{"id":73440,"date":"2012-08-18T17:26:10","date_gmt":"2012-08-19T01:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=17895"},"modified":"2012-08-18T17:26:10","modified_gmt":"2012-08-19T01:26:10","slug":"the-origins-of-modern-humanity-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/08\/18\/the-origins-of-modern-humanity-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"The origins of modern humanity: 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10000872396390444772404577587483438679926.html\">Matt Ridley<\/a> has a column up, <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10000872396390444772404577587483438679926.html\">Did Your Ancestor Date a Neanderthal?<\/a> In it he juxtaposes <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2012\/08\/neanderthal-admixture-the-ecology-of-academe\/\">the two recent papers which got some attention<\/a> on the relationship of modern humans to Neandertals. <strong>To be frank I think it took too much of the &#8220;two sides\/opposing views\/views differ&#8221; tack.<\/strong> From what I can gather the scientific consensus is moving further toward admixture, rather than ancient structure. Additionally, as <a href=\"http:\/\/johnhawks.net\/weblog\/reviews\/neandertals\/neandertal_dna\/neandertal-ancestry-iced-2012.html\">John Hawks<\/a> states flat out the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pnas.org\/content\/early\/2012\/08\/14\/1200567109.abstract\"><em>PNAS<\/em> paper<\/a> which casts doubt on the strength of the admixture hypothesis is not the strongest of contributions to the field(in line with David Reich and Nick Patterson&#8217;s assessments, and others who shall remain nameless).<\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;s hard to keep track of all the threads, isn&#8217;t it? <strong>One of the most tragic aspects of the death of classic &#8220;Out of Africa&#8221; is that we lost an exceedingly simple narrative which had the positives of clarity and precision.<\/strong> The basic outlines were reducible to one sentence: all humans today descend from a small group of modern humans alive ~100,000 years ago. At this time <strong>we do not have such an elegant replacement framework.<\/strong> In fact, we may never have such an elegant model which &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/pspmXHd4yOU\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Matt Ridley has a column up, Did Your Ancestor Date a Neanderthal? In it he juxtaposes the two recent papers which got some attention on the relationship of modern humans to Neandertals. To be frank I think it took too much of the &#8220;two sides\/oppo&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthroplogy","category-human-evolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73440"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73500,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73440\/revisions\/73500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}