The Oldest Dna Evidence Yet Of Humans With An Interesting Twist

[WSA]

Darrell....that ^^^^^.

 

(BadVooDoo...man...you inspire hope. Thanks for that.)

 

And, if you really think the trail turns cold after you've read all the witness reports and ogled the track casts, and listened to the sound recordings...well, all I can say Darrell is we come to life with much different perspectives. I don't expect to bridge that here. I just can't. I just won't try.

[Guest DWA]

 

They say, putcher money where your mouth is.

 

Mainstream on this question:  zero.  Zed.  Big nada.

 

Proponents:  win.  Won with the first tank of gas, long before the first thermal camera.

 

That's how you know stuff in the real world.

 

Science is forbidden from assuming.  Scientists assume all the time.  There is no case against sasquatch; what is alleged to be a "case" is built on a mound of questions a sixth-grader could come up with, a ton of assumptions, and zero money=research.  Some blinkblink in the sky - probably  a smudge on the telescope lens if they ever really checked - is a "Cinderella planet;" and a primate leaving footprints right here on Planet Earth isn't real.

 

That's woo-woo.

Edited December 14, 2013 by DWA

[Guest]

First analysis of Homo heidelbergensis mtDNA shows relationship to Denisovans.

*****

Dienekes' Anthropology Blog

December 04 , 2013

400 thousand year old human mtDNA from Sima de los Huesos

It will come to no surprise to people who noticed an earlier paper on cave bear mtDNA from Atapuerca that the folks at the Max Planck Institute would try to do the same for the plentiful human remains found in the Pit of Bones.

A new paper in Nature reports their success, and overnight increases by an order of magnitude the time depth for which we now have human mtDNA from what is commonly designated as Homo heidelbergensis, from right in the middle of the Middle Pleistocene. Obviously, this opens new vistas for archaeogenetic research, making it possible to directly look at early pre-sapiens forms of humans, and not only on their final forms prior to their replacement, the Neandertals and Denisovans.

The most impressive aspect of the new paper is most likely the technical challenges that the researchers must've overcome to achieve this result. The cave bear DNA showed that this was possible, but human DNA adds an additional complication in the form of contamination by a closely related species, us.

But, the new evolutionary result which will interest those of us not interested in the minutiae of biomolecules will no doubt be the fact that the Sima hominin's mtDNA formed a clade with the much more recent Denisova girl.

Until now, we knew that Neandertal mtDNA grouped together and so did modern human mtDNA. The two groups shared a Middle Pleistocene common ancestor and a much more distant common ancestor (~1 million years) with the mtDNA found in Denisova. The new Sima specimen shares descent from Denisova. This is important because it shows that whatever archaic human population the Denisovan mtDNA belonged to also extended to western Europe. And, surprisingly, the Sima specimen did not group with Neandertals, as might be expected because of the incipient Neanderthaloid morphology of the Sima hominins which has been a matter of controversy as it pushes back the evolutionary lineage of H. neandertalensis deeper into the Middle Pleistocene that some researchers accept.

Before this paper, it was believed that H. heidelbergensis evolved somewhere (perhaps Near East or Africa), a subset of it evolved to H. sapiens in Africa, and a different subset evolved in Eurasia, leading up to H. neandertalensis in the west, and unknown forms in the east, of which the Denisova girl was a matrilineal descendant. The next question is: when did Neandertals and Neandertal mtDNA appear in Europe?

It can now be hoped that such questions will be answered directly. The Sima individual studied in this paper is not some frozen specimen from the Arctic, preserved by a freak accident in pristine form for hundreds of thousands of years, but a person who lived in Southwestern Europe. I am fairly sure that this won't be the last really old human we see a paper about in the coming years. Human mtDNA used to present a simple picture at the time of the discovery of African mitochondrial Eve: the deepest splits were in Africa and Eurasians belonged to a subset of African variation. But, as more and more archaic Eurasian mtDNA is sampled, it now appears that modern human mtDNA is a subset of world human mtDNA whose deepest splits are in Eurasia, and the next deepest splits are in Africa. Obviously, this may be a consequence of the fact that archaic human mtDNA has only been sampled from Eurasia, for factors relating to DNA preservation. But, it is nonetheless interesting to wonder where on the tree the mtDNA of archaic Africans would fall.

Nature (2013) doi:10.1038/nature12788

A mitochondrial genome sequence of a hominin from Sima de los Huesos

Matthias Meyer et al.

Excavations of a complex of caves in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain have unearthed hominin fossils that range in age from the early Pleistocene to the Holocene. One of these sites, the ‘Sima de los Huesos’ (‘pit of bones’), has yielded the world’s largest assemblage of Middle Pleistocene hominin fossils, consisting of at least 28 individuals4 dated to over 300,000 years ago. The skeletal remains share a number of morphological features with fossils classified as Homo heidelbergensis and also display distinct Neanderthal-derived traits. Here we determine an almost complete mitochondrial genome sequence of a hominin from Sima de los Huesos and show that it is closely related to the lineage leading to mitochondrial genomes of Denisovans, an eastern Eurasian sister group to Neanderthals. Our results pave the way for DNA research on hominins from the Middle Pleistocene.

[Guest LarryP]

Human Hand Fossil Suggests Complex Tool-Making Began Far Earlier Than Thought

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/17/human-hand-fossil-tool-making_n_4455315.html

 

The discovery of a 1.4-million-year-old hand-bone fossil reveals that the modern human ability to make and use complex tools may have originated far earlier than scientists previously thought, researchers say.

[Guest DWA]

[yaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwn] another day in the Meticulous Deconstruction of the Entire Science of Paleoanthropology...

[Guest]

So where's the evil conspiracy of scientists suppressing this.

Edited December 21, 2013 by Jerrymanderer

[Guest]

Science is forbidden from assuming.  Scientists assume all the time.  There is no case against sasquatch; what is alleged to be a "case" is built on a mound of questions a sixth-grader could come up with, a ton of assumptions, and zero money=research.  Some blinkblink in the sky - probably  a smudge on the telescope lens if they ever really checked - is a "Cinderella planet;" and a primate leaving footprints right here on Planet Earth isn't real.

 

 

An ironic statement from someone who claims that scientists aren't willing to probe into the unknown.

 

Nope, forget about searching the endless frontier of space, lets search the woods of Ohio to find a giant monkey.

 

They are more out to believe, planet DF6362 in the Omega system has H2o and has Acid Rain.. But ask them to prove it, they say we do not need to, it is now part of the "assumption model" and will therefore become part of the curriculum and then test students.

 

And what school does this?

[Guest LarryP]

So where's the evil conspiracy of scientists suppressing this.

 

Their silence is deafening.

[Guest DWA]

Their silence is deafening.

 

Kinda, you know, the point.  (And of course let's give the paleo community time to weigh in on this, even though it sounds pretty lead-pipe to me.)

 

It's not whether something gets published.  It's like:  Meldrum publishes a paper saying that this Bigfoot guy is leaving all these tracks, and makes a persuasive case.  OK, folks, commentary?  Discussion?  Follow-up?  Hello?  Is this room empty?

 

[crickets]

 

Nope....there's something in here....

 

We have also come to accept - just unthinkingly accept - that some things are evidence, and some things are not.  We never wonder....maybe this is just a rock shaped like a bone...?

 

In fact, we'd consider it silly for anyone to even say that.  But let what is pretty obviously not a human in a suit show up on a film, and we go:  man in suit, and just accept it, even though everything science has picked up says it ain't true.

 

And we go on and on and on and on about our wonderful hands and our wonderful brains and how wonderful wonderful they are (this article being just the latest).

 

And yet when thousands of those brains have absolutely no doubt what their eyes are seeing...they're all afflicted with an undiagnosed mental illness?  They're all doing something each of us knows we would never do?

 

Oh.

 

OK.

[Guest]

Their silence is deafening

 

What silence? The study was just published. You have to wait for more to come.

[Guest DWA]

So.  Any thoughts when the silence on Meldrum's paper is gonna end?

 

And no, silence is not an intelligent response to a peer-reviewed paper.

[Guest]

And an argument from silence is not a good argument for the truth of something.

 

Bindernagel and co are free to jump in and support Meldrum's claims with their own papers.

[Guest DWA]

Wrong answer.

 

An argument from silence is quite sufficient, thanks.

 

I don't want to hear anyone telling me about the scientific community's stance on this when they are silent on the evidence.

 

Period.

[Guest]

And I don't want to hear about claims about a giant ape living across the continent until a body is brought. You're 200 years overdue.

[Guest DWA]

Yes, but I don't care about that.  I'm content to wait for proof when the evidence says it's out there.  And it does.

 

I think it's pretty clear that the community doesn't weigh in on Meldrum because they know they need a bigger boat, and don't have one.