New analysis shows three human migrations out of Africa

[Mr. McD]

Feb. 2, 2006 — A new, more robust analysis of recently derived human gene trees by Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D, of Washington University in St Louis, shows three distinct major waves of human migration out of Africa instead of just two, and statistically refutes — strongly — the 'Out of Africa' replacement theory.

That theory holds that populations of Homo sapiens left Africa 100,000 years ago and wiped out existing populations of humans. Templeton has shown that the African populations interbred with the Eurasian populations — thus, making love, not war.

http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/6349.html

[Viva_La_Revolution]

1. Auel was right.

Clan of the Cave Bear 1984 :)

[mistertrickster]

2. fascinating--thanks for the link nt

[bemildred]

3. Anything else was ridiculous.

Men will have sex with sheep and cows. Why not ANYTHING more closely related?

[bemildred]

9. Mich. Man Sentenced in Sheep Abuse Case

BATTLE CREEK, Mich. - A man who pleaded no contest to a sodomy charge involving a sheep says he should not have to register as a sex offender.

Doesn't quite say "The sheep liked it".

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060215/ap_on_fe_st/sodomy_sex_offender_list;

[rayofreason]

4. I don't buy it...

The link is to an internal publication of Washington U. Where was the paper published? Templeton has long been an opponent of the out of Africa theory.

[Mr. McD]

6. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 2005.

According to the article.

[mountebank]

10. Just saw him give a seminar on this.

He is definitely a proponent of the Out of Africa theory (at least now). Contrary to what some are saying here, these results have nothing to with Neandertals, only the three waves of modern humans coming out of Africa. And I don't see why these results are published in the "Yearbook of Physical Anthropology." Never heard of it. I suspect they are currently being prepared for a more major journal and therefore they still need to undergo peer review.

Concerning Neandertals, there is no evidence currently (to my knowledge) for intermingling of genes (to put it mildly) between modern humans and Neandertals. Someone asked Templeton this at the seminar, because he didn't address it, and he said that although the DNA sequences they have for Neandertals are divergent from humans and show no shared types, the sample size is really small, so the jury is still out.

[jody]

11. Isn't there speculation the gene responsible for red-hair and freckles

in modern Europeans had Neanderthal origins?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

17. Also light skin, blue eyes, and blond hair, which are found ONLY

in the areas that were inhabited by Neanderthals and nowhere else. They're supposed to be adaptations for areas that have low levels of sunlight in the winter, but you'll notice that the Sami and other Arctic peoples are dark-skinned.

It is known that Neanderthals and homo sapiens coexisted in the Middle East for some time.

Sure, it's possible that the modern humans killed off the Neanderthals, or simply took over their hunting grounds, but judging from what modern humans have done throughout recorded history, it would not be surprising if they took some captives and used them sexually.

[mountebank]

20. Hi Lydia - see my post below on Neandertals. All evidence to date

indicates that there was no contribution of Neandertal DNA to our gene pool. And there are peculiarities about the method used, mtDNA, that dictate that if modern humans "sexually used" Neandertal women, at least as a somewhat common practice, we would see that genetic signature in our gene pool. Now that doesn't mean it never, ever happened. Just that offspring that were produced, didn't pass on their genes to the present.

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. What he seems to reject is 'Out of Africa with replacement'

Here's an anthropology blog on this:

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2006/02/alan-templeton-vs-out-of-africa-with.html

To non-anthropologists like me, "Out of Africa" may have always meant "... with replacement". Until now, I thought the consensus was that there had been no breeding between Eurasian Homo erectus (or descendants - does Neandertal man fit into that category?) and the Homo sapiens that came out of Africa later - and Templeton is saying there is.

[mountebank]

14. I'm pretty sure that Templeton is saying that there was breeding

between the different waves of modern humans that came out of Africa, but none of these are Neandertals or H. erectus. I could be wrong, the seminar was about 6 months ago. An unrelated cool detail about H. erectus, though: they have now found several fossils from an island in the South Pacific that are apparently a dwarf species/race of H. erectus, which died out only about 40K years ago. So it seems that ancient human lineages survived until quite recently - although there is still no hard evidence for interbreeding with the groups of anatomically-modern humans that are the ancestors of all of us. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I am consulting no other reference than my memory here.

[mountebank]

15. Ok - I guess they did interbreed with H. erectus. I'm reading the

actual article now (always a good idea). But the questions of interbreeding with Neandertals is still an open one.

[muriel_volestrangler]

16. He is saying Eurasian H. erectus did interbreed with later expansions

From the OP link:

Another novel find is that populations of Homo erectus in Eurasia had recurrent genetic interchange with African populations 1.5 million years ago, much earlier than previously thought, and that these populations persisted instead of going extinct, which some human evolution researchers thought had occurred.

The new data confirm an expansion out of Africa to 700,000 years ago that was detected in the 2002 analysis.

And this is in modern DNA, so they also interbreeded with the Hom sapiens that came from Africa about 100,000 years ago.

[mountebank]

18. It's pretty amazing to think about multiple human lineages inhabiting

the Earth at the same time. I guess that was always the appeal of Jane Auel's books. The more evidence that accumulates, the more we know that the human lineage was not a straight line, but a bush of different lineages, with different lineages co-existing in different places at different times. How satifyingly complex. But if modern humans interbred with H. erectus, I guess I'd like to know why H. erectus is considered a separate species? Would Templeton advocate that they be incorporated into a single species? Damn - I always come up with those good seminar questions 6 months after the fact.... Furthermore, it seems pretty likely, given the morphological differences between modern humans and H. erectus, that they were pretty divergent, probably genetically, too, since they clearly had plenty of time in geographic isolation to diverge genetically. So if they interbred - why don't we see clearly divergent mtDNA in some humans, the ghost of H. erectus past as it were? I will have to read the full article that Templeton published - and I still can't imagine why he published it where he did instead of a higher-profile journal.

[freethought]

5. Wow! That almost reflects the way North America was "peopled"

Some of you fellow DUers may remember the Kennewick Man, actually just a skeleton found on a river bar in the Pacific Northwest. This lends theory that North America was settled in waves as well, likely two, maybe three. That's big "maybe" though. One wave along the western coastline following the shore, the other through a break in the North American Ice sheet, and possibly a third wave along pack ice across the Atlantic from Europe. I don't believe the scientists have enough evidence to really confirm the trans-Atlantic wave.
Kennewick man blew the "Clovis First" theory out of the water. What was even more intriguing about Kennewick was an analysis of his skull gave him facial structure most like the Inu population of Northern Japan. Not many pure Inus left. They are pretty much being absorbed into Japanese society and culture.

Personally I find this type of research and study fascinating. Just when you think you've got it nailed, something pops up that sends you back to the books. Wasn't it Yogi Bera who said "We don't know one tenth of one percent of anything!"? Who knows? Maybe out there somewhere is another archeological site that will render all present theories useless. Could happen!!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. LInguistic evidence also points to three migrations

One that produced the vast majority of North and South American ethnic groups, another that produced (now this is interesting) the Navaho, Apache, and a few other Southwestern peoples AND several ethnic groups in Canada (in other words, the founding group split, with one branch going south and the other going north), and the third and most recent, which produced the Inuit.

[bemildred]

8. And the one which occurred in the last 500 years.

Producing Amurkins, among other cultural types.

[RoyGBiv]

12. I must be crazy ...

I swear I've heard/read this theory before, at least in its most essential details. All I can say is that as a non-anthropologist who forms his opinions of such things on the findings and arguments of those who are experts, the general theory running through my head for the last several years as jibed pretty closely with this.

[mountebank]

19. Here is some recently published info on Neandertals....

Because we have been discussing whether or not they interbred with humans.... From Current Biology (probably need a subscription or password, I'm guessing, to read the whole article).... But here is a snip on the genetic work on Neandertals. While it's difficult to say for sure with such a small sample size, it looks like there was little contribution of Neandertals to our gene pool. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited through the mother, so if there was interbreeding, it would likely have been with female Neandertals - so the fact that no divergent mtDNA like Neanderals has ever been found in modern humans is pretty convincing.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VRT-4J9VXBJ-6&_coverDate=02%2F21%2F2006&_alid=369365535&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_cdi=6243&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000059605&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=4423&md5=4c33d04e6985bf49d7f5db2c342abd05

What have genetic studies of Neandertals revealed?

In 1997 a segment of mitochondrial DNA was retrieved from the original Neandertal bones found in 1856. Its DNA sequence fell outside the variation of modern human mitochondrial DNA sequences, and shared a common ancestor with them on the order of half a million years ago, while all corresponding sequences of extant humans share a common ancestor less than 200,000 years ago. If this had concerned field mice or some insect, the arguments would surely have ended here with the conclusion that these were two distinct populations. However, as it concerns our own species, scientists have continued to debate about the genetic relationship between the two human forms. In the meantime, it has been shown that a number of well-preserved Neandertals contain DNA sequences similar to the first one, while equally well-preserved anatomically modern humans do not. Also, none of many thousands of humans living today have been found to carry such divergent DNA sequences. Given these facts, the contribution of the Neandertals to the gene pool of modern humans can only be minor — if any.

[Odin2005]

21. This doesn't neccissarily support the regional continuity model...

...which mDNA and Y chromosome data has shown to be mostly wrong (the key point is mostly, which I'll get back to later). The 3 migrations match perfectly with the expansion of H. erectus, H. Heidelbergensis (the common ancestor of us and Neandertals), and H. sapiens out of Africa. H. erectus evolved straight into H. heidelbergensis wothout branching. H. Heidelbergensis and Neandertals is where things start getting interesting. Heidelbergensis splits very early into a Eurasian population evolving towards the Neandertal condition and an African population evolvong towards us. By 200,000 years ago the two populations have become recognizably Neandertal and modern human, but they still wern't isolated reproductively, specialtion was not fully complete, and I think there was some gene flow between Neandertals, asian Heidelbergensis populations, and early Moderns (represented by the 100,000 year old remains in Israel and the 200,000 year old ethiopian remians that were recently re-dated) through the middle east, but the two populations became fully isolated reproductively around 80,000 yeras ago as a result of behavioral imcompatibility, when modern humans start to transition from middle to upper Paleolithic. The modern humans, then spread from Africa with very little interbreeding with other populations, but they still had the Neandertal and asian Heidelbergensis markers gained berfore they become reproductively isolated.