Gets more complicated. A very interesting article by Alan Boyle, on whether there were other Homos around besides Sapiens and Neanderthalensis.
8 thoughts on “Human Ancestry”
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Gets more complicated. A very interesting article by Alan Boyle, on whether there were other Homos around besides Sapiens and Neanderthalensis.
Comments are closed.
Homos
Tsk, tsk. What would your Latin teacher have to say if he/she read that? 😉
She would recognize that I was a) not writing in Latin and b) being slightly tongue in cheek.
Well sure – now that they found fossils of nasty hobbitses, the rest of the Tolkien list will inevitably start showing up. Elves, I tell ya.
I’m not so sure the Orcs died out.
The answer lies not in Tolkien, with orcs and elves but in a Science Fiction TV show which was a re-make of a previous effort. (I left this purposely obscure just in case. I still know a few people who haven’t watched it all the way through yet.)
I mean, duh. 🙂
Charlie’s Angels? Wait, that remake was a movie.
V?
Seriously, though: I ran across a well reasoned post on an anthropologist’s blog featuring healthy skepticism on this (specifically noting the actual scientific paper underlying these news stories does not include the word “species” at all) over at: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/denisova-krause-2010.html
Here was the most amazing part of the article.
“The pinky bone was found in 2008, within a layer of material that has been dated to between 30,000 and 48,000 years ago….The researchers ran the numbers for the pinky-bone sample, which they presume came from a young female nicknamed “X-Woman.””
I find it truly remarkable that they know the nickname of a woman who lived more than 30,000 years ago…
Merlin told them before he lost the ability to speak at 18 months.