re: #152 ggt

Some of the press in Australia are getting reactions from some aboriginals - one in the Australian was that the interviewee was going to stick with his creation myth.

Almost all media stories are glossing over the complexities of the migration events, trying to over-simplify what really can’t be. For example, trying to say there were multiple migrations out of Africa post 70,000 years ago is too simple. What could have happened is that a single migration out of Africa into the Levant and Arabia, and from there multiple groups set out eastward, and then some northward.

The paper in Science makes the point that the eastward migration had to happen in at least two different groups - the first being the group that interbred the Denisovans and ended up in Australia and PNG area, and a second group moved through central Asia after the Denisovans went extinct, and ended up in the Orient (China and surrounds.)

So it’s not so much as Out of Africa as much as Out of Wherever. There are many, many possibilities.

The critical issue as far as our culture wars go is that modern anthropology and genetics have shown pretty conclusively that human evolution these past 100,000 years or so is highly complex and there was interbreeding from closely related people that are not thought of as H. sapiens.

Thus the accusation, implied usually and not explicitly stated, by some is that certain groups of people are more evolved than others.

The whole concept of “more evolved” is daffy and springs from the religious model of a creation ladder, where one species is “above” another. All living organisms are evolved, period.