Weekly “what are you reading” Thread #52

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.

!bookworms !classics

I'm started readings some Chekhov's short-stories. First one was “The Kiss”.

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tempest me/me 5mo ago #6518245

I've been reading Humans: From the Beginning. It's an interesting book about all of prehistory, basically charting human development from our ape-like ancestors up to (and I think including) the middle bronze ages. I'm only like 10% through the book so far, and the author is discussing the various Homo species - the chapter I'm currently reading is about their spread in east Asia, including these hobbit-like people Homo florienses or something like that, which we think got isolated on an island and over hundreds of generations shrank in stature (and significantly in brain size :marseygiggle: ).

Interestingly, it seems like Homo erectus was probably around in this region all the way up until 10-20k years ago, and likely interbred with early Homo sapiens. I wonder if that's part of the reason Asians are shorter, but I still haven't gotten to the part of the book on Homo sapiens yet so I'll need to keep reading :marseyreading: to find out.

I do recommend the book, though. It's not too dry but is fairly well researched and up-to-date (including discoveries from just the past few years), and all the potential findings are backed by why we believe them and alternative theories, since there's just so much uncertainty in the field.

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nuclearshill gau/cho tempest 5mo ago #6518278

!biology

But wasn't Homo Erectus around the same size as Homo Sapiens? I remember reading about a H. Erectus fossil found being around 180cm tall

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tempest me/me nuclearshill 5mo ago #6518311

They were definitely taller in stature to Homo habilis (and almost certainly smarter), but not quite as tall as modern Homo sapiens, at least on average. Although there seems to have been pretty significant regional differences. The author discusses how Homo ergaster is sometimes used to refer to an African variant of Homo erectus, but he rejects it and uses Homo erectus for both, prefacing with "Asian" or "African" as necessary.

Apparently there's quite a bit of drama about this kind of thing because there's very little fossil evidence of early hominins (up until a decade ago probably all known fossils in the world would have fit in the back of a single pickup truck). So there are a lot of assumptions that have to be made, and most relationships between species are not clear (ie which ones evolved from which), and even whether specific fossils are the same of different species is uncertain. He talks about "splitters" who think there are more different species and "lumpers" who try to merge fossils into the same species.