Not much commentary on this which is too bad. This is a fascinating subject.
I thought this was a great find but basically it confirms what paleogenomics has been showing for years. We didn't "kill off" the other hominids. We subsumed them.
Paleogenomics has revolutionized our understanding of human evolution. It tells us that we didn’t kill the Neanderthals, we absorbed them. They is us.
While "hard" fossil evidence is incredibly rare and difficult to find. The evidence in our genome exists in every single one of us and it tells a consistent story.
With the sequencing of the Neanderthal and Sapiens genomes we can see clearly now how the two species interacted over a several hundred-thousand-year time span. The fossil record may be murky, but the genes don’t lie.
The main reason that humans didn’t spread into Europe before 50,000BCE was most likely that the land North of the Middle East was already taken by Neanderthal communities. What we know from the genetic traces is that they intermingled, and they interbred. We know this because we can see Neanderthal genes flowing back into the African gene pool each time the ice retreated, and the Middle East became inhospitable again.
Some mixed-race humans returned to Africa and spread Neanderthal genes back into the African gene pool, where they can be detected today. We know that others moved back into Europe because their human heritage has been detected in Neanderthal remains in Eastern Europe that are over a hundred thousand years old.
That’s right, the flow of genes went both ways. We hybridized with the Neanderthals and other Homo species multiple times. We slept with our cousins. A lot.
The genetic evidence tells us this happened multiple times in prehistory. Each time the door out of Africa was open, some humans would move into the Middle East, interbreed with the people they found there, and then vanish as the climate changed and the region became desert once again.
Some would go back to Africa, carrying the new genes they had acquired back to the “root stock”. Others would go to Europe and their “humanism” would fade as they blended into the Neanderthal population. Spreading human genes through the Neanderthal gene pool.
This happened multiple times in a 200,000-year dance of hybridization, isolation, inbreeding, and re-hybridization. The two populations\species profoundly affected each other genetically.
They is us, and we are them.
What finally put an end to the dance was the disaster that nearly killed us about 74,000 years ago. Recent research suggests it was a massive eruption of a volcano in Indonesia. The Toba eruption likely released 100 times as much SO2 as the Pinatubo event, and was the greatest natural disaster of the last 2.5 million years.
Temperatures dropped between 3.5 and nine degrees Celsius worldwide, and global rainfall decreased by 25 percent. What’s worse, computer simulations of the Toba super-eruption, found this event could have wiped out up to half the ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere. Remember the concerns about “destroying the ozone”?
The effects on the human genome indicate that the human population shrank down to a remnant group of a no more than ten to twenty thousand, probably living in Southern Africa.
We know this because it caused a “genetic bottleneck” trace in the human genome.
Humanity survived but we are not a genetically diverse species. The most genetically diverse human populations are the African ones. Because they are the oldest and have evolved the most diversity.
The European and Asian populations have less diversity than the African because they are younger and because they went through a second genetic bottleneck when they migrated out of Africa. The Amerindian genome is the least diverse of all because it went through a third genetic bottleneck when it’s ancestral populations migrated out of Asia.
Human genetic diversity is actually really low for a species.
After the Toba disaster the human population seems to have rebounded. We expanded throughout Africa and absorbed all the other hominid species that we encountered. Cousins, that we have no fossil evidence for except for their traces in our genome.
There are somewhere between 5-7 other "cousin" hominid species that we subsumed as we expanded across Africa. Hominid species that we have almost no physical evidence for but, who live on as "ghosts" in our genes.
In light of this evidence of two different Hominoids existing contemporaneously, I'm immediately wondering was Homo erectus the first species we drove to extinction?
Cynical I know, but my species behavior would lead me ponder that possibility considering we drive 200 species per day to extinction!
I strongly suspect our habit of driving species to extinction began when we had brains big enough to do the deed. We’re now on the verge of taking all life on Earth with us. We’re number one?!?
Thank you for sharing my work and continuing to add to it. I greatly appreciate your ongoing collegiality and scholarly efforts.
Not much commentary on this which is too bad. This is a fascinating subject.
I thought this was a great find but basically it confirms what paleogenomics has been showing for years. We didn't "kill off" the other hominids. We subsumed them.
Random Thoughts — 01 : Oct 2021
https://smokingtyger.medium.com/random-thoughts-01-aac12a607250
Paleogenomics has revolutionized our understanding of human evolution. It tells us that we didn’t kill the Neanderthals, we absorbed them. They is us.
While "hard" fossil evidence is incredibly rare and difficult to find. The evidence in our genome exists in every single one of us and it tells a consistent story.
With the sequencing of the Neanderthal and Sapiens genomes we can see clearly now how the two species interacted over a several hundred-thousand-year time span. The fossil record may be murky, but the genes don’t lie.
The main reason that humans didn’t spread into Europe before 50,000BCE was most likely that the land North of the Middle East was already taken by Neanderthal communities. What we know from the genetic traces is that they intermingled, and they interbred. We know this because we can see Neanderthal genes flowing back into the African gene pool each time the ice retreated, and the Middle East became inhospitable again.
Some mixed-race humans returned to Africa and spread Neanderthal genes back into the African gene pool, where they can be detected today. We know that others moved back into Europe because their human heritage has been detected in Neanderthal remains in Eastern Europe that are over a hundred thousand years old.
That’s right, the flow of genes went both ways. We hybridized with the Neanderthals and other Homo species multiple times. We slept with our cousins. A lot.
The genetic evidence tells us this happened multiple times in prehistory. Each time the door out of Africa was open, some humans would move into the Middle East, interbreed with the people they found there, and then vanish as the climate changed and the region became desert once again.
Some would go back to Africa, carrying the new genes they had acquired back to the “root stock”. Others would go to Europe and their “humanism” would fade as they blended into the Neanderthal population. Spreading human genes through the Neanderthal gene pool.
This happened multiple times in a 200,000-year dance of hybridization, isolation, inbreeding, and re-hybridization. The two populations\species profoundly affected each other genetically.
They is us, and we are them.
What finally put an end to the dance was the disaster that nearly killed us about 74,000 years ago. Recent research suggests it was a massive eruption of a volcano in Indonesia. The Toba eruption likely released 100 times as much SO2 as the Pinatubo event, and was the greatest natural disaster of the last 2.5 million years.
Temperatures dropped between 3.5 and nine degrees Celsius worldwide, and global rainfall decreased by 25 percent. What’s worse, computer simulations of the Toba super-eruption, found this event could have wiped out up to half the ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere. Remember the concerns about “destroying the ozone”?
The effects on the human genome indicate that the human population shrank down to a remnant group of a no more than ten to twenty thousand, probably living in Southern Africa.
We know this because it caused a “genetic bottleneck” trace in the human genome.
Humanity survived but we are not a genetically diverse species. The most genetically diverse human populations are the African ones. Because they are the oldest and have evolved the most diversity.
The European and Asian populations have less diversity than the African because they are younger and because they went through a second genetic bottleneck when they migrated out of Africa. The Amerindian genome is the least diverse of all because it went through a third genetic bottleneck when it’s ancestral populations migrated out of Asia.
Human genetic diversity is actually really low for a species.
After the Toba disaster the human population seems to have rebounded. We expanded throughout Africa and absorbed all the other hominid species that we encountered. Cousins, that we have no fossil evidence for except for their traces in our genome.
There are somewhere between 5-7 other "cousin" hominid species that we subsumed as we expanded across Africa. Hominid species that we have almost no physical evidence for but, who live on as "ghosts" in our genes.
In light of this evidence of two different Hominoids existing contemporaneously, I'm immediately wondering was Homo erectus the first species we drove to extinction?
Cynical I know, but my species behavior would lead me ponder that possibility considering we drive 200 species per day to extinction!
https://a-z-animals.com/blog/how-many-species-go-extinct-on-average-per-day-and-per-year/
I strongly suspect our habit of driving species to extinction began when we had brains big enough to do the deed. We’re now on the verge of taking all life on Earth with us. We’re number one?!?
Thank you for sharing my work and continuing to add to it. I greatly appreciate your ongoing collegiality and scholarly efforts.