New Type of Ancient Human Found—Descendants Live Today?

Hi, Jon.I'm glad you responded. Melodrama aside, I think I can largely agree with the sentiment of this statement.----- I don't find it difficult to reconcile at all. Here is a link to a photo of a simple mosaic. This demonstrates that, even within a mosaic, there are frequently dominant patterns. For instance, I would have no qualms about calling this mosaic blue, even though there seem to be a couple of tiles in the mosaic that are white.These authors are saying that, even though the bulk of the evidence suggests a pattern of blue tiles, they have uncovered at least one white tile. They go on to say that, despite this, the mosaic still rather appears to be blue. From my standpoint, this seems a relatively uncontroversial thing for them to say.----- I find it illustrative to point out that these findings also verify a tenet of the creationist argument concerning Neanderthals as degenerate humans. It is upon the bulk of the evidence, and not upon the singular anomalies, that the veracity of scientific theories are decided.Edited by Bluejay, : No reason given.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Jon. Mr Jack isn't far off at all.You've said a lot about a strict Out-of-Africa model. If you restrict your opponents to the strictest form of their model, isn't it only fair for your opponents to restrict you to the same?The strict MR model is essentially what Mr Jack described. It states that regional populations of modern humans are genealogically continuous with archaic populations of the same regions. It argues that Europeans are essentially Neanderthals, Asians are essentially erectines (or Denisovans), and Africans are Homo sapiens sapiens. It differs from strict polygenism in that it allows genetic admixture between populations. But, it predicts that only those traits that are universally beneficial will have spread, while traits that are neutral or only regionally beneficial will not have spread.Surely you can agree that this strict MR model does not hold up to scrutiny?The version of MRH that is still held to today is not the same as the one I just described. Rather, it's a watered-down model with softer claims. It's essentially been reduced to the view that some unspecified amount of hybridization occurred between regional populations.Essentially, once it was falsified in its strictest form, it was softened and adapted to cover all the middle ground between its original form and the competing out-of-Africa model. Despite this, you now criticize the out-of-Africa model for attempting to soften some of its claims in exactly the same way.Even worse, you're attempting to argue that even a softened out-of-Africa hypothesis is invalidated by this new evidence of admixture. You seem to believe that any deviation from the strictest out-of-Africa model vindicates the stronger claims of the old multiregional model, something that modern MR proponents don't even claim.I hope this provides some insight into why Mr Jack and I have gotten so irritated with you about this.Edited by Bluejay, : No reason given.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Jon.----- I don't think I've misrepresented you. Perhaps my wording isn't the best, but this is hardly call for such exasperation from you. Here are some statements you made in this thread (all from the first page of "Jon posts only"): These are the viewpoints of yours that I am attempting to encompass when I say that you claim that OoA is invalidated. I apologize if my phraseology confuses and bothers you, but I would like you to admit that the irritation you are feeling is just about the semantics, and not about the substance, of the statement.----- I think this is also little more than a semantic irritation on your part. What does "vindication" mean to you? To me, it means something akin to, "we've been saying it for a long time, and now you've finally been confronted with some evidence that forces you to acknowledge it." I think this is a very accurate representation of your position in this discussion.And, as I explained, you have, in fact, argued that, since there is genetic evidence for admixture, there is no longer any reason to believe that an out-of-Africa migration ever happened (both again from only the first page of "Jon posts only"): If you're only making some parochial point about how my terminology doesn't accurately represent the tentativity with which you present your arguments, then I will make a concerted effort to amend my ways. I will refrain from using the words "invalidate" and "vindicate," as the discontent that seem to arouse exceeds their usefulness to my argument. I will instead use words like "untenable" or "unsupportable."But, I think you're going too far when you claim I'm misrepresenting you.----- While you have consistently made statements to this effect, your approach to the subject has not been in accordance with them. Your arguments have concentrated specifically on the migration component of out-of-Africa models. You argue that evidence of genetic admixture leads to the rejection of migration as a tenable explanation for anything. The result is that the available "theory space" is partitioned dichotomously into multiregionalism and strict out-of-Africa-ism.Edited by Bluejay, : Correct "msg" tags: thanks, Jon (I've been away too long, I guess)

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

I have to confess that I'm thoroughly confused now as to what the multiregional hypothesis is and isn't, and about what evidence it would and wouldn't predict. I've been trying to do some reading from the main proponents of the multiregional hypothesis, and I found that my frustration with this particular group of people is only surpassed by my frustration with the work of Alan Feduccia and of the Intelligent Design movement.Milford H. Wolpoff, one of multiregionalism's strongest proponents from the 1980's until today, wrote several papers about the hypothesis. He seemed to only be concerned with chastising misconceptions about the hypothesis, and, as far as I have been able to determine, never actually got around to explaining what, exactly, the hypothesis did say. Here and here are two such papers. They contain little more than lists of things that the multiregional hypothesis does not predict, but is claimed to predict. While that, of itself, is irritating, what really bothers me is that I can't come up with a reason why MR wouldn't predict most of these things.For instance, Wolpoff (and co-authors) is insistent that MR does not predict that there would be more genetic and morphological heterogeneity at the "crossroads" of the regional populations than at the peripheries. Yet, as far as I can tell, this should be an unavoidable result of the MR hypothesis as he explains it. He apparently believes that such a pattern of heterogeneity would have been eroded away over the long intervening time periods.He also claims that MR does not predict that there would be fossils showing hybrid gradients between regional populations. Yet, how could African traits come to dominate non-African populations without either producing hybrids or having Africans migrate out of Africa? He does, however, point to a couple fossils that might be sapiens-Neanderthal intermediates. This gives me the impression that, if hybrid fossils are found, he will claim that MR predicted them; whereas, if they are not, he will argue that MR does not predict them.He also discusses two interpretations of the MR model that he regards as inaccurate: the "multiple origins" model (in which modern regional populations are descended from archaic populations of the same region) and the "parallel evolution" model (in which traits common to different regional populations evolved separately). My confusion lies in the fact that one or the other, of necessity, must be true, at least to some extent, in order for MR to meaningfully explain anything.Also, in this paper, he proposed regional continuity in Australasian fossil morphology as evidence of MR, then claims in the first paper cited above the MR does not necessarily predict regional continuity.In summary, Wolpoff seems to treat his hypothesis the way Intelligent Designists treat theirs. He seems to use a lot of "maybe we would, maybe we wouldn't" reasoning, such that I am left with no insight into what predictions MR actually does make. I'm told by Jon and others that MR predicted admixture between Homo sapiens and other "species" of Homo, but it seems to me that it should have predicted something more specific than that: "Somebody banged a Neanderthal" seems an awfully vague prediction for such a grandiose hypothesis to make.Edited by Admin, : Fix links.Edited by Bluejay, : fix link. Thanks, fearandloathing.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Jon. You'll forgive me, but this still seems like a semantic quibble. "No evidence that supports" and "reject as tenable" are identical in meaning.----- And, we're back to this, I guess. So, I suppose it's time to summarize.Migration is a much better explanation for the wholesale takeover of one gene pool with genes from another than is passive genetic diffusion through hybridization. The transmission of genes from Africa into Eurasia during the Pleistocene, and the resulting distribution of haplotypes in the modern populations, closely resembles the transmission of genes from Europe to North America during the Colonial Period. Surely this much is undeniable.From there, we have to decide which is more likely: that archaic Africans migrated out of Africa and gradually conquered the world, or that their genes diffused virtually unmolested throughout all of the world through hybridization while the archaic Africans themselves stayed in Africa.MR is simply too grandiose a model to seriously explain the distribution of genes in modern human populations. There is no conceivable reason why a model that proposes regional adaptations and extensive hybridization would result in such lopsided dominance by haplotypes from Africa.I submit that MR has been vindicated as a good explanation for a minority of data in the peripheries of the Pleistocene range of humans, but that it falls spectacularly short in explaining the success of African haplotypes.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Jon.The links are working for me. Can any lurkers (if there are any) please test the links to see if the troubles are specific to Jon? Jon, can you just cut-and-paste the links from the "peek" mode?Here are the bibliographical references, if that helps: I have to admit that I've only read several peer-reviewed papers by Wolpoff. I've also read a couple other papers by some of the co-authors on those Wolpoff papers, but I can't remember what any of those papers said now.I have not read the book Race and Human Evolution, but I am familiar with the concept and understand his brief arguments about it from the letters I linked to. His way of dealing with it seems to be that, while one would normally expect center-and-edge effects from a mixing population, there are numerous reasons why these effects would not be apparent, which I would refer to as "ad hoc explanations."

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Jon.I certainly have trouble letting go of a debate: this is the second time I've come back immediately after claiming to be summarizing. Oh well: you're not a bad debate partner, so I don't mind. Agreed. I wasn't presenting a tenet of a hypothesis: I was presenting the physical evidence in human genomes that demonstrates essentially a total African whitewashing of regional gene pools, which has to be incorporated into any hypothesis.----- These aren't predictions: these are ad hoc apologetics to explain why we don't see the center-and-edge effects that a strict hybridization model would predict.----- I realize this. My trouble with your explanation is that you haven't yet offered an observed example of this mechanism actually accounting for such a pattern of lopsided dominance in a real-world population. On the other hand, I have provided at least one clear example of a historical migration event resulting in an identical pattern of lopsided dominance.I can certainly think of examples in which hybridization has been observed to feed population turnover, such as with Africanized (killer) honeybees. However, in this example, migration and replacement play a key role---a bigger role than hybridization, actually---in the turnover of the population. And, I predict that the same will be found in all other examples that you might bring to the table, because, rationally, migration is simply a better explanation for massive, unilateral genetic influx than is hybridization.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Jon. Or, in other words, we don't really see center-and-edge effects, because they have been eroded and obscured over a couple million years. I find it curious that the pattern left behind "after a couple million years in the works" looks for all the world like a pattern of near-complete replacement.----- And, as I've already stated, this comes off as an evasion tactic. I am provided reasons why a given prediction isn't upheld by evidence from modern populations, I am referred to evidence from the past to make my conclusion, I am informed that the evidence from the past may be too sparse to form a solid conclusion, and I am still being told that the evidence does not show an alternative pattern, when, to me, it looks for all the world like it does show that alternative pattern.It all feels like little more than proponents of multiregionalism denying me every possible recourse by which I might falsify it.So, I want to change the focus of the discussion and ask you what evidence would falsify the multiregional hypothesis.