Fourteen Discoveries Made About Human Evolution in 2022

December 27, 2022 7:21 PM

Fourteen Discoveries Made About Human Evolution in 2022. Smithsonian paleoanthropologists reveal the year’s most riveting findings about our close relatives and ancestors.
posted by gudrun (25 comments total)

This is really interesting! Thanks for posting it.
posted by medusa at 7:45 PM on December 27, 2022

Wow. Super interesting. Thank you!
posted by fruitslinger at 7:48 PM on December 27, 2022

Excellent read, thanks gudrun.
posted by Meatbomb at 11:49 PM on December 27, 2022

“Are you going to tell grandma she’s only still alive because of gonorrhoea, or will I?”
posted by rongorongo at 2:31 AM on December 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

So beer was invented right around the time the Bible says the earth was created? hmmmmmmmm
posted by clawsoon at 2:55 AM on December 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

Hominid research is so hot right now.
While it didn't make this list, I'm really excited about Homo naledi and the discoveries made in the Rising Star cave.
posted by neonamber at 4:10 AM on December 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

neoenamber - do you have a link to a paper or article about the discoveries for those of us who do not have time to watch a 1-hour video?
posted by Silvery Fish at 4:35 AM on December 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

@Silvery Fish

This might be a good place to start: https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-naledi .
posted by neonamber at 6:24 AM on December 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

There have also been some very recent claims about Homo naledi and fire/cooking that are still controversial: Dating of the charred remains is still underway, so the decision to announce the fire discovery in a talk on 1 December, prior to the publication of the formal scientific analysis, has proved controversial.
posted by gudrun at 6:54 AM on December 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

While this study points strongly to eastern Eurasia as the geographic source of modern dogs, none of the ancient wolf populations studied were the direct ancestor of modern dogs, meaning that the true dog ancestor (or ancestors) is yet to be found.

There’s still hope for finding the ancient lost realm of the wiener dogs!

(Fascinating info, thank you for sharing!)
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 7:53 AM on December 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Maybe that CD33 gene actually evolved to regulate blood sugars, and kick out highly coated red blood cells, and the gonorrhea prophylaxis was an incidental side gig. This makes me contemplate diseases which utilize high blood sugars to thrive. Anyway, great article. The beer porridge, might have been just porridge going bad, after a few days, then becoming Budweiser, later, much later.
posted by Oyéah at 12:51 PM on December 28, 2022

> Maybe that gene actually evolved to [A], and [B] was an incidental side gig.

Genes don’t evolve to do anything. Every positive effect of a genetic mutation is just a side gig.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 8:15 PM on December 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

"The earliest evidence for human control of fire dates back to at least one million years ago."

I didn't know it went that far back!
posted by storybored at 9:29 PM on December 28, 2022

"The earliest evidence for human control of fire dates back to at least one million years ago."

One of the things that I find just totally mindfucky (in a good way) about trying to comprehend human prehistory and "deep time" is just how stable things were for so long.

For the vast majority of humans' time on Earth, we made do with a real small bag of technological tricks. Tinder, chipped stone blades, bone scrapers. I presume we figured out some degree of leatherworking at some point, although I've not read much about when that must have happened (I'd guess because the fossil record doesn't preserve it until the invention of bone buttons and other fasteners?).

But the world we live in, where we expect things to be different from year to year and generation to generation, is an exception, not the rule. Until extremely recently in our species' history, one generation could very reasonably expect to exist exactly the same way their parents and grandparents did (plus or minus the occasional ice age or random geologic event). That's just hard for me to wrap my mind around at times.

And it's not like these people were stupid. At least as far as we can tell (and there being no reason to assume otherwise), they were just as creative and intelligent and lazy and interested in optimization as we are today. But it doesn't seem like they were exactly finding new and better ways to do things very regularly, given the extremely slow pace of tool development (relative to agrarian/sedentary societies' technology development). How frustrating that must have been! (Or maybe the human cultures that prospered did so precisely because they were the ones that didn't fuck around too much with the design patterns that had been handed down to them by innumerable prior generations?)

Anyway, just one of those things I like to ponder sometimes. Where did these people put their creative energies? To what ends did they put their not-insubstantial (by most estimates) leisure time? What hobbies did a hunter-gatherer have to pass the time, when they weren't hunting or gathering? Painting, drawing, storytelling, dance? Unarmed combat? Erotic massage? Shadow puppets? Something like half the people who've ever lived did so during the time we call 'prehistory', and all that creative output—those entire cultures, rich as our own—are essentially lost to us, typically glossed over in a few pages in a World History book, between "Out of Africa" and "The Fertile Crescent".

Every bit of knowledge we discover about those people is fascinating, but the scale of what we don't know is just vast.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:03 PM on December 28, 2022 [17 favorites]

Here is one from last year from the same authors: Top 7 Discoveries in Human Evolution, 2021 Edition.

To Kadin2048's point, there are occasional finds that give us hints of all we don't know. There is the recent info. on some very early cave art in Sulawesi, for example.

Another example is the mummy Otzi. He is from about 5000 years ago, so a lot more recent than what we have been talking about, but still provides a a bit of a lesson on people of the past. If he had not been preserved by ice, we might just have his skeleton and his copper axe head, the arrowhead that killed him, and a few more of his tools. Because he was preserved in ice though, there is so much more (including his tattoos), and check out his wardrobe.
posted by gudrun at 9:41 AM on December 29, 2022

And it's not like these people were stupid. At least as far as we can tell (and there being no reason to assume otherwise, …

Cro Magnon brains were 15-20% larger than ours, and Neanderthal brains were also significantly larger than ours.
posted by jamjam at 10:34 AM on December 29, 2022

jamjam, your own link says we can't draw inferences about intelligence (already a nebulous concept) just from brain size. Brains (particularly human brains) are just too plastic. The other thing to keep in mind is the encephalization quotient, which is the ratio of brain to body mass. Neanderthals were more robust than contemporary H. sapiens sapiens.
posted by Panjandrum at 11:53 AM on December 29, 2022

re: Neanderthal brains - apparently a single point mutation difference in a single gene (TKTL1) [science.org] (Sept. 2022) is enough to increase the connectivity of neurons - although Neanderthal brains were bigger, we likely have more neurons and more complex connections.

Just sheer numbers and complexity is a bit of a red herring; what specific changes in connectivity and the differences in plasticity that arise from that - likely a bunch of other genes are involved (and not just the genes, but the regulation of those genes during and after development).
posted by porpoise at 3:54 PM on December 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

A priori, I'd assume ancient humans "put their creative energies" primarily into social jockeying and matting, much like modern humans. In other words, our intellect might be primarily a peacock tail, with our technology is an "incidental side gig".

An easier question maybe, how do crows and chimps use their intelligence? At least some birds do gain access to tricky food sources via technology, so the answer is not purely social.
posted by jeffburdges at 4:07 PM on December 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

Cro Magnon brains were 15-20% larger than ours, and Neanderthal brains were also significantly larger than ours.

Sure, although I wouldn't draw many conclusions from that: an African elephant has a brain that's three times the size of a human, but sure don't seem "smarter". Whales and some other cetaceans also have a significant brain-size advantage on humans, and yet they're not the ones hunting us. So there's clearly something else going on.

From what I've read, the current theories are that those large-brained creatures probably use most of their headspace for information storage rather than what we'd recognize as cognition (inference, deduction, prediction) or language. This is at least plausible based on my experiences with elephants, who are… not super clever in the problem-solving sense (also they seem to be emotionally-driven in a way that's disconcerting if you grew up being told that animals don't have emotions), but apparently have extremely good memory, down to the location of individual plants and water sources within a vast migratory area. But chess players they are not.

Human 'intelligence' doesn't seem to take all that much wetware to actually run; people can lose significant chunks of brain matter and yet still be largely functional. We know most language comes from a relatively small part of the brain.

But I don't think we have (or at least I've not read anything convincing—but if there's research out there I'd love to read it!) a good idea of when that developed. Presumably there was a stage in our evolution where our brains worked more like elephants' or whales', and we evolved more general problem-solving abilities and complex language, perhaps at the expense of being able to recall as much information. Where a Cro-Magnon would fall on that spectrum is an open question, I think.

Maybe someday we'll be able to back out the genetic drift accurately enough to recreate one and ask, though?
posted by Kadin2048 at 4:43 PM on December 29, 2022

Anyway, just one of those things I like to ponder sometimes. Where did these people put their creative energies? To what ends did they put their not-insubstantial (by most estimates) leisure time? What hobbies did a hunter-gatherer have to pass the time, when they weren't hunting or gathering? Painting, drawing, storytelling, dance? Unarmed combat? Erotic massage? Shadow puppets?

I imagine people put a tremendous amount of creative energy into teaching. (And if you don't think teaching requires creativity, you haven't been a teacher.)

In hunter-gatherer societies that survived into the modern era, ordinary people have to have a huge number of skills and know a huge amount of information by heart. A lot of the "technology" of these societies is tied up in oral traditions that make that information learnable. I'm thinking, for instance, of the aboriginal Australian traditional epic songs that encoded travel routes across the whole continent, and that let ordinary people cover much more ground than they would have been able to if they stuck to places they'd seen before. I'm sure there were incredibly creative people who put their whole life's work into passing those songs on: inspiring the next generation to learn them, making them vivid and engaging, checking that they'd done it correctly, conveying the importance of passing them on in turn.

I suspect that a lot of that work looks like leisure. Singing is fun! Songs are catchy! (That's part of why it's so brilliant to encode your road maps in them.) And compared to the manual labor of hunting, gathering, cooking, and traveling, it probably is leisure. But it is also the advanced technology of a non-literate, low-specialization society.

And it means "why weren't they inventing stuff?" sort of misses the point. Why wasn't my fifth grade teacher inventing stuff? If she's so creative, where's the technology she produced? Well, she was inventing stuff — she was inventing ways to get her lessons through to me.
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:44 AM on December 31, 2022 [5 favorites]

Whales and some other cetaceans also have a significant brain-size advantage on humans, and yet they're not the ones hunting us. So there's clearly something else going on.

posted by Kadin2048

Such as, they live exclusively in water, which seriously limits the technology they could develop to hunt us, or even protect themselves from us.

Though they do have pretty good sonar.
posted by Pouteria at 6:51 PM on December 31, 2022

I was recently listening to some stuff by James Suzman about southern African hunter-gatherers. What he was describing suddenly made sense for me of a couple of things Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount:

How could you survive if, when someone asks you for your shirt, you give him your coat, too? Well, turns out that if the whole society is organized around demand sharing - which some hunter-gather societies are/were - it works just fine. They demand your coat; later, when you get cold, you demand someone else's coat.

How could you survive if, like the birds of the air, nobody worries about sowing or reaping or storing? Well, turns out that if you have hundreds of different sources of nutrition, there's always something to eat. You don't have to worry about starving because your one big crop failed.

This leads to the half-baked theory that Jesus was just trying to convince people to go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
posted by clawsoon at 8:51 PM on December 31, 2022 [1 favorite]

This leads to the half-baked theory that Jesus was just trying to convince people to go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

He sure used a lot of agricultural imagery though.
posted by Etrigan at 9:37 AM on January 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

(Thirteen) it was not until this year that a team led by Simone Pika from the University of Osnabrück observed apes using topical ointments for healing. After catching insects, the wild chimpanzees from the Rekambo community in Gabon then squished them between their lips, rubbed the insect in the wound and removed the insect afterward.

The truly groundbreaking part of the study, announced in February, is that the chimpanzees treated not only their own wounds but also other chimps’ wounds. This sort of caring behavior was assumed to be reserved for our own species, but it seems like caring for others in one’s community could have deeper roots in our evolutionary history.

This is so fucking cool, thanks for sharing.
posted by ellieBOA at 7:22 AM on January 8, 2023 [1 favorite]