{"id":74464,"date":"2012-10-12T11:21:31","date_gmt":"2012-10-12T19:21:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=18729"},"modified":"2012-10-12T11:21:31","modified_gmt":"2012-10-12T19:21:31","slug":"i-believe-in-the-blank-slate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/10\/12\/i-believe-in-the-blank-slate\/","title":{"rendered":"I believe in the blank slate!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, not really&#8230;but in some ways close enough judged against the initial reference point of where  I started on certain questions. <a href=\"http:\/\/dienekes.blogspot.com\/2012\/10\/ann-gibbons-on-slower-mutation-rate.html\">Dienekes contends<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>This will help us understand both: the ancestors of non-Africans did not come forth fully formed, like Athena from Zeus&#8217;s head, having spent millennia of perfecting their craft and honing their minds by perforating shells and scratching lines in some South African cave. Instead, they may been plain old-style hunter-gatherers who stumbled into Asia by doing what they always did: following the food. At the same time, the UP\/LSA revolution may not have been effected by a new and improved type of human bursting into the scene and replacing Neandertals and assorted dummies, but rather as a cultural revolution that spread across a species that already had the genetic potential for it, and was already firmly established in both Africa and Asia.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The former position, that the Out-of-Africa population were genetically endowed supermen who blitzkrieged other humans ~50,000 years ago was probably the most common position ~10 years ago. It&#8217;s outlined by Richard Klein in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0471252522\/geneexpressio-20\">The Dawn of Human Culture<\/a>. A contrasting argument was put forth at about the same time by Stephen Oppenheimer in <a ...<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/Ek2i21f3acg\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, not really&#8230;but in some ways close enough judged against the initial reference point of where  I started on certain questions. Dienekes contends:<br \/>\nThis will help us understand both: the ancestors of non-Africans did not come forth fully forme&#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-74464","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\/74464","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=74464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}