Human origins - and evolution. Patterns of cooperation and competition

I'm avoiding politics once again this time, in order to dive into the endlessly fascinating topic of human origins. And hence first, for your holiday shopping.... 

... a while back I suggested the perfect gift for that anthropologist or paleo-historian you know (either professional or amateur!) Or else your role-playing aficionado. My way-fun role-playing game TRIBES simulates life in the stone age! 

Can you hunt and gather and woo and connive to have the most offspring successfully reach adulthood? Only be careful competing! You only win if the the tribe survives!

Alas, folks reported interest last time... but no way to actually order the game!

Well, Steve Jackson has fixed the glitch. You can now order and play this fun diversion that's also highly pertinent to today's topic! 

== News about human origins and evolution ==

Scientists are advancing with synthetic evolution: At 493 genes, the minimal genome of M. mycoides JCVI-syn3B is the smallest known free-living organism, artificially culled-down to the absolutely minimum number that’s viable by folks at the Craig Venter Institute. In comparison, many animal and plant genomes contain more than 20,000 genes. So far, the simplest organism would have no functional redundancies or useless spacers. Note that it requires the researchers to supply food and ideal conditions. Which leads to their next step… altering conditions to see if evolution takes place.

Spoiler alert. It does.

At the opposite end of the scale... Neanderthal genes! Was there a penalty for promiscuity around 50,000 BCE?  People with roots outside Africa tend to have about 2% Neanderthal (or else Denisovan) DNA in their genome. So statistically, by random chance, you would expect Neanderthal DNA to collectively account for around 2% of the genetic risk of disease. Not in all cases, it seems: "But here we find that 8.4% is explained by Neanderthal gene flow," much more than is expected by chance alone.”  

It is so tiresome when sci journalists flub their reporting. Take these reports that the human ancestral line almost died out due to low populations about 800,000 years ago.  Yes “bottlenecks” are very interesting! A recently discovered ‘y-chromosome bottleneck’ around the time of early farming towns, has huge implications! As for these news stories: yes, there was likely a time when Homo Heidelbergensis & Antecessor (ancestor of Homo Saps and Neanderthals) were a small, isolated population, and surviving that isolation helped them to thereupon differentiate and speed our evolution. 

But, this was not about ‘the human line almost dying out’! These articles ignore the fact that very close cousins to Heidelbergensis - Homo Erectus - were everywhere in the Old World with no bottleneck. An isolation bottleneck was likely HOW we surged ahead of Erectus – evolution flourishes on such cycles. But Erectus was still around and would likely have spun off another isolated population. And maybe super-brain sapiens might NOT have happened!  See my speculations in Existence. Still, flawed reporting.

Human origins were definitely in Africa, stretching back to Australopithecus – “Lucy’ and her upright-walking kin. But further back to the ancestors of ALL apes? It appears that earlier hominids not only evolved in western and central Europe but spent over 5 million years evolving there and spreading to the eastern Mediterranean before eventually dispersing into Africa. Recent findings establish Anadoluvius turkae as a branch of the part of the evolutionary tree that gave rise to chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and humans.

 But sure, long after that, human genetic diversity in non-African populations appeared to have been shaped primarily by an out-of-Africa dispersal 50 or so thousand yr ago (kya). (As I describe in Existence.) With a major shift in reprogramming-by-culture. But somewhere around 7000ya there was another huge effect. Arrival of agriculture, towns and kings led to a Y-Chromosome bottleneck when only a small fraction of males got to breed. Then, rather quickly, actual cities got larger, law happened, and the great culling of males appears to have stopped... though not feudalism, dominating 99% of our ancestors.

We can do - and have done - better than that failed social norm.

See my neoteny article: Neoteny and Two-Way Sexual Selection in Human Evolution. 

== Did we evolve all the things that make us what we are? ==

I want to just drop in here a few thoughts about Richard Dawkins (famed author of The Selfish Gene , The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion). Down in the comments community here at "Contrary Brin" (the very best such community online!), some opined a while back about Dawkins's belief that humans have no behaviors that did not arise from evolution. And I also must demur. What Dawkins etc. (and nearly all others) ignore is the emergent effects that occur when one layer of activity creates a new, ‘higher” layer.

Cells are vast communities of sub-cellular entities that do their various tasks & business in a manner that is generally at least as much competitive as cooperative, making and ‘selling’ chemicals and structures to each other, much like an economy. Yet the cell seems from the outside to be a consistent, self-cooperative entity.

In Earth I describe how this same effect happens at the next layer between cells in a macro organism, especially during fetal development, when proto-neurons compete with each other savagely, over growth factors, resulting in whole ecosystem structures – jungles and forests and deserts, across the developing infant brain: structures that combine into vastly better mental processes, wherein many next-layer personality drives and components continue to compete across life… yet, the thing that emerges - an individually identifiable human being - portrays with some verisimilitude a unitary organism, actively and effectively pursuing goals…

…goals that change as the organism satisfies ever-higher layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. All the way to abstractions that the cellular and mammal and ape and caveman brains that dwell inside our cortex could never begin to perceive, let alone understand.

And sure, often these higher ‘value’ goals (e.g. religion) can often be just surface justifications for more brutal, lower drives like vengeance, jealously, fear and avarice. And yet… 50,000 years ago (I believe, and argue in Existence), there came a new layering as humans became able to re-program their thinking modes completely via culture, leading to many subsequent major, 'renaissance' shifts in our tools, societies and things we can perceive/contemplate.

And of course this progression continues, as human individuals group themselves in cooperative - but also competitive - associations like families, tribes, communities, towns and nations. And civilizations, which aren't entirely the same thing. 

The crux: Dawkins is completely off-base if he thinks he can ascribe the emergent outcomes from those new and vividly unpredictable layers entirely to earlier evolved selection.  

Every phase and every level reveals the truth that nether cooperation nor competition can explain this, alone. Each is entangled in layer after layer of complexity.

== Where our evolved natures collide with policy? And with AI? ==

Our evolved natures interact fretfully with new technologies. Take recent cries that new generative AI systems may decipher and interpret our personal DNA!  Yes, that could be worrisome! A tool for criminals and oppressors and bigots. As illustrated in the excellent film Gattaca – that DNA is already everywhere. You shed it in flakes of skin wherever you go. 

But that's the point! As shown in that flick, collection and decipherment of our DNA will be trivial and banning all that is a mug's game. What matters - a point I’ve been pushing since the 1990s, in The Transparent Society and elsewhere - is that hiding will neither preserve privacy nor prevent your data being used against you. 

But what matters is not blinding others; it is preventing others from using your information to harm you. There is a possible solution, then. Not by hiding, but by aggressively ripping the veils away from malefactors who might do that sort of thing! 

More (biological) science! Human origins, and lots more...

Sorry for the delay this time, but I'll compensate with new insights into where we came from... 

Not everyone agrees how to interpret the “Big Bang” of human culture that seems to have happened around 40,000 years ago (that I describe and discuss in Existence), a relatively rapid period when we got prolific cave art, ritual burials, sewn clothing and a vastly expanded tool kit… and lost our Neanderthal cousins for debatable reasons. Some call the appearance of a 'rapid shift' an artifact of sparse paleo sampling. V. S. Ramachandran agrees with me that some small inner (perhaps genetic) change had non-linear effects by allowing our ancestors to correlate and combine many things they were already doing separately, with brains that had enlarged to do all those separate things by brute force. Ramachandran suspects it involved “mirror neurons” that allow some primates to envision internally the actions of others. 

 

My own variant is “reprogrammability…” a leap to a profoundly expanded facility to program our thought processes anew in software (culture) rather than firmware or even hardware. Supporting this notion is how rapidly there followed a series of later “bangs” that led to staged advances in agriculture (with the harsh pressures that came with the arrival of new diets, beer and kings)… then literacy, empires, and (shades of Julian Jaynes!) new kinds of conscious awareness… all the way up to the modern era’s harshly decisive conflict between enlightenment science and nostalgic romanticism.

I doubt it is as simple as "Mirror Neurons." But they might indeed have played a role. The original point that I offered, even back in the nineties, was that we appear to have developed a huge brain more than 200,000 years ago because only thus could we become sufficiently top-predator to barely survive. If we had had reprogrammability and resulting efficiencies earlier, ironically, we could have achieved that stopping place more easily, with a less costly brain... and thus halted the rapid advance. 

It was a possibly-rare sequence... achieving efficiency and reprogrammability AFTER the big brain... that led to a leap in abilities that may be unique in the galaxy. Making it a real pisser that many of our human-genius cousins quail back in terror from taking the last steps to decency and adulthood... and possibly being the rescuers of a whole galaxy.

 

== And Related ==

There’s much ballyhoo that researchers found that just 1.5% to 7% of the human genome is unique to Homo sapiens, free from signs of interbreeding or ancestral variants.  Only when you stop and think about it, this is an immense yawn.  So Neanderthals and Denisovans were close cousins. Fine. Actually, 1.5% to 7% is a lot!  More than I expected, in fact.

 

Much is made of the human relationship with dogs…  how that advantage may have helped relatively weak and gracile humans re-emerge from Africa 60,000 years ago or so… about 50,000 years after sturdy-strong Neanderthals kicked us out of Eurasia on our first attempt. But wolves might have already been ‘trained’ to cooperate with those outside their species and pack… and trained by… ravens! At minimum it’s verified the birds will cry and call a pack to a recent carcass so the ‘tooled’ wolves can open it for sharking. What is also suspected is that ravens will summon a pack to potential prey animals who are isolated or disabled, doing for the wolves what dogs later did for human hunting bands.

 

== Other biological news! ==

 

A new carnivorous plant - which traps insects using sticky hairs -has been recently identified in bogs of the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

 

Important news in computational biology. Deep learning systems can now solve the protein folding problem. "Proteins start out as a simple ribbon of amino acids, translated from DNA, and subsequently folded into intricate three-dimensional architectures. Many protein units then further assemble into massive, moving complexes that change their structure depending on their functional needs at a given time. And mis-folded proteins can be devastating—causing health problems from sickle cell anemia and cancer, to Alzheimer’s disease."

 

"Development of Covid-19 vaccines relied on scientists parsing multiple protein targets on the virus, including the spike proteins that vaccines target. Many proteins that lead to cancer have so far been out of the reach of drugs because their structure is hard to pin down."

...and...

The microbial diversity in the guts of today’s remaining hunter-gatherers far exceeds that of people in industrial societies, and researchers have linked low diversity to higher rates of “diseases of civilization,” including diabetes, obesity, and allergies. But it wasn't clear how much today's nonindustrial people have in common with ancient humans. Until bio archaeologists started mining 1000 year old poop -  ancient coprolites preserved by dryness and stable temperatures in three rock shelters in Mexico and the southwestern United States.

“The coprolites yielded 181 genomes that were both ancient and likely came from a human gut. Many resembled those found in nonindustrial gut samples today, including species associated with high-fiber diets. Bits of food in the samples confirmed that the ancient people's diet included maize and beans, typical of early North American farmers. Samples from a site in Utah suggested a more eclectic, fiber-rich “famine diet” including prickly pear, ricegrass, and grasshoppers.” Notably lacking -- markers for antibiotic resistance. And they were notably more diverse, including dozens of unknown species. “In just these eight samples from a relatively confined geography and time period, we found 38% novel species.”

Perspectives on the more distant human past

“A century ago, on July 26, 1916, a viral disease swept through New York. Within 24 hours, new cases of polio increased by more than 68%. The outbreak killed more than 2,000 people in New York City alone. Across the United States, polio took the lives of about 6,000 people in 1916, leaving thousands more paralyzed. Although scientists had already identified the polio virus, it took 50 more years to develop a vaccine. That vaccine eradicated polio in the U.S. in less than a decade. Vaccines are one of the most effective modern disease-fighting tools.

“As of this writing, the fast-spreading COVID-19 has already infected over a million worldwide, and has killed over 22,000 patients. There is an urgent need for a vaccine to prevent it from infecting and killing millions more. But traditional vaccine development takes, on average, 16 years. So how can scientists quickly develop a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2?” (From a primer on vaccines reprinted on Philstockworld. Dated last month.)

Let me add that in the 1950s the most popular living American… replacing the record holder Franklin Roosevelt, was Jonas Salk. The Greatest Generation adored him... a scientist who ‘saved childhood...” and science in general, and not a reality TV star.

Even if Covid-19 proves not to be a slippery devil, like HIV or a rapid-changeling like the flu, there are other reasons to go through the full scope of human pre-testing with a few tens of thousands, before rushing out a vaccine. Earlier I described Antibody-Enhancement by which some vaccines - like that for Dengue Fever - have proved devastatingly harmful, if not properly deployed.

== Speculations on human origins ==

Amazing. Apparently early modern human ancestors seem to have dispersed into the Levant and even Greece about 170,000 years ago… an early dispersal that “failed” as those early human populations then vanished, replaced by Neanderthals (who stretched from Europe to mid-Asia for 400,000 years.)  

That knocked humans back into only Africa…

...from which later versions of Homo sapiens burst forth about 70,000 years ago, spreading first due east and south into Australasia, where they were better adapted to the heat...

... then finally north into Europe for the famed late encounter with Neanderthals - about 45,000 years ago - when fortunes were decisively reversed. And roughly simultaneously with the end of Neanderthals (except some genes till in us) came humanity’s rendezvous with the first great Reprogramming Renaissance, as I describe in Existence.

It may be that humans were simply no match for the stronger Neanderthals, who kept us limited to the African homeland unti... perhaps a mutation enabled us to reprogram. At least that's the speculative theory that seems pretty obvious to me.

Something else amazing from the CARTA conference. While non-Africans tend to have from 2-3% Neanderthal DNA, each of us has a slightly different Neanderthal introgression. And in surveying a variety of these segments from many individuals, experts guesstimate that about 40% of a general Neanderthal genome is circulating in modern humans. Say what???? Given that much of the rest has been interpolated from fossil DNA, it seems we are getting ever closer to the sci fi (but inevitable) situation also depicted in Existence, where Neanderthals are resurrected and walk among us again.

The same can only be done at a 10% level for Denisovans, almost all of it coming from Melanesian populations.

And while we're talking possible brain mutations that led to us... Meanwhile, though few news articles refer to Uplift: “Scientists have grown larger monkey brains by giving marmoset fetuses a gene that's unique to humans.”

== Ha ha. We're all inter-breeders ==

As I've linked elsewhere, it now seems that Africans aren't purely human either. We see gene relics of a 'ghost population' of outsiders - a third kind - in many African populations.

Indeed. Around 700,000 years ago, multiple hominin species apparently shared the Old World: “It is now looking like Africa and Eurasia were inhabited by a whole range of hominin species just a few hundred thousand years ago. While H. naledi was living in South Africa, H. heidelbergensis was surviving in South-Central Africa, and H. sapiens was emerging in Morocco and Ethiopia. At the same time as all this, H. neanderthalensis was evolving in Europe, the Denisovans were developing in Asia, H. erectus may still have been clinging on in Indonesia, and two diminutive hominins, H. floresiensis and H. luzonensis, were living the island life in Southeast Asia.” And a bit earlier: “H. antecessor could be a kind of “basal” species to the “emerging humanity formed by Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans.”

== And more surprises ==

A scientist  found that Himba – a Nambian tribal group - have the highest recorded rate of what researchers call "extra-pair paternity." The term refers to an instance in which a child is born to a married couple, but the husband is not the biological father. The rate of extra-pair paternity found among Himba is 48%, far exceeding the 1% to 10% range previously thought to be typical for humans. Having children with non-marital partners was widespread among this group. A high percentage of couples (70%) had at least one child who was fathered by someone outside the marriage. Socially this did not seem to affect paternal care or Himba relaxed sexual attitudes.

Neuroscientists scanned the brains of lifelong bullies and found something grim: Bullies’ brains appear to be physically smaller than other brains. “Our findings support the idea that, for the small proportion of individuals with life-course-persistent antisocial behaviour, there may be differences in their brain structure that make it difficult for them to develop social skills that prevent them from engaging in antisocial behavior.”

== Fascinating… and Uplift-related ==

A non-scientifically rigorous experiment, but visually persuasive, shows a dog having learned to press twenty different buttons with a variety of meanings that do seem to situationally correlate. Our current pet is the smartest dog I ever had, making me wonder about those “neo-dogs” I wrote about, long ago.

And? A veterinary medicine commercial with an UPLIFT theme.

Interesting look into “dendrochronology” or the use of tree rings to establish a clear timetable of events across the last 6000 years. In this case possibly establishing the exact year of the Thera explosion (that pummeled the Minoan civilization and possibly led to the Bronze Age collapse) at 1560 BCE. 

== And some more science news of interest.... ==

NASA animation

Kinda kool video by NASA draining the oceans… showing the shallows and then middle depths and the great abyssals. Truly impressive things stand out. Like how shallow most of the Arctic is, and what sheer drops surround Africa on all sides and line the west side of the Americas. And how the deepest trenches go on and on, ever downward. (Abyssals of the kind I portray in INFINITY'S SHORE.)

The hydrogen production industry is growing at an accelerated rate. Just last year saw a 40 percent increase in shipments, raising total energy production to 1.1GW. Particularly given lithium-ion battery limitations, alternatives in the storage realm will grow increasingly vital for our renewable energy future.  Now comes “a method for synthesizing hydrogen from sunlight. The process uses a rhodium molecule as a catalyst to store electrons and create hydrogen.” This plus new cheap kinds of hydrogen fuel tanks starts to make a dream seem more likely.  (Via Abundance Insider)

== And finally... ==

One of the best (among many) of my recent podcasts: The Big "UNLOCK" What Next? examined 9 topics with 9 panels over 9 hours by 40+ futurists, thought leaders and industry experts to examine how best to reopen global economies and venture back into our communities purposefully and safely.