>The bone turned out to be the very first Denisovan fossil ever found because the specimens found in the Denisova Cave in Siberia's Altai Mountains were unearthed 28 years after the monk's discovery. But researchers didn't know that at the time.
Interesting, so the Denisovans might have been called something else if they had only looked at this?
This is actually common situation. If you look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Neanderthal_fossils, the first Neanderthal fossil found was Engis 2 in 1829. The namesake fossil Neanderthal 1 was found in the Neandertal valley in 1856. It is just that Engis 2 was found but not recognized as Neanderthal fossil until 1936.
Yes but the immediate meaning of those terms is the totality of their definition in normal communication.
I love - or am practically obsessed with - etymologies, but an etymology is the linguistic equivalent of of a fossil.
Much as evolution reused terrestrial therapod dinosaur feathers for flight in their bird descendants, language creates new meanings and concepts by reusing older ones. And thankfully we don't communicate in etymologies.
Naming this sketchily understood category of ancient people after some cave in Russia (itself named after one Denis, an 18th century religious separatist hermit who lived there by himself) is only obscure at the start. As we become familiar with the name “Denisovan” it becomes a fine description, whether or not we know or care about Denis or his cave.
Denisovans are speculated to have existed no more recently than 15,000 years ago- in New Guinea, at that. That's at minimum 700 generations ago. This jaw find is 8,000 or more generations ago.
The Tibetan origin legend is not random, has been around for a long time, and is an important part of the Buddhist and Bon traditions within Tibet. The “monkey” is referencing the same race of hominid as the legendary Hanuman in Hindu myths. The idea here passed down in the Tibetan tradition is that the wild race of “ogres” have been civilized by noble influences.
So while random legends might be that, there may be other characteristics of legends that are not being accounted for with a purely random selection.
I am not using the same argument. I am not arguing that something must be true by disproving something. I think you misundersand what I am suggesting here.
I am suggesting that there may be a legend that was somehow carried from the days that the Denisovians (ogress) mated with Homo Sapiens (monkey), so that that the modern-day Tibetans carried those genes for living in high altitudes. That mechanism for passing on those genes are exactly what the the article is suggesting.
At no point am I saying that these legends were somehow the cause. I am not sure how you got to that idea.
This isn't the right question. There's nothing stopping a legend from persisting indefinitely.
But the information about where a legend came from or how old it might be will become unrecoverable.
As a minor digression, consider the related question "how long can a word persist in a language?". We can trace languages back several thousand years. Many words don't go back that far. Many words do go back that far, but have changed significantly in form, meaning, or both. Some words have, by coincidence, been preserved almost exactly in both form and meaning -- in at least one descendant language. There's no reason not to expect the same pattern to hold at larger timescales... but we can't reconstruct ancestor languages at those larger timescales, so there's no way to evaluate the claim directly.
Back in the realm of legends, we know that the proto-Indo-Europeans had a legend of a warrior who kills his own son. The Irish reflex of this legend is the story of Cuchulainn, and the Greek reflex is the story of Hercules. These two stories have some suggestive similarities, but in isolation it is not obvious that they are the same story. In particular, the manner in which each kills his own son is totally different. We are nevertheless confident of the relationship between the legends because we can see the same legend occurring in other Indo-European traditions.
So in summary:
1. A cultural feature may persist for pretty much any length of time.
2. However, after a while it becomes impossible to determine how long the feature has been in place for.
3. And very old features are likely to have mutated in some ways; without points of comparison, it is not possible to tell which aspects of something are old and which are new.
Multiple cultures have legends of great floods wiping out civilisation... for which one candidate common ur-event is the sudden sea rises at the end of the last glacial period.
Which if true would put legend persistence at at least 12,000 years.
Many people from Peru and Bolivia (edit: I guess also Mexico) also inherited some genes like these in Tibet that let you breathe at high altitudes. I'm wondering if it could be the same explanation since natives of the Americas allegedly crossed that land bridge from Asia. These people's chests and lungs are quite large compared to a normal person and you can see it in the body type.
This could also be explained by convergent evolution [1] where a similar trait was created by an independent evolutionary path.
The wiki page for 'High-altitude adaptation' in humans even mentions that adaptation to high altitude arose independently among different highlanders as a result of convergent evolution. [2]
Interesting that you said that. I've concluded long ago that the only way we can successfully live off earth is to adapt our bodies to live with different gravity, air pressures, etc.
Be it space or submarine habitats, at some point it has to make sense to have some workers who are adapted to hypoxic situations, if only for emergency work. You go to work, you have kids, the kids fall in love, you have grandkids that might have one, both, or neither of the genes. A few more mingled generations and a little selective pressure here and there and soon you have specialists with two copies of the genes.
I think it's plausible for things to play out something like this, a bit different from Kim Stanley Robinson's predictions in a few critical ways:
You have a group of people on Mars who can survive and reproduce in cheaper habitats than everyone else, eventually they'd realize they could sod off and do their own thing. Lower barrier to entry maybe overcomes economic and political pressure, and pretty soon they outnumber everybody else. Your first group that refer to themselves as ethnic 'Martians': Tall, dark skinned, barrel chested (because of the air) individuals who speak a pidgin of English, Amharic, Quechua, and a handful of Tibetan words, and don't answer to Earth.
They are the first people who can walk the terraformed surface without equipment, and they explode out onto the surface. A fresh wave of earthlings from above 10,000 feet arrive and bolster the numbers and gene pool. As terraforming continues, a second wave inundates the First Peoples with many immigrants who swarm to the lowlands. There is a comedian who does an entire monologue on the crazy customs of the New Coloradans, and how they never seem to get along with the New New Mexicans (which leads to 3 full minutes of material on why the hell they called it New New Mexico). For her second tour, she asks why so many Mormons are there. This trickle never really slows down, and Albuquerque and El Paso become a kind of continuous concierge service where people come to live for a year, and then either go home or to the space port to fly to Mars (people who go through Albuquerque have better outcomes, but El Paso competes on price).
Eventually a third wave brings people from everywhere, and the 'Old Ways' find themselves in the highlands at first, and on the slopes of Olympus Mons later, where no amount of terraforming will ever create a popular destination for lowlanders or Earthers.
The genes have already evolved, you're just selecting for them, which doesn't take long.
The rich have access to gene editing. I seriously doubt working class Martians will. And I'm not sure that safe gene editing will get here before Mars colonies do. I could see it going either way. People will try it anyway, and some will win the lottery while others lose.
We already have gene editing. Last week's "60 Minutes" featured a young woman being cured (so far as the doctors can tell) of sickle cell anemia with gene editing.
Interesting, so the Denisovans might have been called something else if they had only looked at this?