Papua’s ‘monkeys’
Anthropologists are excitedly researching how indigenous Papuans have less homosapien DNA than the people who abuse them as “monkeys”…..
In Papua, non-indigenous Indonesians routinely abuse indigenous Papuans using the term ‘monkeys’ . What’s the anthropological angle? Well, to anthropologists, Papua is the Galapagos of ‘humans’.
Homosapiens overlapped in history with Neanderthals. Until recently, anthropologists used the fact that the two did not breed to delineate the two as different species of human. Through genetic analysis of living people in Papua and elsewhere, anthropologists have now established that that the two did breed after all.
Employing the technology of Genome Wide Association Studies (GWASs), which involves the interrogation of genetic information using prodigiously growing computing power, it was first proposed in 2010 that as homosapiens moved out of Africa they mated with neanderthals. This incurred a neanderthal DNA incidence in modern humans ranging from close to 0% in Africa to up to 4% in Asia and, most notably, Papua.
More recently, genetic analysis has led anthropologists to the discovery of another sub-species of human; the Denisovan. In East Asia, mating between denisovans and homosapiens was more extensive than between neanderthals and homosapiens. As a result, Aboriginals, Melanesians and in particular Papuans today are said by anthropologists to share perhaps 6% of their DNA with denisovans, in addition to that which they share with neanderthals.
Amongst a large number of recent papers on the subject, Skov et al have published research claiming to detect larger than expected amounts of neanderthal and denisovan DNA in modern Papuans. The research took place in Papua New Guinea. The abstract includes:
“(We) detect archaic introgression in 89 Papuans and show how the identified segments can be assigned to likely Neanderthal or Denisovan origin. We report more Denisovan admixture than previous studies and find a shift in size distribution of fragments of Neanderthal and Denisovan origin that is compatible with a difference in admixture time”.
In common with many other researchers today, these anthropologists used GWASs to identify ‘private’ groupings of human through analysis of the latter’s DNA. “Admixture” here is the preferred anthropological term for the outcome of homosapien/neanderthal/Denisovan crossbreeding; “archaic introgression” is the presence of non-homosapien DNA in living Papuans.
In respect of such research in Papua, leading anthropologist Grayson Camp says: “So far I have not seen any convincing functional studies where you take the Neanderthal variant and the human variant and do controlled experiments…no-one has actually shown yet in culture that a human and Neanderthal allele have a different physiological function. That will be exciting when someone does” (author’s bold).
To translate this from the anthropologese: It will be exciting when anthropologists are able to show how some humans today are physiologically and cognitively different from others because of their non-homosapien heritage.
Notably, Camp implies that neanderthals, and presumably denisovans, were not human. This is a common slip amongst anthropologists, although most today prefer to use the term modern humans to make the same implicit distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’.
Anthropologists like Skov et al and Camp are therefore researching the physiological and cognitive effects in indigenous Papuans of having less homosapien (for Camp, “human”) DNA than the non-indigenous Indonesians who racially abuse them as less-than-human ‘monkeys’.
The science looks strong; the commonsense and value a lot less so.
