Thanks for a great interview with Dr. Stringer! The Homo longi skull and all the surrounding speculation are endlessly fascinating. I really hope that science is able to eventually make a determination regarding whether or not it might have belonged to a Denisovan.
I like that he mentioned some information about Dragon Man I hadn't heard before. I was wondering why the old guy who found the skull would keep it a secret for so long. Such a bizzare background story. I hope they find out more about where the specimen came from.
Always a pleasure to hear from Professor Stringer - FWLIW: I went in to medicine but could have chosen anthropology, and after a lifetime of hard work and dedication I can say with much confidence I absolutely backed the wrong horse. PS: As a 50-something who has visited the tarnished wonder that is the Natural History Museum many times since I was a small child I'd like to know. Is the terrible destruction visited upon the museum's public exhibits ever going to be repaired or will the institution always be run by barbarians?
The fertility rate of humans may also have overwhelmed other hominid species. Human females are fertile year round, similar to gorillas and chimpanzees; but humans can have babies almost yearly whereas gorillas approximately every 4 years. Chimpanzees can become pregnant about every five years. Don’t know if there is any data on other hominids.
This interview is very similar to an older interview. Hopefully Homo Naledi has taught us not to take too much freedom with the parts of the fossils that we don’t have. There is a lot more field work that needs to be done before anything can be described with accuracy. There is a lot that needs to be found to determine what this skull represents.
I very strongly suspect that we are going to find that *H. daliensis* and *H. longi* are Denisovans. Of course, the *H. daliensis* name predates the *H. denisova/altaiensis* name as well as the *H. longi* name, so all of them would then wind up renamed *H. daliensis* . An issue with the proposed Harbin/Chinese phylogenetic grouping is that it's including Denisovans as being closer to the *H. sapiens* clade than the Neanderthal clade, but a wide range of other studies, genetically based, place Denisovans and Neanderthals as more close to each other than to *H. sapiens* . If that's the case, then it calls into question the proposed Harbin/China clade grouping in the paper. A recent idea for the extinction of Neanderthals (and potentially Denisovans and others) is that Neanderthals required a lot more food than we needed. We could survive on less food and have higher populations as a result. The proposal is that we essentially ate them out of existence. This is part of the economic competitive exclusion idea and the calorie requirement estimates are relatively recent work.
I suspect you are right,that it’s probably Denisovan.Btw I didn’t recall him comparing to the ‘Peking man’ casts of skulls? And yes couldn’t follow why this scull is closer to Sapiens than Neanderthals.Clearly it is.
@@philbarker7477 If I recall correctly, there has been a bit of controversy in the past over this skull and species designation with some folks saying that China has been pushing for the separate species designation out of nationalistic pride (something they've done with some of the dinosaur fossils in the past too). Whatever the truth of the matter we don't know it yet, but hopefully we will in the future.
Bene elohim, sons of God = neanderthals, went into daughters of men, cro magnon, and made denisovans, nephilim, giants. The many variations from the first to the last are interesting, not different ancestors
Showing a modern human skull is misleading. You have to show archaic Homo sapiens skulls from the same time range. If you show the Jebel Irhoud or the Herto man skulls, the difference between Homo sapiens, Neanderthal and the Dragon man would be less dramatic.
It's still h.sapiens. The features (rounded skull, lack of brow ridge, non-projecting face) are still features of h.sapiens... Jebel I. is a very early specimen which still retains primitive features.
Having a short stature in adapting to cold climates is only valid when dealing with modern human populations. We all are aware of the size of Ice Age fauna. Even today the further north a species lives in the northern hemisphere the larger they get. Extrapolating on this premise how large would DM be in comparison to modern men when considering the size of the cranium? I can't be the only guy wondering over this. I might add the original inhabitants of Tierra Del Fuego dwarfed the Spanish explorers.
Short =/= small. Ice age fauna is actually a good example of your point. Of course mammoths were big, but they were built stockier than Asian elephants, which are their counterpart, and their trunks were shorter. However, there is always more than one factor in play. No one rule explains everything.
Interesting I liked your logo but it's too big, so why not do like in my country. At least in Sweden, we appreciate discrete Information/Advertising. So why not a T-shirts with your logo on the sleeve or on the breast pocket. Love your channel. Carsten
Am I the only one who seeing them thinks dwarfs. And of course they have small related clan groups that slowly go extinct. Meanwhile some adventuters mix with sapiens and create half-dwarfs.
In Asia was there a convergence between homo erectus and denisovens and Neanderthals and African early Homo sapiens? What about a lineage from macaques and native Chinese people, you should look at the genetic data for this, easy to see if it’s there, no need to find fossils for a preliminary analysis. An obvious oversight currently ✌️❤️🇬🇧
No matter how deep are secrets of dragon man, much more deeper are the secrets of dragon lady, like who she mate (only Denisovans or with Neanderthals and Sapiens too?) and the dragon man knows that the dragon lady children weren't his children? so who wears skirt in the dragon man family?
Really had to laugh about the near choice of medicine. I came from an extremely poor background myself, so knowing I could do well at school, I did become a doctor, but I only knew, about five careers to pick from.
The Harbin cranium is a bone with no DNA. The hominins found in Denisova cave are DNA with no bones. You can't say conclusively that they belonged to the same meta-population, even if it's pretty likely
I think he meant "basal"; I've seen that before. I do wish they'd try to use basal and derived as it would be less useful to pseudoscientists than primitive and advanced. Rather like how scientists often forget themselves and use the "cop show" version of theory.
@@robertmiller9735 I prefer "basal" and "derived", too, but I don't see anything wrong with "primitive" or "advanced" in and of themselves. Those terms are easy to abuse, but also have some utility. If you dispense with those terms, you have no standard by which to measure cultural, technological, and intellectual progress. A person might even take issue with the word "progress" itself, for carrying certain implications, but the words exist for a reason. I understand that when it comes to evolutionary fitness or adaptation, one method of doing things is not superior to another if both groups are reproducing/persisting, especially if they're doing so equally well, but it's also a bit ridiculous to look at what the other great apes do and not call them "primitive", when compared to us. This also holds true when contrasting different members of our genus. Editing to say that I know Prof. Stringer was using the words in the context of contrasting more archaic morphologies/anatomies with more recently-evolved or novel ones, but I also wanted to point out that the terms also have utility when discussing culture and mental capacity. I think the terms are just fine for use in both physical respects and cultural/societal/etc. ones.
Idk seems to me “primitive” just means “basal” or “earlier”. I even looked it up to make sure. “Primitive adjective. 1. relating to, denoting, or preserving the character of an early stage in the evolutionary or historical development of something.”
This channel is for the lay person as well as the academic. Chris, I'm sure, is aware of that. 'Basal' is not a commonly used word outside of biology and I believe he was being mindful of that.
So you think all humans origin from Africa Homo sapiens? What about much older fossils discovered along Yantze? Some 1.7 millions old, like 元媒人 Yuanmei Man，蓝田人 Lantian Man.
Only the Chinese don't have authoritative backing of contemporary archeologists, mainly due to theft of so called Peking man by US diplomats after WW2. So we are unable to gather information about the ancestors of the Chinese population.
These programmes are great but with a few honorable exceptions relentlessly show early humans as male only. Which is ridiculous. In Old English Man meant human, not male.
Well your time scale is way off, radiometric dating methods are not reliable, and just how do you expect proteins to survive 400,000 years? I don't see that possibility. Dating methods all have assumptions you must make to use them and you can't prove the assumptions, so how can you trust the dates? You can't. And as for dragon man, one member of the research team, Chris Stringer from the National History Museum in London and one of the contributing authors of the first paper, has yet another view. He agrees that Dragon Man deserves a distinct species name, but he thinks the skull might also be linked to the Dali skull, also found in China. CNET reports his saying, "I would prefer to place the Harbin and Dali fossils together as (Homo) daliensis. I also consider Harbin as a possible Denisovan, although much more work is needed there.” And several other researchers not involved with the study want to ditch H. longi altogether, as they firmly believe the skull is Denisovan or the designation too premature. Paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said, “It’s a wonderful skull; I think it’s the best skull of a Denisovan that we’ll ever have” and Bence Viola, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto is anticipating that future DNA analysis of the skull will allow him to “look into the eyes of a Denisovan.” Paleoanthropologist Marta Mirazón Lahr of the University of Cambridge claimed she was “skeptical of the statements about humans’ long-lost sister lineage,” and María Martinón-Torres, a paleoanthropologist at the national center for research on human evolution in Spain, stated, “It’s premature to name a new species, especially a fossil with no context, with contradictions in the data set.” (Troy Lacey) Fossils do not show direct ancestry of man. "Despite the excited and optimistic claims that have been made by some paleontologists, no fossil hominid species can be established as our direct ancestor", Richard Lewontin in "Human Diversity" pg 163.
Denisovans are a branched off species of homo that dont exist today, u have made 205 comments in this channel but never shown scientic realistic evidence as to how u derived that the most logical assumption scientifically, is believing entirely in ur particular views of a certain religion. No one ever claimed dragon man is an ancestor, he is an ancestral individual of a branched of a species. U can believe in well documented scientifially accurate theories as well as ur personal beliefs about god, like the billions of religious people. Evolution has ridiculously many evidences that creationists deny. Our internal organs, our skeletal system, our abstract thinking, our genetics. All point toward one random ape in africa that lived in close communities as our closest siblings derived from every scientific method in use, only with a few outliers that question how that unfolded or the time rather than the process itself. What are we closer anatomically and mentally to, a certain primate that lives in africa or an omnipotent being that controls the entire universe and somehow is able to notice and care for this particular spinning ball with certain species of apes. Taxonamically we are apes, We have no tail. We have eyes in front We have legs and are capable to stand on 2 legs. We have eyes. We have nasal passages with no keratin covering or protruding muslces. We have 5 fingers. We have body hair. We feed milk and can grow milk in our bodied. Even if we were spontaneously created we are still apes, as the apes are classified based on the following criterias mentioned above.
Radiometric dating has proven to be accurate time and time again. No one claimed that anything is for sure an ancestor of Homo sapiens but we can make reasonable guesses. You’re just quite mining.
Imagine this. You are a chief of primitive humans. A neanderthal hunter is encountered. He easily defeats your best hunters. You decide to invite him to your tribe and give him your daughter, hoping his strenght will give her a strong son that will one day rule your tribe. Sounds possible to me.
Thanks for a great interview with Dr. Stringer! The Homo longi skull and all the surrounding speculation are endlessly fascinating. I really hope that science is able to eventually make a determination regarding whether or not it might have belonged to a Denisovan.
Was so fantastic to listen to you Chris, if not in person at least here on internet, being enlightened by you. Batsheva.
I like that he mentioned some information about Dragon Man I hadn't heard before. I was wondering why the old guy who found the skull would keep it a secret for so long. Such a bizzare background story. I hope they find out more about where the specimen came from.
Apparently, he had to collaborate with the invading Japanese army out of survival. Looks like He preferred his story be told after his death.
What a great episode! Dr.Stringer is fantastic! Such knowledge on early humans.
Always a pleasure to hear from Professor Stringer - FWLIW: I went in to medicine but could have chosen anthropology, and after a lifetime of hard work and dedication I can say with much confidence I absolutely backed the wrong horse.
PS: As a 50-something who has visited the tarnished wonder that is the Natural History Museum many times since I was a small child I'd like to know.
Is the terrible destruction visited upon the museum's public exhibits ever going to be repaired or will the institution always be run by barbarians?
16:20 Am I the only one who immediately started feeling their skull to check the shape?
The fertility rate of humans may also have overwhelmed other hominid species. Human females are fertile year round, similar to gorillas and chimpanzees; but humans can have babies almost yearly whereas gorillas approximately every 4 years. Chimpanzees can become pregnant about every five years.
Don’t know if there is any data on other hominids.
Terrific question
Another superb interview. Thank you.
This interview is very similar to an older interview. Hopefully Homo Naledi has taught us not to take too much freedom with the parts of the fossils that we don’t have. There is a lot more field work that needs to be done before anything can be described with accuracy. There is a lot that needs to be found to determine what this skull represents.
I very strongly suspect that we are going to find that *H. daliensis* and *H. longi* are Denisovans. Of course, the *H. daliensis* name predates the *H. denisova/altaiensis* name as well as the *H. longi* name, so all of them would then wind up renamed *H. daliensis* .
An issue with the proposed Harbin/Chinese phylogenetic grouping is that it's including Denisovans as being closer to the *H. sapiens* clade than the Neanderthal clade, but a wide range of other studies, genetically based, place Denisovans and Neanderthals as more close to each other than to *H. sapiens* . If that's the case, then it calls into question the proposed Harbin/China clade grouping in the paper.
A recent idea for the extinction of Neanderthals (and potentially Denisovans and others) is that Neanderthals required a lot more food than we needed. We could survive on less food and have higher populations as a result. The proposal is that we essentially ate them out of existence. This is part of the economic competitive exclusion idea and the calorie requirement estimates are relatively recent work.
I suspect you are right,that it’s probably Denisovan.Btw I didn’t recall him comparing to the ‘Peking man’ casts of skulls?
And yes couldn’t follow why this scull is closer to Sapiens than Neanderthals.Clearly it is.
@@philbarker7477 If I recall correctly, there has been a bit of controversy in the past over this skull and species designation with some folks saying that China has been pushing for the separate species designation out of nationalistic pride (something they've done with some of the dinosaur fossils in the past too).
Whatever the truth of the matter we don't know it yet, but hopefully we will in the future.
Bene elohim, sons of God = neanderthals, went into daughters of men, cro magnon, and made denisovans, nephilim, giants. The many variations from the first to the last are interesting, not different ancestors
@@TheytellToomanylies youtell toomanylies
@@JCO2002 define a lie
Such an excellent interview.
Showing a modern human skull is misleading. You have to show archaic Homo sapiens skulls from the same time range. If you show the Jebel Irhoud or the Herto man skulls, the difference between Homo sapiens, Neanderthal and the Dragon man would be less dramatic.
It's still h.sapiens. The features (rounded skull, lack of brow ridge, non-projecting face) are still features of h.sapiens...
Jebel I. is a very early specimen which still retains primitive features.
The guy in the thumbnail and I worked together in a steel mill for years.
Good to see him again 👍
You worked with the actor who played the bus driver in Speed? That's awesome!
Evolution Soup 👍
Can’t wait until they find his dragon 😀
@27:00 Q: Where did all the other humans go?
Answer?: Humans don't like humans???
Having a short stature in adapting to cold climates is only valid when dealing with modern human populations. We all are aware of the size of Ice Age fauna. Even today the further north a species lives in the northern hemisphere the larger they get. Extrapolating on this premise how large would DM be in comparison to modern men when considering the size of the cranium? I can't be the only guy wondering over this. I might add the original inhabitants of Tierra Del Fuego dwarfed the Spanish explorers.
That was my summation as well. Giant sloth, giant bears why wouldn’t humans go the same way?
Short =/= small.
Ice age fauna is actually a good example of your point. Of course mammoths were big, but they were built stockier than Asian elephants, which are their counterpart, and their trunks were shorter.
However, there is always more than one factor in play. No one rule explains everything.
I really enjoyed this video, thanks!
Great talk. I wish Chinese shoulld put some effort in these things There were so many mega projects there yet I do not hear about that much fossils.
Interesting
I liked your logo but it's too big, so why not do like in my country.
At least in Sweden, we appreciate discrete Information/Advertising. So why not a T-shirts with your logo on the sleeve or on the breast pocket.
Love your channel.
Carsten
There's close to zero reason to think that _H. longi_ is valid. It's a Denisovan -- on the Neandersovan branch, at any rate.
Isn't it quite possible they were here in America, as their stone tools are found here!
Am I the only one who seeing them thinks dwarfs. And of course they have small related clan groups that slowly go extinct. Meanwhile some adventuters mix with sapiens and create half-dwarfs.
Mmmm.. cheddar
In Asia was there a convergence between homo erectus and denisovens and Neanderthals and African early Homo sapiens? What about a lineage from macaques and native Chinese people, you should look at the genetic data for this, easy to see if it’s there, no need to find fossils for a preliminary analysis. An obvious oversight currently ✌️❤️🇬🇧
No matter how deep are secrets of dragon man, much more deeper are the secrets of dragon lady, like who she mate (only Denisovans or with Neanderthals and Sapiens too?) and the dragon man knows that the dragon lady children weren't his children? so who wears skirt in the dragon man family?
Really had to laugh about the near choice of medicine. I came from an extremely poor background myself, so knowing I could do well at school, I did become a doctor, but I only knew, about five careers to pick from.
Seriously reminds me of an ex.
H Sapiens were created in labs by previous civilizations.
Dragon Man was J A C K E D
NO modern human has ever been found in Africa.. We do have a 240K year old EMH in Greece..
why not classifying him as denisovan?
It is _very_ likely a Denisovan.
Dragon Man is cooler than Denis
The Harbin cranium is a bone with no DNA. The hominins found in Denisova cave are DNA with no bones. You can't say conclusively that they belonged to the same meta-population, even if it's pretty likely
Chris, you used the word "primitive" 8 times. At least you didn't use "advanced".
I think he meant "basal"; I've seen that before. I do wish they'd try to use basal and derived as it would be less useful to pseudoscientists than primitive and advanced. Rather like how scientists often forget themselves and use the "cop show" version of theory.
@@robertmiller9735 I prefer "basal" and "derived", too, but I don't see anything wrong with "primitive" or "advanced" in and of themselves. Those terms are easy to abuse, but also have some utility. If you dispense with those terms, you have no standard by which to measure cultural, technological, and intellectual progress. A person might even take issue with the word "progress" itself, for carrying certain implications, but the words exist for a reason. I understand that when it comes to evolutionary fitness or adaptation, one method of doing things is not superior to another if both groups are reproducing/persisting, especially if they're doing so equally well, but it's also a bit ridiculous to look at what the other great apes do and not call them "primitive", when compared to us. This also holds true when contrasting different members of our genus.
Editing to say that I know Prof. Stringer was using the words in the context of contrasting more archaic morphologies/anatomies with more recently-evolved or novel ones, but I also wanted to point out that the terms also have utility when discussing culture and mental capacity. I think the terms are just fine for use in both physical respects and cultural/societal/etc. ones.
Idk seems to me “primitive” just means “basal” or “earlier”. I even looked it up to make sure.
“Primitive adjective. 1. relating to, denoting, or preserving the character of an early stage in the evolutionary or historical development of something.”
This channel is for the lay person as well as the academic. Chris, I'm sure, is aware of that. 'Basal' is not a commonly used word outside of biology and I believe he was being mindful of that.
@@pansepot1490 Yes, but there's too much subjectivity and baggage that comes with them.
So you think all humans origin from Africa Homo sapiens? What about much older fossils discovered along Yantze? Some 1.7 millions old, like 元媒人 Yuanmei Man，蓝田人 Lantian Man.
Only the Chinese don't have authoritative backing of contemporary archeologists, mainly due to theft of so called Peking man by US diplomats after WW2. So we are unable to gather information about the ancestors of the Chinese population.
These programmes are great but with a few honorable exceptions relentlessly show early humans as male only. Which is ridiculous. In Old English Man meant human, not male.
Well your time scale is way off, radiometric dating methods are not reliable, and just how do you expect proteins to survive 400,000 years? I don't see that possibility. Dating methods all have assumptions you must make to use them and you can't prove the assumptions, so how can you trust the dates? You can't. And as for dragon man, one member of the research team, Chris Stringer from the National History Museum in London and one of the contributing authors of the first paper, has yet another view. He agrees that Dragon Man deserves a distinct species name, but he thinks the skull might also be linked to the Dali skull, also found in China. CNET reports his saying, "I would prefer to place the Harbin and Dali fossils together as (Homo) daliensis. I also consider Harbin as a possible Denisovan, although much more work is needed there.”
And several other researchers not involved with the study want to ditch H. longi altogether, as they firmly believe the skull is Denisovan or the designation too premature. Paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said, “It’s a wonderful skull; I think it’s the best skull of a Denisovan that we’ll ever have” and Bence Viola, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto is anticipating that future DNA analysis of the skull will allow him to “look into the eyes of a Denisovan.” Paleoanthropologist Marta Mirazón Lahr of the University of Cambridge claimed she was “skeptical of the statements about humans’ long-lost sister lineage,” and María Martinón-Torres, a paleoanthropologist at the national center for research on human evolution in Spain, stated, “It’s premature to name a new species, especially a fossil with no context, with contradictions in the data set.” (Troy Lacey) Fossils do not show direct ancestry of man. "Despite the excited and optimistic claims that have been made by some paleontologists, no fossil hominid species can be established as our direct ancestor", Richard Lewontin in "Human Diversity" pg 163.
Denisovans are a branched off species of homo that dont exist today, u have made 205 comments in this channel but never shown scientic realistic evidence as to how u derived that the most logical assumption scientifically, is believing entirely in ur particular views of a certain religion.
No one ever claimed dragon man is an ancestor, he is an ancestral individual of a branched of a species.
U can believe in well documented scientifially accurate theories as well as ur personal beliefs about god, like the billions of religious people.
Evolution has ridiculously many evidences that creationists deny.
Our internal organs, our skeletal system, our abstract thinking, our genetics.
All point toward one random ape in africa that lived in close communities as our closest siblings derived from every scientific method in use, only with a few outliers that question how that unfolded or the time rather than the process itself.
What are we closer anatomically and mentally to, a certain primate that lives in africa or an omnipotent being that controls the entire universe and somehow is able to notice and care for this particular spinning ball with certain species of apes.
Taxonamically we are apes,
We have no tail.
We have eyes in front
We have legs and are capable to stand on 2 legs.
We have eyes.
We have nasal passages with no keratin covering or protruding muslces.
We have 5 fingers.
We have body hair.
We feed milk and can grow milk in our bodied.
Even if we were spontaneously created we are still apes, as the apes are classified based on the following criterias mentioned above.
Radiometric dating has proven to be accurate time and time again. No one claimed that anything is for sure an ancestor of Homo sapiens but we can make reasonable guesses. You’re just quite mining.
Quote*
So, dragon man wore a fur loin cloth? Chinese and American Puritans distorting history. 😂
So you know definitely that he DIDN'T wear a loin cloth? It's just speculative art, not a political statement.
Of course Denisovans wore clothes in cool climates.
I’m glad these speculative artists were not swayed by perverts in the SJW-Antifa crowd. Clothing is an adaptation to environment.
What did they wear hommie? Educate us all, please. Look into your crystal ball and set us all straight.
@@thehairyhominid9972 Really Hairy, you’re not watching tik tok videos of Dylan Mulvaney. Shocking, I say!
Imagine this.
You are a chief of primitive humans.
A neanderthal hunter is encountered.
He easily defeats your best hunters.
You decide to invite him to your tribe and give him your daughter, hoping his strenght will give her a strong son that will one day rule your tribe.
Sounds possible to me.
Yeah, then their great grandkids are eating everyone, and there's a flood. Deffo sounds legit, like seriously legit
Who put the life in the very first organism on this planet?
Who put the fig in the fiig roll??
@@casteretpollux Jim Figgerty
th-cam.com/video/aHqRzNVwLgI/w-d-xo.html
@@Sadqajaria786glad you figured it out.
Ymir.