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Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago

(news.asu.edu)
273 points geox | 2 comments | 17 Jun 24 21:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.652s | source
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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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AlotOfReading ◴[18 Jun 24 07:11 UTC] No.40714924[source]▶
The word human is commonly used for both modern humans and members of the entire genus Homo. Hominids is a more general superset that isn't strictly correct here. The term hominin is more appropriate in this context and what they actually use in the abstract.

In my opinion though, "human" is the better word here for conveying the right mix of informality without implying the specific semantics of "Hominini sans Pan".

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MattPalmer1086 ◴[18 Jun 24 07:24 UTC] No.40714996[source]▶
Is it?

This is literally the first time Ive seen the word human applied to other hominids. I see many discussions about neanderthals and denisovians and so on. I have never seen them referred to as human.

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jb1991 ◴[18 Jun 24 07:29 UTC] No.40715023[source]▶
I think it’s not uncommon to refer to Neanderthals as early humans, I’m sure I’ve read that in many places.

Natural history museum, for example, refers to them as early humans: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/who-were-the-neanderthals.htm...

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graemep ◴[18 Jun 24 07:52 UTC] No.40715168[source]▶
It is also reasonable to argue that they and we are subspecies of the same species not rather than separate species.
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acchow ◴[18 Jun 24 09:04 UTC] No.40715511[source]▶
Of course we are not separate species since successful interbreeding did happen (when the populations interacted).
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jb1991 ◴[18 Jun 24 11:05 UTC] No.40716296[source]▶
Donkeys and horses are not the same species, but they interbreed. Their offspring are called mules. Although mules rarely have offspring, so perhaps not a great example.
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Turskarama ◴[18 Jun 24 12:29 UTC] No.40717021[source]▶
There is supposedly neanderthal DNA in some modern humans, implying that offspring were viable. Breeding resulting in viable offspring is one of the only consistent definitions of what a species even is.
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Amezarak ◴[18 Jun 24 12:53 UTC] No.40717248[source]▶
We could make that the definition, but we'd doing a lot of redefinition: coyotes and wolves would become the same species, as would lions and jaguars. Fertility issues tend to increase with genetic distance but aren't guaranteed; for example, mules are usually but not always sterile.
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1. acchow ◴[18 Jun 24 20:26 UTC] No.40721876[source]▶
What about the 2nd generation of mule, then 3rd? If the probability of viability keeps dropping generation after generation, eventually it will delete itself?
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2. Amezarak ◴[19 Jun 24 00:31 UTC] No.40723510[source]▶
It doesn't work like that. Backcrossing it with one of the parent species (assuming fertility in the first place) as you'd expect tends to increase the likelihood of fertile offspring in proportion to the number of generations. And that's exactly what you'd expect in any hybridization event. And anyway, mules are actually pretty special in that horses and donkeys are actually fairly distant relatives (diverged 4 million years ago) and have different numbers of chromosomes. All members of homo (supposed to have emerged all more recently than 3 million years ago) could probably interbreed and the ones that had the opportunity probably did.

It's really unfortunate that schools tend to simplify the definition of species in this way, because it's just not really not meaningfully true at all. We could "make" it true by actually defining species this way (at least for animals) but it'd radically transform our taxonomies.

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