But why did we think they wouldn’t be? Isn’t there an underlying story here that is slowly being confuted (but no one wants to really discuss the history in those terms so everything must be treated as a big surprise)?
Tag: homo erectus
Researchers: Homo erectus survived longer than thought
At New Scientist: “But the age does open up the opportunity that there could have been potential overlap with the Denisovans,” says Westaway. The Denisovans are known from a handful of remains, which have yielded DNA. They roamed Asia and interbred with the ancestors of people in China and South-East Asia.
But if homo erectus was just an ordinary dude…
“If you bumped into a Homo erectus in the street you might not recognise them as being very different from you. You’d see a certain “human-ness” in the stance, and his or her size and shape might be similar to yours.” They lived 2 million years ago.
Cultural evolution theories “challenged” by multiple dwelling cave
This kind of find is treated as problematic because it means that the missing link is still missing. Nobody is the subhuman. That’s not good news for a Darwinian approach to human evolution, in which someone must be the subhuman.
Academic labels media reports calling Homo erectus lazy as “moronic”
Recently, we reported on one of those Darwinian morality tales, according to which homo erectus died out because he was lazy, compared to the rest of us. Ann Gauger, pointed out that the broader picture (timelines, for example) does not suggest that Homo erectus was lazy. And now we learn, “The inference that laziness typifies Read More…
Ann Gauger: Was Homo erectus really that lazy?
Ann Gauger, a senior scientist at the Biologic Institute, writes to defend homo erectus from charges that laziness led to his his extinction. She writes, This anthropologist is not looking at the broader picture. H erectus is estimated to have appeared somewhere in Africa 1.9 mya. By 1.8 mya H erectus is found in Dmanisi, Read More…
Researchers: Homo erectus died out because he was lazy and very conservative
We don’t hear as much old-fashioned moralizing these days as we used to but this looks like the authentic product from ScienceDaily: Laziness helped lead to extinction of Homo erectus An archaeological excavation of ancient human populations in the Arabian Peninsula during the Early Stone Age, found that Homo erectus used ‘least-effort strategies’ for tool Read More…