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Re:Remains found in China may belong to third human lineage by Aachen on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @08:35AM (#37061711)
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.

Re:Remains found in China may belong to third human lineage by defrost on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @09:10AM (#37062121)
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 :)
Re:Remains found in China may belong to third human lineage by wizofaus on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @09:13AM (#37062178)
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.
Re:Remains found in China may belong to third human lineage by bdcp on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @09:33AM (#37062417)
Wow a whole discussion based on semantics
Re:Remains found in China may belong to third human lineage by AlotOfReading on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @05:20PM (#37068579)
Sometimes it feels like 90% of evolutionary biology is arguing about semantics and how to classify things.
Re:Remains found in China may belong to third human lineage by throwawaymaths on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @10:31AM (#37063269)
I think you're misremembering. It's usually "humans aren't descendants of monkeys".
Re:Remains found in China may belong to third human lineage by Aachen on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @11:53AM (#37064550)
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