Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans

Out of Africa, Multiregional, and the New Skull

• Debate centers on whether the new 1M-year-old skull meaningfully challenges the “Out of Africa” (OOA) model.
• Several commenters argue the skull likely belongs to an archaic Asian branch (Denisovan/“Longi” clade) that contributes only a small fraction of modern non-African ancestry, fitting within OOA + admixture.
• Others claim OOA is “problematic,” suggesting alternatives such as multiregional evolution or a Middle Eastern origin, arguing current models require “hoops” like multiple exoduses and bottlenecks.
• Critics of multiregionalism (in its classic sense: parallel local evolution into modern humans) say genetics overwhelmingly refutes anatomical continuity outside Africa.
• Some emphasize multiple migrations out of and back into Africa, making any simple “out of X” narrative incomplete.

Why Human Intelligence?

• A long thread explores why humans became uniquely intelligent relative to other apes.
• Proposed factors include:
  • Energetics: cooking and diet changes freeing calories from gut to brain; brain’s high metabolic cost.
  • Ecological and social pressures: group living, cooperation, hunting/foraging, rapidly changing environments.
  • Sexual and group selection: intelligence favored as a social/sexual advantage.
• Several stress that evolution has no “goal”; intelligence may be a contingent byproduct that then snowballed.
• Others note all great apes are already quite intelligent; human abilities may be a difference of degree plus fine motor control.

Language, Culture, and Cumulative Knowledge

• Many comments focus on language as the key differentiator: vocal tract changes enabling high-bandwidth, structured communication and complex social coordination.
• Culture and cumulative learning are highlighted: a lone “feral” human is argued to be a poor baseline for comparing species; human intelligence is tightly coupled to social learning and shared tools.
• Analogies are drawn to ants and cephalopods to show multiple independent evolutions of sophisticated cognition.

Trust in Reconstructions and Science

• Some urge skepticism about how much reconstructions and models reflect assumptions vs reality.
• Others counter that trained specialists do consider such issues, but critics respond with examples of bad statistics, weak peer review, and outright fraud.
• There’s a meta-debate over appeal to authority vs blanket distrust: one side warns against anti-intellectualism; the other warns against uncritical deference.

China, Politics, and Bias

• A side discussion examines Chinese paleoanthropology, past “Out of Asia” narratives, and whether findings from China should be viewed with special suspicion.
• Some argue dismissing work solely because it comes from China is nationalistic; others note political pressures and historical revisionism as reasons for extra caution.
• Multiple participants and moderators call for avoiding nationalist flamewars and focusing on evidence.

Miscellaneous Threads

• Clarification that “average lifespan 30” mainly reflects high child mortality; adults often reached 50+.
• Speculations about periodic impact events “adding new code” are labeled essentially creationist.
• A few suggest all age estimates should be read as “at least X years old” given fossil incompleteness.