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As far as I can tell, the entire "Out of Africa" model taken for granted within the MSM is being treated with increasing skepticism/nuance by scientists actuall
by themgt 9y ago
As far as I can tell, the entire "Out of Africa" model taken for granted within the MSM is being treated with increasing skepticism/nuance by scientists actually studying the facts on the ground, leading to these odd & increasingly ancient "first modern out of Africa" stories which may be confusing the public more than they're illuminating the history of human populations.
Razib Khan had a good short primer on this topic a little while back [1], excerpt:
The data for non-Africans is rather unequivocal. The vast majority of (>90%) of the ancestry of non-Africans seems to go back to a small number of common ancestors ~60,000 years ago. Perhaps in the range of ~1,000 individuals. These individuals seem to be a node within a phylogenetic tree where all the other branches are occupied by African populations. Between this period and ~15,000 years ago these non-Africans underwent a massive range expansion, until modern humans were present on all continents except Antarctica. Additionally, after the Holocene some of these non-African groups also experienced huge population growth due to intensive agricultural practice.
To give a sense of what I’m getting at, the bottleneck and common ancestry of non-Africans goes back ~60,000 years, but the shared ancestry of Khoisan peoples and non-Khoisan peoples goes back ~150,000-200,000 years. A major lacunae of the current discussion is that often the dynamics which characterize non-Africans are assumed to be applicable to Africans. But they are not.
[1] https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2017/04/28/beyond-out-of-africa-and-multiregionalism-a-new-synthesis/ https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2017/04/28/beyond-out-of-afri...
- Retric 9y ago200,000 years is still very recent. 2 million years ago we where limited to Africa. After that things get complicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus#/media/File:Human_evolution_chart-en.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus#/media/File:Human... And of course on these time scales people can easily walk all over the place. We only see remnants of larger populations lone wanderers are extremely unlikely to leave any evidence behind.
- danharaj 9y agoRazib Khan is a shit source
- toasterlovin 9y agoCan you elaborate? What I've read from him seems fairly reasonable, but I am open to updating my model.
- z2210558 9y agoI wouldn't have said "shit source", but I think he's better viewed as a reasonable populariser than a proper source. He is up with the literature (in the sense that the day after a new paper is published, he blogs about it), but he's not an authority in any way, and some of what he writes about e.g. the gendered aspect of IE migrations is a bit florid and unsupported by facts, as far as I can tell. You'd never find a reputable scientist in the field (lets say someone from Reich or Willerslev's labs) pushing lines like that. Regarding the Out of Africa (OoA) model, that is definitely still the consensus model. What is becoming clearer is that subsequent to the OoA event, there was substantial admixture within OoA populations, backflow into Africa, and introgression from Archaic Humans (i.e. interbreeding with Neanderthals etc). Razib refers to this as the "Braided streams" model, rather than a model where populations split and then remained isolated. The real revolution in understanding seems to me to be the role played by human migrations in hte formation of modern populations (i.e. the refutation of the "pots not people" view popular since the 60s.
- runlevel1 9y agoNot GP, but a brief search turned up this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2015/03/20/new-york-times-signs-contract-writer-razib-khan-then-dumps-him/?utm_term=.8a8da202a1ca https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2015/03/...
- Steko 9y agoHe's definitely a shit source that comes from "racial realist" fringe.
- Ar-Curunir 9y agoAs far as I know the scientific consensus is still on the Out of Africa theory.
- themgt 9y agoYou can read John Hawks, quoted in this post's linked NYT article, with his own take on recent findings[1], echoing many of the points made by Razib Khan. Even Chris Stringer, one of most vocal & staunch advocates for a simple Out of Africa has recently walked that back [2] If you are reading experts still standing behind a simplistic Out of Africa model after all the recent findings of archaic admixture and incredibly deep splits in human populations, I'd be very curious to see some links to papers/articles. [1] https://medium.com/@johnhawks/the-story-of-modern-human-origins-just-got-more-complicated-9e435bea24f6 https://medium.com/@johnhawks/the-story-of-modern-human-orig... [2] https://www.edge.org/conversation/christopher_stringer-rethinking-out-of-africa https://www.edge.org/conversation/christopher_stringer-rethi...
- Nomentatus 9y agoThere is one massive clue pointing to Africa: more genetic diversity there. This doesn't rule out interesting additions from other populations that left earlier than others, went further than we thought, etc; but it is the elephant in the room. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24984772 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24984772
- haberman 9y agoCan you recommend a good primer on what we know about evolution and the history of our species, and the supporting evidence? I thought The Selfish Gene would be this, but it seemed primarily focused on more abstract/philosophical questions, like group selection vs. gene selection. I'm more interested in concrete information about what our DNA and the fossil record can credibly establish. I want to know what facts are indisputably known, and which are more speculative.
- bobcostas55 9y agoIt's not out until March, but _Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past_ sounds like what you're looking for.
- sigil 9y agoIt sounds like there's precious little certainty to be had [1]: So far, nobody has recovered ancient DNA from archaic human skeletal remains in Africa. The 2000-year-old Ballito Bay boy is not the oldest, but there are no DNA results from truly archaic specimens, like the Kabwe skull from Zambia. As a result, we don’t have the kind of record within Africa that geneticists have built for Neanderthals and Denisovans in Eurasia... Morphology does not tell the story of modern human origins...Did short faces and rounded braincases really make a difference to the survival and success of modern humans? Maybe they were chance legacies of the population that gave rise to our gene pool. We don’t know. Conclusion: We have to discover more fossils. That’s the way that we will start to solve these new problems and shed light on old mysteries. [1] https://medium.com/@johnhawks/the-story-of-modern-human-origins-just-got-more-complicated-9e435bea24f6 https://medium.com/@johnhawks/the-story-of-modern-human-orig... via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16234903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16234903
- burfog 9y agoShort faces and rounded braincases would affect the surface-to-volume ratio. This would help with cold-weather survival.
- doctoboggan 9y ago
- BugsJustFindMe 9y agoEvery time I see someone talk about "the MSM" as a pejorative like this, I laugh, mostly at you, because the alternative is literally conspiracy theorists and, of course, the far right. And, indeed, a quick search for Razib Khan brings up this: https://undark.org/article/race-science-razib-khan-racism/ https://undark.org/article/race-science-razib-khan-racism/
- imhelpingu 9y agoWhy can't the alternative just be a media establishment that doesn't lie all day every day.
- thephyber 9y agoWhy can't there be a human kind that doesn't "lie all day every day"? (1) "lie" has intent. You can't prove intent on the scale you accuse. (2) "The media" is amorphous. Ask any two people and they won't identify the exact same group. Ironically, this is the same problem with the concept of "race", "species", and a few other similar concepts of population. (3) The suffix "establishment" in this context is ridiculously vague to the point of being a No True Scotsman fallacy. IMHO people complaining about "the mainstream media" have no historical anchor. Things were an order of magnitude worse when Hearst was actively running his "yellow journalism" outlets and when governments had monopolies on media coverage. Media literacy is hard now because there is more than one choice for news. I choose not to get my news from the impulse isle or from {TMZ, E! Television, Fox News, MSNBC, local television affiliates}. There are still thousands if not millions of media outlets that don't "lie all day every day", the only difference is now there is more onus on the reader to be able to distinguish journalism from opinion from sponsored stories from entertainment from outright fraudulent stories.
- arkona 9y agoBehold, an enlightened meta-contrarian.
- oh_sigh 9y agoWhat exactly is your point here? Should scientists drop whatever they are working on if racists like it?
- mehrdadn 9y ago> Additionally, after the Holocene some of these non-African groups also experienced huge population growth due to intensive agricultural practice. This happened "after the Holocene"? Aren't we in the Holocene epoch?
- xyzzyz 9y agoHe meant "after the Holocene started".