We’ve had a Denisovan skull since the 1930s—only nobody knew
16 comments
·June 19, 2025AlotOfReading
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.
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).
Bluestein
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.
absurdo
Any rare games that you remember that stood out?
protocolture
In primary school I was part of a team that developed our school website.
We used CuteHTML as our ""IDE"" and then the daily HTML was backed up to floppy and placed in a filing cabinet.
sitkack
Yahoo started as page of links.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Internet_email_address
ldjkfkdsjnv
Dark truths are hidden in ancient dna
jmchuster
And light truths are visibly open in modern dna
Actual paper link for those who are interested:
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.