We talked about these recent findings already at PS throughout this year, now Gunter Bechly discusses them on an excellent summary article at ENV. His summary of the recent finds is outstanding and fits in nicely with the discussion we had at PS.
Perhaps Gunter can stop by and we can discuss at greater detail as these are fascinating results that are coming faster and faster. Perhaps we can also talk about the South American results also.
Also PS should work with Gunter to round up all those Darwinian anthropologists for retraining.
But who’s he bashing? No named “Darwinian anthropologists” Sounds like the boogie man under the bed. That why I said PS and Gunter should work together to round up these Darwinian anthropological infidels and bring them here for retraining. Do you catch the dog whistle on racism?
Agreed. He tries to create a false equivalency between those who deny any possibility of humans evolving from ape-like ancestors and those who disagree about the fine details of how humans evolved from ape-like ancestors. It reminds me of Asimov’s essay “The Relativity of Wrong”
My issues with this are he is missing relevant literature. LD 350-1 probably isn’t Homo. He leaves out the back and forth between John Hawks and Villmoare. His view of human origins also seems way out of date. These ideas and possibilities have been on the table for a while now. And no one is fighting them. Human evolution has become more complex but none of these discoveries change a certain fact. I’ll quote Chris Stringer from his recent review:
“the cumulative evidence still suggests that all modern humans are descended from African *H. sapiens”
Also like this from Chris:
“These recent findings illustrate why researchers must remain open to challenging the prevailing theories of modern human origins.”
@Agauger do you know at what level Gunter accepts human evolution? Is at the level of Genus like you or does he prefer a special creation of H.sapiens or what?
What does that mean? We all descended from Africa, sure. But we also all descended from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. What is meant by this claim?
We already know that “out of Africa” in the strict sense is false. The real debate now seems to be the extent of interbreeding in the past. The evidence for interbreeding everywhere just keeps increasing and increasing from all lines of evidence.
This is the main point to take away from discussions on this topic. It isn’t a binary choice between Out of Africa and Multiregional. Rather, it is about the relative impact each process had on modern populations. @glipsnort is probably the best person to ask, but from my very limited reading and understanding the Out of Africa model explains a very large part of the modern human genome while interbreeding explains a much smaller percentage. As with anything in science, this could change with new evidence.
It means that none of these discoveries change the fact that what we recognize as H. sapiens arose In Africa and pretty much every living person is descended from a population that migrated out of Africa like what, 70kya?
Yes and with more genetic diversity than those modern humans that left Africa. So you’re statement above “pretty much every living person is descended from a population that migrated out of Africa like 70 kya” isn’t true.
Nope. Only thing I’m sensing is maybe you’re wanting to accuse me of some type of racism because my comment made it seem like I was discounting an entire group of people. When in actuality I was at work hiding my phone from my boss and did a short version. I thought everyone would know what I meant.
A view going around in the human origins debate is that the modern humans that left Africa in large numbers around 70 kya were special compared to the millions of modern humans that remained in Africa and diversified throughout the African continent. Nothing special happened to those modern humans who left Africa except they were able to mix with human species that evolved outside of Africa, namely Neanderthals and Denosivans. Africa remained the place where modern humans became modern humans and the place with the largest population and diversity of modern humans for a very long time, perhaps into the present time.
Ignoring the African origins of modern humans and the enormous diversity of humans in Africa, and instead taking the human migration in Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas as more significant than human activity in greater numbers in Africa could be considered biased. We need to discover more about how humans migrated throughout Africa over the past million years.
