For some broader context missing from the article, there's been a long-running "controversy" with certain people in the Chinese Academy of Sciences making an argument called the multiregional hypothesis that modern Chinese evolved in China out of archaic hominins. Every few years they'd dig up another set of bones with weird morphology, slap a new name on it, and claim it represents a new missing link. The Harbin skull was one of these.
These results firmly resolve that discussion on the side of the western consensus. They also support heretofore speculative ideas on how widespread Denisovans were, probably give us a couple other bones that are known to be similar (but lack genetics), and open a lot of research avenues going forward. Outstanding paper.
transcriptase 9 hours ago [-]
It’s not limited to hominins. There’s a bit of a trend among Chinese researchers to conduct extensive genome sequencing and then conclude that economically or culturally significant plant species from Africa or elsewhere in Asia actually originated or were first domesticated in China.
ggm 8 hours ago [-]
It would be useful to understand to what extent this has some basis in ground truth. If it's essentially unknowable, with any confidence, it's just a posture.
If there is significant evidence of domestication originating in China landmass, it fuels other theories of emergence of human cultures.
Your comment is helpful but I think incomplete. Certainly the jokes are rich in the field, "irish invented wireless communications since no glass or copper fragments found in field" type jokes. It used to be "soviets did it first" for a prior generation.
China has significant large landscapes littered with caves. Like parts of Indonesia, and in both cases they have been mostly undisturbed for eons. So it's a landscape rich in potential for preserved remains. I think thats why the hominid discovery in Indonesia was both fascinating and irritating, falling into local power politics and first-rights-to-analyse problems.
The cave systems found in Europe seem to me to point to later occupation and with the changes to the shoreline in Spain and France (and the Doggerland retreat with the north sea) it's arguable older remains are now seaborne and harder to find.
Believing the "out of africa" theory, emergence of these trends in the east prefigures a migration back to europe and down into Austronesia surely?
(not an archeologist but fascinated)
adastra22 6 hours ago [-]
What is the alternative that you are suggesting?
ggm 5 hours ago [-]
More funding for DNA analysis, and a reduction in holotypes as we find these apparent sub-speciations are actually just the same. I don't think there is much we can do about national pride: when individual economies decide to declare a find is culturally significant for their global view, the best science can do is help them overcome the mindset, by applying science.
That said, genuinely new finds are exciting no matter what. If it takes a decade for the family tree logistics to settle down, so be it.
I like Gruber. Lots of people hate Gruber because he was abrasive. It's not that dissimilar to astrophysics where people have love and hate relationships with the scientists and the theories. Historians do a better job than me untangling this in 50 years time.
adastra22 5 hours ago [-]
Sorry that’s not my question. What is the alternative hypothesis here that you are suggesting we be open to?
ggm 4 hours ago [-]
That Chinese arguments about the emergence of modern human culture in their territory be accepted. The tenor of the arguments are "that's bullshit"
Without being ad hom, the Chinese view is culturally informed for domestic political reasons. My view is to ask if even after reduction of (sub) speciation labels their view remains tenable, and there is a case to be made for East West cultural dispersion before historic time. Given out of Africa, at least some ground state of flow is west east.
Nopoint2 7 hours ago [-]
You need to understand that the power structure of the western society critically depends on the myth of the recent cognitive shift. Where people were little more than animals, until several thousand years ago, when modern thinking suddenly somehow emerged, and those chosen few worked tirelesly for the thousands of years to civilize everybody else.
graemep 2 hours ago [-]
> For some broader context missing from the article, there's been a long-running "controversy" with certain people in the Chinese Academy of Sciences making an argument called the multiregional hypothesis that modern Chinese evolved in China out of archaic hominins.
It is appealing because it justifies racism. It is just the contemporary version of polygenism of racial science.
That said, even if human evolution is more complex than simple out of Africa, all of humanity has a lot of shared ancestry and genetics do not support the concept of race.
This reminds me of the day I found an old storage disk, an ancient "floppy disk", in my dad's attic. It had a label that said: "Tommy’s bookmarks". My mum doesn't remember any of his friends or colleagues named Tommy. In Uruguay, that's a common nickname for Tomas. They were probably website URLs, all long extinct by now (I'd guess).
gerdesj 11 hours ago [-]
Tommy is the standard nickname for Thomas in Britain too. We throw in an extra h in Thomas for no good reason 8)
Our soldiers were, politely, referred to as Tommies by German soldiers during WW1 onwards. The Wehrmacht had all sorts of other names for them too!
10 hours ago [-]
Bluestein 13 hours ago [-]
Funny to imagine how (indeed) such floppies 'intersected" - technologywise - with the early web ...
whatevertrevor 13 hours ago [-]
Sounds like this was pre search engines, so Tommy's bookmarks might just be a collection of cool sites that was spread peer to peer. I remember getting CDs of curated games and demos in the late 90s (and not just licensed demos from computer magazines, but also cracked versions of games that went around).
AlchemistCamp 11 hours ago [-]
Sounds like Craig’s list.
absurdo 13 hours ago [-]
Any rare games that you remember that stood out?
whatevertrevor 11 hours ago [-]
Not many that would stand the test of time unfortunately. I remember sinking lots of hours into a racing game I found like that, I think it was called Breakneck. And an RTS called Tzar. Those are the two I remember the most.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.040
For some broader context missing from the article, there's been a long-running "controversy" with certain people in the Chinese Academy of Sciences making an argument called the multiregional hypothesis that modern Chinese evolved in China out of archaic hominins. Every few years they'd dig up another set of bones with weird morphology, slap a new name on it, and claim it represents a new missing link. The Harbin skull was one of these.
These results firmly resolve that discussion on the side of the western consensus. They also support heretofore speculative ideas on how widespread Denisovans were, probably give us a couple other bones that are known to be similar (but lack genetics), and open a lot of research avenues going forward. Outstanding paper.
If there is significant evidence of domestication originating in China landmass, it fuels other theories of emergence of human cultures.
Your comment is helpful but I think incomplete. Certainly the jokes are rich in the field, "irish invented wireless communications since no glass or copper fragments found in field" type jokes. It used to be "soviets did it first" for a prior generation.
China has significant large landscapes littered with caves. Like parts of Indonesia, and in both cases they have been mostly undisturbed for eons. So it's a landscape rich in potential for preserved remains. I think thats why the hominid discovery in Indonesia was both fascinating and irritating, falling into local power politics and first-rights-to-analyse problems.
The cave systems found in Europe seem to me to point to later occupation and with the changes to the shoreline in Spain and France (and the Doggerland retreat with the north sea) it's arguable older remains are now seaborne and harder to find.
Believing the "out of africa" theory, emergence of these trends in the east prefigures a migration back to europe and down into Austronesia surely?
(not an archeologist but fascinated)
That said, genuinely new finds are exciting no matter what. If it takes a decade for the family tree logistics to settle down, so be it.
I like Gruber. Lots of people hate Gruber because he was abrasive. It's not that dissimilar to astrophysics where people have love and hate relationships with the scientists and the theories. Historians do a better job than me untangling this in 50 years time.
Without being ad hom, the Chinese view is culturally informed for domestic political reasons. My view is to ask if even after reduction of (sub) speciation labels their view remains tenable, and there is a case to be made for East West cultural dispersion before historic time. Given out of Africa, at least some ground state of flow is west east.
It is appealing because it justifies racism. It is just the contemporary version of polygenism of racial science.
That said, even if human evolution is more complex than simple out of Africa, all of humanity has a lot of shared ancestry and genetics do not support the concept of race.
Our soldiers were, politely, referred to as Tommies by German soldiers during WW1 onwards. The Wehrmacht had all sorts of other names for them too!
And Tzar? https://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?q=Tzar
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Internet_email_address
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project
We used CuteHTML as our ""IDE"" and then the daily HTML was backed up to floppy and placed in a filing cabinet.