Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Claim: Many types of human were kayoed in the Sixth Great Extinction

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Well, it’s expressed as a question but it sounds like a leading question:

Nine human species walked the Earth 300,000 years ago. Now there is just one. The Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis, were stocky hunters adapted to Europe’s cold steppes. The related Denisovans inhabited Asia, while the more primitive Homo erectus lived in Indonesia, and Homo rhodesiensis in central Africa.

Several short, small-brained species survived alongside them: Homo naledi in South Africa, Homo luzonensis in the Philippines, Homo floresiensis (“hobbits”) in Indonesia, and the mysterious Red Deer Cave People in China. Given how quickly we’re discovering new species, more are likely waiting to be found.

By 10,000 years ago, they were all gone. The disappearance of these other species resembles a mass extinction. But there’s no obvious environmental catastrophe – volcanic eruptions, climate change, asteroid impact – driving it. Instead, the extinctions’ timing suggests they were caused by the spread of a new species, evolving 260,000-350,000 years ago in Southern Africa: Homo sapiens.

Nick Longrich, “Were other humans the first victims of the sixth mass extinction?” at The Conversation

And correlation is causation, right?

But cave paintings, carvings, and musical instruments hint at something far more dangerous: a sophisticated capacity for abstract thought and communication. The ability to cooperate, plan, strategise, manipulate and deceive may have been our ultimate weapon.

The incompleteness of the fossil record makes it hard to test these ideas. But in Europe, the only place with a relatively complete archaeological record, fossils show that within a few thousand years of our arrival , Neanderthals vanished. Traces of Neanderthal DNA in some Eurasian people prove we didn’t just replace them after they went extinct. We met, and we mated.

Nick Longrich, “Were other humans the first victims of the sixth mass extinction?” at The Conversation

And that’s when most of them died of boredom, right?

The trouble with these kinds of stories is, they write themselves. We don;t need data.

If we like our history without much data, we should read epics instead of this stuff.

PS: Sixth Great Extinction: Thought to be happening now due to human encroachment.

See also: Human evolution at your fingertips

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Comments
Great, they have a mechanism to kill them now they need one to create them.ET
November 28, 2019
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Actually, will it be all that long before those stories are rewritten (again), as more finds come in from the field?EDTA
November 27, 2019
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Hey, the others couldn't dance.EDTA
November 27, 2019
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