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Million year old human skull?

Orphia Nay

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Orphia Nay
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I'm going to bet that they're going to find their estimate is off. A million years pushes the date for human evolution back an awfully long way.
 
The method appears sound. It's been developed in peer-reviewed work for more than 20 years, published in journals of high reputation. What I learned from physical anthropology was that it's hard to generalize lineage and overall morphology from so few specimens. Even today, the little model skulls I see at the museum are no longer labeled according to the taxonomy of australopithecines I learned back in college. So my take is that the reconstruction is probably accurate, but the picture it paints may change significantly as we think more about it.
 
I wonder if it's possible, not having much great anthropological knowledge, if it's a nationalistic push by China to set the "origin" of man in China.
 
I skimmed the paper, and I didn't see where they had dated the skull. It only studied the morphological relationship of this skull to other skulls. Everything I can find about it takes the date of 1 million years as a given.
 
arthwollipot said:
I skimmed the paper, and I didn't see where they had dated the skull. It only studied the morphological relationship of this skull to other skulls. Everything I can find about it takes the date of 1 million years as a given.
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You mean a headline in the media about a scientific study was exaggerated?! :D
 
JayUtah said:
They didn’t date it. It was dated in reference 5.
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JayUtah said:
They didn’t date it. It was dated in reference 5.
Click to expand...
They used electron spin resonance, on teeth. The problem can be contamination, with minerals from the environment and accurately assessing local radiation.

An English language discussion of the methodology.
www.frontiersin.org

Frontiers | The Chronology of Early Human Settlement in Three Gorges Region, China—Contribution of Coupled Electron Spin Resonance and Uranium-Series Dating Method

The Three Gorges region (TGR) located in the geographic center of China, is a transition zone between mountain and plain areas, and a probable migration corr...
www.frontiersin.org www.frontiersin.org
 
It's hard to define exactly what counts as a "human". Anything of the genus "homo"? The farther back we go, the more monkey-like, and less "human" presumably it would be. Obviously our most recent common ancestor with other great apes can't be "human" unless we count other species of apes as fellow humans. The estimates for that vary by millions of years, but the most recent end of the range of estimates is about 5 million years ago. So 1 million years is clearly millions of years after that split, and much closer to "human" than to a chimpanzee.
 
Puppycow said:
It's hard to define exactly what counts as a "human". Anything of the genus "homo"? The farther back we go, the more monkey-like, and less "human" presumably it would be. Obviously our most recent common ancestor with other great apes can't be "human" unless we count other species of apes as fellow humans. The estimates for that vary by millions of years, but the most recent end of the range of estimates is about 5 million years ago. So 1 million years is clearly millions of years after that split, and much closer to "human" than to a chimpanzee.
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Anything that could interbreed with modern humans seems like a sensible line to draw. This would include both neanderthals and the Homo Longi the article is about.
 
Well, I'm skeptical that any human, hominid, or monkey managed to live to be a million years old. (No matter how tragic they might have been.)
 
Olmstead said:
Anything that could interbreed with modern humans seems like a sensible line to draw. This would include both neanderthals and the Homo Longi the article is about.
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How would you even know? I know there is some neanderthal DNA in modern humans, but I don't know about Homo Longi and more importantly it has been a long time. One line is now extinct and the other has presumably evolved to some extent since that happened.
 
Every ten years new fossil finds and new ways of looking at the geographic spread change the thinking on human origin.

It was simple when I was in gradeschool. We "knew" then how it was.
But now we have several theories in consideration and many more fossils to confuse the subject.

What we can get is there are several possible lines that merged and split over time.
 
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