If apes did evolve outside of Africa, why did they not radiate across Asia ? Getting over to East Asia would have been far more easier than migrating into Africa and continue evolving there after disappearing from Europe. Yes I know about orangutans, but I would think after 7 million years there would be more diversity of Apes in Asia than Africa.
So I really find this hard to believe. All I can think is more fossils in the now dry environment of Türkiye probably survived than the humid areas of Africa.
Gigantopithecus as well as many hominins besides Homo sapiens, did evolve and radiate across Asia?
Homo Erectus/Heidelburgensis/Neanderthals/Denisovans were all widely distributed outside of Africa. Neanderthals and Denisovans in particular have no records of ever having their range include Africa (Neaderthals may have lived in parts of North Africa but they’re firmly Eurasian). Homo Floresensis only ever lived in Flores.
Gigantopithecus, a giant non-hominin Ape, only has evidence of living in China. It’s thought to be related to Orangutans. You probably are dismissive of Orangutans because they are only a single ape (actually multiple species) outside of Africa in the present day but the Ponginae subfamily including Orangutans and Gigantopithecus had many other species, they are just now all extinct, but all were Asian: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponginae
That said, I do think there is no evidence that Homo Sapiens “evolved outside of Africa” and I suspect most people who do push this are doing so for either nationalistic reasons (we found early hominin fossils in our country, we must be where humans evolved and are the “original” humans!) or racism (not wanting to be descended from “Africans”). But it’s definitely possible there was gene flow from Homo Erectus outside of Africa back into Africa in a way that made it into the human genome, and many people have non-African human ancestry from Neanderthals and Denisovans
Exactly. The oldest evidence of archaic human tool use in Java, Indonesia is over 1.5 million years old with Homo erectus fossils going back 700 kYa [1], long before the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens. In Europe the oldest fossil remains date to 800 kYa at Atapuerca [2] (with cannibalism!).
It's just cultural egotism. It's especially meaningless if it goes as far back as 8 million years because even half a million is enough for hominids to spread across several continents and come back as different species.
Yeah, the fact it’s an 8 million year old fossil really makes the tie to homo sapiens’ origins ludicrous. The earliest evidence for Australopithecus (where humans started to diverge from other apes like Chimps) was 4 million years old.
And there are already 12.5 million year old Ponginae (Orangutan relatives) fossils from India. Since all Ponginae are Asian but none are in human ancestry, that’d imply even earlier radiation of early African apes - which have just as much a claim to possibly being early human ancestors if they were pre-Ponginae - into Asia than this would.
To be fair, all of it is hard to believe, or rather, unlikely when seen without further context. Climate may be a factor that influences fossil survival, but also one that influences migration. Especially if the rest (rhinos migrating from Turkey to Africa?) is also true. I guess we'll just have to wait for more information connecting the dots, if it's ever discovered.
It does however show that all these popular ideas about the origin of man are not rock solid.
There are early finds of Homo in China but these do not predate the finds in Africa.
Neanderthals and Homo floresiensis are not early ancestors and they lived at the same time as modern humans emerged. I believe that Neanderthals are a subspecies of Homo sapiens so they were able to interbreed with modern humans.
If they move south because of major climate changes in the northern hemisphere, that would be a materially different driver for moving towards Africa than moving East across Asia...
There's any number of reasons animals might migrate south rather than radiating in all directions. Lots of factors affect migration. It's certainly a question that needs answering, but far from a reason to dismiss the whole hypothesis.
Finding early-early apes in Turkey is cool but it in no way challenges the out of Africa hypothesis unless you’re really grasping at straws wanting that hypothesis to be false. I don’t even know why that’s part of the story. It’s just as cool and much less speculative to frame it as chimp-like apes living in Turkey/Asia.
My initial reaction was one of suspicion, but the story as it was laid out seemed pretty persuasive. One detail that swayed me was the reported lack of fossils in Africa of early hominin species:
While the remains of early hominines are abundant in Europe and Anatolia, they are completely absent from Africa until the first hominin appeared there about seven million years ago.
Is there another explanation for why these fossils might have been missing despite early hominines inhabiting Africa?
Türkiye may have an environment that is very suitable for the preservation of fossil, and one where said fossils remain near the surface. Africa is huge, but may lack areas that both has those hominids and preserved their fossils well.
Fire example, there are very few footprints on sidewalks, but lots in the mud beside them - should we conclude people must prefer to walk in the mud?
>Is there another explanation for why these fossils might have been missing despite early hominines inhabiting Africa?
Most biological and organic things decompose quickly. Every time we find a fossil, we are winning an insanely rigged lottery. We barely have significant remains from 10k year old towns, so you can't really take any info from a supposed lack of fossils
i always open to any new findings about it. if it turns out that it really is a new hominid, then great! scientists will have more than enough on their plates. if not, then it's also ok! just keep digging and digging and analysing until something worthy of closer inspection come up.
Does pinning down an origin help to fill-in gaps and reinterpret the (scarce) findings? I.e. use spatial proximity to infer biological relations?
Given the enormous timescales and the fact one can walk across eurasia/africa many times over in a lifetime it feels a bit odd that territory seems to be treated as a defining factor.
You can walk across the continent in a lifetime, but you probably don't. You have no reason to.
They probably spent their entire lives within a few tens of miles of their birthplace, possibly within mere miles. And the same applied to generations around them.
It's not perfect, but that's how paleontology has to work. They make their best guesses based on the data they are able to (literally) dig up. That means sometimes making substantial revisions based on one new, tiny piece of data.
> They probably spent their entire lives within a few tens of miles of their birthplace, possibly within mere miles.
While the land area required to support a single human or human ancestor might have been as little as a square mile in ideal conditions [0] that is very different from the range of a human or human ancestor over a lifetime. For simplicity we can consider hunter-gatherer humans who at least would have had similar caloric needs.
For one, humans come in groups, which during most of our hunter-gatherer past would have been 150-300. If one is strictly gathering, this means all the resources around base camp would eventually be harvested and the group would need to migrate their base camp to another location. The group's foraging strategy could form a circuit where they return to their original base camp, but it's unlikely that every foraging location is as good as every other one, so the circuit will likely change over time, extending the lifetime range of a single individual.
Secondly, there is a huge variation in hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Fishing communities are more sedentary while hunting communities are more nomadic and might travel hundreds of miles over a year. This is what one would expect from a generalist species like ourselves.
[0] [David Pimentel and Marcia H. Pimentel, ‘Food, Energy, and Society’, third edition, (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008), p. 45-46.]
Many modern humans would travel for no good reason on a moment's notice.
Ofcourse here are talking about our greater family tree and its entirely possible that more confined lifestyles (like e.g. the great apes of today) where more typical earlier on.
I would think though bipetalism did not get selected just to increase the daily range from the home base. At some point some hominid species started roaming and reasons to do so would be abundand (overpopulation, drought, following animal migrations etc).
The trouble is (starting already with archeology) that the stuff that survives the aeons to be found today is always "special" in some way. Like being burried in certain conditions, being in a collapsed cave etc.
Nature is a great recycler and doesnt leave many traces of its pathways.
Well ... I don't know why non-English speaking countries get to decide how English speakers should pronounce/spell their names. Different languages have different names for each other. It's ok.
And yes, I would have the same opinion if the UK somehow forced Turks to drop "Birleşik Krallık" in favour of its English name.
My questions was actually precisely about this - what is now the name of what used to be Turkey in english and how is it spelled in english alphabet. I wasn’t asking (though I am not opposed to hearing about it, it just wasn’t my point) who came up with it, what the underlying agenda is, etc - but what is now the correct and acceptable way to call it.
Just like there were other countries that have changed their names over time for this or that reason, I figured same thing could have happened to Turkey while I was not paying attention. Or hasn’t. Hence the question.
No. Erdoğan started advocating for a switch to Türkiye a couple of years ago, and the UN recently adopted the Turkish spelling. The US State Department uses both spellings, while asserting (sensibly) that Türkiye should be used in "formal and diplomatic contexts." [0] English Wikipedia still uses the established English spelling. [1]
Some Turks I know seem to think this whole thing was mostly cooked up as a distraction from other issues that have come up or worsened under Erdoğan's leadership.
At least in the UN (and the spelling is pushed by Turkish tourism too). Not sure about adoption beyond that, especially outside of Turkey. Personally don't see myself adopting the new spelling for a while.
I don't see it adopting it myself, because that would also means pronouncing it differently.
Anyway, good luck with qwerty keyboard. I'm using azerty, so it is not so painful.
My understanding was that the name would be pronounced the same way, but as a native English speaker I don't even know what the umlaut does to the sound of the u. So I'm not even sure how the pronunciation would actually change.
In any event, if the Turkish government wants me to stop using "Turkey" I'm more than happy to call it Anatolia instead.
> My understanding was that the name would be pronounced the same way
No, part of the rationale for the change is to reflect the different pronunciation (Türkiye) has three syllables
> but as a native English speaker I don’t even know what the umlaut does to the sound of the u.
While there is a change to the first vowel sound, and I think an even more subtle change to the second, the biggest difference is the existence of the third syllable, which is pretty evident from the spelling, even to most native English speakers.
It is pronounced differently to the English "Turkey". For once, it has three syllables. Anatolia is the name of the large peninsula encapsulating most of Turkey, not the country itself.
Is anyone "originally" from anywhere they live now, really, except maybe East Africa (at some point in time)? Anglo-Saxons came from the continent, "Americans" from Europe, Africa and elsewhere, Native Americans from Asia, etc.
You can type an umlaut (over a u) on a US-International QWERTY keyboard by typing a double quote followed by a u.
And if you are using Windows with, say, US-English QWERTY as your default keyboard layout, its easy to add US-International and switch between them with ctrl-shift; they have the same layout (so your keycaps are still write), but some of the punctuation becomes dead keys that can function either for the punctuation or diacriticals depending on the following keypress.
Because the relationship between the punctuation and the diacriticals they work for is mostly visually intuitive, I find it a lot easier than memorizing Alt-key codes. Especially when using keyboards that don’t have a separate numeric keyboard in the first place like small laptops, and big laptops with relatively powerful dGPUs (the former because of total space available, the latter because they use more space for venting).
On Macs, you can long-press the "u" key and you'll see options for û ü ù ú ū. There's a number underneath, so just long press "u" and then type the number for the character you want.
Not that it's a big deal, but Türkiye uses the ü, and autocorrect and spell checkers don't seem to have made the switch yet so it does require some extra effort to type or copy paste. It seem like the use of Mumbai hasn't even been universally adopted in India, so I'd expect Türkiye to take some time.
Iirc, Mumbai,Bangalaru, etc. were changes to decolonize, not to change the name foreigners called it as much as to change the name resonance called it.
It does. The English I was taught in school, includes the diaeresis as part of the writing system. Words like coördinate, reëngage, Boötes, are spelled as I just spelled them.
I don't adhere to it. It is old-fashioned, even a bit archaic. But it is still the preferred spelling in some style guides, and it is still used in some publications.
As far as I understand, it's actually used to indicate a hiatus instead of a diphtong. E.g. naïvety is meant to indicate that aï are part of different syllables and shouldn't be pronounced in the same syllable, just like the oö in coördinate.
The catch is that the diaeresis in Türkiye does something completely different that the diaeresis you mentioned, so actually it would be less confusing if English didn't have it at all.
...then again, even some Germans are using the diaeresis for this purpose, such as this guy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Ho%C3%ABcker - and you can't blame him, because usually "oe" is a transliteration of "ö", and then his name would mean "hump" (as in camel's hump).
Where did you go to school, if you don't mind me asking? I didn't realize that was ever something that was taught -- I'm curious if it's a geographic thing?
The only place I've ever seen the diaeresis used like that is in the New Yorker.
Ontario, Canada, in the '90s.
We weren't required to use it but I do recall a brief lesson on co-operate, cooperate, coöperate, etc. being valid variants.
The country has officially asked that it be referred to and spelled that way.
If a friend asked me to refer to them with a different name, I'd sure look like a jerk if I made a point to not do so, even though I know it's their preference. Just the same, I try to remember that the country formerly spelled Turkey is now spelled Türkiye.
Perhaps someday they'll say it doesn't matter, or they prefer the old way. Today isn't that day yet.
OTOH, a country is not a conscious, communicating being that's sensitive about its name. The name change follows a decision by a few civil servants and politicians.
Yeah, it's an unreasonable request. I don't even know how to type that symbol. It isn't on my keyboard. Sure, I could probably find a way to type it or copy it from somewhere else. Or I could just keep calling it Turkey and move on.
I find this take so odd. I presume your are from the US, which is a country with so many cultures flowing in, but from your post you will not accept that a friend of yours may have accents in their name, or that a dish may have accents in it, and will forever misspell them.
When I have friends like that (well, my brother too), I make a point of typing it the way it's supposed to be written, out of courtesy and fun and proudness, like I'm clever enough to type any character I want with my keyboard, because I master it and I master other languages. The day I'll learn how to type Chinese characters fluently, I'll be so happy ! Not to boast, but it will mean I unlocked a whole new world!
In human languages, each culture develops its own name for each different culture they interact with. That name is a separate concept to how the other culture calls themselves. Sometimes, the two names are relatively similar (France / France, though pronounced slightly differently), other times its completely different (Germany / Deutschland, Hungarian / Magyarország). This is a simple fact about how human languages work. The country called Turkey in English calls themselves Türkiye in their own language. They have asked certain international bodies to refer to them by that name as well, and those bodies have of course accepted. But those bodies do not "speak English", and there isn't any expectation that speakers of English should change their language as well.
Now, there is nothing wrong with calling it Türkiye in your own everyday speech, but it is not any kind of sign of good manners - it's simply a matter of personal taste. You'd still probably call their language "Turkish", while they call it "Türkçe", and the people living there "Turks" or "Turkish people", when they call themselves "Türkler", and even if you didn't you'd probably use your own grammar to conjugate these words as necessary etc.
yes actually? America literally doesn't use any accents so we write stuff without them. we basically never even use them on cafe, resume, words of that sort. like japanese has no L sound. so (if google translate is to be believed) their exonym for Lithuania is pronounced "Ritoania", and uses an entirely different alphabet.
if you want to learn to use endonyms for countries cool! but most people aren't interested in that level of effort for the whole world. there are ten thousand other things that occupy their minds, every one jockeying for a spot, and this being a passion of yours doesn't change that.
idk why you think there should be any different rules from this, except the general sense of anti-Americanism that seems to pervade this discussion.
fine. then every spanish speaker should call my country The United States of America, not Los Estados Unidos. be equal about this or don't even start.
also: i will under no circumstances use a name that my keyboard cannot type with standard American english. no one besides the new yorker uses an umlaut in our language.
It might be the new globally-used spelling but I don't think you can call anything with an umlaut the "English spelling". You have to use an alt+ code to even get the character from an English keyboard.
Türkiye is Turkey in Turkish. The country isn't saying this word is now English but rather call us by our Turkish name because sharing a name with a bird is worse than being run by an islamist dictator. (While calling India 'Hindistan' and calling the bird 'hindi')
That is illogical. Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection doesn't contain any specifics on how or where hominids evolved. There is nothing in this article which is inconsistent with Darwin's theory.
Darwin’s theory is “just a theory” in the sense that all scientific theories are just theories, and could potentially be revised if new evidence comes to light. We think the sun will rise tomorrow but that’s just a theory too.
Darwin’s theory happens to be the kind of theory that is very well evidenced and consistent with all observations to date, so it would take a truly remarkable discovery to overturn - and this ape ain’t it.
If apes did evolve outside of Africa, why did they not radiate across Asia ? Getting over to East Asia would have been far more easier than migrating into Africa and continue evolving there after disappearing from Europe. Yes I know about orangutans, but I would think after 7 million years there would be more diversity of Apes in Asia than Africa.
So I really find this hard to believe. All I can think is more fossils in the now dry environment of Türkiye probably survived than the humid areas of Africa.