Uncommon Descent Contest: Is there any progress in the study of human evolution?

_{Denyse O'Leary

May 11, 2011

Contests, Human evolution}

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[Contest now judged. here. “Impress your friends with a piece of Mars is open until Saturday, May 28, 2011. The “Why do people refuse to read books they are attacking?” contest is open till Saturday June 4.]

In this version of the very long-running human evolution soap opera (Ewen Callaway, Nature News, 9 May 2011), we didn’t kill the Neanderthals; they died before we got there. (Episode 4440). In a different episode, they were our squeezes and in-laws – which is probably why we killed them. Anyway, they weren’t as stupid as they pretended, either.

Some folk, looking at all this, say “Science, unlike religion, changes its mind in the light of new evidence.” That may be so (the evidence is rather mixed on both sides), but many recent episodes sound more like changing fashions in interpretation rather than decisive new evidence.

For a free copy of The Nature of Nature mailed to your home: Do you think we understand the human-Neanderthal relationship better than we did twenty-five years ago? In what ways?

We don’t know and are hoping for a range of views.

Contest will be judged Saturday, May 21, 2011.

Comments

DrREC, contrary to your personal beliefs the 'interbreeding' evidence is a far cry from being certain. i.e. here is much disagreement within the scientific community from those who question just how much weight should be given to this new 'genetic mixture' evidence that was gathered in a fairly complex way. A complex way that appears to be ripe for error and misinterpretation: Q&A: Who is H. sapiens really, and how do we know? - March 2011 Excerpt: If the error structures of the archaic DNA and one of the modern human DNA samples are similar to each other for one of many reasons, the ABBA-BABA test could report admixture when it did not in fact occur. Even a very small proportion of shared errors could cause a strong effect on the ABBA-BABA statistic. For example, small effects that we typically tend to ignore, such as shared contamination of reagents between the samples, could cause artifactual evidence of admixture. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/9/20 Signs of Neanderthals Mating With Humans - May 2010 Excerpt: "But the new analysis, which is based solely on genetics and statistical calculations, is more difficult to match with the archaeological record. There is much less archaeological evidence for an overlap between modern humans and Neanderthals at this time and place.,, Geneticists have been making increasingly valuable contributions to human prehistory, but their work depends heavily on complex mathematical statistics that make their arguments hard to follow. And the statistical insights, however informative, do not have the solidity of an archaeological fact." They are basically saying, ‘Here are our data, you have to accept it.’ But the little part I can judge seems to me to be problematic, so I have to worry about the rest,” he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/science/07neanderthal.html Moreover, even other evidence is not near as solid as it once was thought,,, Neanderthals did not shop at prehistoric Tiffany's - October 2010 Excerpt: The key finding is that as you dig down through the layers of sediment in the Grotte du Renne, the age of the remains does not increase as you would expect. Instead, the ages of the different objects are all over the place, suggesting that remains from different eras have got mixed up together.,,, This leads Higham to suggest that a key piece of evidence for Neanderthal sophistication has fallen. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/10/neanderthals-did-not-shop-at-s.html Animals Can Skew Archaeological Dates - October 2010 Excerpt: “Animals push human tools into ground—and back in time, study says,” was a subtitle of a report in National Geographic News. This factor could cause mis-dating of stone tools and other artifacts, “making them seem older than they really are—in some cases, thousands of years older,” experiments have demonstrated.,, “To our amazement,” lead author Metin Eren said, “the disturbance was much greater than we had anticipated.” “Trampling could even create the illusion of ancient sites where none really existed,”,, Is this a minor matter? Anthropologist Julien Riel-Salvatore of the University of Colorado Denver said, “Pretty much any open-air site located near a water source will potentially be very seriously affected by some of these conclusions.” http://www.creationsafaris.com/crev201010.htm#20101006b ---------- further notes: Evolution of the Genus Homo - Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences - Tattersall, Schwartz, May 2009 Excerpt: "Definition of the genus Homo is almost as fraught as the definition of Homo sapiens. We look at the evidence for “early Homo,” finding little morphological basis for extending our genus to any of the 2.5–1.6-myr-old fossil forms assigned to “early Homo” or Homo habilis/rudolfensis." http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.earth.031208.100202 Man is indeed as unique, as different from all other animals, as had been traditionally claimed by theologians and philosophers. Evolutionist Ernst Mayr http://www.y-origins.com/index.php?p=home_more4 “Something extraordinary, if totally fortuitous, happened with the birth of our species….Homo sapiens is as distinctive an entity as exists on the face of the Earth, and should be dignified as such instead of being adulterated with every reasonably large-brained hominid fossil that happened to come along.” Anthropologist Ian Tattersall (curator at the American Museum of Natural History) Though the authors of the 'Evolution of the Genus Homo' paper appear to be thoroughly mystified by the fossil record, they never seem to give up their blind faith in evolution despite the disparity they see first hand in the fossil record. In spite of their philosophical bias, I have to hand it to them for being fairly honest with the evidence though. I especially like how the authors draw out this following 'what it means to be human' distinction in their paper: "although Homo neanderthalensis had a large brain, it left no unequivocal evidence of the symbolic consciousness that makes our species unique." -- "Unusual though Homo sapiens may be morphologically, it is undoubtedly our remarkable cognitive qualities that most strikingly demarcate us from all other extant species. They are certainly what give us our strong subjective sense of being qualitatively different. And they are all ultimately traceable to our symbolic capacity. Human beings alone, it seems, mentally dissect the world into a multitude of discrete symbols, and combine and recombine those symbols in their minds to produce hypotheses of alternative possibilities. When exactly Homo sapiens acquired this unusual ability is the subject of debate."bornagain77_{May 11, 2011
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bevets- I think the question was: "Do you think we understand the human-Neanderthal relationship better than we did twenty-five years ago? In what ways?" Considering Sir Keith died 50+ years ago, I'm not sure that quote is germane. I would say the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes have changed the understanding of the Human-Hominid relationship. It appears humans interbred with them, and that some human populations have relics of this meeting in their genome. That some, but not all humans have these genes supports proposed migration patterns. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v468/n7327/full/nature09710.html http://www.eva.mpg.de/neandertal/DrREC_{May 11, 2011
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I am firmly convinced that no theory of human evolution can be regarded as satisfactory unless the revelations of Piltdown are taken into account. ~ Arthur Keithbevets_{May 11, 2011
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