Republished by Scott HarrisonJuly, 33AC.

http://www.wcotr.com/youth@wcotr.com

Ronald Alan FondaAuthor and Epistemologist

email: rafonda@webworkz.com

Age and Origin of the Human Species

Sapiens’ age preclude the possibility that such a replacement event took place in, or marked the origin of, our species.

More than one group of researchers (such as Harpending and Jorde) consider that the data support a "clean sweep" of earlier mtDNA lineages and this has frequently been raised in support of the "Eve/Africa" view. However, such ancient dates for an mtDNA replacement event would be consistent with radiation of pre-human species out of Africa, rather than the origin of s. sapiens. There has never been any reason to assume that the putative female (whose mtDNA is said to be ancestral to that found in all living humans) was, herself, a s. sapiens. The entire basis for the "Eve" hypothesis (that all modern, human mtDNA originated with one woman, or even in one restricted population) is falsified by recent research indicating plural lineages in the mtDNA genome. The putative ‘African Eve’ is probably neither chronologically nor causally related to the origin of s. sapiens.

In this circumstance, it is only reasonable to assume that the date of the human cultural explosion suggests the approximate era of s. sapiens speciation. Research on the Y-chromosome yields an estimate of 59,000 years BPE for the “most recent common [paternal] ancestor”, (Underhill, et al, 2000) assuming no selection and population structure effects. Given that caveat, the -59kyr date fits those of the earliest human cultural remains like a hand in a glove.

About forty thousand years ago, people from central Asia migrated into Europe, and their descendants constitute a majority of the population there today (Semino & Passarina, 2000) so we know what type of people they were. They came from the general area of those earliest human cultural sites, and they shared a genetic marker designated as M173. The population which carried that marker must have existed for some time before their migration began, because derivative forms of it are found in Siberia and the Amerinds, which implies that it was present in their common ancestral population that existed prior to 40,000 years BPE. Again, we have a good idea of what that ancestral Eurasian type was, by inference from the populations it generated, and it seems likely to be as ancient as humanity itself. When was there time, within the human culture period, for evolution of the Eurasian ancestral type from African immigrants? Moreover, the precursors to humanity are all present in Eurasia (from H. ergaster, and heidelbergensis, through archaic sapiens) while no comparable sequence has been discovered in Africa.

Even if, contrary to all the data adduced here, humanity had originated in Africa, it seems contrived to assume that s. sapiens would have immediately migrated from that continent, to leave their earliest known (and all subsequent) cultural artifacts in Eurasia. But if (on the Afro-origins view) they did, why did they evolve into the Eurasian ancestral type? What mechanisms, events, and pressures would conduce to such a change? Why did those other populations, said to be ‘first out of Africa’ (on account of their genetic diversity) such as the Andaman Islanders and tropical S. E. Asian types, not experience any such change? Do the Afro-origin people perhaps agree that the speciation event created the Eurasian type from archaic sapiens? The invocation of "genetic drift" and "founder effect", as used to assert a counter-intuitive interpretation of the diversity gradient (Tishkoff et al., 1998)5, will not serve.

I believe it is incumbent upon those who support the view of s. sapiens origins in Africa to explain how and why they were converted to Eurasian types so quickly. And those who maintain that humans originated long before they began to leave cultural artifacts need to explain why; what changed, that made them really human? Why would humans evolve, long ago in Africa, but only begin to behave like humans once they arrived at northern latitudes: are we back to the climate theory of evolution? The author’s view is that the only logical interpretation of all the available data, including the characteristics of extant populations, is that the speciation event occurred in a Eurasian population, of archaic sapiens, with ancient indigenous roots, in which case it is obvious how s. sapiens' progenitors were sequestered from central Africa.

The current Eurasian populations are lightly pigmented, and that is associated with high latitude species and populations in many other genera. It has often been suggested that the ancient ancestors of the Eurasian types were part of a population that had been resident at high latitudes long enough to manifest the derived characteristic of light pigmentation. On this view we would expect to find that light-skinned people would display low diversity and a distant relationship to central Africans, which is what we find. In fact, the genetic difference between Africans and Europeans is so distinct that the proportion of European admixture in Afro-Americans can be determined with a margin of error of only 0.02 (Destro-Bisol et al., 1999).

Harpending states that the population ancestral to s.sapiens was "small during most of the Pleistocene" and that "the number of our ancestors just before the expansion ('origin') of modern humans was small, only several thousand breeding adults." We can compare this characterization of our ancestral population with the evidence that Africans have always had a large effective population size. It is this incongruity that forces Tischkoff to postulate that the pre-human population was both "isolated from the rest of the African continent" and "somewhere in N. E. Africa."6 Moreover, this would have been for a very long time. Perhaps in Lemuria or Atlantis?

The evidence indicates that humans came from a sparse population in Eurasia; that their diversity was further reduced by the speciation event; that they subsequently expanded in every habitable direction; and that they interbred with the populations they came in contact with, producing extant hybrid populations. Hence Mountain et al. (1994) reports that in the cladistic tree "the European branch is significantly short relative to all other branches," that "the neighbor-joining tree... places the European sample close to the center of the tree with an extremely short branch," and further that "Europeans and northeast Asians are closely related." The first two of these statements are inconsistent with origin and radiation out of Africa while the third does not lend it any support.

Evidence for radiation into Africa was found by Hammer et al. (1998) and Tischkoff et al. (1998) noted such evidence, but the latter went on to suggest that no attention should be paid to it.7 The radiation of low-diversity s. sapiens from Eurasia is also the best explanation for the discoveries, dates, morphology and genetic data in S. E. Asia. There, s. sapiens and erectus lived in proximity for as long as 20,000 years (Swisher et al., 1996). So many of the human fossils from this area and era show a mixed suite of s.sapiens and erectus features that interbreeding is the most plausible interpretation of the data. Many students of fossil morphology have long contended that there is continuity between S. E. Asian Hominid fossils and extant indigenous peoples.8 Genetic data show these populations are distinct from northern Asian populations and of comparable diversity to Africans (Chang et al. 1996).9

The Ngandong specimens, in particular, have occasioned much debate on account of their mixture of s.sapiens and erectus traits and their affinities with Australians.10 We would expect that the crania of such hybrids would show affinities to both species, and that is why these fossils are so hard to classify. Some authorities say they are clearly erectus, while others point to modern traits, and especially that very similar skulls (from overlapping dates) are found in Australia. Moreover, the traits in question occur in the modern population. This is not merely consistent with, but constitutes strong evidence for, the view that radiating, low-diversity s. sapiens interbred with relic erectus populations, thus acquiring the near-African diversity and primitive morphological traits manifest in the Asian fossil record and extant indigenes.

The hypothesis presented here uniquely explains one particularly puzzling aspect of the Australian fossil record. The oldest fossils from Australia are the most modern in morphology. On my view, this is explained by the fact that the first wave of humans who passed through S. E. Asia on their way to Australia were less hybridized with resident erectus populations because they spent less time living among them. Populations that settled Australia later (leaving the Kow Swamp-type skulls) had been living in S. E. Asia for as much as 20,000 years and were far more hybridized in consequence.

Wolpoff accepts that the Ngandong skulls are representative of the population that produced the Kow Swamp-type specimens, and left descendants in the modern population But he explicitly rejects the view, as set forth here, that there was inter-species gene flow, and calls it "unacceptable". This, however, is a socio-political rather than a scientific statement. He does not contend that it isn’t a reasonable construction of the data, but rejects it on grounds of dogma, because of its implication that some modern populations express a more primitive genome. Wolpoff considers that the hypothesis of hybridization is "unacceptable" because it "raises the specter that some human populations can be interpreted to differ from others because they have more genes from an extinct, primitive human species." Thus, according to Wolpoff and other adherents of this doctrine, scientific truths which conflict with their politically-correct "just so" paradigm are outside the bounds of contemplation. It is noteworthy that he is driven to contend that erectus is human (‘true’man) in order to preserve logical consistency … at the expense of common sense.

The people of the Andaman Islands have also been the subject of a study which has been reported as "supporting 'out of Africa.'"11 This is an example of the almost universal, and usually unstated, assumption that there are only two possible hypotheses of human origins: the multi-regional, and African views. If the data conflicts with the multi-regional view it is said to “support” African origin. This not only begs the question, but is arguably deceitful. In this case, the data, considered by itself, may not contradict African origin, but as part of the pattern already noted above, it actually supports the opposing hypothesis presented here. The Andaman Islands are yet another of the places where s. sapiens interbred with a relic erectus population, were hybridized, and existed in an isolated condition until the present. Not surprisingly, they show genetic affinities to central Africans, because (like them, and some S. E. Asians) they preserve substantial portions of the pre-human genome.

It is nonsense to suggest that the first groups of humans "out of Africa" immediately migrated to the ends of the earth (Andamans, Australia, New Guinea, etc...) or that the populations of all such remote places should possess such diversified and similar genomes by chance. The inferred pattern of hybridization is the more parsimonious hypothesis. They are found in these out-of-the-way places because they were driven there by more advanced populations who supplanted such hybrids elsewhere.

Yet another challenge exists to the claim that our species radiated out of Africa. There is a consensus among anthropologists that s. sapiens' cultural artifacts indicate a higher level of cognitive function than any previous species. The technical level and diversity of their tool industry alone would have set them apart. Add to that, whole new categories of behavior: the creation of representative art, the domestication of the dog, etc... Thus, we would expect that populations which were hybridized with predecessor species would be intellectually and cognitively disadvantaged in relation to low-diversity, Eurasian populations In fact, we do observe that (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994), which clearly reveals the direction of species radiation. Expressing this view, however, is likely to attract such vehement abuse that few dare. Only those whose livelihood is not subject to the fiats of "wimmin and minorities" can openly speak the truth on this subject, and their views are ruthlessly censored.

Notes 1. Harpending, et al. (1998); see especially the conclusions. 2. & 3. Tishkoff, S. A., from a report in the Science Daily of 25 January 1999 of a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Anaheim on 22 January. 4. Eyre-Walker, 'Recent Finds in Paleoanthropology' in Athena Review vol. 2, no. 2 (10 March 2000). 5. See p. 1395 and p. 1399, and generally, to account for the observed diversity clines, which intuitively support radiation out of Eurasia by low-diversity s. sapiens, gaining diversity as they interbred with pre-human populations subsequent to their speciation. 6. Tishkoff, as quoted in Science Daily (above). 7. Tishkoff et al. (1998). On page 1399, she postulates a "dramatic" founder effect and genetic drift. 8. Wolpoff, Milford H., submitted a post entitled "No Homo erectus at Ngandong" to Human Origins News (http://www.pro-am.com/origins/news/article19.html) on 16 March 2000. He is perhaps the best known proponent of the view that there is continuity between the ancient and modern populations; saying, for instance, that the population represented by the Ngandong specimens is "incontrovertably" ancestral to some Australian fossils and living people. 9. Chang et al. 1996, p. 98 notes the way Melanesians are genetically differentiated from other Pacific islanders

and Asians (citing Flint et al. (1993)). Their figures 3 & 5 are somewhat pertinent. Mountain, op. cit., p. 6516, notes clustering of pygmies and S. E. Asians. Figure 1 shows how representative global populations cluster: the pattern is consistent (in the author's interpretation) with Eurasian hybridization of a species whose genome subsumed the diversity of the current (also hybridized) Africans. Kidd, op. cit. p. 225, cites Harding (1997) concerning variation of betaglobin in S. E. Asians. Jorde, op. cit., Figure 2 shows S. E. Asians clustering with pygmies. Hagelberg (as cited in 11, below) finds affinities between pygmies and Andaman Islanders. 10. Wolpoff's post (8, above) seems to be in response to the statement of Philip Rightmire (cited as "an expert on the species") in the 15 December 1996 issue of Human Origins News that "They [Ngandong specimens] are unequivocally H. erectus." 11. Hagelberg, E. & Fox, C. L. in an unpublished study, quoted in Scientific American, 'Science and the Citizen', January 1999.

References Awadalla P., Eyre-Walker A., Smith J. M. (1999) 'Linkage Disequilibrium and Recombination in Hominid Mitochondrial DNA', Science vol. 286, pp. 2524-2525 (24 December). Chang F-M., Kidd J. R., Livak K. J., Pakstis A. J., Kidd K. K. (1996) 'The world-wide distribution of allele frequencies at the human dopamine D4 receptor locus', Human Genetics, 98: 91-101. Destro-Bisol G., Maviglia R., Caglia A., Boschi I., Spedini G., Pascali V., Clark A., Tishkoff S. (1999) 'Estimating European admixture in African Americans by using microsatellites and a microsatellite haplotype (CD4/Alu)', Human Genetics 104: 149-157. Eyre-Walker A., Smith N. H., Smith J. M. (1999) Proceedings of the Royal Society, London Series B. Biological Sciences 266, 477. Hagelberg E. et al. (1999) Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, Series B. Biological Sciences 266, 485. Hammer M. F., Karafet T., Rasanayagam A., Wood E. T., Altheide T. K., Jenkins T., Griffiths R. C., Templeton A. R., Zegura S. L. (1998) 'Out of Africa and Back Again: Nested cladistic analysis of human Y chromosome variation', Molecular Biological Evolution, April 15 (4): 427-41. Harding R. M., Fullerton S. M., Griffiths R. C., Bond J., Cox M. J., Schneider J. A., Moulin D. S., Clegg J. B. (1997) 'Archaic African and Asian lineages in the genetic ancestry of modern humans', American Journal of Human Genetics, April 60(4): 772-89. Harpending H. C., Batzer M. A., Gurven M., Jorde L.B., Rogers A. R., and Sherry S. T. (1998) 'Genetic traces of ancient demography', Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA, vol. 95, pp. 1961-1967. Herrnstein, R. J. and Murray, C. The Bell Curve, (1994) Simon and Schuster (The Free Press) Also: Lynn (1991), Zindi (1994), Lynn (1994), Snyderman & Rothman (1987), Jensen (1993), Jensen & Whang (1993). Jorde L. B., Rogers A. R., Bamshad M., Watkins W. S., Krakowiak P., Sung S., Kere, J. and Harpending H. C. (1997) 'Microsatellite diversity and the demographic history of modern humans', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, vol. 94, pp. 3100-3103. Kidd K. K., Bharti M., Castiglione C. M., Zhao H., Pakstis A. J., Speed W. C., Bonne-Tamir B., Lu R-B., Goldman D., Lee C., Nam Y.S., Grandy D. K., Jenkins T., Kidd J. R. (1998) 'A global survey of haplotype frequencies and linkage disequilibrium at the DRD2 locus', Human Genetics 103: 211-227. Mountain J. L. and Cavalli-Sforza L. L. (1994) 'Inference of human evolution through cladistic analysis of nuclear DNA restriction polymorphisms', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, vol. 91, pp. 6515-6519. Semino, Ornella & Passarino, Giuseppe (2000) ‘The Genetic Legacy of Paleolithic Homo sapiens sapiens in Extant Europeans: A Y Chromosome perspective.’ Science vol. 290 (5494) pp 1155-60 (Nov. 10). Swisher III C. C., Rink W. J., Anton S. C., Schwarcz H. P., Curtis G. H., Suprijo A., & Widiasmoro (1996) Science, vol. 274 (5294), pp 1870-1874. Tishkoff S. A., Dietzsch E., Speed W., Pakstis A. J. et al. (1996) 'Global patterns of linkage disequilibrium at the CD4 locus and modern human origins', Science, Washington, March 8. Tishkoff S. A., Goldman A., Calafell F., Speed W. C., Deinard A. S., Bonne-Tamir B., Kidd J. R., Pakstis A. J., Jenkins T., and Kidd K. K. (1998) 'A Global Haplotype Analysis of the Myotonic Dystrophy Locus; Implications for the Evolution of Modern Humans and for the Origin of Myotonic Dystrophy Mutations', American Journal of Human Genetics, 62: 1389-1402. Underhill, Peter A., Peidong Shen, Alice Lin, Li Jin, Giuseppe Passarino, Wei Yang, Erin Kauffman, Batsheva Bonne-Tamir, Jaume Bertranpetit, Paolo Francalacci, Mutanser Ibrahim, Trefor Jenkins, Judith Kidd, S. Qasim Mehdi, Mark Seielstad, R. Wells, Alberto Piazza, Ronald Davis, Marcus Feldman, L. Cavalli-sforza, & Peter Oefner (2000) Letter, Nature Genetics; vol. 26, November.Wolpoff, Milford H., in a post entitled: "No Homo erectus at Ngandong" to Human Origins News (http://www.pro-am.com/ origins/news /article 19.html) on 16 March 2000.

Interbreeding Between Species

From time to time I encounter the assertion that H. sapiens (and/or H. sapiens sapiens) could not have interbred with H. erectus, because they are different species. I've also been told that, "If they could have produced fertile offspring, then they weren't really different species". These fairly common misconceptions proceed from a misunderstanding of the 'biological species concept', which makes species distinctions based on fertility. Most people leave school thinking that, if two creatures can produce fertile offspring, then they must belong to the same species. I wouldn't be surprised if many teachers actually tell students that, but it simply isn't so.

The biological species concept was developed by Ernst Mayr, in 1942. Here it is, as first formulated, and quoted in Douglas J. Futuyma's EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY (1998): "Species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups". The "reproductive isolation" can be genetic (non-fertility), geographic, or behavioral; there is NO criteria that says (as is commonly believed) that if two populations can interbreed they are the SAME species. There is NO criteria that says that two distinct species CAN'T interbreed. Consider the example of wolves, coyotes and dogs: three distinct species that can interbreed. In fact, all species of the genus Canis can mate and produce fertile offspring (Wayne et al., 1997, re: A. P. Gray, Mammalian Hybrids). This is so common, that biologists actually use a different formulation of Mayr's definition: they say, "If two populations can NOT interbreed, they are NOT the same species." That is a very different statement. Note that this is an empirical definition, and gives no guidance in regard to extinct taxons, but the bottom line is: nothing in the biological species concept contradicts the idea that erectus and sapiens could and DID interbreed.

I think it will come as a surprise to many that most scientists accept the fact that sapiens and erectus were so closely related that they could have interbred with each other. To begin with, some (probably most) scientists don't think erectus and sapiens were genetically separate species at all. They consider them developmental 'grades' within a single taxon. Here is an example of that view, from Futuyma.

"The word species, however, is sometimes used simply as a name for a morphologically distinguishable form. This is especially true in paleontology, in which a single evolving lineage (gene pool) may be assigned several names for successive, phenotypically different forms. For example, Homo erectus and Homo sapiens are names for different, distinguishable stages in the same evolving lineage. They are chrono-species, rather than separate biological species. The two species names do not imply that speciation (bifurcation into two gene pools) occurred: in fact it probably DIDN'T in this case." [my emphasis on didn't]

Futuyma claims erectus is "human", probably because all those bad bones from Africa show such strong expression of erectus traits. The afrocentrists say they were erectus slouching toward humanity; I say the more modern-looking fossils were erectus hybridized with sapiens. BOTH views imply that erectus and sapiens were able to interbreed. In fact, the afrocentrist position, that there was only a SINGLE gene pool, is a stronger statement of their capability for interbreeding than mine. Wolpoff, and other multiregionalists, exhibit similar thinking: he maintains that erectus was "human" and evolved into modern sapiens all over the world, while the afrocentrists say that process only culminated in Africa, from whence a modern human type radiated, displacing all other 'people' without interbreeding. They don't deny those (supposedly erectus-derived) moderns and Eurasian indigenes could have interbred, they just claim they didn't.

So, nearly everybody is in agreement that erectus could interbreed with sapiens: multiregionalists, afrocentrists, and even me. Note, however, that some people also say erectus was a distinct taxon. In fact, Rightmire, a recognized expert on erectus, says (The Evolution of Homo Erectus, Cambridge, 1990) they were a distinct species; I even agree with him. It is interesting to see why there is disagreement on the subject. Wolpoff, and others, compare the early African and Asian skulls with the most modern ones and show that there was an increase in cranial capacity, and a morphological tendency toward some sapiens characteristics. BUT, those recent skulls are the very ones I contend are hybrid specimens!

Rightmire excludes the late, Southeast Asian skulls from Ngandong for very good reasons, and shows that the rest of the series reveals no statistically significant development toward becoming modern human. That is even with including later, African skulls that I think show some interbreeding with sapiens radiating out of Eurasia. When you get up to the recent African material, which shows significant sapiens influence, the afrocentrists claim those aren't erectus, but 'early sapiens'. For instance, they call the Herto skulls H. sapiens idaltu.

So, the real difference in viewpoint is whether: 1) erectus evolved into modern humans by a gradual process, with intRA-species gene flow (whether it occurred only in Africa or also elsewhere) or 2) erectus and sapiens interbred, founding some (tropical) modern populations, while Eurasian sapiens founded Eurasian populations, which is my interpretation of the data. None of these views preclude interbreeding between erectus and sapiens, and the multiregional position DEPENDS on it. Note how 'shifty' Wolpoff is. As a multiregionalist, he argues that "gene flow" (interbreeding) between advanced populations (who are called sapiens because of their clearly more-modern morphology) and less-advanced (erectus 'grade') specimens caused all the world's 'people' to evolve into sapiens. YET, in attempting to refute my view (that the Ngandong skulls represent hybrids between erectus and sapiens) he characterizes that as intER-species gene flow, as if it were not exactly what his own theory implies. Then to further obfuscate, he plays the race-card, saying my hypothesis, "raises the specter that some populations will be seen as differing because they have more genes from an extinct species". Well, yes!

If H. sapiens or s. sapiens could interbreed with erectus, then they should certainly have been able to produce fertile offspring with other sapiens, such as H. sapiens neanderthalis, or with H. heidelbergensis, which may have been a direct ancestor. Consider that wolves and coyotes have been distinct species for nearly a million years, or more than 300 thousand generations. A similar number of generations would take the human ancestry back nearly to the last common ancestor of Homo and Pan.

A final consideration is the distinguishing characteristics that differentiate the various Homo species. If they were separated by potentially incompatible mutations, then there might have been diminished fertility between those species. However, it appears they have been distinguished by neoteny: ancestral forms were succeeded by juvenilized versions of themselves. While the effects of neoteny (such as increased intelligence, delayed maturation, progressive gracilization, and a diminution of some ancestral-adult characteristics) may be profound, the genetic changes are subtle. There seems to be little or no impediment to fertility, as the new type must have been fertile with the parent species in order to survive. Accordingly, the entire genus Homo has probably been intER-fertile, just as the genus Canis is.

Clifford Jolly, writing in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (2001; Supplement 33: 177-204) discusses the more apposite hybridization of hominins. He says,

''Another source of phylogenetic uncertainty is the possibility of gene-flow by occasional hybridization between hominins belonging to ecologically and adaptively distinct species or even genera. Although the evidence is unsatisfactorily sparse, it suggests that among catarrhines generally, regardless of major chromosomal rearrangement, intersterility is roughly proportional to time since cladogenetic separation.'' And, ''any hominine species whose ancestries diverged less than 4 ma previously may well have been able to produce hybrid offspring''

Four million years ago takes us back before Homo is recognized to have existed! And that is not even considering that Homo species have a longer generation time, so an equivalent number of generations would extend the potential hybridization period even further than 4 million years into the past. As an aside, this suggests that the genus Homo could have begun by hybridization. That would offer an explanation for why we are so closely related to the knuckle-walking chimps and gorillas, while Homo had bipedal ancestry. Of course, chimps and gorillas may have split off the line of descent from a common bipedal ancestor and reverted to knuckle-walking. The important point, with respect to interbreeding of species, is

that hominin species separated by several million years of divergence can still produce fertile hybrid offspring.

By contrast, the divergence time separating erectus from sapiens, or the latter from Neanderthals, is much less. For instance, Krings, et al. (in DNA sequence of the mitochondrial hypervariable region II from the Neandertal type specimen, PNAS 1999) estimates that Homo sapiens sapiens and H. neanderthalsis shared a common ancestor not more than 741, and perhaps as recently as 317 thousand years ago. Afrocentrists believe sapiens diverged from erectus only a couple of hundred thousand years ago. Even if sapiens shared no common ancestors with erectus after the earliest known Homo fossils in Eurasia, 1.8 million years ago, they should still have been inter-fertile. In fact, morphological features of the Nagandong, Kow Swamp, Herto, and other skulls suggest that sapiens and erectus did interbreed and produce offspring. I contend that view is confirmed by the genetic evidence cited in Age & Origin of the Human Species, Plural Lineages in the Human mtDNA Genome , and Australian Ancestry: Implications for the Origin of H. sapiens sapiens.

In Number of ancestral human species: a molecular perspective, (HOMO Vol. 53/3, pp. 201–224) D. CURNOE, and A. THORNE directly address the question of whether recent types of Homo would have been able to mate and produce viable and fertile offspring. They say, flatly:

”All fossil taxa were genetically very close to each other and likely to have been below congeneric genetic distances seen for many mammals. Our estimates of genetic divergence suggest that periods of around 2 million years are required to produce sufficient genetic distance to represent speciation. Therefore, Neanderthals and so-called H. erectus were genetically so close to contemporary H. sapiens they were unlikely to have been separate species. Distances calculated here for H. neanderthalensis versus H. sapiens and for H. erectus versus H. sapiens are around one-third and two-thirds, respectively, of the mammalian intrageneric mode.”

Some genetic data from humans, chimps, and orangutans suggest there were genetic speciation events in Homo’s history, resulting in populations that could not have interbred with their ancestors, but not many nor recently. This type of speciation, as a result of infertility by reason of genetic incompatibility, must be distinguished from the evolution of ”type” morphology, leading to species designations such as erectus and neanderthalensis.

”Sumatran and Bornean orangutans differ by three chromosomal rearrangements but are known to be fully fertile, and common chimpanzees and bonobos differ by six chromosomal rearrangements, and although some workers regard them as distinct species (see above), they do produce apparently normal hybrid offspring (H. Vervaecke, pers. com.). Most types of rearrangements between orangutan subspecies and between common chimpanzees and bonobos are also seen in humans. This suggests that at least some of the rearrangements in humans might not represent reproductive isolation.”

But they go on to say,

”This observation is complicated by the fact that humans appear to possess even greater chromosomal instability than great apes. Humans possess a high level of chromosomal rearrangements, with 1 out of every 120 babies born being abnormal (Hook 1992). The figure rises to about 25% for 10-day old blastocysts (Gardner & Sutherland 1996). We conclude that chromosomal rearrangements were likely to have been important during human evolution, more so than among the great apes, making comparisons with them of limited value.”

And concluding,

”Given the chromosomal instability in humans, it seems likely that at least some of the chromosomal rearrangements may have had a significant impact on reproductive isolation when they occurred.”

Thus, it isn’t clear (from the ape evidence) that even chromosomal rearrangements would have rendered the different types of Homo infertile, but it is clear that there were fewer such

events, which even might have caused reproductive isolation, than there are recognized taxons of Homo. In other words, just because erectus was different enough to be a recognized taxon doesn’t mean they could not interbreed with sapiens.

The cited authors state there have been five or fewer genetic-isolation-speciations since the last common ancestor with chimps:

”From the above evidence we conclude that the number of species on the DLMH, as inferred from human chromosome rearrangements, might be around 3 and cannot be more than 5.”

So all of the types of Homo living in the last few hundred thousand years would have been fertile with the other types. H. sapiens/sapiens and H. erectus and H. neanderthalensis would have all been able to interbreed … and the genetic evidence, as presented in the papers posted on this site, indicates they DID interbreed, resulting in the modern populations.

In My Opinion

Letter to the Editor of DISCOVER:

Editor:I was so dubious of Feldman's conclusions about human origins (page 56, right column, #7) that I looked up the research on which it was based, and it seems he is telling us what he thinks we ought to believe, rather than what the data really implies.He says:"Humans are all so closely related that our entire population shows less genetic diversity than that of a small group of chimpanzees. It's almost as though we all came from the same town ... and perhaps we did."...but, for the truth click here [the comment] is based on a study by Marcus Feldman, a population geneticist at Stanford University; Noah Rosenberg, a computational biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles; and Lev Zhivotovsky, a geneticist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. They examined short, repetitive fragments of DNA called microsatellites, markers found in every person. 'We used 377 markers that are generally located in non-coding regions of the genome, ones that are likely to be neutral, where there is no natural selection involved,' says Rosenberg. The beauty of microsatellites is that they mutate frequently, at a steady pace, enabling scientists to infer ... when human populations first diverged from each other. Studying those mutations in 1,056 individuals clustered in 52 populations groups around the world ..."

Feldman, and his research associates, are mentioned in a paper by David Rotman, called "Genes, Medicine, and the New Race Debate" from Technology Review; Jun2003, Vol. 106, issue 5, pg. 41. The abstract mentions the "danger of looking for genetic variations among racial groups."The danger of these genetic discoveries! If the data really indicated that 'we are all the same' and 'we are all Africans', (as the media science-writers confidently assure us) would these researchers think that is 'dangerous'? You know better; but we don't have to infer their views: they tell us, in that paper, what they fear and why. First, they tell us that the HapMap "will make it possible to spell out in great detail the genetic differences between people from different parts of the world". [Those differences that Feldman claims hardly exist!] So, "Sociologists, bioethicists, and anthropologists worry that the genetic data could be manipulated to give an air of biological credence to ethnic stereotypes, to revive discredited racial classifications, & even to fuel bogus claims of fundamental genetic differences between groups." [my emphasis]"Here's the rub", says Troy Duster, a sociologist, "...The danger" [there it is again, that danger] is that people will associate those differences with racial groups, and Jonathan Kahn, bioethicist, suggests that, "it is all too easy for biological and genetic categories to become conflated with racial ones." No doubt they will, because that is exactly what the data implies: Feldman's own researchers reported " ... detailed data on gene samples from individuals from 52 populations..." and, bottom line: "how people categorized themselves - whether they called themselves black or white or asian - correlated closely with the genetic categories."Duster thinks that ordinary folk are not to be trusted with this "dangerous" genetic knowledge: he says that "...to map differences between various populations while avoiding the dangers of racial stereotypes is a conundrum without an answer." He doesn't quite say the truth should be withheld from us vulgar rabble, but it is clearly implied that genetic researchers had better come to the right conclusions when reporting research. Feldman's DISCOVER comments seem to be an example of concealing that "dangerous" truth!Feldman claims those 377 microsatellites show so little diversity we could all be from one village, but this is the same data-set, that is discussed in Does Race Exist, Sci. Am., Dec 2003. That article grudgingly admitted the race-genetic correlation. "...we needed 60 polymorphisms to assign individuals to their continent of origin with 90% accuracy. To achieve nearly 100% accuracy, however, we needed to use about 100...". This article reveals that Noah Rosenberg and Jonathan Pritchard, formerly of Feldman's laboratory used 375 of those sets of polymorphisms from 1000 people of 52 ethnic groups to find that, "...by looking at varying frequencies of these polymorphisms they were able to distinguish five different groups of people whose ancestors were typically isolated by oceans, deserts, or mountains: sub-

Saharan Africans; Europeans and Asians west of the Himalayas; east Asians; ... Melanesia; and Native Americans." They were also able to identify subgroups within each region that usually corresponded with each member's self-reported ethnicity". [What a village!] That information is all extracted from the variation among those microsatellites that Feldman characterizes as having "less diversity than a chimpanzee troop". While perhaps technically true, the impression imparted is deceptive.Feldman asserts that we "are all so closely related" because there is 'so little diversity' among those carefully chosen microsatellites. Here's a quote from the abstract of, Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin's Fallacy, A.W.Edwards, Bioessays Aug 2003; Vol. 25: (8) 798-801 http://www.goodrumj.com/Edwards.pdfthat gives perspective on Feldman's conclusions. "In popular articles that play down the genetical differences among human populations, it is often stated that about 85% of the total genetic variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups. ...this argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors." In other words, this is a deceitful argument, and those who make it know that.

Even the NY Times, that bastion of PC, is beginning to admit the truth about Lewontin’s error, albeit only in an OP-editorial. On March 14, 2005, ARMAND MARIE LEROI wrote specifically about Lewontin, in the aptly titled, A Family Tree in Every Gene:

“The [Lewontin’s] error is easily illustrated. If one were asked to judge the ancestry of 100 New Yorkers, one could look at the color of their skin. That would do much to single out the Europeans, but little to distinguish the Senegalese from the Solomon Islanders. The same is true for any other feature of our bodies. The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry. But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger's face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from - and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.

Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many - a few hundred - variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so. Indeed, a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia - more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.”

Read the second question and answer How genetically diverse are humans? especially the paragraph starting with Obviously, humans are not at the low end of the genetic diversity spectrum, particularly in relation to other mammals., found in this site www.goodrumj.com/RFaqHTML.html

Australian Ancestry

In Age and Origin of the Human Species I pointed out that fossil evidence shows the earliest inhabitants (Mungo Man) had a more modern morphology than later Australians. I have suggested that the first humans to settle Australia were derived from Eurasian sapiens, albeit they became somewhat hybridized with erectus during their radiation through the tropics. The much more recent Australian population typified by the Kow Swamp specimens was so robust, and the skull features so primitive, that some have argued they were H. erectus. While the weight of opinion seems to be that they are not erectus, it can’t be denied that they manifest many diagnostic features of that taxon. In fact they have strong affinities to the Ngandong skulls, which are erectus, but show so much sapiens influence that Rightmire excludes them, as atypical, when considering the spectrum of conserved features that characterize the erectus taxon: The Evolution of Homo Erectus; Cambridge, 1990; see, for instance, Figure 40, page 196. I have suggested that the Ngandong specimens were an erectus-sapiens hybrid type, and representative of the population that migrated into Australia and left the Kow Swamp fossils. Having lived in close association with tropical S E Asian erectus for over 20,000 years, the Kow Swamp type was much more affected by hybridization than the population that originally settled Australia.

Lightly shaded areas, on the map below, were above sea-level during the last glacial epoch, when so much water was locked up in ice. From after 30 kya until 12 kya, S E Asia was almost connected to Australia, which was joined to New Guinea until 8 kya. Of course, sea levels were lowest during and shortly after glacial maximum, and the channels separating Australia from Asia were then at their minimum width. It was during this era that the Kow Swamp type, erectus-hybrid population was able to migrate into Australia.

Figure 1

[Map from Ingman and Gyllensten; Mitochondrial Genome Variation and Evolutionary History of Australian and New Guinean Aborigines; Genome Research 13:1600-6, 2003]

The original colonists of Australia arrived much earlier. Dates as early as 62 kya have been attributed to the oldest human fossil in Australia (Mungo Man; LM3) but in Nature (Feb 20, 2003) a multidisciplinary team reported 42 kya. It is evident, just from the location of the find, that Mungo Man was not among the first to arrive; nor is it likely that era's only human bodies to be fossilized and discovered would have been the very earliest people to step ashore. There was a glacial epoch between 73,000 and 55,000 years ago (Oxygen Isotope Stage 4) and an ice sheet covered much of the central Asian plain during that era. About 74,000 years ago Mt. Toba erupted, creating a broad extinction zone in India and a 'nuclear winter' that lasted for several years. The effects of Toba and the glacial era seem to have driven the inhabitants of central Asia south. Hoffecker states, in Desolate Landscapes: Ice Age Settlement in Eastern Europe, on page 19, that, "The scarcity of artifacts in the loess bed that overlies the [central Asian plain] suggests that much of the plain was abandoned between 73,000-55,000 years ago." I have suggested that there was a massive migration of advanced Eurasian archaic sapiens, out of central Asia, into S W Asia, N Africa, and India. I believe that elements of this radiating population reached and colonized Australia during the OIS 4 era, which is plausible, as sea-levels were relatively low then. Conversely, suggested later dates for first settlement are less credible, due to the difficulty of crossing wider ocean expanses as the ice melted and sea-levels rose.

There is genetic evidence for Australian colonization during OIS 4 in Mitochondrial Genome Variation and Evolutionary History of Australian and New Guinean Aborigines (Ingman & Gyllensten,2003). They state that the "estimate of a genetic coalescent for Australian Aborigines with individuals from outside Australia based on mitochondrial HVS1 sequences ranges from 60,000 to 119,000 years, depending on which substitution rate is used". They note that other research, on mtDNA D-loop sequences yields a range of 51,000 to 85,000 years ago, for an "expansion date". The expansion date is when a small founding population began to multiply significantly. They give an mtDNA coalescence date for the N macrohaplogroup, which includes all but one Australian lineage, as 71,000 years ago, with a confidence interval of plus or minus 12,000 years. The M haplogroup's was 78,000 years ago,

with the same confidence interval. So the evidence indicates that Australia was settled during OIS 4.

Mishmar (2003) gives a coalescent for both M and N as 65 kya, which is within the confidence interval op cit. I interpret that data to mean that most of the ancient Eurasian mtDNA lineages were lost, either during the era of Mt. Toba’s eruption, or by subsequent lineage sorting. As an example of the latter, the LM3 mtDNA lineage, which is the most ancient human mtDNA lineage known, survived at least until 42 kya among migrants to Australia, but was lost sometime before the present.

Afrocentrists have argued that the original Australian population came 'Out of Africa', while, on my view they came from Eurasia. It is indisputable that the Australian mtDNA derives from macrohaplogroups M and N (Ingman & Gyllensten, 2003), which are Eurasian lineages. It is true that a few African populations' lineages have affinities to M and N, and afrocentrists interpret that to mean M and N diverged from the African genome. I argue that the evidence and time constraints indicate M and N lineages were carried into Africa by Eurasian radiation: see Plural Lineages in the Human mtDNA Genome (on site). Note that all but one mtDNA lineage in Australia is derived from the N macrohaplogroup, which contains the European lineages. In other words, to argue that the first Australians were Africans, requires one to assume that M and N are derived from the African genome, rather than being indigenous to Eurasia: I contend Plural Lineages falsifies the assumption of a single African source for all modern mtDNA.

There are a few African populations that have some mtDNA with affinities to M and N, and you can see examples of them on the branches under box 2, such as the Yoruba. The afrocentrist who drew the 'tree' below has assumed that the African mtDNA is ancestral to the Eurasian. However, LM3, the oldest known mtDNA, is Eurasian!

Macrohaplogroups M and N are in the dotted-line boxes of the graphic below: N is 1; M is 2. You’ll note that ALL the lineages within the boxes are Eurasian. That sole M lineage is most plausibly associated with a more recent radiation that occupied New Guinea. It is remarkable that the migrants who settled Australia were derived specifically from the population that later became Europeans, suggesting that the first settlers of Australia began their migration AFTER the M and N haplogroups diverged. Of course, it is possible the M haplogroup could have been present in the proto-Australian population and was lost by lineage sorting. After all, Mungo’s mtDNA is unlike ANY modern lineage! In other words, the population that first came to Australia included at least one type of mtDNA that has since been lost, and does NOT correspond to any of the extant, and supposedly ancestral, African lineages. One sequence from Mungo’s mitochondria found its way into the nuclear DNA of ancient humans and is carried, on chromosome 11, by many contemporary people. The extraction of mtDNA from LM3 was reported by Adcock, et al. and published as Mitochondrial DNA sequences in ancient Australians: implications for modern human origins. It was printed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA 98 (2001) page 540. Figure 2, below from Ingman and Gyllensten, 2003, loc. sit; reproduced by them, from Saitou and Nei, 1987.

Fig. 2

The ''implications for human origins'' are that modern humans are NOT 'all Africans'! African replacement is contraindicated by the population distribution of the relic mtDNA sequence inserted in chromosome 11. In A Nuclear ‘Fossil’ of the Mitochondrial D-loop and the origin of Modern Humans, by Hans Zischler, et al, published in Nature 378:489-492, page 491, we read,“Overall, 39% of chromosomes tested carried the insertion. In four African populations, the frequency of chromosomes carrying the insertion ranges between 10 and 25%, whereas it varies between 38% and 78% in populations tested in Europe, Asia, Oceania, and South America.” The highest frequency of insertions were among the Japanese @ 65%; an Amerind tribe (Surui) @ 78% and the Melanesians @ 68%: Europeans were @ 54%. Clearly, this insertion of ancient, indigenous Eurasian mtDNA, into the nuclear DNA, occurred outside of Africa, probably in N E Asia. Since the proto-Australians carried the mtDNA lineage that was inserted, it is more likely that they were an Eurasian population. Nuclear DNA, as discussed below, practically excludes the possibility that Australians are derived from Africans.

Therefore, since Australian mtDNA is derived from the N lineage, and LM3 from the insert, there is no justification for the assumption that M and N are of African origin. This evidence is more consistent with the view that those lineages were carried INTO Africa by the radiation of Eurasian humans (H. sapiens sapiens). Only the unjustified assumption that ALL modern mtDNA comes from a single, African source allows the presumption that M and N are African-derived.

Previous sequence analyses of the chromosome 11 insert had revealed NO allelic variation in any sample from any part of the world. While exhaustive analysis indicates that the LM3 sequence derives from the same mtDNA lineage that engendered the insert, there are 14 nucleotide differences. The range of differences between the LM3 sequence and contemporary sequences is at the upper end of the range of differences between contemporary sequences. Since the number of differences is a proxy of age, we can infer that LM3 was as old as the older African lineages by 42,000 years ago! The range of differences between the insert sequence and contemporary sequences extends well beyond the range of differences between contemporary sequences. This indicates that the lineage leading to the insert sequence diverged well before the most recent common ancestor of living human mtDNA sequences. In other words, the LM3 lineage is OLDER than the 'African Eve', and the insert is far older than LM3 ... perhaps as much as 14 mutations older!

Because mtDNA accrues variation much more rapidly than nuclear sites, and because there was no observed allelic variation in the insert, it is plausible that those 14 differences accrued to the LM3 mtDNA lineage since the era of the insertion event. Thus, it is evident that insertion occurred long before the coalescence of the most ancient African mtDNA lineages. Given the geographical distribution of that chromosome 11 insertion, It is hard to imagine stronger evidence for the continuity of archaic Eurasian populations. Even afrocentrists concede that by implication, as in this tree of mtDNA lineages.

Fig. 3; Klein and Takahata, WHERE DO WE COME FROM? The Molecular Evidence for Human Descent, page 281.

The length of the line, from left to right, corresponds to the estimated time-depth of that lineage. Note that the insertion 'branch' extends far to the right of the most ancient African mtDNA lineages, as well as the Neanderthal specimen. Even so, I think the scale understates the insertion’s antiquity, as 14 mutations, plus the 40 thousand year age of the Mungo specimen, represents an immense time-span! In an equivalent sequence of that Feldhofer neanderthal specimen, Krings et al. found ''11 transitional differences from the [modern human] reference sequence''(as reported in DNA sequence of the mitochondrial hypervariable region II from the Neandertal type specimen, PNAS Vol. 96, 5581-85, May 11, 99). Approximately half those differences may have accrued through changes in the human lineage. By contrast, it is hardly possible that as many differences accumulated in the chromosome 11 insert as occurred in the LM3 lineage, because nuclear DNA changes much more slowly than mtDNA, let alone the hyper-variable region. Accordingly, we may infer that the coalescent between the LM3 lineage and the chromosome 11 insert is significantly older than the most recent common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals. Krings estimates the mtDNA of humans and Neanderthals began to diverge 465,000 years ago; add in the 40,000 year age of LM3 and it is looks as if the insertion on chromosome 11 occurred at least half a million years ago, or even a million, as Kring’s upper age estimate is 741,000 years ago!

Here is the lineage diagram Adcock presents. Note the tree is rooted in the common ancestor of Homo and Pan; the Neanderthal lineage is separate from Hss; and one of the Australian fossils robust types is also shown as distinct from all other modern human lineages. I contend such specimens resulted from hybridization with Asian erectus.

Figure 4, from Adcock, 2001, op cit

As noted, the modern Australians’ mtDNA comes from macrohaplogroup N (and, to a minor extent, from M) and that they have affinities to Europeans. That is remarkable, when you consider that the original settlers must have lived in S E Asia for some time, and that later waves of migration to Australia show strong affinities to the erectus-sapien-hybrid Ngandong

population. In fact, that tends to corroborate the view I expressed in Age and Origin: Eurasian sapiens radiated through the tropics, interbreeding with indigenous erectus, and later migrations displaced the most primitive of those hybrid populations.

As the afrocentrists claim the M and N lineages diverged from the African mtDNA genome in N E Africa, it is instructive to compare the nuclear DNA of Africans and Australians. On page 75 of The History and Geography of Human Genes (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi & Piazza; Princeton, '94) we find that Africans and the people of Australia & New Guinea are the most UN-related populations on the face of the earth! The Bantu and N. Guineans have a genetic distance of 3372, while the Australians are 3272, exceeded only by the Thai at 3364. To put these units of genetic distance into perspective, consider that Europeans are separated by distances two or three orders of magnitude less! English and Italians are separated by only 4 units, compared to the 3,272 units that separate the Australians from typical Africans. Even the Basques and Greeks are only separated by 5 units; the Lapps and Danes by 204. There is another common method of calculating genetic distance, and it is expressed in a different numerical scale. The same authors used that method too, and it yielded equivalent results: Africans and the Australians are the most UNrelated populations on earth.

IF Africans settled Australia and M & N macro-haplogroups are African derived, one might suppose that the Australians would be substantially more closely related to the African populations that have some mtDNA lineages with affinities to the M and N haplogroups. But, compare the people of Australia and N.G. specifically to the Africans that are descended from the population supposed to have been ancestral to the M and N macrohaplogroups: the Yoruba, for instance. The Yoruba’s distance from the most unrelated west-African group is only 398. The N E Bantu’s distance to the Bane, at 153, is less than the difference between groups of Bantu, and the Bane cluster with the Yoruba. Note how the Bantu {“BNT”} and Bane group (along the 2nd principle component axis) while all the northern African populations are separated by the first principle component. On my view, that is because N African populations are the ones most affected by gene flow from Eurasian radiations, especially since the agricultural era. By contrast, the less-mixed African populations are separated from each other by distance from the second principle component axis.

Fig. 5, from Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza, page 178, op cit.

Bear in mind that the 'genetic distance' figure is based on sound data: the frequency and distribution of various alleles and polymorphisms. However, the 'trees' that authors construct with that data are usually based on debatable assumptions: that Africans are an ancestral population, and that modern humans are all descended only from H. sapiens. On my view, Africans are a hybrid population, created by the interbreeding of Eurasian sapiens with H. erectus, just as the Australians were. In order to accurately reflect the human lineages, such trees would have to distinguish between the ancestry of Eurasians and the tropical populations created by recent back-cross hybridization with remnant erectus. The trees would, in fact have to be networks. To give him his due, Cavalli-Sforza acknowledges that as a possibility, loc cit page 81. The authors state that, ''a tree with inter-connections would be highly desirable'', albeit he is apparently only considering the mingling of modern human populations, rather than taking erectus into account.

All but 2% of the 'bootstrap' trees generated by Cavalli-Sforza et al. showed the first separation between Africans and all other populations, but the way ''all other non-Africans'' grouped is significant. 1) in 25%, the Australians+NG+Pacific islanders & S E Asians vs. all other non-Africans; 2) in 24%, Pacific islanders+S E Asians vs. all other non-Africans; 3) in 15%, Australians+NG vs. all other non-Africans; 4) in 8%, Europeans+extra-European Caucasoids vs. all other non-Africans; 5) in 8%, Americans vs. all other non-Africans. In the other 18% of trees the sub-clusters disintegrate. The authors say, ''For instance, in some of them New Guineans and Australians part from each other, one of the two being separated from all other groups in the second fission''. What is really indicated, as the authors acknowledge, is ''a trichotomy, separating the three sub-clusters of NG+Australians; S E Asians + Pacific islanders; and all other non-Africans. The bottom line: NG/Australians and Africans are the most unrelated populations on earth, but BOTH of them are very different than all other non-Africans, with the reservation that there are affinities between S E Asians

and NG/Australians, as might be expected due to relatively recent population mixing. I contend that the 'out of Africa' hypothesis cannot account for this. By contrast, the hypothesis that Australians and Africans are erectus-sapiens hybrid populations, is completely consistent with such data, even explanatory of it.

A 'principal component map' shows the genetic difference between European and African populations in a graphic manner that facilitates appreciation of their minimal relationship, and avoids the unwarranted assumptions inevitable in the 'trees' that ignore the recent, as well as ancestral, influence of erectus. Ancient Eurasian sapiens' radiations led to erectus-sapien hybrid populations, such as represented by the Herto skulls in N Africa, and even more advanced forms in S W Asia. But the well-adapted tropical populations were very much larger than the radiating Eurasian's, and they absorbed the early migrations, preserving a great deal of the erectus genome. Later sapien radiations, especially since the agricultural era, displaced the most primitive groups, but, to a great extent, those large, hybrid populations still exist.

Fig. 6, Cavalli-Sforza, et al., page 81, op cit.

Since there is less genetic affinity between Africans and the populations of Australia and N. Guinea than anyone else in the world, it is obvious that Africans didn’t settle Australia. That casts doubt on the afrocentrist assertion that macrohaplogroups M and N are derived from the African mtDNA genome, and tends to corroborate the view advanced in Plural Lineages, that M and N are indigenous to Eurasia.

The question naturally arises: why are Australians and Africans so genetically different if they were both created by Eurasians interbreeding with erectus? I contend that it is because the S E Asian and African erectus were so long separated, with so little gene flow between them. There, as in the mtDNA insert on chromosome 11, are the 'deep genetic lineages' the afrocentrists say should exist if the multiregionalist model is correct! The S E Asian and African erectus genomes were so divergent because they had been separated for over a million years, and that deep division is only partially unified by both interbreeding with Eurasians, principally with the population that became Europeans. That is also why there are some affinities between Europeans and Africans, in spite of their vast phenotypic differences, and deep genetic separation. The afrocentrists try to interpret this as meaning that Africans are ancestral to Europeans, but, for all the reasons documented in Age and Origin, Plural Lineages, and elsewhere, that is impossible. In contrast, those affinities are well explained by my hypothesis of Eurasian radiation into Africa, with interbreeding between sapiens and African erectus.

Yet another method of graphic representation reveals the genetic relationships between Eurasians and Africans. A 'neighbor-joining-tree' by the cited authors is particularly valid because it is NOT 'rooted'; in other words, no assumptions are made about which population is ancestral.

Fig. 7, Cavalli-Sforza, et al., page 91, op cit.

Three significant aspects of the topology are that the Europeans have a CENTRAL location, on VERY SHORT branches (d & e), and there is MAXIMUM SEPARATION between Melansians (which includes Australians) and Africans. With respect to branch 'e', its minimal length indicates how closely related the Europeans are to the COMMON ancestor of Asians. One might interpret the very short 'd' branch as indicating how similar Europeans are to the original H. sapiens sapiens type, while their central position could support the same view. One might also view it as consistent with slight introgressive hybridization (of a common ancestral, Eurasian Hss type) with archaic sapiens in central Asia and Europe, leading to differentiation of the Euro-type. I attribute the long 'c' and 'g' branches to the influence of the archaic, and widely diverged, remnant erectus genome on both African and Australian/ New Guinean populations.

Genetic Reality of Race

In WHERE DO WE COME FROM: The Molecular Evidence for Human Descent (Springer, 2002) Klein and Takahata write, on page 381,

''The species, as the only biologically definable category, provides a dividing line in biological classification. Most of the other categories (genus, family, order, etc) are positioned above the species level, while only a few are in the sub-species level. The latter, which include variety, subspecies, and race, are poorly defined and ambiguous. Any deviation from the holotype, the specimen on which the description of a new species is based, is referred to as a variety, even when the deviation is in a single morphological character. A subspecies is a population or a group of phenotypically similar populations inhabiting a geographically defined region and differing from other populations of the same species in diagnostic characters. Race is used by taxonomists either as a synonymn of sub-species or as a designation of a local population within a sub-species. Different variants, subspecies, or races of the same species are either known or expected to interbreed if given the opportunity.’’

[Note that only a single character is enough to distinguish a 'variety', and SOME distinguishing designation is certainly called for between Europeans and Asians. Thus we can conservatively say Euros and Asians are different varieties.

Next, consider that statement, ''race is used by taxonomists either as a synonym of sub-species or as a designation of a local population within a sub-species''. That means race signifies a greater distinction than variety, and it might be used to distinguish a 'lesser' difference than subspecies.

Klein and Takahata discuss how the gorillas are divided into subspecies by their fur length and color or various morphological characteristics. They go on to say,]

''All this is biological reality which raises few emotions. Taxonomists may disagree on the number, delineation, name, indeed on the very existence of the subdivisions in a particular species, but other than that they find nothing objectionable about the notion of species consisting of populations between which gene flow has been reduced, because of the geographical distance between them, for example.'' and ''Biologically, H. sapiens is a species like any other and as such it might be expected to be differentiated into subspecies, especially since its global distribution creates opportunities for adaptation to different climatic conditions and so for morphological divergence.''

[Commenting on the current, PC effort to deny the very existence of race, K and T write,]

''The proposal to scrap the concept of race altogether is currently only one extreme in a range of views. It is certainly not shared by all anthropologists and is by no means the majority opinion of the public at large. It appears to be a conclusion reached more on the basis of political and philosophical creeds than on scientific arguments. Correspondingly, anthropologists who do hold this opinion often attempt to shout down their opponents rather than convince them by presentation of facts. Their favored method of argumentation is to label anybody who disagrees with them as racist. The public, however, seems unimpressed by their rhetoric. It refuses to believe that the differences they see are a mere figment of their imagination. A lay-person can tell with a high degree of accuracy where individuals come from just by glimpsing their features.”

[The authors give a specific example and go on to write,]

''Except for some anthropologists, everybody else seems to be able to distinguish people from different parts of the world at a glance by their outward appearance. This apparently is also the view of some government administrators in countries with programs designed to fight racial discrimination. Obviously, there is a credibility gap between some anthropologists on the one side and the public, as well as the governments of some countries, on the other. One way to settle the arguments among anthropologists and to reconcile anthropologists with the public might be to move away from physical characteristics and focus on the genes. If races

are real, they should have a genetic basis separable from environmental and cultural influences.'' and ''Provided the races separated a long time ago, random genetic drift should have diversified their genetic composition even in the absence of selection. It can be expected that the longer ago the races diverged, the greater the differences between them will be. Even if there has not been enough time to 'fix' different alleles in distinct races, at least differences in gene frequencies should have been generated.''

[The research discussed in Letter to the Editor of Discover (posted on site) describes the results from the sort of study Klein and Takahata suggest. It turns out there ARE fixed alleles that vary by race, and different frequencies that are associated with Africans, Europeans, and Asians. In other words, there ARE genetic 'races' in spite of the disingenuous statements that are publicized in an attempt to obfuscate and deny the facts. Everyone has noted that Europeans have white skins; many of them have lightly pigmented eyes and hair; on the other hand Africans have dark skin, hair, and eyes, while Asians have dark eyes and hair, and Eurasian hair has a different texture from that of Africans.

Harding et al. (in Evidence for Variable Selective Pressure at MC1R, Amerian Journal of Human Genetics, 66:1351-61, 2000) studied the MC1R gene, which influences the pigmentation of eyes, hair, and skin. They found that all Africans, and tropical indigenes in general, had an ancestral form of the gene: there were NO non-synonymous alleles. Thus, they contend that MC1R is tightly constrained in the tropics; this implies that any indigenous population radiating 'Out of Africa' would have been black. By contrast, there were several alleles, at various frequencies among European populations, accounting for the observed ubiquity of white skin, and substantial frequency of light hair and eye colors. These alleles could ONLY have arisen in populations that left the tropics a very long time ago, or never lived there to begin with. It would have taken a long time for the mutations in these alleles to occur and then rise to the observed distribution. Harding et al. calculate that at least a hundred thousand years, and possibly more than twice that long, might be required for one of these alleles to reach its current frequency. I defy any population geneticist to produce a credible model of genetic mutation and diffusion that turns an all-black African population into an all-white European population in the 50 to 70 thousand years that current Out of Africa models permit! And remember that those same afrocentrists claim the African radiation replaced the indigenous Eurasians, rather than interbreeding with them, so they can’t postulate acquisition of MC1R alleles from archaic Europeans, followed by selection to achieve fixation of euro-genes; that would be more like absorption than replacement! Moreover, they must, but can’t, explain why the putative African radiation in Asia produced an entirely different variety and set of alleles. The afrocentrists appeal to selection, but Harding finds evidence that MC1R has NOT been selected at Euro-specific alleles, though it has been tightly CONSTRAINED to the ancestral form in the tropics. Klein and Takahata, writing of the various attempts to explain what kind of selection would make ALL Europeans white, or account for their eyes and hair, concede that,]

“None of these explanations is fully satisfactory” and “Satisfactory explanations are also not available for hair color and texture, eye color, and other external differences between human races.”

[Before the recent advances in genetics it was possible to contend that black Africans were somehow converted into Eurasians. Geneticists speak glibly of ''drift'' as if it were a serious theory for how ALL those putative black Africans turned white in Europe and yellow in Asia; and not just their skin color, but all the other soft tissue, cranial, and intellectual features. Everybody changed completely and there was no mix of people with different degrees and phenotypic expressions of afro-characters. What kind of a pseudo-science theory of population dynamics could yield an ALL white-characteristic Europe from blacks? There is an old saying that some ideas are so dumb only highly educated people can believe them.

As noted above, no satisfactory explanations were forthcoming for such conversion, but the socio-political, PC 'virtue' of an African origins theory was irresistible to academia and media opinion makers. The early research on mtDNA was misinterpreted to support the ''African Eve'', or ''Out of Africa'' theories, by asserting that all human mtDNA came from an African woman. This assertion is maintained today, and it continues to be represented as 'proving'

African replacement, even though the data does NOT justify such an assumption. See Plural Lineages in the Human mtDNA Genome (posted on site) for contraindications.

Since the morphological, genetically mediated, differences between Europeans, Asians, and Africans are so obvious, those who wish to deny the biological reality of race are forced (against all common-sense) to argue that such differences are statistically trivial. Lewontin, for instance, argues that since ''only'' 15% of the variation in the human genome is completely correlated to race, that such differences are trivial. As noted in the closing paragraph of Letter to the Editor of DISCOVER, this is a deceitful argument. Klein and Takahata are quite PC on the subject of race, but they have too much scientific integrity to misrepresent the data as Feldman does; here is what they say,]

''Formally, these findings demonstrate, first, that the species is indeed subdivided into genetically definable groups of individuals and, second, that at least some of those groups correspond to those defined by anthropologists as races on the basis of physical characters.''

[Klein and Takahata note that, in spite of the genetic findings, many continue to argue that such distinctions are trivial. Then they write,]

''By contrast, Sewall Wright, who can hardly be taken for a dilettante in questions of population genetics, has stated emphatically that if differences of this magnitude were observed in any other species, the groups they distinguish would be called subspecies.”

[So, while genetic research does support traditional and common-sense racial distinctions, it is even more consistent with a nuanced view that the major distinction is between the indigenes of New Guinea/Australia and sub-Saharan Africans versus Eurasians. The differences between Europeans and northern Asians are minor by comparison, so the old tri-racial distinction of white, yellow, and black, while not invalid, is not strictly accurate from a taxonomic perspective. Genetically, we should regard Europeans and northern Asians as varieties of H. s. sapiens; the sub-Saharan Africans and Australian/NG populations as subspecies, and the back-crossed hybrid indigenes of N. Africa and much of southern Asia as one or more races.

Klein and Takahata write,]

''One can extend Wright’s argument even further. The more than two hundred species of haplochromine fishes in Lake Victoria differ from each other much less than the human races in their neutral genes, although they are presumably distinguished by genes that control differences in their external appearances. The same can be said about at least some of the currently recognized species of Darwin’s finches and about other examples of recent adaptive radiations. In all these cases, reproductively isolated groups are impossible to tell apart by the methods used to measure differences between the human races. Obviously human races are not reproductively isolated (interracial marriages are common and the progenies of such marriages are fully fertile) but the external differences between them are comparable to those between the cichlid fishes and Darwin's finches. Under these circumstances, to claim that the genetic differences between the human races are trivial is more a political statement than a scientific argument. Trivial by what criterion? How much difference would Lewontin and those who side with him consider non-trivial?''

[Actually Klein and Takahata understate human racial differences by calling them ''comparable'' to the finches and cichlids, because only an expert can tell those birds and fishes apart, while any ordinary person can tell another person’s race at a glance!

K and T go on to write,]

“By mixing science with politics, geneticists and anthropologists are committing the same infraction of which they are accusing other scientists, whom they themselves label as racists. Even worse, by dismissing genetic differences as insignificant, they play into the hands of genuine racists who can easily demolish this claim.”

[These genetic differences between human races offer an important test of the Out of Africa theory, and it fails!]

“Multiregionalists have no difficulty explaining the 10-15% differences between the human groups. Since they assume that the differentiation began up to 2 my ago, when H. erectus established founding populations in the different regions, there has been sufficient time to accumulate the differences. Uniregionalists [Out of Africa theorists] who assume that the differentiation into groups began after the exodus of H. sapiens from Africa, are at a disadvantage, because calculations indicate that only under highly unrealistic assumptions (e.g., no gene flow between populations) would the time interval suffice for the origin of the observed differences.”

Here is some research that gives a perspective on the claims that differences between human races are genetically insignificant.

In Number of ancestral human species: a molecular perspective

D. CURNOE*, and A. THORNE, (in HOMO Vol. 53/3, pp. 201-224) write:

“Nuclear DNA

Our analyses using 24 genetic distances provide an estimated speciation rate of 1-13 with a mean of 4 for all DNA distances (table 1). Some of the speciation rates in table 1 are <1. This results from the fact that some of the distances between humans and chimpanzees, when halved, are below those between Africans and Asians.”

Just think about that: some of the genetic differences between Africans and Eurasians, are more than half as great as between the consensus human genome and chimpanzees!

Compare the research cited above, in regard to the great difference between African and Eurasian nuclear and mtDNA, to the deceptive statements by Feldman, as quoted in Discover magazine (IMO…, posted on site).

Next, consider how ‘racial’ differences, between Eurasians and sub-Saharan Africans, compare to the difference between modern humans and pre-human species of Homo.

“We estimate the mean distance between H. sapiens

and «terminal» H. neanderthalensis from 16 distances to be around 0.08%. This is a very small distance and is less than half the estimated genetic difference between living sub-Saharan Africans and Eurasians (Starr & McMillan 2001). The mean of 8 genetic distances between H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis is 0.026-0.027. This is equivalent to the genetic distance between Papua New Guineans and Thais or Na Dene and Indonesians (Cavalli-Sforza et al 1994).”

So, the difference between the modern human consensus genome, and H. neanderthalensis, is less than half the difference between s-S Africans and Eurasians. These are the differences: twice as much as the gulf between Hss and Hn, which Lewontin and the race-deniers call ‘trivial’!

What about the genetic distance to H. erectus?

“Homo sapiens and … H. erectus living about 0.3 Ma, … may have shared an ancestor around 1.5 Ma (a total divergence time of 2.4 million years). The distance between them as determined from the mean of 16 distances may have been around 0.19%. This is about equivalent to the estimated genetic difference between living sub-Saharan Africans and Eurasians of 0.2% (Starr & McMillan 2001). The mean of 8 other genetic distances between H. sapiens and H. erectus is 0.065-0.068. This overlaps the range of distances for living humans, with the lower estimate identical to the distance between «Bantu» and «Eskimo» (Cavalli-Sforza et al 1994).”

So, modern Eurasians and s-S Africans are about as genetically distant as modern humans are from H. erectus! The authors say erectus and modern humans may have shared a last common ancestor about 1.5 million years ago. Notice how that fits with the data on fossil mtDNA included on chromosome 11 (see Australian Ancestry) which also implies that African erectus and Eurasians had diverged for more than a million years, before [on my view] hybridization between Eurasian sapiens and tropical erectus produced the indigenous populations of Africa and southern Asia.

Even authors who have, in the past, minimized the importance of racial genetic distinctions are now admitting that the shibboleths, ‘race is a social construct’ and ‘we are all the same genetically’, are just plain wrong. As one reviewer wrote,

“New support for the existence and significance of group, or racial, differences in medicine comes from several contributors to the [then] current Nature Genetics, a leading journal of genetics. This already widely noted issue is devoted to the question of whether inherited differences between groups should be considered in medical research and treatment, and though various authors deny the relevance of such differences, Sarah Tishkoff (University of Maryland) and Kenneth Kidd, of Yale, in “Implications of biogeography of human populations for race and medicine” report that racial differences indeed exist, while Joanna L. Mountain and Neil Risch, both of Stanford, in “Assessing genetic contributions to phenotypic differences among ‘racial’ and ‘ethnic’ groups,” recognize racial disparities and regard them as important for medical treatment.”

The reviewer comments that,

“The careful (and sometimes cautious) findings of these scholars may seem all too obvious, but they are an important corrective, in an authoritative source, to efforts to use such recent advances in genetic knowledge as the Genome to obscure the fact and the importance of racial differences.” The reviewer continues, writing of a recent Stanford study that …

“…found a very close correlation between individuals' racial self-identification and the evidence from their DNA. In Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies, which appears in the February 2005 issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, a dozen researchers report the way the 3,636 individuals studied classified themselves racially tallied almost perfectly with their racial type as indicated by 326 signposts in their DNA: only 5 participants volunteered a racial identity at variance with that indicated by their genetic material. Intriguingly, the study also determined that the DNA of self-identified African-American and Hispanic participants, despite their substantial genetic admixture from other racial groups (and despite their historical tendencies to identify with other racial groups), jibed with their expressed racial membership as often as did those of whites and East Asians. The largest of its kind to date, the Stanford study focused on four major racial groupings (white, East Asian, African-American, and Hispanic) and was conducted in fifteen locations in the United States and Taiwan. Study leader Neil Risch, currently a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, believes that the demonstrated ability of prospective patients to accurately specify their group DNA can save time and money otherwise spent on painstaking individual genetic testing. … Without knowing how the participants had identified themselves, Risch and his team ran the results through a computer program that grouped individuals according to patterns of the 326 signposts. This analysis could have resulted in any number of different clusters, but only four clear groups turned up. And in each case the individuals within those clusters all fell within the same self-identified racial group.”

Risch said,

“people’s self-identified race is a nearly perfect indicator of their genetic background, contradicting the race-as-social-construct view”.

I commend those authors for having the courage to tell even a little of the truth about this PC-censored topic.

A paper by Deka, et al., titled: Population genetics of dinucleotide (dC-dA)n.(dG-dT)n polymorphisms in world populations (Am J Hum Genet. 1995 Feb;56(2):461-74) is both pertinent and long-ignored.

“We have characterized eight dinucleotide (dC-dA)n.(dG-dT)n repeat loci located on human chromosome 13q in eight human populations and in a sample of chimpanzees. Even though there is substantial variation in allele frequencie at each locus, at a given locus the most frequent alleles are shared by all human populations. … The microsatellite loci examined here are present and, with the exception of the locus D13S197, are polymorphic in the chimpanzees, showing an overlapping distribution of allele sizes with those observed in human populations.”

This study compares the genetic distances of eight human populations (Samoans, North Amerindians, South Amerindians, New Guineans, Kachari [Mongolids], Germans, more generalized Caucasians, and Sokoto: sub-Saharan Africans from Nigeria) to each other and to chimpanzees. The data were analyzed two ways - with Nei's standard genetic distance, and with modified Cavalli-Sforza distance.

Using Nei's method, the Nigerian-chimp distance was 1.334 +/- 0.375, by far the closest value. By the Cavalli-Sforza method, the Sokoto Nigerians were again the closest to chimps (0.539) by a large margin. The farthest were again the South Amerindians (0.712), with the Germans (0.680) and general Caucasians (0.667) being a very close third and fourth behind the South Amerindians as well as Samoans (0.711) and North Amerindians (0.697). So, while the two methods give slightly different orders, in both cases the Nigerians are by far the closest group to the chimps. Once again, given the first method, these sub-Saharan Africans were at 1.334 while all the other groups ranged from 1.527-1.901, and given the second method they were at 0.539 while the other groups ranged from 0.643 (Kachari again) to 0.712.

Finally, there have been numerous publications asserting that modern humans are 99.9% genetically identical. EVEN if that were true, there are so many loci in the human genome that a tenth of a percent of them would be MILLIONS! As one of the authors (quoted below) observes, “that could explain differences” … NO doubt!

However, that 99.9 figure is WRONG. As posted September 8th, 2004, in World Science:

“New research casts doubt on the widely accepted belief that humans are 99.9 percent genetically identical. That statement has been used to argue that race isn't real.

But two new studies suggest that percentage is too high, researchers say … “The 99.9 percent number is pure nonsense,” wrote Michael Wigler, of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, in a recent e-mail. “I will not say anything more about it.” … Wigler is a co-author of one of the two studies, which is published in the July 23 advance online edition of the prestigious research journal Science. In it, the researchers wrote that they were surprised to find large-scale differences in human DNA. “There is considerable structural variation in the human genome [genetic code], most of which was not previously apparent,” they wrote.

Wigler’s group sampled DNA from 20 people from around the world. They detected 76 major differences among the people, differences known as copy number polymorphisms. This means that some sections of genetic code are repeated, but the numbers of repetitions vary among people.

This “could explain why people are different” … said Scherer, whose team reached similar findings to those of the Cold Spring Harbor group.

“At first we were astonished and didn't believe our results because for years we had been taught that most variation in DNA was limited to very small changes,” Scherer said. But later he learned Harvard University researchers were making similar observations, so the groups combined their data and reached the same conclusion.

The Cold Spring Harbor team found that these changes affected the code for 70 genes [just in the small set studied]. These included genes involved in Cohen syndrome - a form of mental retardation - as well as brain development, leukemia, drug resistant forms of breast cancer, regulation of eating and body weight.

That [99.9%] figure has become one of the most prominent pieces of their [“race-isn't real” proponents] argument since about four years ago, when the number came from scientists associated with the Human Genome Project, a 13-year program to map the human genetic code.

Lander - a researcher who has been quoted in published reports giving the 99.9 percent figure, and who works with the Whitehead Institute in Boston - didn’t respond to phone calls and e-mails requesting comment for this story. His secretary said he was abroad.

Also unreachable was Craig Venter, chairman of the Institute for Genomics Research in Rockville, Md., U.S.A. He was president of a company whose research produced the 99.9 percent figure in 2001, Celera Genomics. He didn't return phone calls or repeated emails.

.Miami University’s Jon Entine, author of, “Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It,” wrote, in an e-mail:

“Rats are about 95 percent the genetic equivalent of humans. These are ridiculous statements, although technically accurate. The use of the 99.9 percent figure by the popular press and scientists is, frankly scandalous.”

[I agree.]

Plural Lineages

Plural Lineages in the Human mtDNA Genome

At the time I wrote Age and Origin of the Human Species, published research on the mitochondrial genome could not support conclusions regarding human origins. Accordingly, I had to leave it an open question. The cited research by Awadalla, Eyre-Walker, and others, was challenged. Innan and Nordborg review the follow-on studies of recombination. http://walnut.usc. edu/~magnus/papers/InnanNordborg02-MBE.pdfBottom line, there may well be some recombination, but you can't prove it the way Awadalla tried to.

For the purposes of this discussion it isn't necessary to even understand what recombination in mtDNA means, let alone the details of how it is accomplished: we can simply treat it as an 'object' in this analysis.

There has been unanimous and vociferous insistence in the media, on one critical afrocentrist assumption: all modern human mtDNA is 'so similar' that it had to have come from a single woman. This is known to the public as the 'African Eve' theory, and researchers speak of the same idea as 'a single genealogy for the mtDNA genome'. Far from proving the out-of-Africa theory, that assumed 'single source of all modern mtDNA' is an absolutely necessary pre-condition for their theory of afro-replacement to be true. However, there is a fundamental reason to reject the claim that all human mtDNA is 'so similar' that it must come from one woman!

Consider this sentence, [italic emphasis mine] from the first paragraph of the Innan & Nordborg paper, "The argument for recombination is based on the observation that the pattern of polymorphism in mtDNA is incompatible with a single genealogicaltree and unique mutations." Thus, there are three things that might account for the observed pattern of polymorphisms: 1) recombination, 2) more than one lineage, or 3) multiple mutations at many sites. Look at Figure 2 of the Innan paper and you will see that the possibly recombined or repetitively mutated sites are scattered throughout the genome, and do not occur only in the hypervariable region. Note that the quote from Innan & Nordborg implies that the less recombinationor repetitive, same-site mutation has affected the mitochondrial genome, then the LESS likely it is that there is a single genealogy for the human mtDNA genome. In other words, unless there has been enough repetitive mutation or recombination to account for the observed pattern of polymorphism, then not all mtDNA is from the same source, as claimed by proponents of the 'African Eve' or African radiation-and-replacement theories.

On the other hand, the more recombination, or repetitive mutation that has occurred, then the more Eve's age has been under-estimated. That is true because the effect of either repeated mutations at one site or recombination is to make the mtDNA genome appear younger than it really is. If we knew Eve's era from historical or anthropological data, we could compare that date with the one derived from the mtDNA coalescence algorithm. The difference between the calculated coalescence result and the historical date would reveal the combined effect of recombination and repetitive mutation. If that combined effect is obviously insufficient to account for the observed pattern of polymorphism, then we may infer a plural genealogy for the human mtDNA genome.

There is nothing in the historical or anthropological record to independently establish the era of (a supposed) human speciation in Africa. However, the situation in Eurasia is very different. There we can calibrate the coalescence date of Eurasian strains of mtDNA with an historical event, anthropological evidence, and research on the human y-chromosome. Thus we can infer the effect (hence extent) of recombination and repeated mutations, by comparing those other dates with the result of the mtDNA coalescence calculation. If the fit on all these dates is fairly close we can be assured that little recombination or repetitive mutation has occurred, hence the observed pattern of polymorphism must be interpreted to reveal plural genealogy for the mtDNA genome.

Refer to the Mishmar paper at, http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/100/1/171.pdf (second full paragraph, right-hand column, on the first page) for a brief description of the M and N mtDNA lineages. Technically, one can't say that these are 'Eurasian specific' lineages, only because they have found their way into the African population. Note Mishmar's admission concerning the afrocentrists' assertion that M and N evolved/diverged in North Africa. This paper's authors come about as close to admitting that is implausible as they can, while remaining politically correct and afro-orthodox. On the afro-view, M and N lineages diverged from the African Eve's lineage, while on my view they are the oldest surviving Eurasian lineages. One's view as to the origin of the M and N lineages doesn't affect the argument I am making in regard to determining the relative contribution of repeated mutation and/or recombination versus plural genealogy.

Mishmarcalculates the M and N lineages are both 65,000 years old, and there was a lot going on in Eurasia around -65 kyr. The last common paternal ancestor of Europeans lived at -59 kyr, as calculated from y-chromosome data. So we have a date for the male counterpart of Eurasian Eve, calculated from a different genome at a date within 10% of agreement. Then, 'modern' human artifacts are found in Eurasia by -50 kyr. Allowing for the fact that it is unlikely that we have found the very first artifacts, and that people may have been genetically modern for awhile before developing human (Homo sapiens sapiens) culture, those dates are in remarkable agreement. Add to that, radiation into Australia by anatomically modern humans may have occurred before -60 kyrs, and no doubt that radiation took some millennia.

It begins to look like that -65kyr coalescence date is right on target, and we could claim there is no influence from recombination and repeated mutation, so all the sites reflected in Figure 2 are evidence for plural genealogies: QED! However, that would be disingenuous, because I believe there has been some recurrent mutation, though it is possible they have fully accounted for it in their model, and some recombination, which they probably have not explicitly factored in. So, I would expect that coalescence date to be a little more recent than the era of a genetically significant event, which actually caused modern humans to differentiate from a relatively advanced population of archaic sapiens.

One reason we can expect the loss of lineages existing before the modern type differentiated, is that there could have been a population 'bottle-neck' associated with speciation itself. Moreover there must have been a severe population loss in temperate or higher latitudes when Mt. Toba erupted around -74kyrs and caused a nuclear winter in Eurasia. That savage selection event alone would account for the loss of archaic Eurasian mtDNA lineages. It may be significant that the two oldest Eurasian mtDNA lineages are the same age. The fact that they both date from the same era makes it more plausible that ancient lineages were lost in a specific selection event and/or population bottleneck rather than only through 'lineage sorting'. It is comparatively unlikely that two mtDNA lineages would simultaneously diverge from a putative African lineage, and both (but only they) migrate from Africa and survive to the present. It is far more reasonable and parsimonious to assume that no archaic Eurasian lineages survived two severe bottlenecks, and subsequent lineage sorting, in the indigenous Eurasian population.

So, even if we assume that the actual population constriction occurred prior to the coalescence date, and associate it with the obvious selection event of Toba's eruption, the -65kyr coalescence date still calibrates quite closely. If we compare the dates, we note that -65 kyrs is only about 12% less than the putative genetically significant date of -74 kyrs. So we can see that both recombination and repeated mutations can only have had a small effect on the calculation of a coalescence date, hence there are not many sites in the mtDNA genome that have experienced recombination or repeated mutation. But, look at Figure 2, where it is evident that many of the sites show evidence of either recombination or repeated mutation, or else they are evidence of more than one genealogy for the mtDNA genome! Accordingly, most of the sites graphed in Figure 2 must be considered as evidence for more than one mtDNA genealogy. Therefore, M and N lineages are not derived from the African genome, but represent the oldest, surviving lineages of the Eurasian types. Hence M and N are Eurasian specific lineages that only entered Africa through radiation, rather than coming from Africa

In conclusion, recombination and repetitive mutations are not enough(by a wide margin) to explain the observed pattern of polymorphisms in the mtDNA genome. Therefore, there is more than one genealogy: there are two Eurasian maternal lineages, associated with the speciation of modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) in Eurasia, and another, African lineage. This falsifies the 'Afro-radiation and replacement' theory, and the politically correct shibboleth that 'we are all Africans'. As explained in Age and Origin of the Human Species, the evidence already pointed to a recent, Eurasian origin for modern humans. Only the assertion of a single genealogy for mtDNA could be construed as evidence of African replacement, and that assumption is revealed as unjustified.

Mishmar et al, is probably correct to attribute variation, in lineages derived from M and N, to natural selection. One supposes they theorize that mtDNA selection took place in the last 50kyrs (Wallace's date for an African radiation, quoted in NYT, "Ice Age Ancestry") in order to accommodate their theory to the constraints of assuming an African origin for modern humans. However, it is more plausible that such selection took place in very ancient times (when pre-human species were adapting to a cold climate) and was only retained at high latitudes, among people living at low culture levels, as the adaptations come at a fitness cost, and thus were lost when and where physical adaptations were superseded by elaborated clothing and shelter, in the temperate zone and the recent era.

FIG. 2 Evidence for recurrent mutation or recombination (or both) in human mtDNA (data of Ingman et al. 2000). Each point represents the comparison between a pair of polymorphic sites. The point is black if the pattern of polymorphism for the pair of loci is such that either recombination must have occurred between the loci or recurrent mutation affected at least one of the loci. The point is white otherwise.

If recombination has occurred, and (importantly) the probability of recombination increases with distance between sites, white points are expected to be clustered along the diagonal (because recombination is less likely to have effected closely linked sites). Recurrent mutations, on the other hand, might be expected to give rise to a pattern that does not depend on the distance from the diagonal, leading to black "crosses" against a white background. The D-loop is visible as a cluster of such crosses in the upper right corner (position 0 corresponds to the first position after the D-loop).

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