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New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2010 7:06 pm
by Rokcet Scientist
A new hominid variant, the 'Denisovans', apparently escaped the arctic ice age cold of Siberia and emigrated to warmer climes: nice warm tropical islands like Papua New Guinea and Melanesia.

Wanna bet they walked/waded (they could: it was GM)?
They wouldn't have developed very impressive boating technology in the frozen Siberian tundras... they were used to walking on water! Frozen water, of course.
30,000-year-old girl's pinkie points to new early human species

An overlooked female pinkie bone put in storage after it was discovered in a Siberian cave two years ago points to the existence of a previously unknown prehistoric human species, anthropologists say.
And the lineage of that species may survive today in some people in Papua New Guinea and nearby islands, scientists say.

A report on the discovery of the finger was published in the December 23 edition of the scientific journal Nature.
Anthropologists say the 30,000- to 50,000-year-old finger is evidence of a new population of hominids they call Denisovans. The name is derived from the southern Siberian cave in which the finger bone was found.
Geneticists say the finger probably belonged to a 6- or 7-year-old girl.

"The whole story is incredible. It's like a surprising Christmas present," said Carles Lalueza Fox, a Spanish paleontologist not involved in the research who was quoted in the online article.
The 3 billion-letter nuclear genome derived from the child's finger shows that the ice-age population of early humans was more diverse than previously thought. Also, a comparison of the genome to modern humans indicates that Melanesian inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and various South Pacific islands inherited as much as 5 percent of their DNA from Denisovans.

The genome research was conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The Denisovans, the scientists say, were more closely related to Neanderthals than modern humans. The discovery in Siberia suggests they may have lived across a wide swath of Asia and are likely to have intermingled with the ancestors of modern humans who migrated eastward from Africa.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiap ... index.html

The more we discover, the murkier the picture gets.

Re: New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2010 12:31 pm
by Digit
Wanna bet they walked/
No! Really?

Roy.

Re: New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 6:26 am
by circumspice
Here's a link to the Discover blog on this subject:

http://mblogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp ... -paradigm/

It has a fairly extensive set of links contributed by the people who responded.

Re: New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 8:49 am
by Minimalist
Siberia does have rivers, though.


Image


I would not bet that these people were too stupid to learn how to make use of them.

Re: New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 8:58 am
by Minimalist
That's a great link, Circ. Going to take a while to get through it.

Re: New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 10:06 am
by kbs2244
The only problem is most of those rivers flow north.
They would have been a pretty good food source though.

Re: New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 1:36 pm
by Digit
I think now to the fact that both the Romans and Muslims abhorred the idea of the king. The Romans overthrew their monarchy, established a republic, and replaced it with a despotism which was a monarchy in all but name. The Muslims had caliphs, vice-reagents of God, and sultans and emirs, who were vice-reagents of the caliphs. Despite the glory which is given over to their God the Muslim despotisms were things of men. Domination of the many by one is a matter of substance, not style. Human dignity should not be contingent on details of ancestry. Isn’t that obvious? I thought that was what the 20th century was to some extent all about.
FROM ABOVE...

Domination of the many by one is a matter of substance, not style. Human dignity should not be contingent on details of ancestry. Isn’t that obvious?

Roy.

Re: New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 2:39 pm
by Minimalist
kbs2244 wrote:The only problem is most of those rivers flow north.
They would have been a pretty good food source though.

Agreed...but all rivers flow in one direction and somehow people figure out how to go the other way.

For the zillionth time, I don't think our ancestors were stupid because they couldn't program a VCR. They survived and adapted to conditions which would kill most of us modern smart-asses inside of a month.

Re: New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 2:45 pm
by Minimalist
Domination of the many by one is a matter of substance, not style
Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.

--Gaius Sallustius Crispus

Re: New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 2:50 pm
by Digit
Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.
and tend to get neither!

Roy.

Re: New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 3:42 pm
by Rokcet Scientist
Minimalist wrote:Siberia does have rivers, though.

Image

I would not bet that these people were too stupid to learn how to make use of them.
Of course not. But that doesn't mean they would know how to make use of them in the way you expect!
Because Siberia is obviously not like the Arizona desert. It is extremely cold. Like minus 50ºC in the daytime, and minus 70ºC at night. And back then it was glacial max! I.o.w. those rivers – whether they were supposed to flow north, south, east, or west – were frozen solid! No water! 'Only' 8 foot ice. Which could easily carry an Abrams tank today.

So I'm betting a C-note that these people never developed boats or boating. Or anything close. Why would they? They didn't have any open water to boat on. Wanna be they developed skates instead?
So when they got fed up with the cold and finally migrated to the tropical south-east, to eventually end up in what is now New Guinea and the Marshall Islands, they didn't bring boat technology with them. Because they didn't have it. Yet they got to where they got to. Without boats. So unless there was a precursor to Phillipine Airlines that went bust since, and knowledge of which got lost in the mists of time, the Denisovans must have walked/waded to New Guinea and the Marshall Islands! There is no other way.

Re: New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Wed Dec 29, 2010 3:49 pm
by Digit
And only developed boats after having their flesh fall off from prolonged exposure to salt water whilst wading.

Roy.

Re: New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Thu Dec 30, 2010 10:57 am
by circumspice
Minimalist wrote:That's a great link, Circ. Going to take a while to get through it.
You're welcome Min.

My son is a geneticist. He is personally acquainted with two of the authors of the paper. I've asked him for his opinion of Paabo (et al).
He spoke highly, for the most part, of the genetics department at Max Planck. He also gave some caveats... e.g. the sensationalistic aspect
of ancient hominid DNA research, the high profile of the researchers and the institution, etc.

But overall, he stated that he places a good deal of trust in the published results. He said that the biggest problem was the interpretation of
the facts by journalists and the media spin doctors

Re: New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Thu Dec 30, 2010 11:04 am
by Digit
the biggest problem was the interpretation of
the facts by journalists and the media spin doctors
I think that is something we are all familiar with Circ.

Roy.

Re: New hominid variant, Denisovans, escaped the cold

Posted: Wed Jan 05, 2011 8:34 pm
by uniface
RS wrote:Siberia is obviously not like the Arizona desert. It is extremely cold. Like minus 50ºC in the daytime, and minus 70ºC at night. And back then it was glacial max!
Yet the mammoths that thaw out there were flash-frozen : very suddenly. And still have buttercups and such in their stomachs.

Something's askew here.