If right now we found a weird island with a population identical to that "common ancestor that goes way further back", the general population would label that ancestor as an ape - while it's not the same as any of the modern species of great apes, they were morphologically similar to primates as such, not something totally alien or conceptually different.

You might want to debug your process for figuring out which information sources to trust because it sounds because "humans didn't descend from apes" is about on the level of "birds aren't real"

Maybe reread the comment and ask yourself whether they may have meant humans are not descended from monkeys or any other primate living today.

We do share a common ape ancestor with chimpanzees. It lived between 8 and 6 million years ago.

I also, like the person above, heard we're not descendants of apes and, while it seems odd, took that as my best available knowledge.

I never considered that this makes a ton of sense: of course we didn't evolve from apes, after which the apes just stopped evolving and froze their DNA and never had mutations again. Of course they'll be different from their ancestors. But that doesn't mean that our common ancestor was an alligator or something and we developed all ape-like features independently of each other. That's what I took it to mean (when I heard this, idk, maybe as a teenager more than ten years ago), but your comment makes a lot more sense.

No drama, we've all written poorly phrased comments and|or read one too fast and gone for that [reply] like HN was a prize fight :)

We didn't just evolve from apes, we are apes. Just as we are animals. But obviously we also frequently use the words "animals" and "apes" with an implied "non-human" qualifier. And yes, almost certainly any common ancestor of both human and modern day non-human apes was likely to have been just as different genetically to us as it would be to our primate cousins, though obviously it's possible genetic change occurred more rapidly in one branch vs the other.

Wow a whole discussion based on semantics

Sometimes it feels like 90% of evolutionary biology is arguing about semantics and how to classify things.

I think you're misremembering. It's usually "humans aren't descendants of monkeys".

Could be. In my language, we don't differentiate between monkeys and apes. (Like how in English you call any lightness of blue blue, but not any lightness of orange (darker: brown) or red (lighter: pink). Russian would call the blues, sinii and goluboi, as different as orange and brown are to us.) I couldn't tell you the difference in English, so I probably wouldn't have remembered if it was one or the other ...if I got the information in English in the first place

It's just a weird argument to make because nobody is claiming that we are descended from chimpanzees, monkeys, etc. As far as I know from history, that same strawman argument was used extensively during the evolution debates of the 1930s in America.

It's a place to tread carefully in the context of discussing a multiregional human origin theory.

I can't read minds but they may have intended to point out that while humans did not evolve from any of our modern cousins (modern apes, modern monkeys) we all evolved from some common ancestor (generally classed | accepted as an 'ape' albeit not a modern one) and it's conceivable that common ancestor may have had its own diaspora from which various human groups evolved in differing regions of the world.

Not my argument, mind you.

This all being distinct from Snopes trial era memes, etc.

That widely dispersed ape we evolved from is already a well-established species called Homo erectus.

The conflict this thread is discussing is between the (strong) multiregional human origin model (MRO/MRE) that used to argue that these aboriginal are where modern dispersed populations come from. This view is now considered completely dead on the basis of genetic evidence alone, with dozens of other lines of evidence refuting it. Weaker versions still exist though.

The oppositional view was that humans evolved solely in a small part of Africa and spread from there, with no little/no admixture from other archaic humans, called the recent single origin model (RSO). This view is not widely held today either.

Modern anthropologists and evolutionary biologists usually believe that humans evolved out of a complex mix of archaic humans broadly distributed across Africa into anatomically modern humans (AMHs). Eventually AMHs left Africa and admixed with other archaic humans in a fairly minor way, forming modern human populations. Differences between academics usually come down to what they think of that within-Africa population structure, or thetiming/significance of archaic admixture. Chinese academics tend to follow in the footsteps of Xinzhi Wu, a prominent Chinese academic that was a strong MRO advocate before his death. That includes the authors of this paper.

I largely agree save I'd describe Homo Erectus as mildly dispersed (from my perspective and to the best of my current knowledge, admittedly a few years out of date), never having gone deep into Europe, Mongolian steppes, the Americas, Northern China, the Sahul (Meganesia|Oceania), etc.

These were all extended trips for the kids.

Given the reference to a common ancestor, I suspect that they means something more along the lines of "birds aren't reptiles", which is or is not true depending on what you mean by "reptile".

The term ape has being used traditionally in different ways with slightly different meanings.

This sounds like it was made up by some racists to try to explain why some races are better than others.

Race is a bad idea to begin with. There is no major difference, we are all human.

There’s no major difference between a chihuahua and a German shepherd in the same way there’s no major difference in “insert your X & Y breeds here” - it’s pathological to think that there isn’t a bred phenotype exposed within a population cluster.

Pure imbreds in dogs end into retardations and dangerous genetic illnesses. There's no 100% pure dog... with a good physical fit. Deal with it. The same with humans. Read about the "sleep illness".

Deal with it?

Human have no species. It's the same species all over the world.

These are political statements and as such they should not be made with the authority of science.

More like the reverse. There's no proof on being separate human species. The rest it's quakey science.

There’s no proof you exist but there’s proof you belong to a group by comparisons.

If we use the current definition of species, humans can reproduce with any other human in the planet, therefore we are at this moment the same species. We are probably too promiscuous to expect otherwise.

That's not the definition of species. In many cases different species can reproduce together, e.g. wolves and coyotes. In other cases, species are asexual so clearly there must be some other way of distinguishing them besides sexual compatibility.

The actual definition of species is essentially arbitrary and, when applied to humans and the possibility of different human subspecies or species, the question is essentially political.

It becomes even more obvious when you look into previous proto-human groups like neanderthals, denisovans, etc, as far back as you want; one can ask what counts as a subspecies, what counts as a species, and struggle to apply that in a self-consistent way today between Chinese, neanderthals, Australian aborigines, African pygmies, denisovans, native Americans, etc.

Don't let anyone trick you into thinking there is some clean science answer here - biology is far too messy.

This is false. Many animals have races, and they are different enough from each other genetically.

Human "races" are in not different enough to be called races from a scientific point of view.

What’s different enough? There’s clearly physical differences of magnitude and measurement.

I’m saying dogs have “races” - yes, just as humans do. Whatever you call that grouping it is based on the comparison I made on my original post which is logically correct.

Don't know much biology, but appears "modern human biological variation is not structured into phylogenetic subspecies ('races'), nor are the taxa of the standard anthropological 'racial' classifications breeding populations."

"'Race' is a legitimate taxonomic concept that works for chimpanzees but does not apply to humans (at this time)."

https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1455

You don’t need to be a biologist to know that when you bring a chihuahua to a dog park you go to the little fenced section compared to the bigger section for the bigger “breeds” and as a human you marvel at the sight and fact fact that they’re biologically the same species yet clearly with defined differences. Perception of reality allows you to infer boundaries and collections of similar things, words in a paper to justify what reality demonstrates physically and clearly is not only an appeal to authority and a fallacy of argument but it’s also meaningless as it’s out of context and can’t possibly refer to a shared experience of reality.

> What’s different enough?

Genetics. In case of humans the differences are tiny.

> There’s clearly physical differences of magnitude and measurement.

By that logic two brothers would be different races if one is tall and one is short.

Eh, there are, but not sorted by skin tone or location. If you consider a situation as "home" (the species cycled through crisis/conflict every generation), certain neuro-types pop out as adaptions to this situation cycle parts. A shizophren might look out of place in SF, but he might call us out of place in a warzone.

Its not a good thing though and hardly something to claim pride from or for. Nobody wants to be on team wheel chair.

Humans didn't descend from apes. We are apes. Taxonomically speaking we are in the Hominidae, or great ape family. It is comprised of 8 extant species of which we are one of them.

In many ways, we’re the naked mole rat of the Hominidae.