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Aboriginal Australians, Pacific Islanders carry DNA of unknown human species

ABC possibly could have worded this more nicely:

Unidentified species flagged in Aboriginal Australian DNA

Stormfront Australia will be loving that.
 
I recently heard about the Denisovans in Asia.

Once Earth was home to a host of human species, from Neanderthals to hobbits. But today only we survive
In September 2015, another species was added to the list. Hundreds of bones discovered in a South African cave are now believed to belong to a new species, known as Homo naledi. There may well be many more extinct hominin species waiting to be uncovered....

Rewind to 30,000 years ago. As well as modern humans, three other hominin species were around: the Neanderthals in Europe and western Asia, the Denisovans in Asia, and the "hobbits" from the Indonesian island of Flores....

In reality, our evolutionary story is more complicated than that. Homo erectus survived for a long time and was the first hominin species to expand out of Africa – before even the Neanderthals – but its brain was quite small....

For tens of thousands of years, before we developed these abilities, modern humans and other hominins were fairly evenly matched, says Conard. Any other species could have taken our place.
But they did not, and eventually we out-competed them. As our population exploded, the other species retreated and eventually disappeared altogether....
Click to expand...

It's an interesting article. It would seem that the more genome mapping we do, the picture of these shorter lived hominids will become more clear.
 
So there are NO different races, but there are different SPECIES?
 
casebro said:
So there are NO different races, but there are different SPECIES?
Click to expand...


Not any more. But yes, in the past there were a number of different species of hominid closely more related to humans than chimpanzees are.
 
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Excuse the racialism, but does this have any bearing on physical traits like apparent insane strength and bone structure and stuff? Or is it just embedded in their DNA like ancient virus fragments?
 
casebro said:
So there are NO different races, but there are different SPECIES?
Click to expand...

Defining "species" is complex. But yes, there were many different populations of humanoids in the "recent" past who competed with, shared locations, and bred (to some extent) with one another. We, the species who survived to the current time, have a mix of DNA ancestries from these different populations, with the percent of each in our genomes varying geographically.

Personally I suspect that the current human lineage survived because we were the most vicious of all of them and killed off the others.
 
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casebro said:
So there are NO different races, but there are different SPECIES?
Click to expand...
Race is an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics. As such it is is too crude to provide useful information, an antiquated concept that has social meaning that interferes in the scientific understanding of human genetic diversity.

Species too can be imprecise and requires different definitions depending on what field of science the term is being used. But at least it does have scientific meaning and is useful in whatever context it is being used. The problems come into play when mixing contexts.

This is why race is being phased out of science, in favor of new descriptors. (but not completely yet)
 
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IIIClovisIII said:
Excuse the racialism, but does this have any bearing on physical traits like apparent insane strength and bone structure and stuff? Or is it just embedded in their DNA like ancient virus fragments?
Click to expand...

I know that some of the Neanderthal genes have been proposed to affect the immune response. I presume, but I have not read, that certain aspects of appearance may similarly be linked to DNA sequences that are associated with one lineage or another (e.g. the thicker and heavier bones of some Europeans may be related to Neanderthal sequences, but I don't know for sure). There is no doubt that the abundance of certain alleles in the human population differs geographically and helps account for the geographical differences in human appearance, whatever the original source of these alleles. But as you know, there is a lot of mixing of these alleles in different ways in even these previously-geographically isolated human populations (now more than ever with more routine travel), which is an important reason many scientists do not like to think in terms of "race."
 
I always believed that my own European ancestors were kicked out of Africa rather than "expanding" out of Africa voluntarily. This is based on my interactions with my relatives.
 
casebro said:
So there are NO different races, but there are different SPECIES?
Click to expand...

No. There were in ancient days long ago multiple species decendent from an original gene pool source. Some were closely related enough to interbreed. The other species are no longer represented intact as a distinct population, having died out and/or absorbed into the population of Homo sapiens sapiens in their area.
 
casebro said:
Elsewhere. Mostly by SJWs who say there are no racial differences in modern man, we all the same bro.

Yet here we are, discussing different SPECIES of humans. Ah dunno.
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That's because today there is one species of humans, but in the past there were several.


Races are not species. Species are not races. Races are an obsolete vestigial remnant of a primitive understanding of human genetics. There is no objective criteria by which various "races" can be uniformly divided and grouped. The Sunday school notion of "red and yellow, black and white" is the least useful of all because it totally ignores the yellowish brownish white people scattered across the Middle East, and the bewildering variety of "races" in India, none of whom are "black" but many of whom are very very dark, especially those with distinct facial features most similar to Northern Europeans.
 
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The Atheist said:
ABC possibly could have worded this more nicely:

Unidentified species flagged in Aboriginal Australian DNA

Stormfront Australia will be loving that.
Click to expand...

I'm worried about something almost the opposite.

I went to a "Cultural Awareness Workshop" a few years ago. Against my will, but still.

The presenter was an aborigine who worked for Melbourne University, and he raised a number of arguable points. But the doozy was that aborigines have no oral history of arriving in Australia by boat ("oral histories last 50,000 years?" I muttered). His theory was that aborigines evolved in Australia!

This was too much for me and I asked where were the great ape fossils in Australia. He ignored me. I raised DNA evidence supporting the Out of Africa theory. Again ignored.

Guys like him will be all over this. The unknown species was the original, noble aborigine evolved in Australia, now contaminated with inferior DNA.

Bleagggh.

ETA I should have added that a belief like this is totally political. If aborigines came by boat or across land bridges, the only thing separating them and following settlers is time. If they evolved here, they are the true and absolute custodians of Australia.

I'm not suggesting that this is a majority view of aborigines. Most don't give a stuff one way or other. But there is a radical rump which will love this.
 
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Jrrarglblarg said:
That's because today there is one species of humans, but in the past there were several.
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But the more we learn, the more obvious it is that we are a confluence of those species, to varying degrees.

But you are right, skin color is not the distinction. Genes are- Caucasians have Neanderthal genes, Orientals have Denisovan, Africans have neither. And according to the OP, Islanders have yet another mixed in.

Or is the word "race" so charged with negativity that we can't even discuss the difference between peoples? Ought we use a different word? Family? Tribe? Breed? Is "Ethnicity" neutral enough?

Point: I am 2.9% Neanderthal. Also 2.7% Ashkenazim. Is it OK that we discuss dead tribes, but not to discuss my tie to a living tribe of ethnic Jews? Or the lack of all of those in Africans? They are the purist race of all, aren't they?

oo,ooo, Mr Kotter- Haplogroups, that is the scientific term for "race". Cancel the whole discussion, eh?
 
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casebro said:
Elsewhere. Mostly by SJWs who say there are no racial differences in modern man, we all the same bro.

Yet here we are, discussing different SPECIES of humans. Ah dunno.
Click to expand...

There is no disagreement that many alleles (= different sequences at a given genetic locus, or in less technical terms, different versions of the same overall type of gene) differ among the human population. You and I (or any random person) probably differ in one base pair every few thousand (that is a lot over the entire genome). There is no disagreement that some of these different alleles give rise to different detectable physical traits- skin color, shape of nose, height, etc. Further there is no disagreement that certain of these alleles are more common in some populations than others (most often because of prior geographic/reproductive isolation, sometimes combined with a selective pressure. For example there is a selective pressure to have less melanin in areas with less sunlight to allow the synthesis of vitamin D/more melanin in areas with lots of sun to protect against UV exposure). No one is claiming that people are all alike or that genetics are not an important part of why they differ.

But the concept of race had been invented presupposing that an entire cluster of alleles/traits lump together in a scientifically meaningful way so as to separate people into distinct groups as compared to humans as a whole (e.g. "Negros" have this SET of traits; "Caucasians" have that SET of traits). But it is now clear that these different alleles/traits are not usually linked together biologically and therefore don't really provide any useful or accurate way to catalog people into groups. Lots of different people in different parts of the world have alleles for dark skin. In some cases these alleles are common in populations with alleles for thin noses; in other cases they are common in populations with alleles for broad noses.

The bottom line is that of course we all differ in our physical traits in part due to our genetics, and that certain alleles/traits are found at different abundances in different populations (less so now as people travel more and marry other people from other populations/regions). This is all accepted. But these alleles/traits don't form larger meaningful clusters that would be useful for assigning people into groups. I have a big nose, straight hair, and pale skin. Someone in Africa may have a big nose, curly hair, and dark skin. Someone in India may have a thin nose, straight hair and dark skin. Someone in China may have a thin nose, straight hair, and very light skin. Therefore trying to lump people into different "races" by somehow trying to partition these different traits into interrelated clusters doesn't really work and doesn't yield anything real or meaningful in terms of biology.
 
casebro said:
Jrrarglblarg said:
That's because today there is one species of humans, but in the past there were several.
Click to expand...

But the more we learn, the more obvious it is that we are a confluence of those species, to varying degrees.

But you are right, skin color is not the distinction. Genes are- Caucasians have Neanderthal genes, Orientals have Denisovan, Africans have neither. And according to the OP, Islanders have yet another mixed in.

Or is the word "race" so charged with negativity that we can't even discuss the difference between peoples? Ought we use a different word? Family? Tribe? Breed? Is "Ethnicity" neutral enough?

Point: I am 2.9% Neanderthal. Also 2.7% Ashkenazim. Is it OK that we discuss dead tribes, but not to discuss my tie to a living tribe of ethnic Jews? Or the lack of all of those in Africans? They are the purist race of all, aren't they?

oo,ooo, Mr Kotter- Haplogroups, that is the scientific term for "race". Cancel the whole discussion, eh?
Click to expand...

Just to illustrate why it is not so easy to catalog- East Asians have more Neanderthal sequences than do Europeans. And Denisovan sequences are found not just in China and Mongolia, but also in India. The racial cataloging of the 1800s would not have matched this distribution of NEanderthal/Denisovan ancestry at all.

Again- no one is saying that different populations don't differ in their abundances of certain DNA sequences, or even that certain of these sequences don't tend to be found together for historical reasons. What scientists are saying is that many of these sequences don't really lump together in any biologically relevant way- a given allele can be found frequently with some other allele in certain populations and with yet another allele in another population.

And yes- haplotypes are much more accurate and useful because they represent examples of a cluster of alleles that were, in a particular person, inherited together from their parents/etc- they are simply a report of the genetic reality for that particular person/group. In contrast "race" has typically assumed that specific clusters of alleles can be meaningfully used to define subgroups of people (rather than look at the actual inheritance of each individual, which is much more complex).
 
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