My post The paradigm is dead, long live the paradigm! expressed to some extent my befuddlement at the current state of human evolutionary genetics and paleoanthropology. After the review of the paper of possible elevated admixture with Neandertals on the dystrophin locus a friend emailed, “Remember when we thought everything would be so simple once we could finally see this stuff?” Indeed I do remember. The fact that things aren’t simple is very exhilarating, but it is also a major quash on theoretical clarity. Science is after all not a collection of facts, but it is in part facts which one can sieve through a analytic framework.
In hindsight with the relative robustness of ancient DNA results we can make some assessments about the role of human bias within particular heuristic frameworks over the past generation. From the mid-1980s up until 2000 it was victory after victory for the Out-of-Africa with total replacement model. The rise of mtDNA and Y chromosomal lineage studies seemed to buttress the idea of common descent from neo-Africans within the last 100-200,000 years for all human populations. There wasn’t much …