Not really. Pick a random skull out of the 7 billion humans that exist today. How likely are you to get a Peter Dinklage or a Shaq?
Also, pretty sure archaeologists aren't dumb. The idea that this might be an outlier specimen probably occurred to them? They're obviously synthesizing a lot more information than just this one skull.
With increasing cookie warnings, email signup modals, adblock notices, nth article advisories, and other annoyances, I go directly to Safari reader view more every day. It works quite well.
I have seen it done in archeology occasionally, but for all science which depends on the shape of specific samples, this shape should be available as a 3D model for printing. It should be a huge boost if any researcher could "reproduce" these samples. And great for educational purposes, if you could bring a copy to a school class room.
It's incredibly unlikely for such a mutation to occur, the individual make it to adulthood, and for their remains to be recognizable after 140,000 years. The principle of mediocrity implies that this person was probably of a relatively common variety at the time.
He also is looking at his arrowhead like it is a smartphone and he’s posing for a selfie. Does anyone, when working or inspecting their work, strike poses?
> Now, nearly 90 years later, a study published in the journal The Innovation makes the case that this skull represents a new human species: Homo longi, or the Dragon Man.
How does one get "Dragon Man" from Homo longi, besides for marketing? Longi translates to long, not to dragon.
Changmiania liaoningensis, named after the Liaoning province, comes to mind, and a trilobite named Han Solo[0] after the Han people of China.
There are entire lists named after Harry Potter[1], Tolkien[2], and Pokemon[3]. Scientists are both utter nerds and not terribly stuck on sticking to Latin and Greek for their naming.
Yes; species names are all over the place. This one at least means something in Latin, which is not always guaranteed. There’s a moth called Neopalpa donaldtrumpi, for instance (similar hair). Looking a bit Latin-y is generally considered sufficient.
In the paper they describe the etymology of the name like this: "The species name is derived from the geographic name Long Jiang, which is a common usage for the Heilongjiang Province and literally means “dragon river.”"
I don't think this is due to the 'dominance' of English. The connection between Western and Chinese dragons is probably a lot older and goes back to the earliest contacts during the Middle Ages by European explorers (who weren't English in most cases).
Nowadays there's a relatively strict idea in Western fantasy art of what a dragon is supposed to look like, but that's a fairly new development.
You make it sound like Chinese dragons not having a separate word in English is somehow a nefarious plot when in reality it's just that people noticed that these creatures are pretty similar and used the same word to describe them. This happens all the time. I would say Westerners are fairly aware that a Chinese dragon is different from a Western one even if the same word is used.
I only did a cursory look on Chinese Wikipedia, but it seems like Western dragons are also referred to as 龍 in Mandarin. Is this also forced upon the West due to the dominance of Chinese culture and civilization?
Dragon and Long (loong) are two different thing. I am not sure why historically translators have made the connection between these two. Long is a god and Dragon is a monster. There is nothing similar between these two creatures.
You might find Wikipedia a better source[0]. The etymology of the word dragon describes a giant serpent, very similar to what 龍 represents. Many different cultures have a creature like this, not just Chinese and English.
Westerners naturally identified the Chinese 龍 with dragons, and so did the Chinese in reverse. The people that were directly involved found them equivalent, which is what matters.
Keep in mind the « Westerners » were mostly Italian, not English, and that the Dragon in question was that of Saint George's iconography [1], a serpent with wings and quite often hair.
It must be the first few explorers made the connection and everyone just followed. The same with many things named by Westerners. I found many things are not equivalent due to culture differences, but there is no way to translate if you don't approximate it to something in the other culture. I am just surprised that a correction has not been proposed by Chinese.
See, that's what serious discussion brings about. Now I am fully on board with the idea that dragon has a long cultural history and is appropriate to use on loong or 龙.
The sad part is that the down voting is plainly distasteful.
I hope people see the importance to maintain the right behavior pattern to enoucrage high quality discussion.
Was anybody else annoyed by bodybuilder type 6 pack in the illustration. While ancient man would have been realtively lean I doubt a 6 pack is an accurate representation. A quick Google of modern hunter gatherer societies shows lean people but no 6 packs. Maybe I'm wrong or being too picky?
Here is an image of a few Aboriginal Australian men, who could plausibly be the closest human relatives to this fossil (assuming closely related to Denisovan).
The artist impression is somewhat exaggerated, maybe inspired by chimp musculature? But still not too out there.
Modern humans as hunter gatherers may or may not have six packs (depends mostly on body fat percentage, which would be smaller in bad times), but they are very much not-bodybuilders. The # of protein to build and maintain a bodybuilder-like level of muscle is only available to people from sedentary civilizations, and only to some of them.
The Neanderthals were probably more robust than we are, but it might also have spelt their doom: H. sapiens sapiens could operate more efficiently within the same natural constraints.
BTW Do not be that much annoyed, a high BMI is a source of its own problems even if that person is lean and not fat. For example, our knees and hips are not designed to carry too much weight. I wouldn't like to cross BMI of 25 or 26 ever.
A 6 pack would be normal, it's dictated by body fat and even the weakest people would have visible, albeit tiny, 6 packs showing.
The inaccurate representation in the photo is the fact that you'd need a shitload of calories to be able to put on that much mass, while working out pushing serious weight a few times a week. So yeah, completely inaccurate unless this guy was benching deer before eating them solo.
But annoyed? No. That's sounds like insecurity. Time to hit the gym bro.
While this debate is very interesting from an academic level, it should also be noted that it exists as a part of a nationalistic Chinese history of claiming a unique anthropological history of the Han as emerging from a separate course of evolution. [1] In some case scholars have gone as far as claiming an “out-of-asia” theory as opposed to the broadly accepted African origin of humanity [1]. Whereas these fossils could very well represent a new species of “Dragon Man” (note the mythical/national connection in the name) these claims need to be understood within the social and political framework of their originating nation.
tl;dr: some Chinese "scholars" claim English is a Mandarin dialect and Europe had no history before the 15th century (and Greece, Rome, etc. were fabricated in imitation of Chinese history).
if i've learned anything in the last year... there might actually be a sizeable amount of people (who you might not interact with on daily basis) that actually deeply believe it
If you are taking about relative importance, then these people's voice will be negaliable compared to main stream views.
If you are talking about absolute number, then of course it could be substantial, but that's true for any situation, I.e., there are just more people there.
Haven't we learned anything when looking at America over the past 5 years? "Nobody important actually thinks that" becomes legitimate nationalistic pride.
Well, that's one thing I now point out often to American people (I was born and raised in China), American nationalism is not same as Chinese one. To some degree, Chinese nationalism went beyond the narrow view point already in the Mao era. Chinese people nowadays are very sensitive to nationalism topics, but they are also rational. I never saw Chinese people disapprove facts for national pride. It's that Chinese people have a conviction that they can do whatever other people can do, and probably can do some better. That's one benefit of tight propaganda control, as the CCP knows very well how powerful and uncontrollable the nationalism can be. So they are relatively adept in managing the sentiment.
> I never saw Chinese people disapprove facts for national pride. ... That's one benefit of tight propaganda control, as the CCP knows very well how powerful and uncontrollable the nationalism can be.
CCP propaganda has a long, terrible history, to the present day. They require compliance with it and hire people to spread it. The CCP regularly stirs up nationalism, for example over the Nine Dashed Line.
"I never saw Chinese people disapprove facts for national pride. It's that Chinese people have a conviction that they can do whatever other people can do, and probably can do some better"
Are you sure about this? Because if the view that humanity developed in china is still popular, despite strong dna evidence suggesting otherwise - I do see nationalistic skewing of facts here.
This reads "I don't, and I assume others don't, too", which, again, America has proven even the most ridiculous of ideas are believed by _some_, and oftentimes _lots_ of people.
Isn't that need to considered in relative term? Some people showing certain behavior, when they are below certain percentage, just not going to affect the overall outlook of the nation. And we are talking about the national sentiment of China, comparably speaking, that applies to equally large scale sentiment in US. For example, there are a lot of people believe in flat earth theory, but that does not stand to be a US sentiment, one cannot claim that US people believe in flat earth. Same, one cannot claim Chinese people believe they are evolved from independent source than people living in other countries.
How sure of that are you? This sounds remarkably similar to the claims about, say, Great Zimbabwe; up until the 20th century, almost everyone assumed it was built by some sort of outsider (weirder contenders include the Queen of Sheba!) rather than the locals, and indeed in Rhodesia, where the site was located, it was not permitted to question this until the regime collapsed. Professional modern archaeologists didn’t buy this, of course, but it hardly mattered; normal people believed it because they were told it.
Party officials. The more absurd the claim, the more loyal you are. Extremely few actually believe these statements, but the statements are more widely viewed as being politically useful.
We have our share of crackpots like those in our country as well. No one takes them seriously. Most of them do not even have a history on anthropology degree. They're the laughing stock of younger history majors.
The thing about crackpots with wildly unsubstantiated self-aggrandizing anthropological theories is that they often wield disproportionate power and influence. Take the Mormon church for example: they believe Native Americans were white Jews who were cursed with dark skin and it was god's will they be wiped out by European settlers. It's horrifically racist and there's zero evidence to support the origin story. And yet, the church holds over $100 billion in their investment portfolio alone and nearly had one of their own elected as US president. It's hard to laugh at.
Religion fundamentalists the world over very angrily push their myths as literal facts, and often politicians have to at least somewhat indulge them.
While multiple US examples are probably well known here, I’d like to suggest one from India from circa 2008, the controversy over the Sethusamudram Shipping Canal.
India wanted to dig a “canal” (more like dredge a shipping channel) in the waters between India and Sri Lanka. Religious fundamentalists opposed this because it would involve cutting a natural rock formation. What so special about these rocks? Well they were placed there by Lord Ram and his army of monkeys as chronicled in the Ramayana.
Civilization has at its root the concept of cities, so by that standard it's fair to say that large parts of North America had no civilizations.
Whether this is particularly important is open to debate; I prefer to think that it is relevant (cities allow for specialization) but should not be considered a sign of sophistication.
Most archaeologists and anthropologists don't like the term 'civilization' as a whole because it's overloaded with these outdated connotations that reflect the biases of the speaker rather than anything meaningful about the society under discussion. You can repeat the first sentence to any Americanist you like and see if they agree with the spirit of what it says.
I'm not going to bother with the conspiratorial bits beyond to say that Machines as the Measure of Men is a book you might find interesting to engage with. The precolumbian Americas are a fundamentally alien continent that evolved separately from Eurasia. Europeans, explorers and scholars alike, had fundamental misunderstandings of how differently societies can evolve and judged them by how similar they were to European societies. Not surprisingly, entirely alien societies evolved a bit differently and get misjudged harshly on that mistaken basis.
However, to engage with your position in good faith, it's worth going through the sorts of things Indigenous American societies were incredibly advanced at. Let's talk list some fun facts about American urbanism:
* Teotihuacan during its heyday was one of the largest cities on earth.
* Some modern cities like Tucson have continuous urban habitation stretching back to before the founding of Rome.
* Tenochtitlan was equal to or larger in size than any city of Western Europe at the time of contact. Other cities like Cusco were merely "extremely large" by European standards.
* The Valley of Mexico at contact was one of the most densely populated and urbanized regions on earth, far exceeding anything in Europe at the time.
* One of the largest residential structures at approximately the size of the modern Kremlin is Pueblo Bonito in modern New Mexico. By room numbers (though not sheer area), later Rio Grande pueblos would rival Versailles.
* Parts of modern Chandler and Mesa, AZ, as well as most of Southwestern Colorado have approximately the same population density today as in precolumbian times.
As an archaeologist I don't think any of these are particularly meaningful metrics (or that comparative work is all that useful), they're just fun. I could probably go longer with other areas and facts, but it gets boring quickly. More meaningful would be discussions of agricultural intensity or resource efficiency or systemic resilience. American societies were phenomenally competitive on these sorts of metrics. They constructed the largest irrigation networks in the world, achieved per-acre calorie densities that wouldn't be seen again until fertilizer and intensive automation were invented in the 1950s, and practiced agriculture in some of the most arid locations on the planet, where Eurasians never succeeded.
To really put the cherry on top, it appears there were even large cities further north that we didn't know about until fairly recently, such as Cahokia[0]. Gardens built on rafts were functionally an early form of aquaculture, too.[1][2]
Not a single pre-columbian city in the americas had a million people.
In North America, the largest city, Cahokia, had 15,000 - 20,000 and peaked around 1100 AD. North America was mostly a stone age culture without a lot of cities.
You had more advanced civilizations in central and south america.
The Aztecs were the biggest. The largest urban area were the two sister cities of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco. Again, population estimates are hard to come by, but 200,000–400,000 inhabitants are estimated for Tenochtitlan and half that for Tlatelolco. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan
Teotihuacan was the largest city in the Americas during the classical period, beginning to decline around 600 AD and virtually dissapearing by 1000 AD. Peak population of 150-250,000 around 450 AD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan
The absolutely fascinating Olmecs (with the enormous heads and jade masks), were the largest before then, but they died out around 450 AD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmecs
Population estimates for their biggest city, La Venta, are about 20,000 people.
Teotihuacan had about 125K around 500 A.D, but again collapsed by around 1000 AD.
In South America, the largest Incan city, Cusco, had a peak population of up to 150,000.
> Not a single pre-columbian city in the americas had a million people.
Hardly any cities anywhere had ever had 1m people at that time. A quick google puts ancient Rome at 450,000, ancient Athens at 200,000, and London in 1500AD at 50,000 (200,000 by 1600AD)
The UN scheme deliberately uses the term "Northern America" to differentiate it from the continent of a similar name. The second sentence on the wiki page says as much:
> Note that the continent of North America comprises the intermediate regions of the Caribbean, Central America, and Northern America.
The UN uses that scheme because Mexico is part of the Latin America region and makes more sense grouped with them for statistical purposes than with the US and Canada.
Even if you interpret my comment to mean something other than what I meant, what I said is still true: Large parts of North America had no cities prior to European settlement.
Like everything in archaeology, that depends on your definitions. Restricting the scope to the lower 48 for sanity and taking Michael Smith's attributes of urbanism (a good default starting point), a good chunk of the US had pre-columbian urbanism. The southwest and southeast are inarguable. The Midwest had similar urban agglomerations on a smaller scale. The PNW and California (aside from the bits already described by 'the southwest') displayed most attributes aside from "true agriculture", which is a silly eurocentric concept anyway. That leaves the Northeast where I'm simply not familiar enough with the archaeology to comment.
Florida, possibly a bit of the plains, and the upper northeast could be said to lack cities, sure. That's a far cry from how I understand your statement. What am I missing here?
Is there a point be made by including areas that continue to lack cities and urbanization even today? I was assuming that you were making a point about pre-contact demography in North America being unique in some way. If you were just stating random characteristics it shares with every other continent, my mistake I guess?
Most people in the world don't seem to have any problem with distinguishing North-America-the-Continent from North-America-the-Region depending on context. For example in my native tongue there's not even a way of phrasing them differently. Yet humans can somehow disambiguate the two just fine.
Why a debate needs to be understood within social and political framework? A debate should be based on evidence, nothing else. If a Trump supporter has some evidence to support his claim, you shouldn't discard his opinion because he is in the different political camp.
It’s important for you to be specific when you accuse someone or some people of “aggrandising” because that’s an insult when applied to individuals who are not guilty of it.
And the kind of upstaging we see in the name of nationalism is also quite understandable as imperialism was often justified by the "superiority" of the white man's culture and religion. Revisionist history in the colonies was one of the political tool used to keep them subjugated.
I am talking from a purely political perspective, and since China has a one party system with only one broad political ideology allowed, I thought it would be obvious that I meant the political leaders of the Communist Party of China. (I cannot be more specific than that because I don't know the spectrum of political thoughts that is allowed within that ideology in the CPC).
If you actually read the scientific American article cited, you can see that the title is click baiting.
The only direct statement for the point of the title:
"""
Some Western researchers suggest that there is a hint of nationalism in Chinese palaeontologists' support for continuity. “The Chinese — they do not accept the idea that H. sapiens evolved in Africa,” says one researcher. “They want everything to come from China.”
Chinese researchers reject such allegations. “This has nothing to do with nationalism,” says Wu. It's all about the evidence — the transitional fossils and archaeological artefacts, he says. “Everything points to continuous evolution in China from H. erectus to modern human.”
"""
And the rest of the article enumerates many evidences that prove the evidences uncovered in China and many other Asian countries pose a lot of questions of the established theory.
I don't think it's fair to put nationalism at the center of the discussion.
Edit: I would not expected down voting on this comment if this was in before 2016 (just rough impression). Now I fully prepared to it. The lack of inter exchange is killing the vitality of this forum. Hope this idea becomes more evident here. After all, there are so many pther places to not engage in serious discussion, this forum is most valuable when it predominantly values facts.
No, the nationalism is a real issue, though it's not a majority view among Chinese researchers.
What Wu claims above is directly and unambiguously contradicted by genetic evidence. Han are overwhelmingly O-M122 (sometimes written as O2 or O3) which absolutely goes back to the common African ancestor. You can look up the lineage yourself on the wikipage for haplogroups. What's true is they're a fairly recent split off the "spine"
This is a settled matter, not one where HN is somehow censoring evidence based debate. The argument is fundamentally dishonest vs the evidence in total.
Edit:
Just to follow up with more useful information:
What we are learning that's overturning some conventional views from recent digs in India and across Asia is about how technology/culture diffused amongst modern humans once they were resigning there. We're finding it was more of a web than a linear diffusion as previously thought. But that's all, again, among modern humans, not evidence of independent evolution of the Han people from homo erectus.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. You've even dipped a toe, or a foot, into slurs. That is seriously not cool.
Other commenters have raised this issue in ways that were at least marginally less flamebaity. I'm not entirely sure about those either, but what you posted here is definitely over the line. Please don't.
I for example have an enormous head, bigger than a size 10 hat. I also have that weird protruding ridge on the back.
In 10k years is someone going to think I'm a different species?