Remains of archaic hominins from southwest China (Curnoe et al, 2012). They were around when villages and towns were arising in the Middle East. Recent findings have confirmed the ‘Out of Africa’ model of human origins, but only in part. The model diverges from actual prehistory on two main points. One is that modern humans... Read More

Broken Hill (Kabwe) skull. In Africa, very archaic hominins persisted into recent times. Were archaic hominins still roaming over parts of Africa when farming villages began to form in the Middle East? I raised this question in my last post. But others are now raising it too: A new convert to this view is the... Read More

Broken Hill skull from Zambia, dated to 110,000 BP. It is often identified as a Homo sapiens, largely because it is so recent. We now have evidence that very archaic hominins inhabited central and southern Africa at least 35,000 years ago. The past year has brought us a new model of human evolution. It’s a... Read More

Andaman Islanders. Related peoples once inhabited the coastal regions of southern, southeastern, and eastern Asia. The past year brought two major advances: the long awaited sequencing of the Neanderthal genome and the genetic sequencing of an another archaic human, the Denisovans of East Asia, whose existence had previously been unsuspected. The bottom line comes down... Read More

With the onset of the glacial maximum c. 20,000 years ago, and the ponding up of the Ob River, humans circulated less easily from one end of the steppe-tundra belt to the other. This barrier separated ancestral Europeans from ancestral East Asians. Outside Africa, people seem to have the same amount of Neanderthal admixture, be... Read More

Expansion of modern humans out of Africa and within Africa. Mellars (2006). When we discuss the origins of modern humans, the term ‘Out of Africa’ is a bit misleading. Our common ancestors came not from Africa as a whole but from a relatively small area somewhere in East Africa. Beginning around 80,000 years ago, this... Read More

Skhul V – one of the Skhul-Qafzeh hominins. Were they the middleman between Neanderthal genes and the modern human genome? When I initially published my last post, I pooh-poohed the rumors about the reconstructed Neanderthal genome. How could modern humans have Neanderthal DNA when no such admixture appeared in previous analyses of mtDNA, dentition, and... Read More

Linda Vigilant – Was she in on the Big Secret? Was the rhino? The HBD blogosphere has been rife with speculation about the reconstruction of the Neanderthal genome. John Hawks, Razib Khan, and Steve Sailer felt that something big was in the offing. Above all, this something would resurrect the multiregional model of human origins.... Read More

Ségolène Royal and supporters A University of New Mexico research team has announced that the human gene pool seems to have admixture from an outside source, most likely from the Neanderthals and other archaic humans. This conclusion was based on analysis of variation in microsatellite DNA from European, Asian, and Oceanic populations. Since microsatellite DNA... Read More

How did archaic humans evolve into the different populations of Homo sapiens we see today? The answer has long divided anthropologists. Some opt for the ‘out-of-Africa’ model; others for the multiregional model. According to the out-of-Africa model, we all descend from a small group that existed some 100,000 to 80,000 years ago somewhere in eastern... Read More