OUR DAILY THREAD: The Most Overlooked Story Of The Year
We're all hominins now
THE SET-UP: No matter how often I bring it up, I am still amazed that we’re in the 21st Century and the Speaker of the House believes the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. It also amazes me that, as a Gallup poll found in 2024, 37% of Americans agreed that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” That’s slightly more than the 34% who think Homo Sapiens “developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.”
The outlier is, of course, the 24% of us who are certain that humans “developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.” On the other hand, 24% is a high-water mark … up from just 9% who agreed with that statement in the year 2000.
It’s clear that something changed in 2000.
That was the year George W. Bush won the presidency as an unabashedly Christian candidate who promised to govern accordingly. It is also right before another set of Abrahamic Monotheists launched the 9/11 attack, which triggered the Global War on Terror and, according to then-president Bush, a divinely-endorsed invasion of an overwhelmingly Muslim country that had nothing to do with 9/11, nor did it pose a threat to the US. That, in turn, set off more violence by Christianity’s Muslim cousins … which was mostly directed at other Muslims.
Not to be outdone, the two direct descendants of Abraham—Muslims and Jews—spent the first twenty-five years of this century killing each other in the so-called “Holy Land” in no small part because God supposedly issued a divine land deed four thousand years ago.
Taken together with the ascendance of political Evangelicalism, it could be that year after demoralizing year of Christians, Muslims and Jews killing each other has contributed to a much-discussed decline in religiosity in American life that, in turn, caused Americans to question the Biblical creation myth.
But something else happened in 2000.
In June of that year the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium announced its completion of a “working draft” of the human genome sequence. The Human Genome Project was fully realized three years later and then, in 2004, the Human Genome Sequencing Consortium published a “scientific description of the finished human genome sequence.”
Unlike often-contradictory religious texts that emerged from hazy oral traditions in the highly syncretic world of the Ancient Near East, the human genome is not built around a tribal identity or the need to placate a supernatural tribal warlord. That made a lot of sense for tribal people living at the well-trod crossroads between three continents. It also made sense in a region of religious foment where a host of different gods traveled on the backs of a number of different empires over the course of five millennia.
But that was then … and this is now.
And now we have the evolutionary equivalent of the Hubble or James Webb space-based telescopes. By looking at light that’s traveled for billions of years from distant stars and galaxies, we can basically look back in time. Now we humans can do something quite similar with DNA … and not just with “modern” humans, but also with a growing roster of hominins that not only preceded Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but, we are discovering, the five-to-seven kindred species that walked the Earth alongside our immediate ancestors.
And we are discovering quite a bit.
In fact, this last year was filled with breakthroughs and discoveries that paint a complex picture of recent human evolution … one that may stretch back 300,000 years. That’s approximately 295,000 years of human history before the god of Abrahamic Monotheism was first contrived by an ancient tribal people.
As this year’s bounty of scientific studies showed, many of those years were likely shared with Neanderthals and Denisovans … and with Homo erectus, Homo naledi, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis, and Homo heidelbergensis. And then there is the fact that we share DNA with some of them!
For my money, this is a far more profound story than that offered by an angry, genocidal tribal warlord who picks winners and losers according to one’s happenstance of birth. It also raises some fundamental questions about who we are as a species and why we are the last hominin standing. - jp
2025 was chock full of exciting discoveries in human evolution
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2507618-2025-was-chock-full-of-exciting-discoveries-in-human-evolution/
Human evolution’s biggest mystery has started to unravel. How 2025 tipped the scales
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/26/science/denisovans-dragon-man-human-evolution-mystery
10 things we learned about our human ancestors in 2025
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/10-things-we-learned-about-our-human-ancestors-in-2025
New fossil evidence suggests that “Lucy” may not have been our direct human ancestor after all
https://archaeologymag.com/2025/12/lucy-may-not-have-been-our-direct-human-ancestor/
1.5-million-year-old Homo erectus fossil reveals diversity and early migrations of ancient human ancestors
https://archaeologymag.com/2025/12/1-5-million-year-old-homo-erectus-face-reconstruction/
Modern humans arrived in Australia 60,000 years ago and may have interbred with archaic humans such as ‘hobbits’
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/human-evolution/modern-humans-arrived-in-australia-60-000-years-ago-and-may-have-interbred-with-archaic-humans-such-as-hobbits
10-thousand-year-old genomes from southern Africa change picture of human evolution
https://phys.org/news/2025-12-thousand-year-genomes-southern-africa.html