Leading With Our Chin
IMG source - ©Susana Santamaria / Atapuerca Foundation
A very interesting discovery in Spain of a 1.4m year old human has recently been published. The Atapuerca region of Spain has been one of the most productive archeological sites in history, with over 1600 human remains of 5 different species spread over more than 1 million years found there.
The most intriguing thing about this particular ancient bone is that it shows a chin. Only H. sapiens have chins. There are a great many shared anatomical features between Sapiens and Neanderthals, Denisovans, Floresiensans, and the many other species in Homo, but the chin is not one of them. No other hominins have chiseled chins.
In 2007 another find dating to 1.2mya showed a chin (I was unaware of it until now), but this 1.4mya bone came from beneath it, and shows a lingering human presence of this yet unnamed species at Atapuerca for over 200k years - and more than a million years before the theorized diaspora out of Africa that seems to be the official and promoted line taken by socially acceptable archeology. While we certainly have a lot of hybridization to reckon in Homo, we aren't one species, and no site shows this better than Atapuerca, where the new find predates H. antecessor by half a million years, H. antecessor itself, pre-Neanderthals, Neanderthals, and H. sapiens all have been found.
It's really weird that the oldest human remains found there have a chin, because, as I pointed out, only H. sapiens have chins. Brain size of these remains is comparable to modern humans and Neanderthals. Previously the oldest Sapien remains I was a aware of were from the Levant, some teeth that remain somewhat contested, from ~400kya. I would have never suspected the chin had evolved so long ago, and given that no other hominins have chins, it seems extremely unlikely to be a parallel evolution in a species that did not lead to Sapiens.
Therefore the implication of this find is that H. sapiens were out of Africa more than a million years ago, and arose in Europe, or, as I have long considered because of our hybrid nature, evolved across the entire landscape as species from Africa to Java, from Siberia to Europe interacted and interbred. I consider the evidence of Mitochondrial Eve to be a relic of the Toba eruption that almost wiped humanity out ~75kya, and this is why our mitochondrial DNA seems to have come from one African woman ~70kya.
Given H. sapiens chins in Spain over a million years ago, it is not a diaspora out of Africa that has suddenly occurred only ~70kya, but a cataclysm that has left the many European and Asian maternal lines of mitochondrial DNA without surviving issue today, giving the appearance of recent diaspora because of the chance survival of that mitochondrial line to modern times. Eve may have left Africa, but she entered a previously populated Europe and Asia, rather than being a pioneer boldly going where no Sapien had gone before.
Something to think about is that the chin from Atapuerca predates any from Africa. Eve had a chin, we can be sure, and as far as we can tell chins are found first in Spain, and therefore must have migrated into Africa in order for Eve to have left Africa with a chin ~70kya.
All of the impetus behind the Out of Africa theory seems to be completely unscientific at this point, as the science clearly points to Europe as the primate playground that spawned Homo, sometime after Graecopithecus freybergi lived in the Balkans more than 7mya, more than twice as old as Lucy the Australopithecine from Africa. Now we have a singular and diagnostic Sapiens feature more than 4 times older than any found in Africa, from Spain.
One of the things I find interesting about archaeology is that there seems to be a great deal of pressure for political reasons to support the African genesis of Homo, and also to deny the great antiquity of the megalithic structures that are of identical - and yet unknown today - construction methods, from Peru to India, Egypt to Russia. As a rebel born, I am happy to see scientific evidence refute propaganda in archaeology today.
Dear @valued-customer , Do you not accept the theory that human ancestors originated in Africa? 😯
Do you think the first Homo sapiens were born in Europe?
I think there is no evidence of an origin for H. sapiens capable of having confidence in. So little is fossilized and so little of that is yet apparent that extant theories are swimming in a sea of doubt. Bold assertions are complete tripe.
It's quite possible the pig/chimp hybrid hypothesis of Dr. Eugene McCarthy is the best explanation for H. sapiens. Archaeology is hopelessly propagandized, so degrading actual research that the field is a refuge for Gender Studies dropouts today.
Like Plato, all I know is that I know nothing.
Thanks!
History is hugely whitewashed to serve the personal power gains of those making the judgements (often presented as fact). As far as I am aware, the 'cavemen' of yesteryear were not part of an evolutionary push, they were part of a devolutionary process that many of us experienced due to poor thinking and choices. The soul groups on Earth reincarnate and are billions+ of 'earth years' in 'age'. Ancient history is wildly different to the false images being held by almost all people at this point.
I have long noted that prior to the advent of agriculture, society was largely egalitarian because everyone had to make what they needed by hand. Centralization and the introduction of food surpluses made war the primary evolutionary force, weeding out dissent/intelligence, and advancing conformity/brutality.
Decentralization of the means of production of the blessings of civilization, particularly of means of security, promise to restore humanity to that egalitarian society we evolved in and for by rendering armed gangs of thugs as obsolete as overlords parasitizing collective production.
Thanks!
I was saying to hubby only recently that with the shifts in land masses over the millennia, can we even be certain that the locations of these discoveries were of the same climate that they are today? If discoveries are being made that over a million years old, not just even tens of thousands of years old, then this seems even more important to take into account. So Sapien remains found in modern day Africa may not have lived in an Africa as we know it today and the same would go for a discovery made in modern day Europe. I wonder if archaeologists and geologists have collaborated on something like this.
The periodic change in climate flipping the Sahara from verdant swamps to uninhabitable desert, and the fact that the Mediterranean was a river valley until ~90kya really renders the question of human origins unanswerable. We begin to see glimpses of heterotic hybridization of Homo, perhaps with Sapiens as a hypersexual basket of genetic admixtures, but we have such fragmentary evidence it's relatively facile to coin unfalsifiable hypotheses. Almost all mammals only breed in season. Three are hypersexual: Bonobo, Dolphin, and Sapiens. Sapiens females are sexually receptive even when menstruating, which perhaps explains the multiplicity of hybridization events revealed in our DNA.
Worse, funding is hunting for politically useful claims, like wolves guarding sheep.
Thanks!
Climate flipping is something I hadn't even considered!
I'm going to have to come back and chat some more on all the rest of that when I'm feeling a bit better. You're touching on topics which fascinate me.
I'm sorry to hear you're not feeling your best. I hope you soon are.
The hypersexuality of our species isn't often remarked in archaeology, which is strange because it's such a signal feature, shown in so few species. I have no information on the sexual seasons of other hominins, but since the vast majority of mammals, including primates, are seasonal breeders, it seems likely most hominins were as well.
In such species it is the females which determine seasons, and males generally are willing and able to sire offspring whenever females go into estrus. In the situation where Sapiens females were constantly in estrus, as today, males of other hominins would not be prevented by seasonality from interbreeding, while male Sapiens would be far less likely to contribute genetically to species with seasons, as presumably their own males would dominate in season.
I have often considered Sapiens to be ill-named, preferring the designation H. vulgaris, or H. domesticus, to be more appropriate, because of our quite hybridized genetic material making us something of a common derived from multiple species of Homo. We are also clearly a domesticated species, almost certainly singularly so in Homo, making the designation of domesticus quite appropriate.
We are not so wise as we are common, and domesticated. Our ancestors had brains ~25% larger than our own today, and Neanderthals larger brains than us by ~20%. While there is no direct correlation between individual brain size and IQ apparent today, there certainly is on a species level, and I very much doubt we are the smartest hominins to have walked the Earth.
I would bet the farm on us being the most hybridized and domesticated though.
I've never really studied these things much, but have occasionally caught the odd documentary which delved into these things. There have been a couple that have stuck in my mind. One was a theory from some evidence that Neanderthal may not have been wiped out by Sapiens so much as bred into them, with the outward Sapien physical characteristics being dominant, so they aren't apparent in us. We still have stronger and weaker genetic characteristics in different races even today.
The other was some evidence found of some remote village in Russia, I think, where the villagers had bred with what we'd call a yeti or big foot. They unearthed one of the offspring that survived from that union. It's entirely possible there have been other hominid survivors into recent times that we've labelled myths.
Nothing except seals, some bats and some birds made it to Australia in millions of years.
Humans conquered Australia a few times just within some ten thousand years.
I think even the people who work on this professionally, have a hard time scaling those timeframes. It seems that mammals evolve rather slowly compared to humans who made huge leaps within possibly just thousands of years.
Moving a population across oceans (deserts, jungles), creating a new line and then blending it again just some thousand years later seems to be an incredibly strong force for evolution.
Australia is a very special case. Until recently, Aboriginal Australians were considered to have the highest levels of Denisovan admixture, but Papuans and Phillipine Negritoes are today considered to have a higher percentage of Denisovan genes.
There has been an ongoing dispute whether Oz was colonized only once because the fact that Australia has never been less than dozens of miles away from other lands inhabited by people means that colonization event(s) was undertaken by ocean-going people(s). However, because it seems to have happened no earlier than ~60kya, and that is not long enough for pygmies to have evolved, and there were Aboriginal pygmies (in Tasmania IIRC. Don't hold me to that, as the recollection is vague and I do not have the reference material in front of me at present), and also other apparent admixture events, such as from Madagascar and/or S. India, estimated to have occurred ~10kya, I am convinced that multiple colonization events contributed to Australia's Aboriginal peopling.
Also strange is that when sea levels recently rose, separating Papua from Oz, despite evidence on local islands of habitation from both sides, there seems to be no admixture of language or genes, suggesting some cultural barrier. However that barrier seems not to have been outright hostility, as there is a lack of evidence of ongoing warfare.
Language studies are quite interesting, as Papua was until recently connected to Oz, and the great diversity of languages across that entire landscape are divided into families that seem to have suddenly diverged, with the newer family appearing to have quite recently swept across Australia, perhaps replacing in genetic lineages more venerable the languages they formerly spoke, which is not common at all.
It is far more common for a lineage to be replaced when the language of a region is than for a group to adopt a new language.
All of this and much more make Australia a very interesting field in every discipline touching on archaeology and human history.
Thanks!
Edit: the subsumation of Sundaland at the end of the Younger Dryas ~13kya seems remarkably to not have produced an influx of people from SE Asia, at least according to archaeogeneticists. This is inexplicable to me, as islands have long been reachable by boat, so long that H. luzonenesis and H. floresiensis both arose on islands their human ancestors could only have reached by boat. Why or how Oz was not repeatedly colonized as successive waves of inundation sank Sundaland beneath the sea is quite mysterious. About the only reason I can think of for that failure to occur is implacable hostility of the then extant Australian population.
...I should have gone with NZ instead :)
what do you think of this?:
I got a feeling that advanced navigation and things were discovered multiple times.
I find this fascinating. A recent paper (Population Genomics of Stone Age Eurasia, May 2022) involving the genetics of the Proto-IndoEuropean expansion of the Yamnaya across Europe and Asia shows a great ferment of people that prefaces the time of the claimed Maori precursors. There certainly was conflict between light and dark skinned peoples at the time in India, as well as across Eurasia, as the pastoral Yamnaya and corded ware culture that came from it used the recently invented dairy technology as an economic springboard launching them into conflicts in all directions.
Another paper (Shinde et al, 2019) on the origin of the Harappan people sheds light on the ferment of the time. Discussion of the paper is almost more informative than the paper, which you can read here. The drying up of the Sarasvati River and subsequent desertification of the region dramatically altered the economic base thereabouts.
I also note the divergence between Polynesian peoples and their heretofore presumed progenitors in Melanesia. There is a very distinct phenotype in Melanesia, Papua, Australia, and the Negritoes of the Phillipines that simply isn't found in Polynesia.
I am only able to have a look at the first few minutes of the video right now, as I am called away to a roof that needs me, but I will - and greatly anticipate - watch the full video. I am aware of archaeological remains that are claimed to have been found of pre-Maori people in NZ, that the researchers are handling with great discretion because of the political hand grenade that evidence is. It will have to suffice presently for me to say there is considerable evidentiary basis for claims that the original people in New Zealand didn't get there from Taiwan, as I have gleaned from the video so far.
Anyway, thanks very much for stirring the fermenting prehistorical evidence bubbling in my potted brain!
If you realize that the Poles are ever moving you can see how the populations that survived had to move.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/maps/historical_declination/ The south pole is getting close to Aussie land now again. It has happened over and over again.
Learn about Catastrophism. It is more than likely the truth.
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https://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Report_Paving-a-Digital-Road-to-Hell.pdf
This is a great look into the plans of the Technocrats.
Got it from this source. ttps://twitter.com/katelyncioffi/status/1537828058824069121
Sadly it looks like it was funded by George Sorros Open Society Foundation.
I'm having a look now, and from what I've read it seems well intentioned and haply provisioned by those seeking to pave the road to hell, rather than either unfunded or from pockets of lesser depth. When I manage to get through it I'll try to make substantive comment.
Thanks!
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I have not read it, but have read excerpts. I strongly disagree with Kaczinski's conclusion that technology and technological advancement is bad. I think he accounted the evils of centralization to technology itself, and failed to grasp that decentralization restored egalitarian society and ended the parasitism of overlords in due time.
Thanks!
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