DNA data offer evidence of unknown extinct human relative

Traces of long-lost human cousins may be hiding in modern people’s DNA, a new computer analysis suggests.

People from Melanesia, a region in the South Pacific encompassing Papua New Guinea and surrounding islands, may carry genetic evidence of a previously unknown extinct hominid species, Ryan Bohlender reported October 20 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics. That species is probably not Neandertal or Denisovan, but a different, related hominid group, said Bohlender, a statistical geneticist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. “We’re missing a population or we’re misunderstanding something about the relationships,” he said.

This mysterious relative was probably from a third branch of the hominid family tree that produced Neandertals and Denisovans, an extinct distant cousin of Neandertals. While many Neandertal fossils have been found in Europe and Asia, Denisovans are known only from DNA from a finger bone and a couple of teeth found in a Siberian cave (SN: 12/12/15, p. 14).

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dna-data-offer-evidence-unknown-extinct-human-relative

Steve Bannon Wants To Start World War III

To Bannon, and the parade of conservatives he marshals to make his case (Newt Gingrich, Heather MacDonald, Roger Kimball, Michael Novak, and Shelby Steele all get lots of face time), the rebellions of the 1960s were all rooted in the baby-boom generation’s narcissism. Not once do racism or the Vietnam War appear as possible causes for mass movements for social change or human liberation. Instead, the left—represented by organizer Saul Alinsky and academics Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward—is blamed for manipulating the children of the 1960s into believing that American society was evil and that disruption of the status quo was moral. Only if you ignore the proximate causes of protest, like racism or war, can you make this sort of intellectual leap. But Bannon is just warming up.
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Bannon doesn’t just believe that we are in an existential conflict with Islam or with China. It seems he wants to exacerbate those conflicts into a new world war. As a believer in Strauss and Howe’s theory of history, Bannon fantasizes that he can use that cataclysm to forge a completely new order. He is now in a position to make that a reality.