re: #18 freetoken

Speaking of human evolution, PNAS has a new paper that proposes the best solution to matching genetic and morphological data with the past is two major pulses of OOA migration for modern humans:

Genomic and cranial phenotype data support multiple modern human dispersals from Africa and a southern route into Asia

The abstract doesn’t mention it, but the first pulse would have hung out on or around the Arabian peninsula for many thousands of years, before moving east to India, and then later some of them moving all the way to Australia.

The article at ScienceDaily:

First Eurasians left Africa up to 130,000 years ago

includes this graphic:

[Embedded image]

During the time of the second exodus out of Africa there was probably some back-migration into East Africa, taking with it some Neanderthal DNA from then recent inter-breeding in SW Asia.

Mongrels, all of us.

Combine this with the recent discovery that the paleness of Europeans is a very recent phenomenon (likely driven by sexual selection) in modern human evolution, with the discovery of the circa 25k-20k common ancestors in central Asia of both east Asians, Native Americans, which also influenced European gene pool … and we see just how wrong “racial” divisions of old are, as far as dividing up people today.

Oh, heck. If only they’d published this paper during my evolution class that ended in March. Wonder how much they charge for a single paper…