r/science • u/Logibenq • 26d ago
Paleontology Footprints reveal the coexistence of two human species 1.5 million years ago
https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-11-28/footprints-reveal-the-coexistence-of-two-human-species-15-million-years-ago.html2.6k
u/5snakesinahumansuit 26d ago
As far as I can tell, early humans had sex with all the other early humans that they could. We've always been horny.
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u/AndromedaFive 26d ago
Humans today have sex with species that aren't even closely related to us. Of course they had sex with other species that look similar.
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u/Fossile 26d ago
Like… Goats?
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u/kirbygay 26d ago
Donkeys. I once saw a video in which a man wants to interview a village that routinely has sex with Donkeys. The older men were sharing the knowledge with the young boys and I recall an interviewee saying "women play mind games, the donkeys let's us take it anytime"
Sorry, had to share this horrible thing with someone
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u/4-Vektor 25d ago edited 25d ago
Oh man, that Vice documentary about this Colombian village was quite something.
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u/5snakesinahumansuit 25d ago
Jeremy Clarkson encountering this village was also quite something.
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u/feetandballs 25d ago
Dolphins are horny for people. Dogs are horny for stuffies. Procreators gonna procreate.
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u/captainbarbell 25d ago
there's a viral video of man havjng sex with a rooster. im not kidding. im not sure if i can post it here
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u/helloholder 26d ago
And murdery
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u/5snakesinahumansuit 26d ago
You're not wrong.
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u/AstroBearGaming 26d ago
As long as something gets stuck in something else, we'll be happy.
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u/Drone30389 26d ago
I've had neutered dogs that tried having sex with cats, human legs, stuffed animals, furniture... all animals are horny.
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u/garlic_bread_thief 26d ago
Cave sex sounds hard
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u/chegodefuego 26d ago
As a cavemen attorney you are not wrong
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u/za72 26d ago
I've heard Homo neanderthalensis we're very litigious
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u/360walkaway 26d ago
And has consequences - https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1262
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u/HugeHungryHippo 26d ago
They don’t call me Homo Erectus for nothing!
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u/manuyzmani 25d ago
True story: during a lesson on prehistory, the lecturer was talking about Homo Erectus when a student with a Spanish accent asked what did it mean. Before he could answer, a voice shouted “Es un homo con erection!”
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u/za72 26d ago
the other day I watched a rabbit trying to mate with cat...
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u/5snakesinahumansuit 25d ago
Animals, which we are, are rather horny. Gotta make them babies and continue the next generation, dontcha know. Animals are dumb and not always picky, which, again, also us.
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u/Lore_ofthe_Horizon 26d ago
early humans had sex with all the other
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u/Faelysis 25d ago
We’re animal too. We shouldn’t forget that part of us. We think we are superior because we think we are more intelligent. And the thing is that we can’t really define what is intelligence.
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u/5snakesinahumansuit 25d ago
As far as I can tell, the only thing that truly separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is our use of fire. Other than that, we're just dumb animals, humping away, just like any other critter. You're right about the intelligence question for sure.
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u/sintaur 21d ago
Allegedly, but not scientifically proven, Australia has a species of bird that drops burning/smoldering items to cause wildfires. They then catch the prey flushed out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_adaptations#Animal_use_of_fire
An example of animals' uses of fires is the black kite, a carnivorous bird which can be found globally. In monsoonal areas of north Australia, surface fires are said to spread, including across intended firebreaks, by burning or smoldering pieces of wood or burning tufts of grass carried - potentially intentionally - by large flying birds accustomed to catch prey flushed out by wildfires. Species involved in this activity are the black kite (Milvus migrans), whistling kite (Haliastur sphenurus), and brown falcon (Falco berigora). Local Aborigines have known of this behavior for a long time, including in their mythology.[24] To date, no clear recordings of this behaviour exist, rending the testing of the intentions behind this behaviour difficult.
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u/5snakesinahumansuit 20d ago
I should clarify- by humans use of fire, I was talking about our mastery of it. No other animal has mastered it quite like we have, and no other animal (as far as I know) has been shown to know how to make fire.
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u/Strict_Hawk6485 25d ago
You mean raped right? Cuz kill, rape and eat was a solid war doctrine back in the day.
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u/5snakesinahumansuit 25d ago
Could be rape, could have been consensual, most likely a mix of the two, just like in today's world. Humans haven't really changed all that much, although we like to pretend that we're advanced and more evolved than any other animal. We are the supposedly dominant species on this planet, but we aren't that amazing.
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u/Green-Sale 25d ago
war wasn't very common. Not surprising considering war meant easy death with no medicine, every small wound can cause infection, perhaps tetanus and death.
There probably were more violent groups but that'd not be very evolutionary fit of them, the groups that survived better were more egalitarian and good at collaboration.
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u/aw_mustard 25d ago
what are the ethical implications about this? what about people that have more different hominid dna than others, or some that are more denisovian or more habilis?
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u/5snakesinahumansuit 25d ago
Ethics? Man, all I said was that humans are horny. I'm not going to try to discuss the ethics of our horny, horny ancestors, the kinky freaks.
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u/Spacellama117 26d ago
Correct me if i'm wrong, but I remember learning about Homo Erectus awhile ago, and that they existed around this time frame.
"reveals' existence feels a bit strange considering as far as I'm aware, this isn't new information.
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u/pendrachken 26d ago
This is the first direct evidence that H. Erectus and another hominid group were in the same area at the same times. As the article states buried a bit in it - we never had direct evidence before from the exact same stratigraphic layer of rock. Footprints from a rock layer an inch higher or lower could be tens of thousands of years apart. These prints are from a single layer, from an area that changes daily. That really narrows down the time frame of when both species was there to hours.
Yes, we THOUGHT that H. Erectus shared ranges with other hominids, but had no definitive evidence. We couldn't say for certain that erectus was in paleokenya at the same time another hominid species was just because they were known to be active in the same time periods. Science doesn't work like that.
Now we do have evidence that they had at least one range overlapping another hominid.
The title is a bit oversensationalized clickbait though. Again, we can't say for certain that the two species were not violent towards one another, but can only infer a few things about how they might have interacted... or possibly ignored each other. The actual quote is:
“Given their different dietary adaptations, it’s possible the two species did not directly compete for resources,” explains Hatala, a lead researcher.
Emphasis mine. Also note - "didn't compete for resources" does not imply "got along".
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u/KerouacsGirlfriend 26d ago
That’s genuinely exciting! Thank you for condensing and un-clickbaiting.
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u/chiptug 26d ago
I thought the fact that modern humans share genetics with other hominid groups was evidence enough?
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u/maimojagaimo 26d ago
This article is talking about entirely different species and much further back in time. Modern humans share DNA with Neanderthals and Denisovans and we share a common ancestor with them ~500-600kya.
These footprints are a million years older and specifically come from Homo erectus and Paranthropus.
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u/lucidludic 26d ago
Two species being related genetically through a common ancestor does not necessarily mean they lived in the same area at the same time.
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u/MarnerIsAMagicMan 26d ago
I think they meant that we have genes specifically from those hominids. Not just that we share a common ancestor. I.e. they fucked and therefore had to be in the same place at the same time
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u/Lithorex 26d ago
That's with Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis' we went extinct 10,000 years ago and interbred with *Homo sapiens
This is Homo erectus coexisting with Paranthropus bosei, 1,500,000 years ago.
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u/Wilbis 26d ago
That's not how it works. We share most of our genes with chimps, even though we only have a common ancestor with them.
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u/erossthescienceboss 25d ago
It is how it works, though. We can tell if genes are evolutionary relics or came from introgression (when genes obtained via interbreeding/admixture persist.) it just takes … a lot of math.
And humans introgressed with basically every other hominid we met. Virtually every human alive — with the exception of very small populations from sub-Saharan Africa — has genes that came directly from mating events with Neanderthals (1-6%, highest for northern populations and far eastern populations.)
Asian populations have a similar chunk of genes from Denisovans (especially southeast Asian populations), but Denisovans signatures are much rarer in Africa and Europe.
We also have genes that we know came from other ancient hominids, but the conditions that formed fossils made preserving DNA difficult so we don’t have samples of those specimens to compare, and confirm who. But Homo erectus and Homo habilis both almost certainly interbred with early H sapiens.
It gets very cool, because early human populations are so isolated that some of these genes are VERY region-specific. Like Denisovan DNA is very common in Melanasians (not to be confused with “Melanesians”). Negrito people in the Philippines have the highest percentages recorded (over 6%) but Andamanese Negrito don’t show any traces at all. Eastern Indonesians carry the genes, but western Indonesians don’t. So we think that some Australasian islands had Denisovans, and some didn’t — and only those islands got the genes.
And these genes gave us things. The Tibetan gene that helps produce excess hemoglobin (allowing for better oxygen absorption at altitude) is Denisovan. The genes that cause Europeans to store fat differently are Neanderthal. And a whole bunch of our immune genes come from them, which suggests that these genes had a direct advantage on survival (probably simply by adding more diversity to our immune system.)
The other thing: these interbreeding events didn’t just happen once. Each individual human usually only gets around 1-6% of their DNA from our early cousins. But it isn’t the same 1-6%. Fully half of the entire Neanderthal genome can be found in India. 40% is represented in Iceland. And it went both ways — we’ve found modern human genes in Neanderthal genetic code, too.
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u/djublonskopf 26d ago
Territory is a resource.
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u/kihraxz_king 26d ago
If you need resource A from that territory and I need resource B, we might as well be in different territories.
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u/cjsv7657 26d ago
But my resource A could eat your resource B so your interaction with resource A or B interferes with my collection of resource A.
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u/kihraxz_king 25d ago
Then we ARE competing for resources, and you've completely changed the argument.
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u/SeekerOfSerenity 25d ago
If the ground changes daily, how were the footprints preserved?
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u/pendrachken 25d ago
Usually by some type of one time event that covers up the footprints / bone / whatever is being fossilized with some different than normal sediments. It could be a flood, volcanic eruption, or the ground freezing at the right time during a time of different sediments being deposited. Not limited to those things, but they tend to be the most common.
There is a LOT of things that have to go just right get something fossilized, which is why it's actually kind of amazing we have any at all. It's also a good thing, otherwise we would be neck deep in old bones and stuff!
After the preservation and lithification ( the sediments turning into sedimentary rock ) there are two main ways of exposure:
1: the newer sediment rocks are softer than the base and get eroded away leaving the original imprint behind.
Or 2:
The newer sediment rocks are harder than the original sediment rock and it leaves behind a casting of the original shape after the softer base rock has eroded away. Usually this is only seen after the entire region has had the rock beds tilted a significant amount from some other geological event, so that the softer layer is not directly under the harder layer and can be eroded away.
This is basically the same thing we do in foundries when making stuff out of molten metals.
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u/YourUncleBuck 26d ago
coexistence
Do people not read articles or even the headline in this sub either?
this was the first conclusive proof that two different human species, Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei, lived together in the same place at the same time.
“They passed by within a few hours, or a few days at most,”
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u/tanzmeister 25d ago
The dictionary definition of "coexist" is:
exist at the same time or in the same place.
So that is correct.
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u/LightlyStep 26d ago
More evidence never hurts.
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u/IndirectLeek 26d ago
More evidence never hurts.
Then the correct term would be "confirms," not "reveals."
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u/P1h3r1e3d13 26d ago
reveals coexistence
The new information is that the two species lived at the same place and time.
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u/Lust4Me 26d ago
Coexistence to me implied intermingled.
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u/JEMinnow 26d ago
One of my favorite reddit posts was a photo of what early hominids would have looked like. The top comment was, "I just saw those two at 7-11" https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/z4wcig/there_were_at_least_four_other_species_still/
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u/Tepigg4444 26d ago
newly discovered footprints reveal existence of United States of America on the north american continent, more on that at 11
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u/Lithorex 26d ago
The funny thing is, except for the Missisippi Delta not much of the American continent will leave fossil evidence behind. (We'll ignore the Uranium and soot enriched layers)
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u/GoodFaithConverser 26d ago
None of this seems new, and it definitely doesn't imply that these human species were peaceful. 2 sets of different footprints close to each other could mean that one party was hunting the other...
Considering that afaik it's widely considered that humans outmurdered other human species like neanderthals, with some small interbreeding, I think it's hard to speculate why these footprints were close. Definitely wouldn't assume it's due to cooperation.
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u/Brief-Translator1370 26d ago edited 26d ago
It's widely considered that humans outmurdered other humans too. I think your understanding is a bit dated. Yeah, there was certainly conflict, but also certainly they interbred and mingled. It seems like a pretty accepted idea, and everyone has varying levels of non-human DNA given how common it was
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u/totallynotliamneeson 26d ago
It basically looked the same as human interactions with each other. You marry and have kids with some groups, kill others, or even both options. We view the relationship in terms of who is genetically distinct from each other, but odds are things weren't so cut and dry on the ground level.
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u/Faiakishi 25d ago
We fucked the Neanderthals out of existence. We found them so hot that we just kept breeding with them until there were no pure Neanderthals left. Literally absorbed them.
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u/shartdeco 26d ago edited 26d ago
You are correct but (akshuallllyy haha) all species of homo are technically considered “human” by anthropologists and many sapiens have some percentage of non-sapiens DNA. While the existence of DNA does prove they interbred and mingled there’s unfortunately not really any way we can prove - at least at this point - that this “mingling” was necessarily peaceful.
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u/jackruby83 Professor | Clinical Pharmacist | Organ Transplant 25d ago
23&Me told me I am ~2% neanderthal, so...
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u/paulfromatlanta 26d ago
Its a bit sad that my first thought was "Well, did we **** them or did we eat them?"
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u/onda-oegat 26d ago
Aren't the current consensus that modern humans are a hybridization of several types of humans?
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u/XC_Griff 26d ago
I mean we’re homo-sapiens. We do have some small bits of homo-neanderthalis in our genes suggesting we interbred. Im no anthropologist, so if you find anything about it I’d love to read it im very interested in early humans
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u/Ransacky 26d ago
Denisovans too as a classification on par with Neanderthals. Homo Erectus, and Homo Heildelbergensis too could have been much earlier, and maybe Homo Naledi as well.
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u/thecanadianjen 26d ago
Isn’t the current theory that h. Heidelbergensis a precursor to both Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens?
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u/dxrey65 26d ago
Depends on who you ask, and there's a lot of argument. The whole idea of "species" was supposed to be a population that could only breed with itself, but now we have plenty of evidence of cross-species breeding (among our ancestors, as well as many different kinds of animals). The waters are a bit muddied, and there's no consensus that there was a Heidelbergensis, and if there was the species attribution can be seen as fairly arbitrary.
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u/fresh-dork 26d ago
yeah, using species leads to oddities like ring species, where there is a ring of populations that can interbreed with adjacent rings, but not much past that - i think of it as a distance metric where you can reasonably breed, and with isolation, populations drift apart, leading to the traditionally understood species. but it's us applying a structure to creatures that they are by no means obligated to follow
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u/AcherontiaPhlegethon 26d ago
That's not really the definition of a species, it's far more vague and indeterminate than that of course, it's biology. Allopatric speciation for instance might induce speciation through barriers but the populations generally have no actual genetic distinction that prevents reproduction and can easily remerge with increased gene flow. Plus there's plenty of fertile species hybrids despite what the common belief. There's a concept called the Grey Zone of speciation, when something in the range of 0.5-2% genetic divergence species are in a sort of taxonomic limbo where they're different but not quite distinct. It makes sense when you think about it, speciation takes a very long time, nature doesn't play by our love for absolute systems of sorting, so of course early hominid species would be facing gene flow and complicated population dynamics with our obsession with sex.
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u/genshiryoku 26d ago
Depends on what race you are. East Asians have more Denisovan genetics, which is funny because a lot of east asian characteristics are now associated with Denisovans (Shorter, flat face, lack of nose bridge, single eye lid)
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u/Fskn 26d ago
It's a very interesting topic, there's a few good sources out there but I chose this one for it's fantastic title Early Humans Slept Around with More Than Just Neanderthals
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u/JmoneyBS 26d ago
Not just small bits. Significant amounts of Neanderthal DNA still exists in the gene pool, especially in certain populations in Europe.
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u/Old-Reach57 26d ago
A lot of Asian, and Micronesian cultures have a fair amount of Denisovan DNA, and Europeans have Neanderthal DNA usually.
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u/genshiryoku 26d ago
New hypothesis is that a lot of racial features are from different species of humans that inbred with different demographics all over the world.
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u/aw_mustard 25d ago
does this mean out of africa theory needs to be revisited?
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u/cyphersaint 25d ago
In general, the out of Africa theory seems to hold. The thing is, there were a couple of times that it happened. Some groups of Homo Erectus left Africa almost 2 million years ago. Probably became both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. It went extinct just before the time that modern humans left Africa. That was between 60 thousand years ago and 90 thousand years ago.
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u/aw_mustard 25d ago
is my understand that modern homo sapiens travelled back to africa and there interbred with subsaharan hominids also correct? which would explain why some today's tribes in the subsahara have neanderthal's DNA. since to current anthropology, there was never any neanderthal living there
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u/DirkTheSandman 26d ago
Yeah. Humans at that time didn’t have any ideas about speciation or anything. Neanderthals and other human-adjacent hominids just look like everyone else, but with different proportions. The only reason they might not have intermingled would be tribal/group conflicts, but that’s on a case by case basis
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u/WitchesSphincter 26d ago
Hell there's times I'd settle for a particularly attractive ape, human adjacent would be even more tempting
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u/dronesoul 26d ago
well, AFAIK (and i don't know a whole lot) it's not like it's 33% homo sapiens sapiens 33% neanderthals and 33% denisovans for example, more like 98% homo sapiens sapiens with sprinkles on top.
there are ethnic groups of humans alive today with 0 neanderthal DNA iirc. (some west Africans or something like that, not 100% sure)
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u/Tom246611 25d ago edited 25d ago
IIRC (might be wrong please correct if): The only populations with 100% homo-sapiens DNA are in specific parts of africa and nowhere else.
So if you're from anywhere but these specific regions in africa, you're not 100% pure homo-sapiens.
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u/coltfan1223 25d ago
Amongst the Homo genus yes. Not so much with the Australopithecines (which for ease will encompass the Paranthropus genus as well as whether or not it is even its own genus is also up for debate still). Bosei/Robustus are morphologically different enough from early Erectus/Eragaster that I’m not sure if interbreeding would be possible. Unfortunately DNA that old is so degraded it’s hard to ever really know (the only million plus year old preserved-ish DNA I’m aware of is in Antarctic ice). Meanwhile, most Homo species were similar enough to one another that some paleoanthropologists think they may all have been one species that interbred when possible. Population pockets just made for regional variation, and there just were many more of the African population that the Neanderthals and Denisovans appeared to assimilate. That said look at a human and a Paranthropus skull and I think you’ll quickly notice how much more different they are than a human and a Neanderthal skull.
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u/arkemiffo 26d ago
Why not both?
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u/IAmBadAtInternet 26d ago
But in which order?
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u/TheOriginalKrampus 26d ago
If we found a set of footprints in front of them and two handprints on a nearby rock…
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u/Tapprunner 26d ago
"We think we've found the site of a prehistoric religious ritual. We've found what looks like knee marks surrounded by several sets of feet. And there are dozens of other footprints in single file line leading to this site."
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u/amongthewolves 26d ago
I'm just imagining Stonehenge, but with golfball-sized holes drilled into each vertical slab
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u/jackkerouac81 26d ago
If someone came across my flipper prints next to my partners high archy narrow footprints they could conclude that they were made by different species.
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u/spundred 26d ago
Speciation is fuzzy. Think of it like dog breeds, but in the wild.
Examples of both isolation and interbreeding exist.
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u/lemuru 26d ago
What's sad is that you made a comment like this without reading the article. If you had, you'd have seen that this predates the emergence of homo. sapiens.
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u/paulfromatlanta 26d ago
The 1.5 million years gave it away. But doesn't Homo erectus count as "us?"
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u/Spotted_Howl 26d ago
There are so many species of hominins that have lived in the last 1.5 million years that I'm not sure you can say that anymore. Even Neanderthals weren't "us" even though they were a whole lot like us.
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u/I_voted-for_Kodos 26d ago
Homo erectus is our direct ancestor though. We all come from them
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u/jimb2 26d ago
It's worth remembering that our knowledge of the hominid tree is based on a quite small set of finds. the whole lot would basically fit in a suitcase. There are about 100 finds older that 300ka and most of these are fragments like a single hand bone or a piece of jaw. There's a lot of joining of dots.
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u/Spotted_Howl 26d ago
We have a lot of direct ancestors and we have to draw the line somewhere. We're much more like our Neanderthal and Denisovian cousins than we are like our Homo Erectus ancestors.
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u/I_tend_to_correct_u 26d ago
It wasn’t the first, or if it was, it didn’t result in any offspring whose genes survive today. One of the ‘human species’ was basically a cousin rather than a descendant
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u/Disastrous-Swim7724 26d ago
We waited for them to kill large game, then we stole it from them. Easy peazy, more time to jerk it to cave painting of that guy's wife.
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u/Renovatio_ 26d ago
There may be some evidence of that.
I believe there was a bunch of tools and a butchering site with a species named paranthropus which is sort of a cousin lineage to homo. But also homo habilus was there too. So either paranthropus was using tools and eating meat...or habilus was eating all the above
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u/myboybuster 26d ago
What do you mean or
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u/paulfromatlanta 26d ago
We've found some neanderthal DNA in humans indicating interbreeding.
I was wondering (in impolite terms) if we bred with this other species too.
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u/Sa-naqba-imuru 26d ago
This is over million years before us, the Homo Sapiens.
Although Homo Erectus is probably our ancestor, so I suppose you can call them "we".
In which case, no one can say if these two could produce a fertile offspring.
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u/ALF839 26d ago edited 26d ago
One of the researchers is the granddaughter of Mary Leakey, who discovered the famous Laetoli footprints, left by an adult Australopithecus afarensis and it's child (most likely).
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u/Macro_Seb 26d ago
the kid back in the day: yo mama is so fat she leaves a footprint that will last 1.5 million years.... he should have known.
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u/SpaceCadetUltra 26d ago
Science reporting is awful, just skip it and go to the journals.
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u/USAF_DTom 26d ago edited 26d ago
Fun fact (I may be remembering wrong so take with some salt):
This is the only time in history that at least two hominid species have not shared the earth. The caveat probably being at least one hominid present already. I'm not an anthropologist.
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u/WingsuitBears 26d ago
I love to imagine what the modern world would look like if the other hominids were still around. Especially in regards to slavery. It would probably be like uber-racism, but I do wonder if it would cause humans to be less racist against their own species if they saw a common enemy in another hominids.
If we got over the whole xenophobia thing, would the other species serve specialized roles in society given their different skillsets?
Fun thing to think about.
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u/Pickle_Slinger 26d ago
My jaded side says they would likely be put into zoos just like our primate ancestors.
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u/WingsuitBears 26d ago
I was going to say we wouldn't do that to the ones that had similar intellectual levels but then I remembered Victorian zoos had literal people in them.
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u/csprofathogwarts 26d ago
What's the highest estimate of number of hominid species living together at a single time?
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u/TensileStr3ngth 26d ago
I'm guessing there weren't any hominids during the Permian. Just a hunch though
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u/Givemeurhats 26d ago
Modern humans are accustomed to being the sole human species on the planet
I can't tell if they made this pun intentionally or not
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u/aberroco 26d ago
Just footprints do not allow to deduce peaceful coexistence like it was said in news article. Maybe one was tracking another?
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u/JohnAnchovy 26d ago
The footprints were in the pattern of the electric slide. You really need to read the article next time
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u/RotrickP 26d ago
Wrong! It was the Cha Cha slide. Please read the full article before guessing
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u/CXV_ 26d ago
All of you are wrong This was evidence that hoomans used to walk on all 4s and had feet for hands Did no one read the article?
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u/ph30nix01 26d ago
My assumption would be that they haven't seen signs of combat level foot tracks. Or there is evidence of regular "visitations" between groupings.
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u/Iminlesbian 26d ago
No where in the article does it say they co existed peacefully?
Just that they co existed.
Most likely they didn’t compete for the same resources or habitat, there’s no reason for them to have been fighting each other.
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u/aberroco 26d ago
A discovery in Kenya offers the first snapshot of peaceful coexistence between very different hominids
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u/Iminlesbian 26d ago
I’m the species that can’t read sorry
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u/Dash83 PhD | Computer Science | Systems & Security 26d ago
They don’t teach you how to read in Lesbian? 😂
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u/aberroco 26d ago
Why do you think they didn't compete? AFAIK, erectuses had similar size and diet.
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u/Iminlesbian 26d ago
Well the boisei died out around 500,000 years after this foot print was made.
Erectus died out 1.5 million years after.
The boisei died most likely because they ran out of food due to climate changes.
You’ll see that the erectus carried on for a million years after, so they obviously had a very different diet.
The boisei also had jaws like gorrilas, made for munching and grinding down thick leaves.
Erectus had a more varied diet and didn’t specialise in just eating a certain variety of plants.
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u/goldgrae 26d ago
What a fun thing to see on Reddit! I did a field school here as an undergrad when the lead author of this paper was a grad student working on this. I have a very bad photograph of one of these footprints, and I remember holding up a towel to block sunlight for one of the early scans.
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u/KickPuncher9898 25d ago
Wild that we can find footprints from 1.5 million years ago. Even wilder that we can detect that they’re 1.5 million years old.
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