problem either, half the text was clearly AI generated.
> then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis.
You should sit in some academic meetings and paper drafting e-mail chains! There’s a degree of believing the best in people but in my experience that can unfortunately be misplaced in science.
Have you not observed that science is very often politicized, filled with fraud or just plain mistaken? The anti-intellectual position is anti-skepticism.
Then come with proof or some shred of evidence, rather than asking an unsubstantiated question that undermines the scientific process unnecessarily by trying to insert doubt from a place of zero expertise in the field.
I think they call this the appeal to authority fallacy, it’s the people without expertise in a field that often see the holes in something first, then the holes start glowing after they get hand waved away by smug narrow-minded experts.
> it’s the people without expertise in a field that often see the holes in something first
While it's obvious that everybody makes mistakes and has blind spots, I'd wager that, in general, being more knowledgeable gives you better tools to spot actual holes.
And sure, experts too can be narrow-minded and smug. Just like everybody else.
> And sure, experts too can be narrow-minded and smug. Just like everybody else.
Being an expert always adds a big weakness: You get paid to do this so you are biased.
So no, they are not "just like everybody else", they have spent more time on it so they know some things better, but you can't get away from biases that comes from being paid to do something and that makes experts worse at some other things.
> the people without expertise in a field that often see the holes in something first
No they don't. That never happens. Would you expect someone who knows nothing about programming to identify flaws in a computer language?
Of course not. You expect it will be people who actually understand the field that can identify issues.
it can even happen in software engineering but takes different forms, someone outside sees the problem first because they are looking from a different perspective or due to familiarity with some external factor or edge case of their environment
Example?
and what are you engaged in, appeal to nothingness? appeal to authority isn't a fallacy outside of formal logic, it is just everyday knowledgemaking.
Everyday knowledgemaking is filled with fallacies.
And we make myriad daily mistakes because of them. Most have no real negative consequences, so we don't correct.
welcome to hacker news :)
I'm curious why humans evolved intelligence and chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans did not.
We don't know.
All of the great apes are incredibly intelligent in comparison to most other animals. The basic roots of our intelligence are probably a common feature to the whole family, but there's no consensus on why it's so advanced in humans. Any paleoanthropologist can rattle off about half a dozen possible explanations, but we honestly don't have enough evidence to really distinguish if, when, and how these were factors at different points in human evolution. Here's a quick attempt at some broad categories, which each have multiple hypotheses within them:
* Because intelligence had advantages for individual selection (e.g. mimetic recall hypothesis)
* Because intelligence had advantages for group selection
* Because intelligence had advantages for sexual selection (spandrel hypotheses often start here)
* Because adapting to rapidly varying ecological conditions required so many adaptations that we crossed some kind of barrier and "fell into" intelligence
* Because intelligence helped with foraging/hunting (exclusive of sociality)
I hadn't heard the term "spandrel" before, especially not in this context. Makes sense, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)
I personally dislike the definitions here-- traits and genetic changes are, by default, unattributed to external pressures. They don't "arise" from the environment, rather the environment selects for traits through survival/reproduction, if applicable.
That means, if a trait is unaffected by the environment, then there's no attribution of why it developed; this is the default state.
I feel often in biology, there's a mindset of figuring out why features developed and that's great for pushing the field but it runs into a limit. Not every trait developed from a environmental pressure.
Technically yes, kind of, but if a feature is truly unaffected by the environment, then there's no particular reason it would get fixed, and you have to make the rather shaky assumption that it became widespread purely by chance. Most features have some cost, and the simplest explanation for that feature being widespread is that it has some counteracting benefit that leads to it being selected for. That's a reasonable first hypothesis, to say the least, which means the "spandrel" hypothesis makes sense as the less common special case.
> Most features have some cost
I don't agree and that's totally fine-- we have millions of gene edits from parent to child and not every change is environment-selected. Certain features can be dominant by the mechanics of genes, not due to selective pressure.
Blood types are an example of this-- they aren't major environmental pressures for why one blood type is more common than others, it mostly comes down to population mechanics.
My belief is that "spandrel" features are less selected for studies because they have a harder burden to prove; there exists no external reason they exist and this must be verified through proof by contradiction. Its a high bar to prove.
Blood types aren't fixed across the population. It's kind of a tricky question which of our points they make a better example for. :D
But also, I guess by "feature" I tend to mean "noticeable feature". You might be more right about that, at least as far as terminology goes. At the bottom end you have a point mutation to a codon for the same amino acid, and then eventually you get something like a slightly different color pattern. Those are probably free.
But as soon as you have to, say, add or increase the size of a physical feature, there's a metabolic cost. And when those features aren't used, that (small!) cost drives them to disappear in relatively short order (for instance, all the convergently legless lizards). That strongly implies that for those, there needs to be a persistent reason for them to keep existing.
Entirely aside, I wonder how long we need to have blood transfusions as part of society before blood type compatibility starts exerting selective pressure.
Didn't a lot of other great apes evolve intelligence similar to ours, but we more or less drove them all to extinction?
Less than more. Most of the early hominids crossbred. For as much violence as there was, there was also a lot of sex.
Less extinction, and more evolution.
The jury is still out on exactly how intelligent other hominins were (and the extent of our involvement in their extinction). Regardless, the term human can apply to all of genus Homo and that's the sense that discussions of "human intelligence" typically use.
The burial sites of Homo Naledi suggest they had developed burial rituals and primitive art which would mean non-Sapiens hominids were likely smarter than previously believed
The subject of Homo Naledi is very controversial. Take it with a grain of salt.
it's interesting to think that since humans got established, becoming too intelligent became a disadvantage? Like there's a glass ceiling.
I like that theory although it is depressingly grim ... the top dog species will inherently see any alternative intelligence as a threat and eradicate it. Would definitely make one pause for thought about the wisdom of creating an AGI ...
Came here to say this, but you did it for me :-) . I truly believe there's a more than 50% chance the vast history of hominids ends this century.
I think it might be just competition. Human brains are expensive in terms of energy expenditure. So at certain population scales having less energy to expend might be comparative advantage.
And same really goes for other niches we do not even occupy. You need to get something out of those expensive to keep brains.
> Human brains are expensive in terms of energy
I dunno ... 10 bits/second ain't so lavish...
Perhaps, but 1/3 of your blood supply is expensive.
Since the invention of contraception, intelligence seems maladaptive, although we may have already reached technological escape velocity so it's not clear to me that it'll matter.
There are huge reserves of the population where contraception isn't a thing. There are so many people alive today, that evolving out intelligence is really hard to imagine. Perhaps in some kind of far future science fiction "robots spoonfeeding drooling humanoids" scenario.
Considering human intelligence is very social, I wonder if bias to focus on individual humans leads us to a wrong way of understanding why it arose…
One of my pet theories is that it may be related to vocal cord development[0], where losing certain physiology that allows apes to be louder allowed humans to be more specific, if quieter, with enhanced pitch control and stability offering higher information density communication. This unlocks more complex societal interactions and detailed shared maps. (In Iain McGilchrist’s terms, it let the Emissary—the part of the brain shown to specialize in classification and pattern recognition, the requisite building blocks for efficient communication—to take priority.)
This is an example highlighting how it is not about individual humans “becoming smarter”, evolving larger brains, etc., but rather about humans becoming capable of working together in more sophisticated ways. In fact, human brain shrunk in the last few thousands of years, in concert with growing size of our societies and labour specialization[1], which in turn in no small part is helped by communication density offered by our vocal cords. Really, humans in this way are closer ants[2], where being part of human community is the defining part of our nature.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/aug/11/how-quirk-of...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240517-the-human-brain-...
[2] Ants that farm and have stronger division of labour have smaller brains: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-ants-becam...
> ... vocal cord development ...
I've read, from a few separate sources that were not research papers, something similar that claimed the development was a result of existing in semi-aquatic environments such as home on land but swimming for food/safety. I neither agree or disagree (not my field, I don't possess appropriate background/information), but I do think of it when evolution of vocal cords is mentioned.
I don't recall the sources ATM, possibly something out of CoEvolution Quarterly or Bucky Fuller. Again, not research papers.
Semi-aquatic environments make sense if you look at our brains dependency on DHA (seafood is a rich source) and the hypothesis that our fingers get wrinkly in water after a while to improve grip.
Aren't we a lot more evolved for hunting animals on foot? The whole thing with us losing our fur and sweating with the whole body, adaptations to running and throwing stuff, all of this makes us better hunters, but not necessarilly fushermen.
The two go together. Living with water requires control of breathing. Hunting animals on land requires strong endurance and probably also an ability to carry water.
Depending on which factors you weigh most heavily, sociality theories usually fit into either individual or group selection categories. They're sort of the default consensus, but not one that's firm.
Your idea would be what's called a spandrel hypothesis, basically that language (or culture etc) is a side effect of other adaptive traits.
It is not my idea per se, of course… I only gathered (well, it seems sort of obvious) that, given the overwhelmingly social nature of human intelligence, communication with high information throughput is likely the key differentiator between HS and other apes; the rest was ~1 minute of googling.
As to “side effect”, given better communication and consequently cooperation and potential for more complex collectives lead to persistent survival of the species in the environment, they seem like a pretty straightforward evolutionary advantage that would be expected to be naturally selected for in the first place. If anything, chances are in long term the great larynx update is the real side effect, it just happened to be a trait enabling all the above evolutionary advantages.
This highlights just how little we really know, even with decades of fossil, genetic, and behavioral data. What's always struck me is how intelligence might not have been a linear "goal," but more like a byproduct of other traits that just happened to snowball...
I'm a huge fan of the hypothesis that:
1. Survival is easier in groups
2. In order to survive in groups, we need to communicate
3. We communicate using language
4. Language is directly linked with intelligence
See how computers started displaying intelligence when we taught them our language
all of this applies to monkeys
Yes but we were first
How about if we were the only apes to not fear fire as much and discovered that we get much more nutrients by cooking stuff?
Stone tools predate even the oldest suggestions of intentional fire use by at least a million years, so the cooking hypothesis isn't particularly compelling. Elsewhere in this thread I've also discussed how it's not really an explanation either.
The cooking hypothesis is not well known, however, from what I understand, this was when we went from having big guts and average brains to small guts and big brains. The fossil record of primates is far from complete, but roughly speaking, we have been eating cooked food for a million years.
The stone tools that predate this by a few million years reinforce the cooked food hypothesis in this 'chicken or egg' situation.
The only logical pathway is that some genetic mutation or plant-based hallucination allowed for lack of animalistic fear/true context generation within the brain. Understanding that bear/tiger/snake/etc won’t kill you in certain circumstances, means you can expend exponentially less calories and focus on building tools etc. It allows for rapid growth across the species in many areas.
chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans evolved intelligence too. They are smarter than most other critters in the jungle. Just all not as much as the lineage that leads to humans.
It's actually quite difficult to define human intelligence. Every time we think we find something unique by humans eventually some animal turns up that can do it too. It may be all just a question of degree and how it's used.
From what I've heard, language is unambiguously unique to humans, if you consider grammar an integral part of languages. You can teach chimpanzees hand signs, but they could never make the leap to stringing them together under a coherent rule: something like the difference between "Mom give me cookies" vs "I give mom cookies."
(I'm no expert, so take that with a grain of salt.)
Cetacean communication obeys Zipf's law: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11797547/
As does house finches: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.202...
Sperm whale codas exhibit contextual and combinatorial structure: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8
Ants have developed symbolic language: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10093743/
Everywhere we look close enough, we find life doing smart things.
Those are interesting examples. Do you know of a species where ALL of those properties (and more) exist?
Likely all of the ones named, and more. These are just a sampling of papers and not at all exhaustive.
proto-grammers are fairly common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot) for example shows that parrots are capable of understanding English word order to some extent.
Bee "dance" communication is remarkably sophisticated and precise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance?wprov=sfla1
Don't think so. Whales and dolphins seem to have a fairly sophisticated language with regional dialects and accents.
Unique to modern humans, maybe. But that's only because we outcompeted/killed all of our sibling species that also spoke language. Denisovans likely had language as well.
Are there any other animals that have a system of writing?
No, but humans didn't have writing up until pretty recently either so I don't think that is a great measure of base intellectual capability.
The interesting part is how do you research that.
Starting from what should be considered "writing" to how to identify specific artifacts as abstract words.
Some researchers spend years in the forest studying one animal to isolate one single word they're speaking. Understanding other kind of intelligences is a crazy complex task.
Researchers have taught primates to communicate using sequences of simple symbols. It's sort of like a system of writing but very primitive.
Not even close.
Some great apes can learn to use symbols for communication. Bees can use specific dances to indicate direction and distance.
I dont think any other animal even have language at all (at least not language like we use the word language)
"Why humans evolved intelligence but orangutans did not".
There's a different way to think about this that is closer to how evolution actually works and will make the answer clear.
Our common ancestor (common to orangutans and humans) did evolve intelligence (concurrently with harnessing fire, clothing etc.). Not all of them, but some of them. And they broke off from the group. We now call them humans.
Intelligence was evolved millions of years after the most recent common ancestor. Harnessing fire, clothing, etc. came later still. The lineage that would ultimately give rise to humans split from the chimp/bonobo lineage as the human ancestors adapted to savanna life, likely due to aridification brought on by the formation of the Himalayas.
It's possible that selective pressure towards intelligence was greater for the human lineage than for the others. It's also possible that the evolution of intelligence was equally likely across the different lineages and humans just happened to be the one where the mutation happened. Regardless, once human ancestors filled the niche, it would have been difficult for another lineage to get in on the game.
Is there a specific definition for intelligence?
What definition are you using to say chimps don't have human level intelligence?
By any useful definition, the intelligence of human ancestors very closely resembled that of chimps for about 4 million years after the human and chimp lineages diverged. While it's impossible to say for certain, that's around the time that endocranial volumes started growing consistently beyond the range seen in chimps. That is also around the time of the first evidence of stone tool making.
Like life, many sources define it differently.
Is there a specific definition of definition?
Substitute orangutans for Australopithecus. That is (one of) the branches that did evolve more intelligence, but didn't survive. I suppose there were lots of such branches, that either merged back into humanity (like the Neanderthals), or died out.
Australopithecus is essentially on the human branch, and likely was still several million years before the development of advanced intelligence. Our common ancestor with Australopithecus was not any more intelligent than a typical Australopithecus, as far as we can tell.
As far as we can tell, no branch developed significantly increased intelligence after splitting off from our own lineage. That's not to say it definitely didn't happen or that our lineage was always the smartest, just that there isn't any evidence demonstrating a qualitative difference which has survived to the present. But it's weird that no such evidence exists.
Conversely different primate groups did independently evolve similar levels of intelligence, like Capuchin monkeys (which are new world primates) developed their intelligence after splitting off from the old world primates some 40 million years ago. Baboons and Macaques likewise each evolved intelligence independent of the great apes. Likewise similar levels (if different specializations) of intelligence have evolved independently outside the primates, such as cetaceans, elephants, and corvids. For cephalopods, which likewise are highly intelligent, their common ancestor with us didn't even have a brain.
I always believed that it was the group that had first mastered fire. Cooking food fundamentally changed human energy budgets. And keeping a fire meant that the group would congregate and form a larger social group, which would then lead to greater communication.
This of course changes the question as to why only/mainly homo erectus developed the capability.
I think their question is not about why humans evolved intelligence, but why one and only one single species did.
It's the other way round: we are a species because we are the ones that evolved intelligence, which was certainly an enormous difference between intelligent humans and physically identical unintelligent apes.
> why humans evolved intelligence, but why one and only one single species did
Well, that's false. But we killed off/interbred with all of the peer/near-peer species.
Wouldn't the first ones always wonder that?
This led me on a tangent that eventually took me to this line on Wikipedia:
“Humans have visited the Moon and sent human-made spacecraft to other celestial bodies, becoming the first known species to do so.”
How would we know if we’re the first known anything? You don’t know what you don’t know, as they say.
Ah, I meant on our planet. Of course, we wouldn't wonder if it's evident that there is aliens (other intelligent life from another object) at a similar time as when we evolve this level of intelligence. This would be far before we can make technological means to rule out intelligent life on nearby celestial objects, or someone would probably have come up with the question why we don't talk with (the equivalent of) apes and dolphins and such. The other intelligent life would have to be either among us, or visible from where we live (mountains, ocean surface, idk) with whatever we have for senses (like eyesight good enough to observe structures in orbit that are clearly not natural, as an example)
Intelligence must surely be a cluster of evolved changes, let's say A-Z. Each of those letters must have appeared, and been advantageous on their own (or they wouldn't have persisted).
So why didn't chimps get some of them?
For example, chimps have hands, but do not exhibit anywhere near the dexterity and agility of human hands.
Think less in terms of "this must be inherently better than that" and more in terms of the thermodynamics at play. Dexterous hands probably have some cost. Maybe they aren't as durable as a chimps hands. Maybe they take more calories to run. Maybe they need more brain power dedicated toward the hands and respective energy requirements. I'm not really sure what they may be, but there are usually tradeoffs between any A vs B in an organism.
Now if these costs are indeed less than the fitness advantage of a chimp having more dexterous hands, and that is in biological fitness as in reproductive success not the colloquial 'fitness' as in going to the gym, and that mutation for dexterous hands is present among the breeding population, you will expect to see offspring with that mutation, having higher fitness, to increase in frequency in the population.
There are a lot of potential edge cases to consider as well. Maybe the dexterous hands allele is very close to a very bad allele in chimps, such that through recombination it is likely that these two alleles are inherited together (called linkage). You'd see both these alleles purged from the population over time through purifying selection.
There is the population history aspect to consider. Maybe you don't need dexterous hands if your population is still living in the jungle among plentiful calories like the chimpanzee. Maybe it is more relevant to comparatively more feeble humans that were pushed out of that jungle by physically stronger ape populations into more nutrient poor environments, where suddenly the increased fitness from the advantages dexterous hands might bring now pay for their energy costs.
They did get some of them. Functionally, chimps are pretty smart compared to almost anything but a human. Only if you define intelligence specifically as the gap between humans and chimps (or whatever other reference) can you say chimps didn't get any of the pieces. We can ask why humans have more of the pieces, but that's basically the same question as why any species diverges. So, some inscrutable combination of chance, path dependence, etc
Underrated point wrt intelligence is the extent to which it depends on fine motor control. Whether you're building tools, writing, or speaking a complex language, you need fine motor control to make that possible.
So it's not just brainpower, it's likely a combination of potential brainpower - which many species have/had - and fine motor control, which set up feedback loop that translated a mind/body synergy into practical evolutionary benefits.
It’s more like A appeared and there was a split off. Then B appeared and another split off from the A group and so on until you get to modern day Z.
So why didn't other lines evolve X and Q?
Pure chance, you might as well be asking why don’t monkeys have wings.
> So why didn't chimps get some of them?
The chimps that did get them we now call humans.
There were no chimps back then. We had a shared common ancestor, and subgroups gradually emerged and gradually became different enough that they stopped interbreeding (or were physically separated).
It sounds like you're saying that the common ancestor of humans and orangutans harnessed fire and made clothing. I don't think that's correct.
It's an interesting question, but maybe more complex than it appears. We cannot get rid of the cultural passing of information (non-genetic) in humans. If we do, we get feral children [1] (also known as Mowgli in popular culture). But I doubt anyone would seriously want to compare this "pure" intelligence with that of other primates. There is a possible agreement that socialization is not an option for humans but a requirement. Maybe if by some bad luck feral children were grouped together for some time, this might be an approximation, but I'm not sure. Overall, using computers as an analogy, it's like humans are only functional after the software installation following the first power-on, which is more or less required for normal activity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
This may not be entirely accurate. Feral children are those that do not have interaction with other humans.
If you had a bunch of human children together and provided them sustenance and all that without adult interaction they might still develop normally and form their own language and means of communication with each other.
We don’t know for sure because such an experiment would be horrible and extremely immoral. However I do remember reading a while back that a similar situation happened where a bunch of deaf children in a an environment without much adult interaction did manage to create their own sign language to communicate with each other.
So it seems the feral child phenomena might be due to the fact that the child is alone rather than simply due to the child not having adult interaction.
> where a bunch of deaf children in a an environment without much adult interaction did manage to create their own sign language
You probably had Nicaraguan Sign Language [1] in mind. I think it’s a good example of the human brain’s ability to invent something and acquire knowledge easily. What I tried to show with my comment is that when human intelligence is discussed, it’s easy to refer to all instances of human achievements around us, but they are essentially accumulated cultural knowledge. Because of this, we tend to overestimate our intelligence, at least when comparing an individual human with an individual primate of another kind.
So, it’s also interesting why humans are probably unique in this ability to pass on and accumulate information, while other apes (and crows) limit this to skills like retrieving ants with sticks and breaking shells with stones.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
I have no expertise in the field whatsoever but can't help but wonder if it is at all related to our consumption of cooked foods. At the very least it reduces the incidence of parasites but I am sure there are myriad benefits beyond treating foods for longevity through methods like smoking.
I have zero expertise either, but I find this field fascinating. Cooking makes it easier to chew so we can devote less of our skulls to chewing muscles. At birth our skulls are barely small enough to fit through the birth canal in one orientation, and one of the prerequisites for a baby to be born is that it’s facing head down and shoulders rotated into that orientation. Maybe cooking is beneficial because it allowed us to have a bigger braincase but also it gave us access to more nutrients from the same food.
A semi-serious tinfoiled answer:
Humans are a protected species, carefully raised and nurtured by higher organisms that are hundred thousand times larger than us (in terms of space and time). The earth and solar system is just a vivarium of galactic scale. Several "glass wall" mechanisms were placed to ensure we are separated from the rest of the universe, like the oort cloud.
Somewhere out there in the universe are humans living freely outside the glass wall.
Playing with this outlandish thought further, the idea that earth is an enclosure for research or preservation explains why the solar system is configured the way it is and why tiny adjustments could render it an inhabitable wasteland.
As time goes on, the glass walls tend to age and occasionally the "cracks" allows external lifeforms (aliens) to slip past the protection layer, much like how insects or parasites would occasionally slip past any opening.
With this in mind, there would be two types of aliens/visitors to our enclosure: (1) lifeforms that are similar to humans in terms of size and biological complexity but more technologically advanced and (2) our protectors who are incomprehensibly larger and more complex than any life on earth. This isn't as outlandish as it seems to be considering there are stars that are million times larger than our own sun.
This sheer difference in scale might as well make the protectors exist in a different dimension. This explains why people would say that aliens were here all this time, but from another dimension. Technically they are here, but more accurately to say the protectors surround us.
Occasionally protectors would step in to prevent mankind from destroying their own enclosure, much like a terrarium owner would reach into the enclosure to remove unwanted organisms. Frequent unidentified sightings on nuclear sites is the protectors' way of peeking and reaching a "hand".
It remains to be seen if humanity would one day evolve to outgrow the enclosure.
They don't compete with us directly, so they survived.
We destroyed the many other humanoid/intelligent species, who did compete with us.
Is an individual human raised alone significantly smarter than a chimp?
How much of the intelligence gap is culture and communication that lets us educate ourselves and compound knowledge vs biology? Homo lived for thousands and thousands of years with the same level of development as other apes
Since it is impossible to instill human culture into a chimp (and scientists certainly have tried) there must be some important biological differences between people and chimps.
A curious-er question to me would be how did cephalopods (octopuses, cuttlefish) develop sophisticated intelligence a few hundred million years before ‘we’ did separately from us?
And they still are alongside us right now. Which to me is fascinating.
No other intelligent humanoids have survived besides us, so maybe just a really clever survival strategy ;)
Why did birds evolve flight and people didn't?
The other apes are intelligent enough for their niche. At some point in humanity's past, the environment was harsh enough that the less intelligent ones died.
That question is analogous to asking why did some fish grow legs and become mammals.
The answer is mutations sometimes specific members of a group will gain a mutation that will overtime cause that group to split off away from the ancestor group. It’s all a matter of chance evolution doesn’t have a direction.
Multiple lines of mammals have independently evolved back into being marine life. Whales, seals and manatees do not have a common ancestor, for example.
They do have a common ancestor, it's just not a marine mammal.
> not a marine mammal
which is the point. They were not evolved from the same species of land animal.
Because we are farther way on the evolutionary tree then is commonly thought, there is a tree of common ancestors going much further back (5 million or more years) that links humans with monkeys
I'm just curious. Not all animals can evolve into humans. And many animals today have very high intelligence, we just don't know about it.
More energy from the digestive system to power a bigger GPU. Theories abound that this is due to the harnessing of fire for cooking.
Evolution doesn't have end goals like building the most powerful computer possible. If caloric excesses are a factor, it's because there was some other selective pressure that made use of the energy to support more neurons. But even then, more hardware isn't the same thing as more intelligence. Elephants and whales have bigger brains than we do. Shrews and birds have a higher brain/body mass ratio. None of them are intelligent to the degree humans are. An explanation for human intelligence has to explain us, not just our brain mass.
Sperm whales may have more massive brains, but they have fewer cortical neurons total, and of course a much smaller brain to body mass ratio.
But more importantly for this conversation, our brains use up a staggering 20-25% of our resting metabolic needs. A whale brain uses something like 3%.
For us to be able to devote 20% of our calories to our brains, we simply needed to have a huge excess in the number of calories we had available. This is why the cooking hypothesis makes sense. Once we were smart enough to get lots of excess calories, that opened the door to this new fitness landscape of organisms that could devote a ridiculous proportion of their food to their brains. It wasn't that we gave up something else, it's that this wasn't even a possibility before.
The point of my comment is that cooking doesn't explain "why". It explains "how".
we just got virus into heads(which mutated some cells) forcing us to eat more. we are vodoo dolls driven by craving for flesh.
> More energy from the digestive system to power a bigger GPU.
Is GPU already the metaphor du jour? I thought we were still aboard the steam engine ;)
And metabolizing alcohol, which also encourages reproduction.
Their biology simply filled a different ecological niche more effectively, it’s the same for all life.
I think this is actually an easy question to answer because you’ve accidentally preselected your demographics.
Imagine this: among primates, there is an even distribution of species of differing levels of intelligence. All the primates who became intelligent have similar evolution paths because intelligence defines their evolution path (opposable thumbs, large heads, standing upright, etc.) Then because they all have similar evolution paths we put all those into the genus “Homo.” Each of species of the genus Homo eventually either breeds with each other or genocides one another until there are only the Homo Sapiens left.
So with an even distribution of intelligence among all primates, it’s logical that, given enough time, all that is left are primates of sufficient intelligence enough to breed with each other or be genocided until there is only one species, or many species of primates who weren’t intelligent enough.
This is my guess (I’m not a biologist or ancient historian or anything)
It might just be that we evolved it first. Someone has to (if anyone does).
Who says they didn't?
What would "intelligence" look like WHILE it was evolving?
A slightly more unsettling thought: How would newly-emerging intelligence FEEL like, internally?
Also, how would humans fare if born and raised in the wild, without any language or tools taught to them?
I can extrapolate based on my toddler that a modern human dumped in the wild would invent language. He has made several phonemes that aren’t in the language we speak at home. And he’s clever enough that even though he’s never seen us stand on furniture, he still climbs drawers and chairs if there’s something he wants that’s out of reach. I think that tool use and language are borne of some innate drive that’s accelerated by culture.
> He has made several phonemes that aren’t in the language we speak at home.
No I mean absolutely zero contact with or help from modern (say since the last 10,000 years) human civilization.
I mean literally giving birth in a forest and then raising the baby there without ever speaking a word around it or showing it any tools etc.
(this assumes that it will survive to 1-2 years old without any fatal sickness etc. but let's say that the mother/parents will get just enough "outside" help to make sure it does, but the baby itself is not to come in contact with any tech or language)
I'm pretty sure there were children where the parents basically locked them in cages or chained them to a post in the basement, where they had almost no social contact, etc. And in these cases they were considered effectively mentally disabled by the time they were rescued.
That’s different. He’s not saying to totally isolate the child, but that the child is born to modern humans without any language or culture or knowledge but who live in a wilderness. So not a place of deprivation but a place of danger and exploration. I would argue that kids are wired to explore, and that the parents would do their best to protect the child. It’s kind of a useless thought experiment because our lineages stretch back unbroken to the beginning of life, and that includes culture and transmitted knowledge.
Given that the future human is different than you are today, they could ask you the same questions. How does it FEEL for you to communicate worldwide with an HN post, but not yet have the ability to (insert advanced capability here).
Every one of our evolutionary ancestors was the best human yet, just like we are.
> Given that the future human is different than you are today, they could ask you the same questions. How does it FEEL for you to communicate worldwide..
No no no, I don't mean going from already intelligent/sentient/sapient to MORE intelligent….
I mean, going from the levels of intelligence/awareness we see in insects → fish → chickens and cattle → monkeys/apes → what we consider "actual" intelligence as seen in humans.
Evolution of anything is obviously not some simple boolean switch: It's not like one day you're a full fish and the next day you give birth to an amphibian with legs.
But how would the gradual evolution of intelligence look and feel like?
Going from what we consider animals to be, to having awareness and introspective thoughts and future planning?
Is it like, do you have just 1 thought per day at first,
or can only count up to 3 for a few thousand years,
only plan for up to 1 day ahead, and remember that plan for only a few hours…
And when do all the clearly self-destructive things kick in, that we Modern Humans™ do that obviously harm individuals and the species? :)
I guess I see it as a continuum. My cats are clearly not as smart as a human, but they remember and they have independent thoughts. Presumably they wouldn’t feel inadequate compared to a human, since they get everything they could possibly want and we do the work. But it’s highly unlikely that they are smart enough to have that self-reflective thought.
Humans have the gift of understanding, but our lives are filled with things we either don’t really understand or that we have an illusion of understanding. Of course, we wonder “why does evil exist?” whereas cats wonder “when is dinnertime?”
All apes are intelligent. Studies have shown that their causal reasoning is almost on par with humans. What they seem to lack is language for communicating sophisticated concepts and persisting them across generations.
Thank you. One person. One person is able to question the narrative of human intelligence and arrive at the essential distinction. Maybe a reflexive habit of mind that seeks to find differences between the human and the other and is incapable of seeing the other in the human.
I think everyone overlooks fungi/plant’s impact of evolution/adaptation.
Survival of the fittest never includes the gene impacts plants and fungi can force onto creatures.
Also cyclical 12kyr catastrophic events leading to small condensation of species under stress.
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Out of africa is basically false, there were decently advanced walking hominids in asia a long time ago. Then they migrated west, africa was the origination, but that origination was not the ~50k years ago like was frequently claimed
All the evidence we have points to the vast, vast majority (>90%) of non-african human ancestry originating from hominin populations that were in Africa around 60-80k years ago, and were anatomically modern about 300k years ago. This article is about an ancestral clade of archaic hominins that contributed around 2% of modern non-african ancestry globally, that we've known about for years.
OOA (with minor admixture) is the consensus position for a lot of excellent reasons.
there were multiple out of africa migrations and backmigration into Africa, 60-80k is just the most recent and the prominent founder population for modern humans outside of Africa.
> OOA (with minor admixture) is the consensus position for a lot of excellent reasons
It isn't really. Serious historians and geneticists take great issue with it.
It's only really the pop-anthropologists (the non-rigorous social science ones) who think OOA is a settled issue.
You're going to have to explain this one. The only thing I can figure is that you're making a distinction about "traditional" RAO vs modern hybridization models, but my comment already mentions those (albeit indirectly, given that I'm writing to an audience).
But if you're genuinely trying to say that the broad strokes out of africa model isn't consensus, I have no idea what you're talking about. Just to make sure I haven't missed some momentous event since the last time I was doing fieldwork, I even checked some unpublished books, review papers, and actual research. They all talk about OOA as completely settled or instead simply assume it.
Is this like a CAS thing? Truly baffled.
OOA is extremely problematic. Lots of hoops are needed to make it work - a double exodus from Africa and a population bottleneck, etc. None of these hoops are needed if we just let go and assume a Middle Eastern origin for homo sapiens.
Basically the only reason a Kuhnian paradigm shift isn't happening is because of American politics; OOA is needed to debunk some stupid 19th century American racial theories. (Theories that the rest of the world doesn't even know or care about.)
A middle eastern origin presents obvious problems explaining the genetic diversity data and the serial founder effects we observe globally. These naturally fall out of African origin, whereas a middle eastern origin needs a back to Africa that somehow avoids founder effects.
Which stupid racial theories do you think African origin is trying to debunk and why would the many European researchers working on human origins care?
But where’s the evidence? I haven’t heard Reich or Paäbo go about this.
It is also the consensus position for a lot of bad reasons though.
There is an assumption that belief in, or even reasonable agnosticism towards, any other theory can only be motivated by racism.
There are many people that believe OOA because they want to believe it, because they want to believe we are all more similar than we are different, etc.
Multiregional hypotheses are perfectly plausible. We have very limited information one way or another. Out of Africa may be more likely but it is far from certain.
Just to be clear about what the term multiregionalism means, it's an argument that there's anatomical continuity between archaic hominin populations around afroeurasia and modern human populations. That is, anatomical modernity didn't evolve once in Africa, but multiple times all over the world in populations that are still extant today. A multiregional hypothesis might say that modern Chinese people evolved from archaic populations in Asia.
This is completely and unequivocally rejected by the genetic evidence. The evidence is so absolutely overwhelming that even fucking Wolpoff came around and now says:
Now, if you mean something completely different to the commonly understood definition of multiregionalism, I'm willing to hear it.There are many people that believe OOA because they want to believe it
But, also, There are many people that [do not] believe OOA because they [do not] want to believe it.
That's why we look at genetic evidence, to eliminate nonsense. That evidence strongly points to chimps, gorillas, humans etc all coming from the same place.
If it makes you feels better, think of it this way:
we don't believe OOA because the evidence says we're related to blacks. We believe it because the evidence says we're pretty much hairless apes. (And a lot of us aren't even hairless!)
There, feel better about it now?
theres actually almost zero clarity around the common ancestor between apes and humans, and a lot of speculation that the common ancestor lived 6-8 million years ago.
> That evidence strongly points to chimps, gorillas, humans etc all coming from the same place.
No. Non-African humans have genetic lineages that do not occur anywhere in Africa.
This doesn't mean OOA is necessarily false, but does makes it much less likely.
Also, lumping in primates is a red herring. The resolution of our gene clade knowledge doesn't go that far back. Dreaming about some hypothetical ape ancestor is a vibe, not a science.
We know there were indigenous folks here in Australia ~50K years ago, and we know that we didn't evolve in Australia, so any origination must be further back than that.
You are completely wrong. Out of Africa is correct. Out of Asia is incorrect, and is outdated sino propaganda. Even the modern Chinese state admits that DNA evidence pretty conclusively points to out of Africa.
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Please don't start nationalistic flamewars on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
But the analytics were not made in China or by a Chinese researcher. So unless they tampered with the skull's age somehow, they would have little influence here.
Twelve of the paper's thirteen authors (all except Chris Stringer) are shown as working in China according to https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado9202 (click "Authors Info & Affiliations" near the top), and the research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
someone call Joe McCarthy
To be clear I don't mean to imply anything about possible biases or ulterior motives or whatnot. I was merely responding to "the analytics were not made in China or by a Chinese researcher" (which seems factually incorrect, unless I misunderstood something).
Dismissing out of hand because it's from China is ridiculous but speaks to the jingoistic times we are living in, particularly when this is a Denisovan skull.
Legitimately saddens me to see such a low-info reply at the top. Highly recommend people read "who we are and how we got here" - it provides a lot of great context to discoveries like this.
I have to admit I thought it might be "like that" before I read the article. But I don't think Chris Stringer would be a co-author on the paper if there was an issue of bias.
While this work is impressive, it is just one skull and, as the article points out, seems statistically anomalous, and therefore interesting.
> I'm not convinced that this is any sort of neutral analysis
Did you actually read the article? Nowhere does it suggest that anyone is claiming that China is the origin of Homo Sapiens. This million old skull discovered in China is not Homo Sapien, but related to Denisoven. It’s scientifically interesting since it suggests two things
1. Homo sapiens have existed longer than we previously thought.
2. Homo Sapiens may have come out of Western Asia, not Africa. But China is not in West Asia…
Please find other articles to fit into your the-Chinese-are-supremacist narrative. This one is not relevant.
I mostly agree. Direct link to the paper https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado9202
I'm not an anthropologist and not even close, so a lot of uninformed opinions:
It has a few nice photos of the skull. It looks quite complete. 90%? And the reconstruction look accurate for my untrained eye, because there are few parts to guess, specially if you assume the skull is (almost) symmetrical.
I'm not sure if it's possible to cheat and give it an additional 1% or 2% of brain volume, but I guess it's not possible to give it a 10% more brain volume. Anyway, the volume is quite small compared to modern humans, that is not surprising because it's quite old.
IIUC figure 4 shows 3 big branches: Neanderthal (Europe???), Longi (Asia???) and Sapiens (Africa???). (Add a fee "???" here if necessary.) And the new fossil is in the "Longi" branch.
So as you say it may be an older than expected side chain, or something like that.
[Happy to get any corrections or more details.]
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It's really not particularly anti-China imho, as indeed the West has its own brand of this in American Exceptionalism in general. We from smaller countries sometimes call this Big Country Syndrome.
It's true that China has a lot of affection for the Out of Asia theory of human origin, and to this day there are museums dedicated to the Peking Man that are at the very least heavily suggestive of this, or at least of China's population having a distinct origin.
Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_Man
Books and reams of sociology papers can and have been written about the relationship between CCP policy and the Peking Man and the CCPs difficulty with adjusting to today's generally preferred Out of Africa theory, and the effect on Chinese scientists working in anthropology. HN favorite Jimmy Maher (Digital/Analog Antiquarian) has a lovely line of free amateur history books including an excellent one on China that has a chapter on this:
https://analog-antiquarian.net/2022/01/14/chapter-2-origin-s...
I think it's a useful approach to contemporary Chinese identity. Nothing anti about that, any good-natured attempt to grok China would include this, just as no diatribe on America is complete without mentioning the 30-something % of Americans who state belief in some form of Creationism when polled.
I don't think less of China for containing a, shall we say, "patriotic" paleoanthropology community. Not any more than I think less of the US for the Book of Mormon being a thing. God knows we have these subcultures in Europe too.
But it is a thing and you need to be aware of it. A result from China which seems to support an out of China theory rather than an out of Africa theory, I am immediately suspicious of.
And you know, just because you and I don't bristle at the thought of descending from ancient Kenyans, lots of other people all over the world do. It's not just "regular" racists, also a lot of e.g. indigenous protected groups.
Given what we now know about backmigration and intermixing (particularly with Denisovans), it's really not coherent to say any "out of" theory is the Truth.
Sure, modern homo sapiens outside of Africa are all descendants of a founding group that left Africa, but they are also descendants of hominids who returned to Africa from elsewhere as well as local hominid populations that had left Africa far earlier (like Neanderthals and Denisovans).
Out of Africa has meaningful consequences even if people mixed back in. For example our closest evolutionary cousins should barring evidence to the contrary also tend to hail from Africa as well.
It’s that kind of reasoning that makes it important to try and be accurate here. Not a fact in isolation but everything else that it implies.
It's all a matter of how far back you look.
The time period you look at also informs what you can extract from that analysis. So it’s not an arbitrary choice free from consequences.
do Americans think higher about Europe just because ancestors of many of them came from there? Not happening.
I agree with you on the Sinophobia, but interest in the British royal family/British history generally and interest in Irish heritage are extremely common among groups of Americans. Most British visitors to the US can attest to how their accent is interpreted and affects treatment, in a positive sense, too.
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> The interesting and exciting thing about China and Asia in general is that it does not suffer from the diabolical and evil brainwashing and psychological abuse that the whole "west" has been subjected to for many generations now, but especially post WWII.
Hold on a second, China and Asia in general don't suffer from diabolical and evil brainwashing and psychological abuse, since when?
China doesn't even acknowledge its own Historical events, and this has been a recurring pattern of diabolical and evil brainwashing and psychological abuse. Should we even address Russia goofy propaganda of mystical creatures?
Why should it be expected that everyone shouldn't be cautious of claims coming from a place where Historical revisionism is part of their culture?
Have you even checked the rates of fraudulent paper submissions?
you might well be right in most of this, but how do you get from OOA to "black Africans are more primitive"?
isn't the same nonsense debunked every time with "all living species are equally modern in that they share common ancestors, they didn't descend from one another"?
Maybe I missed the mark, but the point is that just because China makes a claim does not mean it should be automatically dismissed because they have a supposed superiority complex. I mean there are many on this planet who have superiority complexes, and far more consequential and imposing ones at that...by far...but that does not mean we should/can just dismiss what comes out of China. Test it, challenge it in a truly scientific manner...sure...but don't just apply ones own superiority complex to project a superiority complex on others. What if they are correct and accurate in their claim?
It is simply not a fair, honest, or decent thing to do and often comes from a superiority complex itself that seems to be projected on others in direct correlation to the degree of intensity of the superiority complex.
that seems unconnected to what I wrote?
(I agree with it, just seems like a non-sequitur...)
doctor banjo?
When the average life span was something like 30 years, why do all images look like they are 60+ years old? Is it a cognitive bias that we assume that people that are tens of thousands years old also look really old? :P
classic misunderstanding of avg
avg of 30 usually just means higher child death rates
once adult you would likely still get to 50+ on avg
I always felt Chinese.
A lot of people here seem remiss to accept this but the claim was made, I think around 2018? And now the international community has gone and doubled checked - and it seems legitimate. 2025: the mainstream belief of descension changes.
What other base beliefs do you hold that will likely be false?
I can think of 5+. Our ancestors thought a lot of things for certain and died never knowing. Technological advancement is so fast nowadays, I hope we get to live through more.