> As for the timeline, bipedality is far older than one million years before sapiens, and in fact arrives around three million years before the earliest erectus. Australopiths are decidedly bipedal by 5mya, there’s a strong case for pushing this another million years back. Erectus dates back to just barely 2mya.

There are different kinds of bipedalism. Australopithecus was not an obligate biped. Early homo were unable to run even if they were obligate bipeds. Erectus was the first hominin that demonstrated modern capabilities. This is what I meant by cursorial adaptions, i.e. adaptations for running, which are not derived traits from earlier primates and novel to Erectus onwards. Nuchal ligaments, Long bone length, gait, narrowing of the hip, extension of the achilles tendon and arched foot, broader heel and short toes. I'm unsure of any others off the top of my head. These traits would have appeared around 1.8mya, but erectus was a highly variable chronospecies so I said "over a million years ago" because I wasn't positive if they appeared all at once. If they were present in African erectus or Asian erectus, etc.

> Hair loss is a hazier picture because we still have basically all of the mammalian genetics for fur, and the adaptations seem to be substantially in hundreds of regulatory elements,

I wasn't actually counting hair loss as a thermoregulatory adaptation, because it definitely is more of a recent feature. Hair vs body lice and all. There are other adaptations which may have, or were, present. These include evaporative cooling, larger body size and its corresponding metabolic benefits and greater surface area (to prevent hyperthermia). The changes in gait and obligate bipedalism mentioned above also conferred metabolic/energy conservation benefits. Bipedalism itself can be considered such an adaptation, but it clearly didn't evolved in response to selective pressure for hunting, and that's the rub with much of this. It very well might be that we just evolved a kit that could be repurposed for a hunting style - and we're misunderstanding the cause and effect.

> Remember, this is all a position again the actual hypothesis coined “Endurance Running/Persistence Hunting Hypothesis”, not the occurrence of persistence hunting in human evolutionary history overall, which is incontrovertible. The hypothesis frames persistence hunting as the adaptive roadmap for bipedalism and hairlessness, and given the timeline of these elements it’s basically unsupportable.

This is a fair point. There is of course the question of when it appears, and I'd argue that there is support for its appearance well before sapiens.

> which is incontrovertible.

I disagree about how emphatic this is. I think there's ample support for its occurrence, of course, and I do believe it, but the primary source for it in modern humans comes from a single author (I don't recall his name, but it might be Liebenberg) writing about the San, who are very much a removed population operating outside their indigenous cultural norms. Moreover, there are several criticisms of his work the greatest that out of the dozen or two dozen observed persistence hunts, the majority of them were induced by the researcher and not spontaneous. So there's weak evidence that it was a preferred strategy, although from my own reading it's actually very successful compared to traditional hunting in that the great majority of hunts are successful and on average the caloric efficiency does well exceed a traditional hunt when factoring in success rate. Maybe they're just picky.

Maybe projectile weapons are just much safer and preferred. One of the postulates of the hypothesis is that persistence hunting was a response to the general inability of a hominin to take down non-exhausted megafauna through other means. Even with handaxes and spears, it would be very difficult, unless you're (literally) a Neanderthal. Perhaps the adoption of projectile weapons (the oldest don't predate sapiens, I believe 90kya) is what ultimately ended the reliance, if any, on habitual persistence hunting. Could Erectus even throw a spear? I seem to recall hearing something about their wrist being unable to rotate.

Why did they have to be forcibly evacuated? Did they not realise how brutal the Japanese army was?

I cannot think of a single dictatorship that ended with a peaceful transfer of power. The non-violent exchange of power is what distinguishes a demorcacy from a dictatorship. So finding a book about specific dictatorships and peaceful transitions of power seems hard. I would suggest looking into political science or philisophical works to address those topics.

The invention of the washing machine. Widespread literacy. Child labor laws. Increased enfranchisement.

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Can anyone recommend me any books/podcasts/docs about Taiwanese history? I’ve read Forbidden Nation by Manthorpe and I’m looking for more.

Additionally, any good bios or histories on Sun Yat Sen? Thx!

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That is unfortunately what we call a “just so” story, a common logical error when looking at traits and suggesting adaptive histories for them based on some trait interactions at a given point in time.

As for the timeline, bipedality is far older than one million years before sapiens, and in fact arrives around three million years before the earliest erectus. Australopiths are decidedly bipedal by 5mya, there’s a strong case for pushing this another million years back. Erectus dates back to just barely 2mya.

So, we’ll say bipedality arrives at around 5mya, the earliest stone tools at 3.2, the persistent presence of stone tools at 2.7, the diaspora of toolmakers out of Africa at 2.2, persistent butchery at 1.9, which are mostly small animals not really suited to persistence predation. Megafauna butchery arrives at around 1.5, a full 3.5+ million years after bipedalism.

Hair loss is a hazier picture because we still have basically all of the mammalian genetics for fur, and the adaptations seem to be substantially in hundreds of regulatory elements, which are harder to date as precisely. That said, the error bars don’t really extend back much further than 900kya, which is 1.1 mya after megafauna butchery becomes commonplace. What we’d need to see is hair loss happening during the transition from persistent butchery of small animals and into larger ungulates, etc, not over a million years after.

Remember, this is all a position again the actual hypothesis coined “Endurance Running/Persistence Hunting Hypothesis”, not the occurrence of persistence hunting in human evolutionary history overall, which is incontrovertible. The hypothesis frames persistence hunting as the adaptive roadmap for bipedalism and hairlessness, and given the timeline of these elements it’s basically unsupportable.

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Plenty of people disagree with you. It's officially used more than you seem to realize. It is the reality of it too. Like the words literally properly encompass what happened... If a species dies out... It lost. Period.

It’s not possible to fix.

Here’s a question for you. There are three species of zebra— grevy’s, mountain, and plains. You might wonder “why aren’t they all just the same species?”

It’s a good question. Turns out all three species have completely different number of chromosomes. Sure, they all look very similar and can interbreed, but once you start to look underneath the hood, you discover complicated distinctions. Lumping them all together erases those distinctions and is an oversimplification in that case.

That’s what scientists struggle with and why there’s so much discussion. You have animals that LOOK very much alike, but when you unravel their genomes and trace their phylogenetic and geographical history, you realize a lot of those similarities are very superficial.

There’s no “fixing” that. There’s just making adjustments and tweaks as we gain more information and improve our understanding of how different groups of similar animals relate to each other.

Humans and Neanderthals have the same number of chromosomes. But under the hood, we’re looking at evidence that hybridization wasn’t simple, and that the male offspring of such unions may have been infertile or even sterile. That suggests that the two groups were far more distant than any ethnic distinction you’d find in modern humans today, while still being a lot closer to each other than a Plains Zebra is to a Grevy’s Zebra.

The comparison may be a lot more similar to domestic cats and Asian leopard cats. The crossing between those two species produces the breed we know as Bengal cats today. But not all the direct offspring of such pairings are fertile— interestingly, as in Human-Neanderthal hybrids, the male offspring are often infertile. But nobody in their right mind would say an Asian Leopard Cat is the same species as a domestic housecat.

That’s just one example of why it’s complicated.

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I feel like this exact same article comes out once a year. Didn't we already know this?

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Another group of archaic/early humans, alongside the likes of Neanderthals

I think winning and losing are not a good analogy for the fluctuations on a gene pool caused by the contact of two previously separate populations and their interbreeding.

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whats denisovan?

do we know that homo sapiens are not just a mix of homo something and neanderthals?

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yes, they are caried by us today.

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All scientific based definitions are objective and can be used for classification purposes. It is basically useless to try to find a single answer, but the debate is extremely profitable.
This is a better explanation than I can give you https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-species-the-most-important-concept-in-all-of-biology-is-a-complete-mystery-119200