r/history • u/thenervouslistener • 20d ago
Researchers have found the remains of a teenager who died 7,200 years ago, revealing a group of humans previously unknown to science News article
https://news.yahoo.com/researchers-found-remains-teenager-died-120055976.html316
u/TheDesertWalker 19d ago edited 19d ago
I'm reading a book and the author claims that bones found near dangerous spots(caves/cliffs) are usually teenager bones. Lol.
Edit: to brutally simplify what the book explains: teenager's frontal cortex is not developed well enough for risk assessment. (I'm going by memory here, I don't have the book at hand)
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u/dill_pickle_chip 19d ago
Haha. What book?
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u/Semi-Pro_Biotic 19d ago
I'm going with either Teen Life or All of them. It would be surprising if it wasn't true.
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u/marmorikei 19d ago
I wonder if this is because teenagers would be in the best physical shape to access hard to reach resources or if it's just because teenagers are stupid. Maybe both.
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u/TheDesertWalker 19d ago
it's just because teenagers are stupid
It's most likely that (no offense teens). I added to my original reply elaborating further. Tldr: crucial brain part not developed well enough at teenage years.
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u/insane_contin 19d ago
That, and teenagers have less experience. Put 5 teenagers in a locked room, and they'll run through ideas until they get one to work and get out. Put 4 teenagers and an adult who's had to get out of a locked room and that adult will show the teens how to get out. If they listen.
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u/platitood 19d ago
And itās also possible, evolutionarily speaking, that teenage brains are properly developed for the situation. Hereās my two points in favor of that idea. First, a teenager is right at the point where theyāre going to start reproducing. Itās an awesome time to roll the dice for a win if you need it. Second, a teenager can do things and survive, and heal, that would cripple me now that Iām in my 50s. A teenager can abuse their body all day at a game of tackle football, fall off a unicycle, stay up all night, sprains wrist the next morning, and one week later they are perfectly fine.
So yeah, with the risky behavior becomes sometimes fatal consequences. But in terms of evolutionary benefit, a teenager is at the peak point to take risks and survive.
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u/TheOneWhoReadsStuff 19d ago
Well, Iām old (older than a teenager) and chubby. The reason I donāt climb the tree is because I donāt need to. If I had to, Iād find a way to chop it down, or Iād chop a couple down and build a ladder.
So Iām guessing teens get into dangerous spots because they have more physical capability and less patience to think of alternate avenues.
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u/TheDesertWalker 19d ago
So Iām guessing teens get into dangerous spots because they have more physical capability
Except they didn't. Famously, teenagers and adolescents couldn't wear full heavy armor and be effective in medieval armies. Full effective armor was worn by older men. Keep in mind people back then also developed much slower than nowadays.
It's because they have poor risk assessment and underdeveloped frontal cortex. Also lack of experience. Car accidents in relation to driver age also prove this.
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u/cheeeeezy 19d ago
There gotta be a better article to link than yahoo
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u/[deleted] 19d ago
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u/Lo-siento-juan 19d ago
A lot of the time it's a study of an area where people are known to have lived or traveled through often, they'll use mapping of finds and geophysical imaging to determine likely locations. Often though it's largely luck.
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u/Kevin_Uxbridge 19d ago
Believe it or not, it's mostly about looking for 'old dirt'. Not all depositional environments are good for fossils and bones, but the better ones are often datable. Find dirt of the right age and poke around.
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u/GreenLurka 19d ago
If you were looking for an injured camper, where would you go looking?
Now bring a spade.
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u/Phokasi 19d ago
Caves are the best place to start looking. Not because all early humans were "cavemen", most likely were not, although they sometimes used caves as places for shelter or perhaps burials. The bigger factors are:
1) the cave floor one-hundred-thousand years ago is still close to the cave floor today, it's not like the ground surface outside where remains could be buried under one hundred meters of soil deposits.
2) remains rapidly disappear unless they're in a dry sterile environment. This is even more rapid in a humid rainforest environment like in SE Asia. If you're going to find anything there it is probably in a cave.
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u/junktown2161 19d ago
Those arrow heads look mean as hell. Some serious skill went into making those.
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u/shieldtwin 19d ago
Unknown to science is such a weird thing to say. They were unknown to modern humans. Science is just a process humans use, it isnāt an entity
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u/Dapper-Analyst-3686 19d ago
It is an entity. Science can be used like "scientific method," but science is also "a systematically organized body of knowledge on a particular subject." It's pretty common for people to say "unknown to science." Similarly, you hear of "new science," even if it comes from established methods. "Climate change science" is not an entirely unique method for studying climate change, it is a body of knowledge in that field.
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u/shieldtwin 19d ago
Itās weird wording and sounds like weāre speaking a deity.
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u/Dapper-Analyst-3686 19d ago
Well it makes a lot more sense when you realize that it isn't just a process that people use, but rather a collection of information that has passed some criteria, some more than others. A new discovery is unknown to that collection. It would be better wording in this case to specify the particular scientific field in which the discovery was unknown, because new human species is certainly not unknown to all scientific fields.
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u/onlyonetruthm8 18d ago
That's accurate there. And they control the knowledge passed around to make sure we only get told about what what they want us to know. You can not trust a scientist that is well respected by the science magazine publishers.
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u/atomicmarc 19d ago
I keep seeing this added comment in both /u/science and here - "previously unknown to science". As if science ever claimed to be omniscient. Or journalists were ever good at writing accurate headlines.
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u/yuube 19d ago
You can take it that way but theyāre highlighting itās an undiscovered people which is always exciting in my opinion.
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u/MrPhi 19d ago
Hairdressers found a new haircut previously unknown to hairdressing.
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u/Sideos385 19d ago
To be fair, I donāt think anything that claims to be omniscient would announce something new and specify that it was āpreviously unknown to usā.
But also, it doesnāt imply that science is omniscient either. In this context, for people not very familiar with this specific type of thing and the history of such discoveries, it explains potentially the most significant part of the discovery. (That we had no idea it existed prior to finding this).
Hereās what I think, as an unfamiliar generally curious person, when I read a headline like this. 1) I think itās cool to find any human remains that are old. 2) Itās especially cool to have found a young person
So without the tidbit telling me we didnāt know about these people, Iām initially missing out the most interesting part to me, which is that itās totally new. And I may have skipped on clicking in.
Conclusion: this does not imply science is omniscient and itās more relevant with less knowledge you have of the subject.
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u/TheMarsian 19d ago
I'll settle with "previously unknown."
like if science don't know about it, then we don't.
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u/atomicmarc 19d ago
You're not wrong, I'm just sick of seeing that phrase. it implies (to me) that science SHOULD know everything but doesn't. Naturally, science will never know everything but it's the best way we have of learning about the universe.
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u/HokumsRazor 19d ago
Journalism believes in the science of click-bait headlines š
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u/Lo-siento-juan 19d ago
It's not really a bad title though, it's not lied about anything or exaggerated anything, it didn't even tell me that I'll never guess what happend next
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u/platitood 19d ago
It never occurred to me to read it that way. I wonder if youāve been fighting a lot with people who are anti-science, and you are starting to see that attitude where it doesnāt exist?
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u/ExactYogurt 19d ago
Why are 80% of people clowning in this subreddit? Variations of millenial jokes all over the place. Does nobody care about this find?
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u/OrlandoArtGuy 19d ago
You should start your own reddit.
One where people don't mock news on science and fossils, hell, throw on other news as well.
You could call it Digg
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u/mr-death 19d ago
That's reddit for you. Almost every comment thread is littered with the same(ish,) fill-in-the-blanks jokes, movie references and spammed emojis.
I'm constantly looking for new subreddits and deleting those that are taken over, but I think it might be nearing time for me to just leave.
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u/ExactYogurt 19d ago
And those jokes are upvoted and people need to skip a lot of content to access commentary and additional knowledge on topic
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u/L00MWeaver 19d ago
50 000 years ago 99% of humans got extinct, and again 12 000 years ago. We are pretty inbreed, more diversity between dna of chimpanses than humans. 65 000 years ago there was 6 different living Homo species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens killed them all.
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u/uzra 19d ago
I want to see a doc about this story.
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u/L00MWeaver 19d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory Killed 99% and again 50 000 after that again 99%
The Youngest Toba eruption has been linked to a genetic bottleneck in human evolution about 70,000 years ago,[29][30] which may have resulted in a severe reduction in the size of the total human population due to the effects of the eruption on the global climate.[31] According to the genetic bottleneck theory, between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, human populations sharply decreased to 3,000ā10,000 surviving individuals.[32][33] It is supported by some genetic evidence suggesting that today's humans are descended from a very small population of between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs that existed about 70,000 years ago.[34][35]
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u/PoliticalAnomoly 19d ago
Always wondered if there was a way to use lasers or sonar to detect small caves in mountainsides that were covered by landslides while people were sleeping in them.
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u/HighTreason25 19d ago
Hell yeah, new human class dropped! I for one welcome our new cousins.
That being said, there's gonna be some real fun in readjusting and refitting the human section of the evolutionarily tree there.
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u/esdraelon 19d ago
This is why you can't trust science.
I've known about "teenagers" for almost 7 years now, and "science" is just now discovering them.
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u/dirtdobber2020 19d ago
Or they have no idea how many years ago it was and their guess is a bust. Trust the science remember
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u/kaysea112 19d ago
So when the austroneseans branched into groups of papa new guinea and australian peoples, one group interbred with mainland asia and formed this isolated toalean culture in indonesia.
But I never knew denisovans interbred with the austroneseans. So there was a time when three human species possibly interacted with one another within this region.