Svante Paabo
assumes "some new creature" "carried this mitochondrial genome out of Africa about a million years", as do most commentators. It strikes me that a multiregionalist explanation is as consistent if not more consistent with the evidence at hand. If we entertain the possibility that "African Eve" ultimately descends from Eurasian
Homo erectus, we don't need to posit some unknown intermediate "out of Africa" event.
Reference: Johannes Krause, Qiaomei Fu, Jeffrey M. Good, Bence Viola, Michael V. Shunkov, Anatoli P. Derevianko & Svante Pääbo.
The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia. Nature advance online publication 24 March 2010. doi:10.1038/nature08976.
Probably not news to you, but JH's blog says it might be only a highly divergent mt line within neanderthals, since mtDNA is just one, what do you call it, large non-recombining bloc. If it is a new taxon it should have other divergent loci (in its yet-unpublished nuclear genome).
ReplyDeleteHe points out that allelic divergences within a species can be much older than the last speciation of the species. I know this is true in us for some of our MHC lineages - some of them branched off before we branched from chimps.
If we entertain the possibility that "African Eve" ultimately descends from Eurasian Homo erectus, we don't need to posit some unknown intermediate "out of Africa" event. - n/a
ReplyDeleteYes, Fuerle's outstanding research seems to suggest an erectine origin for sub-Saharan Africans and a separate evolution of anatomically modern humans taking place in Eurasia.
Of course we both know the implications of this are "racist" and will thus never be entertained until there is some kind of serious reorientation of academic thought.
RS,
ReplyDeleteYes, hence the name of my post. I do notice Hawks says:
"But a million-year-old divergence does tell us one thing: this cannot represent a Homo erectus population that originated in Africa 2 million years ago, colonized Asia around the time of Dmanisi, and was isolated after that time.
In other words, it would argue strongly against the hypothesis of a deep divergence of eastern and western hominin species, starting with the initial dispersal of humans from Africa in the Early Pleistocene. It argues in favor of continued genetic exchanges or a more complex history of population movements.
I hesitate to take this line of reasoning too far. It's a pinky bone."