Denisovan DNA found in cave on Tibetan Plateau
science.sciencemag.org
science.sciencemag.org
Did those dinosaurs really live near mud flats, or were they driven there by severe drought followed by torrential rains? Or was it part of a migration route driven by repeating cycles of drought and rain? (the fact that they are under many, many layers of sedimentary rock suggests the latter)
Similarly, were hominids living in that cave a plan A, plan B, or plan C? Plan B could be a "Helm's Deep" situation, where you go there when something goes wrong. While Plan C could be an 'any port in a storm' situation where unexpected weather caught you in an area you did not mean to stay.
Plan A might have been a biologically active region where life devours anything that stops moving for too long, the same way we have trouble finding evidence of these huge cultures in Central and South America.
Some future civilization is going to find an American frozen on Mt Everest and think that was our favorite habitat.
Because most who go (and die) there, have no fun doing it.
There are plenty of beautiful mountains, but most just want to stand on this particular mountain (sometimes after being dragged up there), because of some numbers. Not because of the mountain.
Then I remember how we treat animals in general and it makes me think we'd be destined to have a dominating species making all others miserable and I stop thinking those hypothesis are so fascinating.
Just thinking out loud.
Women have only been allowed to vote for about 100 years. It's not that long ago that you could go to an advanced country where people could be bought and sold.
We are good at defining the boundary socially, rather than scientifically. Who knows, perhaps we'll also decide that eating animals is wrong sometime. Certainly, there's some hope in that violence has lessened over recent decades.
At some point, there's the very real possibility that vat-grown meat may become a main staple.
It sounds a bit icky, but think about it: We could have flavors and textures of meat that were never available in nature (and maybe also some horrific mistakes). It's entirely possible that we could have "top-shelf vat" brands that sell for more than farm-raised.
Of course, the biomass to create the foodstuff needs to come from somewhere...Soylent Green?
I wonder how this would affect some vegetarians.
In the meanwhile, I'm quite happy with vegetable based "meat". It was definitely harder to be vegan 10 years ago (social interaction somehow demands a certain diet), and especially here in Spain. Now it's really easy and confinement makes it easier too.
"one of the most important cell lines in medical research"
"Lacks was the unwitting source of these cells"
I believe this can be done in Libya today
true. Second world, maybe? And where in Europe would one go to buy a human?
But I understand what you mean.
Human trafficking is the 3rd largest crime industry in the world, and to find slaves you just need to go wherever there are prostitutes in your area.
Yes, even when prostitution is legal, for example Germany is one of the main destinations in Europe.
EDIT: Some useful FAQ from the EU website on the matter are here https://ec.europa.eu/anti-trafficking/citizens-corner/traffi...
> Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."[0]
The difference between the first and second world was a objective distinction in prosperity experienced by inhabitants in the different systems.[0] The first world capital allocation was several orders of magnitude more efficient than the Soviet block.
[0] https://www.nhregister.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article...
But the expression "third world" arose to mean "neither NATO nor Warsaw pact" and only later started to mean "poor" because most of the countries in this group were. See wikipedia's references[0]. There were poorer countries in the communist block, and richer non-aligned ones.
> a collection of alternate history short stories by American writer Harry Turtledove set in a world in which Homo erectus and various megafauna survived in the Americas instead of Native Americans or any other human cultures.
Romans did it to northern european “barbarians”, Europe and colonies did it do african and native american “savages”
It's more or less widely accepted in broader society that European colonialism laid the foundation for much of the modern world and many historians agree it was in turn partially justified by the "subeuropean-ness" of colonized peoples. I can easily show you papers published in the last decade continuing to justify historic colonialism as bringing civilization. There's an excellent (though dated) book on this called "Machines as the Measure of Men", which I often recommend to other people in tech.
Then you go on about your 300 years of complete family opposition to slavery in the US which has only existed for 244 of those years... and you're speaking for ... eh thousands to tens of thousands of people? Calm down.
Perhaps a real geneticist will chime in, but I seem to recall we can find more genetic diversity within a family of another species say chimps or dogs than we do across the entire human species. We thought our lack of diversity was due to some "bottleneck" event where the global human population dropped to around 10K. But then we sequenced neanderthal and had to re adjust that to many repeated bottle necks each decreasing the chance of being it being a correct hyposisis as just one bottleneck is unproven. A different explanation is there were no global bottlenecks just the multitude of day to day local choices we have been making for a long time. (don't date the people from the other side of the river... they wear funny hats)
From a CS perceptive I would describe it as too much DFS not enough BFS which matters because backtracking means we go extinct.
"We show that genes associated with face and vocal tract anatomy went through particularly extensive methylation changes." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15020-6
What fascinating hypothesis? Why not spell it out rather being so coy? Well we have different races of people. Why not work off that? It's not like we lack diversity amongst human.
> Then I remember how we treat animals in general
Oh I see now. It gets exhausting and boring to see everything twisted for the vegan agenda. You should see how we treat plants. Now that's horrifying.
> it makes me think we'd be destined to have a dominating species making all others miserable
99.99% of animals killed on earth aren't killed by humans. Each day more animals are killed in nature than are killed by humans in a century. Most animals are made "miserable" by non-humans. I doubt you're losing sleep over that since you can't win virtue signaling points that way.
> Just thinking out loud.
We get it.
It strikes me as fascinating how societies would evolve and behave when different species could have and exchange different narratives. This a something not new, that has been exploited more than once in science fiction, precisely because the diversity between humans is not enough (many would argue that there are not human races) or simply not enough to be a scenario for picturing vastly different realities, or a playground for a different role playing.
I won't reply to unfortunate comments about plants but allow me to tell you that not only vegans agree on many of the the things that have been said regarding the domination of a species above others. And yes, even among vegans there are debates about wellbeing/misfortunes of animals cause by other animals. As many other topics concerning ethics, it's open and, although science has helped much to set a path, much there is still to discuss. By discuss, however, I mean tolerant and well-intentioned exchange of thought, not cheap attempts of mocking perspectives you don't share.
> A late Middle Pleistocene mandible from Baishiya Karst Cave (BKC) on the Tibetan Plateau has been inferred to be from a Denisovan, an Asian hominin related to Neanderthals, on the basis of an amino acid substitution in its collagen. Here we describe the stratigraphy, chronology, and mitochondrial DNA extracted from the sediments in BKC. We recover Denisovan mitochondrial DNA from sediments deposited ~100 thousand and ~60 thousand years ago (ka) and possibly as recently as ~45 ka. The long-term occupation of BKC by Denisovans suggests that they may have adapted to life at high altitudes and may have contributed such adaptations to modern humans on the Tibetan Plateau.
The Denisovans or Denisova hominins ( /dɪˈniːsəvə/ di-NEE-sə-və) are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human that ranged across Asia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. Denisovans are known from few remains, and, consequently, most of what is known about them comes from DNA evidence. Pending consensus on their taxonomic status, they have been referred to as Homo denisova, H. altaiensis, or H. sapiens denisova.