"Out of Africa" Settled?

[Steerpike]

Not really.

One of my favorite subjects - Anthropology. And here is a nice blog post on the subject:

Is the Out of Africa model of human migration right? | EvoAnth

 

[Legendary Sidekick]

Funny timing. I just stumbled onto this 1.8 million year old human skull.

…which reminds me of a song!

 

[Jabrosky]

I have to be honest, I think it is a little suspicious that the Y-chromosomal and mtDNA evidence before 2010 pointed towards modern humans receiving very little if any "archaic" admixture, but after 2010 you have all these reports finding genetic traces of Neanderthals or Denisovans or whatever in this or that modern population. If archaics really contributed so much to modern human ancestry within the last 200,000 years, you would think the earlier studies would have picked up on that. Admittedly this isn't enough to discredit the newer research, but I would say the jury is still out on this admixture scenario.

Though come to think of it, in science a lot of issues still have their juries out...

 

[Steerpike]

Well the neanderthal genome project published its results in 2010, and you also have results of mtDNA studies of neanderthals that same year, so maybe there was simply more data available to researchers looking for this evidence?

 

[Jabrosky]

^ Yeah, that could be it.