HN Reader

Actual paper link for those who are interested:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.040

For some broader context missing from the article, there's been a long-running "controversy" with certain people in the Chinese Academy of Sciences making an argument called the multiregional hypothesis that modern Chinese evolved in China out of archaic hominins. Every few years they'd dig up another set of bones with weird morphology, slap a new name on it, and claim it represents a new missing link. The Harbin skull was one of these.

These results firmly resolve that discussion on the side of the western consensus. They also support heretofore speculative ideas on how widespread Denisovans were, probably give us a couple other bones that are known to be similar (but lack genetics), and open a lot of research avenues going forward. Outstanding paper.

Dark truths are hidden in ancient dna

However there are two bizarre facts: 1.Modern-day Chinese carry virtually zero Denisovan DNA, yet it accounts for over 5% in indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia and Oceania; 2.Modern-day Chinese possess 20% more Neanderthal DNA than contemporary Europeans.

This reminds me of the day I found an old storage disk, an ancient "floppy disk", in my dad's attic. It had a label that said: "Tommy’s bookmarks". My mum doesn't remember any of his friends or colleagues named Tommy. In Uruguay, that's a common nickname for Tomas. They were probably website URLs, all long extinct by now (I'd guess).

I really don't like these clickbait titles