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Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

(news.asu.edu)
273 points geox | 9 comments | 17 Jun 24 21:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.888s | source | bottom
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cpncrunch ◴[18 Jun 24 04:25 UTC] No.40714063[source]▶
News article says humans, but earliest human (homo sapiens) was around 300kya. The actual paper uses the word hominids rather than humans.
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1. sydbarrett74 ◴[18 Jun 24 05:19 UTC] No.40714284[source]▶
Can we all agree that 'human' should be defined as all members of the genus Homo?
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2. Pengtuzi ◴[18 Jun 24 05:41 UTC] No.40714381[source]▶
No
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3. alberto_ol ◴[18 Jun 24 05:58 UTC] No.40714468[source]▶
Archaic human?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_humans

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4. eru ◴[18 Jun 24 07:06 UTC] No.40714890[source]▶
I would be fairly happy with that definition, but I wouldn't rely on it out-of-context.

(I would definitely call Neanderthals "human" in almost any context.)

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5. ljf ◴[18 Jun 24 12:37 UTC] No.40717101[source]▶
According to 23andme I am 2 to 4% neanderthal, and I think of myself as human...
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6. bloak ◴[18 Jun 24 13:43 UTC] No.40717778[source]▶
A single-word common name usually refers to a genus: "oak" is anything in Quercus, "wagtail" is anything in Motacilla and so on. That's not conclusive because there are plenty of exceptions, and "human" could easily qualify as a special case, but I don't see why "human" shouldn't be any member of Homo.
7. eru ◴[19 Jun 24 02:51 UTC] No.40724285{3}[source]▶
While funny, I don't think this has much bearing on the topic at hand: we share a lot of DNA with chimps as well (or rather, the last common ancestor between chimps and humans). But that doesn't mean we should call chimps human.

So the shared genes alone can't be used as a reason to call Neanderthals human.

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8. ljf ◴[23 Jun 24 21:44 UTC] No.40770837{4}[source]▶
True, but while all humans have chimp dna, many humans have 0 percent neanderthal dna - are they more human than me?
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9. eru ◴[24 Jun 24 05:53 UTC] No.40772934{5}[source]▶
No human had a chimp ancestor. But humans share a fairly recent common ancestor with chimps.

Some human had Neanderthal ancestors, some did not, as you rightly suggest. However, all humans and Neanderthals share a common ancestor that's much more recent than our last common ancestor with chimps.

Ie we only have 'chimp DNA' in the sense that we share a lot of DNA with them, and that we haven't changed too much since our last common ancestor. Exactly the same is true of us and Neanderthals.