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Comment on At somepoint in human history there was likely a day where not a single human died.

So in my professional opinion I’d say no. I studied anthropology and work in Archaeology.

Evolution just isn’t simply fast enough to do that. It’s a very very slow series of changes. There would never be a point that two homo erectus would have given birth to a modern human. Eventually the populations would so much genetically we would then arbitrarily classify them as human, but it would be on a population scale.

So yeah there was never just 1 human.

Honestly this demonstrates the flaws of how we try to arbitrarily classify species.

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TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Here we stumble again on the flawed definition of a species. It’s not black and white. Biology is a fuzzy mess with no clear borders, so am the fuzzy terms should be treated accordingly.

People love clear boundaries, but biology doesn’t work that way. Everything in biology is incredibly complex, so any rule of thumb comes with huge caveats. Fuzzy concepts like “species” or even “life” are useful—as long as you avoid the grey areas.

The moment you start exploring edge cases, all bets are off, and the warranty on all neat definitions expires. Nothing works neatly with edge cases, so those who wander into the grey area are on their own.

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Coopr8@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Yes, it very much depends on the definition of Homo sapiens.

There is a strict genetic definition in which a set of defining genes constrain the species, in which case there was likely a first human, but there is every possibility that their first descendents didn't meet that definition and it took a few generations of back and forthing and natural selection for a consistent line of humans to exist.

On the other hand you could define the species based on social behavior, in which case the "first human" only arose in context of at least one other member of the species, and "Adam and Eve" or "Annie and Eve" or "Adam and Steve" scenario.

Then you go to what most agricultrually minded people think of as a "species", which is fetile interbreeding. In that case it seems like there never really was a separation between Homo sapiens and Homo erectus and Neanderthals, as there is now broadly accepted evidence of interbreeding long past the "differentiation" of the species, though social and territorial differences seem to have kept them from re-merging into a unified population.

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NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I don’t think they were saying that two cave men banged and out popped Ryan Gosling.

But at some point? The very nature of incremental evolution means that “homo sapiens” was indeed born and, for however brief a moment, there was truly one single “human”.

That said, nobody will EVER be able to figure out when or where that was for obvious reasons. And it truly doesn’t matter since it would still have been raised and live the same as its parents and even its less evolved siblings and so forth.

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- arrow74@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Unfortunately no it does not mean that. At least according to the current science of taphonomy.
  
  Populations evolve, individuals do not. Individuals can have genetic mutations that improve their ability to reproduce which impacts evolution.
  
  Parents of one species cannot give birth to a new species. Sure their offspring may look closer to what we associate with one species or another, but those genetics are held within the parents and greater population. You can have an individual born that appeared strikingly like a modern human, but if their population hasn’t genetically changed enough their offspring go right back to looking just like any other precursor to modern humans.
  
  It’s messy and annoying. People love to have a definitive starting and ending point, but thr world juat doesn’t work that way. There’s are reason the start of a new species is given as an estimate that ranges tens of thousands to even sometimes hundreds of thousands years.
  
  Although there are lots of ongoing arguments on where we draw these lines because it is arbitrary to a degree. However, there is absolutely no acceptance that parents of one species can give birth to another. That just isn’t evolution.
  
  Now that’s the scientific answer. I think the more philosophical questions around what is human is much more interesting. Where should that line be drawn in our deep past? When is the psyche truly human?
  
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  - NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Again. Nobody is saying there is a definitive starting point of “In the year 0 ICBA, the first homo sapien was born”. There fundamentally cannot be.
    
    But… there was. Or, to be less precise, there were probably multiple definitive starting points before one took hold.
    
    You can have an individual born that appeared strikingly like a modern human, but if their population hasn’t genetically changed enough their offspring go right back to looking just like any other precursor to modern humans.
    
    Yes. The individual was, potentially, “evolved”. But the population “reverted” back. That doesn’t change the fact that there was an individual who had reached the next stage. Because… a mutation/defect is isolated until it isn’t.
    
    But for the purposes of a thought experiment/“shower thought”? Yeah, there was very much a point where a single human existed. We just will never know beyond “it probably happened in this very large span of time”.
    
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    arrow74@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Unfortunately that’s still not quite right.
    
    The individual was, potentially, “evolved”. But the population “reverted” back.
    
    Individuals cannot evolve, but more importantly there is no “reverting back” evolution moves in one direction. It’s the slow slow change in the genetics genetics of an entire population.
    
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  - Aeao@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I disagree with science I guess then.
    
    I consider like life and death. I can point at someone alive and I can point at someone dead but in between it gets tricky.
    
    There’s is an exact line between life and death but it’s impossible to really say exactly where that is.
    
    At a certain point you have to call an individual a human. Their parents would therefore not be “human”
    
    We may not know exactly where that line is and that line is probably arbitrary and basically meaningless but there has to be a line where you say “okay that’s a human “
    
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    PyroVK@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Think of it like language, was there ever Latin speaking parents that gave birth to a French speaking child? No, it’s a gradual change. Or take a color gradient from blue to red there’s a definite change taking place but picking out one specific spot in the middle might be purple
    
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