For some broader context missing from the article, there's been a long-running "controversy" with certain people in the Chinese Academy of Sciences making an argument called the multiregional hypothesis that modern Chinese evolved in China out of archaic hominins. Every few years they'd dig up another set of bones with weird morphology, slap a new name on it, and claim it represents a new missing link. The Harbin skull was one of these.
These results firmly resolve that discussion on the side of the western consensus. They also support heretofore speculative ideas on how widespread Denisovans were, probably give us a couple other bones that are known to be similar (but lack genetics), and open a lot of research avenues going forward. Outstanding paper.
transcriptase
It’s not limited to hominins. There’s a bit of a trend among Chinese researchers to conduct extensive genome sequencing and then conclude that economically or culturally significant plant species from Africa or elsewhere in Asia actually originated or were first domesticated in China.
ggm
It would be useful to understand to what extent this has some basis in ground truth. If it's essentially unknowable, with any confidence, it's just a posture.
If there is significant evidence of domestication originating in China landmass, it fuels other theories of emergence of human cultures.
Your comment is helpful but I think incomplete. Certainly the jokes are rich in the field, "irish invented wireless communications since no glass or copper fragments found in field" type jokes. It used to be "soviets did it first" for a prior generation.
China has significant large landscapes littered with caves. Like parts of Indonesia, and in both cases they have been mostly undisturbed for eons. So it's a landscape rich in potential for preserved remains. I think thats why the hominid discovery in Indonesia was both fascinating and irritating, falling into local power politics and first-rights-to-analyse problems.
The cave systems found in Europe seem to me to point to later occupation and with the changes to the shoreline in Spain and France (and the Doggerland retreat with the north sea) it's arguable older remains are now seaborne and harder to find.
Believing the "out of africa" theory, emergence of these trends in the east prefigures a migration back to europe and down into Austronesia surely?
(not an archeologist but fascinated)
adastra22
What is the alternative that you are suggesting?
ggm
More funding for DNA analysis, and a reduction in holotypes as we find these apparent sub-speciations are actually just the same. I don't think there is much we can do about national pride: when individual economies decide to declare a find is culturally significant for their global view, the best science can do is help them overcome the mindset, by applying science.
That said, genuinely new finds are exciting no matter what. If it takes a decade for the family tree logistics to settle down, so be it.
I like Gruber. Lots of people hate Gruber because he was abrasive. It's not that dissimilar to astrophysics where people have love and hate relationships with the scientists and the theories. Historians do a better job than me untangling this in 50 years time.
You need to understand that the power structure of the western society critically depends on the myth of the recent cognitive shift. Where people were little more than animals, until several thousand years ago, when modern thinking suddenly somehow emerged, and those chosen few worked tirelesly for the thousands of years to civilize everybody else.
amarait
Care to elaborate? Does this come from roman times/ post french Revolution/post industrialism?
greatpostman
Why was this downvoted
graemep
> For some broader context missing from the article, there's been a long-running "controversy" with certain people in the Chinese Academy of Sciences making an argument called the multiregional hypothesis that modern Chinese evolved in China out of archaic hominins.
It is appealing because it justifies racism. It is just the contemporary version of polygenism of racial science.
That said, even if human evolution is more complex than simple out of Africa, all of humanity has a lot of shared ancestry and genetics do not support the concept of race.
amarait
This is like trying to hide neanderthals because they seem to point to some of the differences in european populations traits such as white skin or blue eyes.
If theres evidence I dont think it benefits anybody to discredit it under the racism label
IAmBroom
It always reminds me of the Japanese attempts to diminish the status and history of the Ainu, a caucasoid racial group from their northernmost islands.
Extensive research and data now point to the Ainu having lived on those islands from long before Chinese people first sailed to Japan and populated it - making the despised Ainu the true, actual Native Japanese.
However there are two bizarre facts:
1.Modern-day Chinese carry virtually zero Denisovan DNA, yet it accounts for over 5% in indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia and Oceania;
2.Modern-day Chinese possess 20% more Neanderthal DNA than contemporary Europeans.
pyman
This reminds me of the day I found an old storage disk, an ancient "floppy disk", in my dad's attic. It had a label that said: "Tommy’s bookmarks". My mum doesn't remember any of his friends or colleagues named Tommy. In Uruguay, that's a common nickname for Tomas. They were probably website URLs, all long extinct by now (I'd guess).
gerdesj
Tommy is the standard nickname for Thomas in Britain too. We throw in an extra h in Thomas for no good reason 8)
Our soldiers were, politely, referred to as Tommies by German soldiers during WW1 onwards. The Wehrmacht had all sorts of other names for them too!
BluesteinOP
Funny to imagine how (indeed) such floppies 'intersected" - technologywise - with the early web ...
whatevertrevor
Sounds like this was pre search engines, so Tommy's bookmarks might just be a collection of cool sites that was spread peer to peer. I remember getting CDs of curated games and demos in the late 90s (and not just licensed demos from computer magazines, but also cracked versions of games that went around).
AlchemistCamp
Sounds like Craig’s list.
bbarnett
There was a point before search engines of course. And, there was a point before people outside of, say a university, had any real Internet access.
But via my personal experiences in the late 90s, I recall search engines working just fine (eg, Alta Vista) then slowly degrading, then one day they were just completely useless. I mean, any search term would just returned page after page of spammy links. You could find nothing, ever.
There was Yahoo's curated list, with lots of volunteers keeping it going, but it had dead links, and was always a tiny tiny fraction of what was out there.
Just a few years later Google appeared, which at the time was absolutely gob smacking insanely good. It was no contest. Yet even this nascent google didn't have a large portion of the web, I remember people trying to get their links on larger sites so Google could find them. I think Google even had a submit link page too? Not sure when that appeared.
So I can imagine in this time period, someone might have had a list of links they found and spread by email. I remember using the 'bookmark' function of my browser a lot, it was easier than searching.
absurdo
Any rare games that you remember that stood out?
whatevertrevor
Not many that would stand the test of time unfortunately. I remember sinking lots of hours into a racing game I found like that, I think it was called Breakneck. And an RTS called Tzar. Those are the two I remember the most.
Its half-dozen or so robo-players made the game come to life.
They all bantered back and forth, made pop culture references, etc., got vindictive...
I printed physical cards, made a Geocities website for it (still zombie-mode on "oocities"!), learned Photoshop just so I could make my own higher-fidelity cards, and when I finally learned to program I started on a new version only to get a Cease and Desist from Mattel. Heh.
Meanwhile, I and a couple other fans tracked down the original authors via a Yahoo Groups channel and learned about the original game...
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.040
For some broader context missing from the article, there's been a long-running "controversy" with certain people in the Chinese Academy of Sciences making an argument called the multiregional hypothesis that modern Chinese evolved in China out of archaic hominins. Every few years they'd dig up another set of bones with weird morphology, slap a new name on it, and claim it represents a new missing link. The Harbin skull was one of these.
These results firmly resolve that discussion on the side of the western consensus. They also support heretofore speculative ideas on how widespread Denisovans were, probably give us a couple other bones that are known to be similar (but lack genetics), and open a lot of research avenues going forward. Outstanding paper.
If there is significant evidence of domestication originating in China landmass, it fuels other theories of emergence of human cultures.
Your comment is helpful but I think incomplete. Certainly the jokes are rich in the field, "irish invented wireless communications since no glass or copper fragments found in field" type jokes. It used to be "soviets did it first" for a prior generation.
China has significant large landscapes littered with caves. Like parts of Indonesia, and in both cases they have been mostly undisturbed for eons. So it's a landscape rich in potential for preserved remains. I think thats why the hominid discovery in Indonesia was both fascinating and irritating, falling into local power politics and first-rights-to-analyse problems.
The cave systems found in Europe seem to me to point to later occupation and with the changes to the shoreline in Spain and France (and the Doggerland retreat with the north sea) it's arguable older remains are now seaborne and harder to find.
Believing the "out of africa" theory, emergence of these trends in the east prefigures a migration back to europe and down into Austronesia surely?
(not an archeologist but fascinated)
That said, genuinely new finds are exciting no matter what. If it takes a decade for the family tree logistics to settle down, so be it.
I like Gruber. Lots of people hate Gruber because he was abrasive. It's not that dissimilar to astrophysics where people have love and hate relationships with the scientists and the theories. Historians do a better job than me untangling this in 50 years time.
It is appealing because it justifies racism. It is just the contemporary version of polygenism of racial science.
That said, even if human evolution is more complex than simple out of Africa, all of humanity has a lot of shared ancestry and genetics do not support the concept of race.
Extensive research and data now point to the Ainu having lived on those islands from long before Chinese people first sailed to Japan and populated it - making the despised Ainu the true, actual Native Japanese.
Our soldiers were, politely, referred to as Tommies by German soldiers during WW1 onwards. The Wehrmacht had all sorts of other names for them too!
But via my personal experiences in the late 90s, I recall search engines working just fine (eg, Alta Vista) then slowly degrading, then one day they were just completely useless. I mean, any search term would just returned page after page of spammy links. You could find nothing, ever.
There was Yahoo's curated list, with lots of volunteers keeping it going, but it had dead links, and was always a tiny tiny fraction of what was out there.
Just a few years later Google appeared, which at the time was absolutely gob smacking insanely good. It was no contest. Yet even this nascent google didn't have a large portion of the web, I remember people trying to get their links on larger sites so Google could find them. I think Google even had a submit link page too? Not sure when that appeared.
So I can imagine in this time period, someone might have had a list of links they found and spread by email. I remember using the 'bookmark' function of my browser a lot, it was easier than searching.
Its half-dozen or so robo-players made the game come to life.
They all bantered back and forth, made pop culture references, etc., got vindictive...
I printed physical cards, made a Geocities website for it (still zombie-mode on "oocities"!), learned Photoshop just so I could make my own higher-fidelity cards, and when I finally learned to program I started on a new version only to get a Cease and Desist from Mattel. Heh.
Meanwhile, I and a couple other fans tracked down the original authors via a Yahoo Groups channel and learned about the original game...
... good times.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Internet_email_address
We used CuteHTML as our ""IDE"" and then the daily HTML was backed up to floppy and placed in a filing cabinet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project