Out of Africa? – Races are more different than previously thought

This is the cover story on the February edition of American Renaissance vol 22.2

Some interesting new research appeared too late to be included in the article. This is my summary of them: 

“There is also recent research which suggests that the Out-of-Africa 200,000 years ago version of the evolution of modern man may be mistaken. Prof Avi Gopher and Dr Ran Barkai of the Institute of Archaeology Archaeologists at Tel Aviv University have found teeth in Israel thought to be 400,000 years old which from their type seem to belong to modern man. The research – “Middle pleistocene dental remains from Qesem Cave (Israel)” – is published in American Journal of Physical Anthropology http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.21446/abstract   The finds are still the subject of debate,  but if they are substantiated they will overturn the prevailing human evolution orthodoxy and greatly strengthen the regional  development theory. “

Out of Africa?

Races are more different than previously thought.

by Robert Henderson

Researchers led by Prof. Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have placed a very large question mark over the currently fashionable “out-of-Africa” theory of the origins of modern man. They have done this by producing a partial genome from three fossil bones belonging to female Neanderthals from Vindija Cave in Croatia, and comparing it with the genomes of modern humans.

Neanderthal Man: our ancestor after all.

Their initial results show that Neanderthals interbred with anatomically modern humans, mainly with the ancestors of peoples now found in Europe and Asia. This discovery both underlines the genetic differences between African and non-African populations and contradicts the pure, “out-of-Africa” version of human evolution, according to which all non-Africans living today are descended exclusively from migrants that left Africa less than 100,000 years ago. These migrants are said to have out-competed and eventually driven to extinction all other forms of homo and to have done so without interbreeding.

The authors of the Max Planck study note that Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and western Asia, were the closest evolutionary relatives of current humans, but went extinct about 30,000 years ago. They go on to note:

“Comparisons of the Neanderthal genome to the genomes of five present-day humans from different parts of the world identify a number of genomic regions that may have been affected by positive selection in ancestral modern humans, including genes involved in metabolism and in cognitive and skeletal development. We show that Neanderthals shared more genetic variants with present-day humans in Eurasia than with present-day humans in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that gene flow from Neanderthals into the ancestors of non-Africans occurred before the divergence of Eurasian groups from each other.” (Richard E. Green, Johannes Krause, et. al., A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome, Science, May 7, 2010).

http://www.amren.com/ar/2011/02/index.html