Posted by:
schrodingerscat
(
)
Date: May 04, 2021 01:19AM
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/essential-timeline-understanding-evolution-homo-sapiens-180976807/?
This is a great article that explains a lot more complex and fascinating narrative about our origins than any naïve fairy tale contained in scriptures.
"A recent study of human genomes in Papua New Guinea suggests that humans may have lived with and interbred with Denisovans there as recently as 15,000 years ago, though the claims are controversial. Many living Asian people inherited perhaps 3 to 5 percent of their DNA from the Denisovans.
On the Indonesian island of Flores, fossils evidence a curious and diminutive early human species nicknamed “hobbit.” Homo floresiensis appear to have been living until perhaps 50,000 years ago, but what happened to them is a mystery. They don’t appear to have any close relation to modern humans including the Rampasasa pygmy group, which lives in the same region today.
Neanderthals once stretched across Eurasia from Portugal and the British Isles to Siberia. As Homo sapiens became more prevalent across these areas the Neanderthals faded in their turn, being generally consigned to history by some 40,000 years ago. Some evidence suggests that a few die-hards might have held on in enclaves, like Gibraltar, until perhaps 29,000 years ago. Even today traces of them remain because modern humans carry Neanderthal DNA in their genome."
IOW, Anatomically Modern Humans, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, self described "Wise Wise Men" were interbreeding with two other species of humans 15,000-30,000 years ago, creating hybrid breeds of humans.
Europeans are a hybrid mix of Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalis. Asians and Melanesians are a hybrid mix of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, Homo Neanderthalis and Homo Denisovan. Africans are an earlier hybrid mix of Homo Sapiens Idaltu and other sub-species of humans, 16 of which lived in Africa, that we have fossil remains of. Some of which we only have DNA.
The big remaining mystery is why we were the last sub-species to remain.
"Despite the bits of genetic ancestry they contributed to living people, all of our close relatives eventually died out, leaving Homo sapiens as the only human species. Their extinctions add one more intriguing, perhaps unanswerable question to the story of our evolution—why were we the only humans to survive?"