Drive-by anti-intellectualism like this is the death of interesting conversation, truly.
Distrust is science, deferring to authority without a good reason is anti-intellectualism.
That is when they're not outright fabricating data, and having their colleagues cover for them (at Harvard):
In or before 2020, graduate student Zoé Ziani developed concerns about the validity of results from a highly publicized paper by Gino about personal networking. According to Ziani, she was strongly warned by her academic advisers not to criticize Gino, and two members of her dissertation committee refused to approve her thesis unless she deleted criticism of Gino's paper from it. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Gino
You should sit in some academic meetings and paper drafting e-mail chains! There’s a degree of believing the best in people but in my experience that can unfortunately be misplaced in science.
All of the great apes are incredibly intelligent in comparison to most other animals. The basic roots of our intelligence are probably a common feature to the whole family, but there's no consensus on why it's so advanced in humans. Any paleoanthropologist can rattle off about half a dozen possible explanations, but we honestly don't have enough evidence to really distinguish if, when, and how these were factors at different points in human evolution. Here's a quick attempt at some broad categories, which each have multiple hypotheses within them:
* Because intelligence had advantages for individual selection (e.g. mimetic recall hypothesis)
* Because intelligence had advantages for group selection
* Because intelligence had advantages for sexual selection (spandrel hypotheses often start here)
* Because adapting to rapidly varying ecological conditions required so many adaptations that we crossed some kind of barrier and "fell into" intelligence
* Because intelligence helped with foraging/hunting (exclusive of sociality)
One of my pet theories is that it may be related to vocal cord development[0], where losing certain physiology that allows apes to be louder allowed humans to be more specific, if quieter, with enhanced pitch control and stability offering higher information density communication. This unlocks more complex societal interactions and detailed shared maps. (In Iain McGilchrist’s terms, it let the Emissary—the part of the brain shown to specialize in classification and pattern recognition, the requisite building blocks for efficient communication—to take priority.)
This is an example highlighting how it is not about individual humans “becoming smarter”, evolving larger brains, etc., but rather about humans becoming capable of working together in more sophisticated ways. In fact, human brain shrunk in the last few thousands of years, in concert with growing size of our societies and labour specialization[1], which in turn in no small part is helped by communication density offered by our vocal cords. Really, humans in this way are closer ants[2], where being part of human community is the defining part of our nature.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/aug/11/how-quirk-of...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240517-the-human-brain-...
[2] Ants that farm and have stronger division of labour have smaller brains: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-ants-becam...
1. Survival is easier in groups
2. In order to survive in groups, we need to communicate
3. We communicate using language
4. Language is directly linked with intelligence
See how computers started displaying intelligence when we taught them our language
It's actually quite difficult to define human intelligence. Every time we think we find something unique by humans eventually some animal turns up that can do it too. It may be all just a question of degree and how it's used.
(I'm no expert, so take that with a grain of salt.)
There's a different way to think about this that is closer to how evolution actually works and will make the answer clear.
Our common ancestor (common to orangutans and humans) did evolve intelligence (concurrently with harnessing fire, clothing etc.). Not all of them, but some of them. And they broke off from the group. We now call them humans.
It's possible that selective pressure towards intelligence was greater for the human lineage than for the others. It's also possible that the evolution of intelligence was equally likely across the different lineages and humans just happened to be the one where the mutation happened. Regardless, once human ancestors filled the niche, it would have been difficult for another lineage to get in on the game.
This of course changes the question as to why only/mainly homo erectus developed the capability.
So why didn't chimps get some of them?
For example, chimps have hands, but do not exhibit anywhere near the dexterity and agility of human hands.
If you had a bunch of human children together and provided them sustenance and all that without adult interaction they might still develop normally and form their own language and means of communication with each other.
We don’t know for sure because such an experiment would be horrible and extremely immoral. However I do remember reading a while back that a similar situation happened where a bunch of deaf children in a an environment without much adult interaction did manage to create their own sign language to communicate with each other.
So it seems the feral child phenomena might be due to the fact that the child is alone rather than simply due to the child not having adult interaction.
Humans are a protected species, carefully raised and nurtured by higher organisms that are hundred thousand times larger than us (in terms of space and time). The earth and solar system is just a vivarium of galactic scale. Several "glass wall" mechanisms were placed to ensure we are separated from the rest of the universe, like the oort cloud.
Somewhere out there in the universe are humans living freely outside the glass wall.
As time goes on, the glass walls tend to age and occasionally the "cracks" allows external lifeforms (aliens) to slip past the protection layer, much like how insects or parasites would occasionally slip past any opening.
With this in mind, there would be two types of aliens/visitors to our enclosure: (1) lifeforms that are similar to humans in terms of size and biological complexity but more technologically advanced and (2) our protectors who are incomprehensibly larger and more complex than any life on earth. This isn't as outlandish as it seems to be considering there are stars that are million times larger than our own sun.
This sheer difference in scale might as well make the protectors exist in a different dimension. This explains why people would say that aliens were here all this time, but from another dimension. Technically they are here, but more accurately to say the protectors surround us.
Occasionally protectors would step in to prevent mankind from destroying their own enclosure, much like a terrarium owner would reach into the enclosure to remove unwanted organisms. Frequent unidentified sightings on nuclear sites is the protectors' way of peeking and reaching a "hand".
It remains to be seen if humanity would one day evolve to outgrow the enclosure.
We destroyed the many other humanoid/intelligent species, who did compete with us.
The answer is mutations sometimes specific members of a group will gain a mutation that will overtime cause that group to split off away from the ancestor group. It’s all a matter of chance evolution doesn’t have a direction.
How much of the intelligence gap is culture and communication that lets us educate ourselves and compound knowledge vs biology? Homo lived for thousands and thousands of years with the same level of development as other apes
And they still are alongside us right now. Which to me is fascinating.
The other apes are intelligent enough for their niche. At some point in humanity's past, the environment was harsh enough that the less intelligent ones died.
Is GPU already the metaphor du jour? I thought we were still aboard the steam engine ;)
Imagine this: among primates, there is an even distribution of species of differing levels of intelligence. All the primates who became intelligent have similar evolution paths because intelligence defines their evolution path (opposable thumbs, large heads, standing upright, etc.) Then because they all have similar evolution paths we put all those into the genus “Homo.” Each of species of the genus Homo eventually either breeds with each other or genocides one another until there are only the Homo Sapiens left.
So with an even distribution of intelligence among all primates, it’s logical that, given enough time, all that is left are primates of sufficient intelligence enough to breed with each other or be genocided until there is only one species, or many species of primates who weren’t intelligent enough.
This is my guess (I’m not a biologist or ancient historian or anything)
What would "intelligence" look like WHILE it was evolving?
A slightly more unsettling thought: How would newly-emerging intelligence FEEL like, internally?
Also, how would humans fare if born and raised in the wild, without any language or tools taught to them?
Every one of our evolutionary ancestors was the best human yet, just like we are.
Survival of the fittest never includes the gene impacts plants and fungi can force onto creatures.
Also cyclical 12kyr catastrophic events leading to small condensation of species under stress.
OOA (with minor admixture) is the consensus position for a lot of excellent reasons.
It isn't really. Serious historians and geneticists take great issue with it.
It's only really the pop-anthropologists (the non-rigorous social science ones) who think OOA is a settled issue.
There is an assumption that belief in, or even reasonable agnosticism towards, any other theory can only be motivated by racism.
There are many people that believe OOA because they want to believe it, because they want to believe we are all more similar than we are different, etc.
Multiregional hypotheses are perfectly plausible. We have very limited information one way or another. Out of Africa may be more likely but it is far from certain.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Legitimately saddens me to see such a low-info reply at the top. Highly recommend people read "who we are and how we got here" - it provides a lot of great context to discoveries like this.
While this work is impressive, it is just one skull and, as the article points out, seems statistically anomalous, and therefore interesting.
Did you actually read the article? Nowhere does it suggest that anyone is claiming that China is the origin of Homo Sapiens. This million old skull discovered in China is not Homo Sapien, but related to Denisoven. It’s scientifically interesting since it suggests two things
1. Homo sapiens have existed longer than we previously thought.
2. Homo Sapiens may have come out of Western Asia, not Africa. But China is not in West Asia…
Please find other articles to fit into your the-Chinese-are-supremacist narrative. This one is not relevant.
I'm not an anthropologist and not even close, so a lot of uninformed opinions:
It has a few nice photos of the skull. It looks quite complete. 90%? And the reconstruction look accurate for my untrained eye, because there are few parts to guess, specially if you assume the skull is (almost) symmetrical.
I'm not sure if it's possible to cheat and give it an additional 1% or 2% of brain volume, but I guess it's not possible to give it a 10% more brain volume. Anyway, the volume is quite small compared to modern humans, that is not surprising because it's quite old.
IIUC figure 4 shows 3 big branches: Neanderthal (Europe???), Longi (Asia???) and Sapiens (Africa???). (Add a fee "???" here if necessary.) And the new fossil is in the "Longi" branch.
So as you say it may be an older than expected side chain, or something like that.
[Happy to get any corrections or more details.]
It's true that China has a lot of affection for the Out of Asia theory of human origin, and to this day there are museums dedicated to the Peking Man that are at the very least heavily suggestive of this, or at least of China's population having a distinct origin.
Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_Man
Books and reams of sociology papers can and have been written about the relationship between CCP policy and the Peking Man and the CCPs difficulty with adjusting to today's generally preferred Out of Africa theory, and the effect on Chinese scientists working in anthropology. HN favorite Jimmy Maher (Digital/Analog Antiquarian) has a lovely line of free amateur history books including an excellent one on China that has a chapter on this:
https://analog-antiquarian.net/2022/01/14/chapter-2-origin-s...
I think it's a useful approach to contemporary Chinese identity. Nothing anti about that, any good-natured attempt to grok China would include this, just as no diatribe on America is complete without mentioning the 30-something % of Americans who state belief in some form of Creationism when polled.
But it is a thing and you need to be aware of it. A result from China which seems to support an out of China theory rather than an out of Africa theory, I am immediately suspicious of.
And you know, just because you and I don't bristle at the thought of descending from ancient Kenyans, lots of other people all over the world do. It's not just "regular" racists, also a lot of e.g. indigenous protected groups.
I agree with you on the Sinophobia, but interest in the British royal family/British history generally and interest in Irish heritage are extremely common among groups of Americans. Most British visitors to the US can attest to how their accent is interpreted and affects treatment, in a positive sense, too.
Hold on a second, China and Asia in general don't suffer from diabolical and evil brainwashing and psychological abuse, since when?
China doesn't even acknowledge its own Historical events, and this has been a recurring pattern of diabolical and evil brainwashing and psychological abuse. Should we even address Russia goofy propaganda of mystical creatures?
Why should it be expected that everyone shouldn't be cautious of claims coming from a place where Historical revisionism is part of their culture?
Have you even checked the rates of fraudulent paper submissions?
isn't the same nonsense debunked every time with "all living species are equally modern in that they share common ancestors, they didn't descend from one another"?
avg of 30 usually just means higher child death rates
once adult you would likely still get to 50+ on avg
A lot of people here seem remiss to accept this but the claim was made, I think around 2018? And now the international community has gone and doubled checked - and it seems legitimate. 2025: the mainstream belief of descension changes.
What other base beliefs do you hold that will likely be false?
I can think of 5+. Our ancestors thought a lot of things for certain and died never knowing. Technological advancement is so fast nowadays, I hope we get to live through more.
