Out of Africa: celebrating 100 years of human-origins research
93 comments
·February 6, 2025r0ze-at-hn
throwup238
IMO the next big thing - if anyone ever has the stones to propose it - is going to be the reclassification of many archaic human species as subspecies of Homo sapiens. The difference between humans and known neanderthal samples is barely more than the genetic diversity within extant humans. The more data we get, the more archaic humans in general look like small morphological variations of the hairless monkeys we see now. I think the taxonomy we have is the result of prestige-seeking behavior more so than actual science.
transcriptase
Human geneticists are cult-like in their commitment to never explicitly interpreting findings, however unambiguous the evidence is, in a way that could potentially have a remote chance of being used as fuel for discrimination.
For example you can spend your career mapping hundreds of small-effect variants linked to intelligence or phenotypes that lead to increased likelihood of certain behaviours.
You can even publish a study showing that people who carry a certain gene variant and experienced childhood neglect have “increased risk of committing severe, impulsive, violent recidivist crimes”, and that the variant is more prevalent in prison populations than the general public in a certain region.
You can also publish a population genetics study showing that humans have relatively easily computed genetic structure (see: 23andMe ancestry) because countless alleles are practically fixed in certain populations relative to others due to selection or founder effects, or are prevalent enough that if you have a segment of your genome with enough of them them you must have had an ancestor from a certain region.
What you can’t do is combine these concepts into any uncomfortable findings when it comes to humans.
mannyv
What's amusing is that according to the literature height can be inherited but intelligence can not be.
More generally, any characteristic that can be used to denigrate (or promote) a group is not inheritable. It's the fiction that keeps genetics moving along.
jltsiren
For most, it's a simple defense mechanism.
Some topics are more likely to attract assholes than others. If you don't want to be drawn into a political debate with assholes, you don't study those topics. Better to study something that can be studied without being forced to make a political stand.
That would not happen in the ideal world, where people try to avoid misinterpreting and overgeneralizing results. But controversial topics always attract people acting in bad faith. Even most of those acting in good faith are unused to the level of precision and pedantry required to make justified conclusions from data.
Cornbilly
Which uncomfortable findings are you referring to?
Apparently, they’re also hard to plainly state on an anonymous forum as well. Weird.
BugsJustFindMe
> have “increased risk of committing severe, impulsive, violent recidivist crimes”, and that the variant is more prevalent in prison populations than the general public
If your goal is to show that the gene variant causes violence, you probably need to compare violent vs nonviolent prison populations, not prison populations vs general public. We already know that there are aspects of genetics that affect likelihood of being imprisoned, all else being equal.
sangnoir
> What you can’t do is combine these concepts into any uncomfortable findings when it comes to humans.
You can[1], and it's been done.
api
> Human geneticists are cult-like in their commitment to never explicitly interpreting findings, however unambiguous the evidence is, in a way that could potentially have a remote chance of being used as fuel for discrimination.
History has shown this to be wise. If human beings -- as individuals or as a group -- come to view themselves as superior to others, the next step is always abuse, enslavement, or war. Civilization tries very hard to suppress this for the same reason that it suppresses some of the wilder expressions of unbridled human sexuality, physical aggression, etc. Moral issues aside, there’s certain stuff that just breaks everything if you let it run unchecked.
A truly intelligent being could look dispassionately at the various distributions of abilities and other differences in its population and deal with this maturely and rationally. We aren't capable of this yet. I don’t think we can handle it emotionally.
This is an area where my opinions have evolved as I’ve gotten older and seen more of the world. We do, in fact, need taboos around certain things. I don’t think there should be too many of them, but there’s areas where the need has been repeatedly demonstrated.
dani__german
Which is a hilarious fact in itself.
A common refrain among non religious people is that religion is false, self contradictory, or something similar.
And yet the large overlap between these people and anti-racists cannot face the evidence that evolution applies to humans, and that genetic differences can have measurable effects. This becomes a core tenent of their (un)beliefs, that somehow we are all equal in construction, AND that evolution is real. Two completely incompatible beliefs (or concepts, if you can't stand such a word).
Prevalence of the MAOA gene is quite interesting indeed.
To expand upon that a bit, one deeply held belief is that Racism is wrong, not just morally but factually, that we are all exactly equal in nature. That our only differences come from nurture. The other belief (or "non-skeptically accepted prospect") is that humanity has evolved, first from africa, then in disparate populations spread over the entire land area of the earth, being subject to many varied natural environments and thus selections. Such natural selections MUST select for different traits, often wildly different. Such traits cannot be contained to "skin color only" a meaningless, arbitrary restriction.
RobotToaster
There's been a dispute over that for a long time, they're often called Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. (Modern humans then being Homo Sapiens Sapiens, which seems somewhat vain, calling ourselves "wise wise man")
BurningFrog
"History is written by the victors"
Symmetry
I'm not sure that matters but one hill I will die on is that all members of homo are humans too.
If we're renaming things I'd rather we call ourselves homo gregarius. There's no evidence we were individually smarter than our Neanderthals cousins, rather we were a variety of humans which lived in larger groups and thus could sustain a more sophisticated technological toolkit.
stefantalpalaru
[dead]
r0ze-at-hn
And for the curious as I can't go back and edit the comment it was the Altai, Vi3315, and Vi3319 that have the CYP21A2 rs6467 (C;T) variant
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systemstops
Razib Khan did an excellent write-up about the latest research on this:
TealMyEal
To anyone that has a intrest in this area, (which if you are reading this you proably have some) I would highly reccomend the book Fossil Men by Kermit Pattison. Also if anyone has some book reccomendations along these lines plz do send them my way
ne8il
"The Sediments of Time" by Meave Leakey is fascinating both from her life and her family history.
"Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art" by Rebecca Wragg-Sykes is great.
"Almost Human" by Lee Berger is about one particular discovery rather than human origins as a whole but is an entertaining read - there was an accompanying PBS special (NOVA?) that's worth watching as well to really understand the scale of some of the caves they were in.
throw4847285
One of those interesting cases where a scientific development seems on its face to rebut scientific racism, and instead becomes incorporated into it. Because scientific racism is a degenerate research programme, its adherents were able to jettison any hypotheses that seemed like part of the core and replace them with new ones. As long as you realize that the actual core is the racism, not the science, then the dynamic makes perfect sense.
They could now argue that Out of Africa was in fact proof of the superiority of whites, who had clearly evolved since leaving Southern Africa. Of course, any evidence that this is not the case can be ignored, keeping the true core of the research programme intact.
anonylizard
Most of social sciences today is 'degenerate' by your definition, at least a plurality of those researchers openly admit that following the evidence is not the highest virtue, but arriving at the most socially correct result is.
throw4847285
That's not what Lakatos meant by degenerate. It's a technical definition, and his response to Popper's claim that falsification can be used to differentiate science from pseudoscience. I think if you seriously apply Lakatos's reasoning then at the very least many types of quantitative social science are progressive research programmes in a way that race science is not. And if you try naive falsification instead, you end up with weird results like mathematical physics isn't science but quantitative sociology is.
Oh, and "socially correct" is a thought terminating cliche. You clearly meant "politically correct" but that has such a negative valance that you need to change one of the words to not sound conspiratorial.
pwrson
How do archeologists solve the survivor bias of the "Out of Africa" theory?
After all, if humans were randomly distributed on planet Earth according to the local environment's carrying capacity, 100 000 years later Id expect to find a lot more human remains in Eritrea than the Pontine marshes.
AlotOfReading
Archaeologists don't, human origins is the domain of anthropologists. There's some overlap, but they're different professional specialties.
Anyway, multiple concurrent lines of evidence. You're morphologically similar to ancient African ancestors. The serial founder effect points to Africa. Molecular clocks point to Africa. Fossil evidence points to Africa.
Anthropologists don't think anatomically modern humans originated exclusively in the places with the most fossils though. That's just where we find the most fossils.
wqaatwt
Bodies in certain environments (e.g. especially some bogs/marshes) are much more likely to be preserved? On the other hand it’s extremely unlikely for human remains to survive for long in tropical forests or similar places.
netdevphoenix
Given the implications of this kind of science, people often find it hard to accept the findings and much preferred the multi-regional hypothesis as many find it more palatable and similar to the mythos of people having popped out from the same area or region that they their most recent ancestors have lived
Tor3
"people often find it hard to accept the findings and much preferred the multi-regional hypothesis"
AlotOfReading
These people exist, though much more rarely than they did 30/40 years ago when the genetic data wasn't yet fully in. It's quite a popular school of thought among Chinese biological anthropologists because originally, it was used to support the idea of China as the ethnic homeland for han people back in the 50s. Now it's just an idea that's become institutionally ingrained.
graemep
Racism. Much easier to believe in intrinsic differences between races if they do not share close common ancestry.
Other systems of racism can also tied to some sort of belief in separate origins - caste in India.
willmadden
Here's why I find it hard to accept out of Africa (OOA).
Ancient Fossil Evidence Outside Africa – Fossil remains predating the supposed OOA migration (~60,000 years ago) have been found in China (Dali skull, 260,000 years old), Greece (Apidima 1, 210,000 years old), and the Levant (Misliya jaw, ~177,000 years old), suggesting Homo sapiens or proto-sapiens were present outside Africa long before the mainstream migration timeline.
Genetic Discrepancies – Some non-African populations (e.g., Australo-Melanesians and East Asians) possess archaic DNA from unknown hominins not found in Africans, implying deep regional continuity rather than a complete replacement by recent African migrants.
Multiple Ancestral Lineages – The discovery of distinct ancient hominin populations, such as the Denisovans and Red Deer Cave people, suggests a complex web of interbreeding rather than a single-origin replacement model.
Stone Tool Continuity in Asia – The presence of advanced stone tools in Asia (e.g., at Jwalapuram, India, ~74,000 years ago) suggests technological continuity rather than a disruption expected from an OOA replacement event.
MtDNA & Y-Chromosome Inconsistencies – While mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is often cited in support of OOA, recent studies indicate that some deep-rooted Y-chromosome lineages (e.g., haplogroup D found in Tibetans and Andamanese) show ancient divergence outside Africa, inconsistent with a recent African bottleneck.
Early Human Artifacts in the Americas – Artifacts and footprints in the Americas (e.g., White Sands, ~21,000–23,000 years ago) suggest a much earlier presence of humans, challenging the late migration model and implying deeper population history.
Human evolution and migration were likely far more complex than a single, recent dispersal from Africa. The evidence supports alternative models such as multiregional evolution or earlier, undocumented migrations.
Mountain_Skies
Anytime something is declared an unquestionable truth, it's going to attract questions. Usually this ends up being pointless but sometimes unquestionable truths end up being false.
Asooka
Exactly. Even if it is not entirely correct, the single-origin "out of Africa" theory is extremely useful in fostering unity and stamping out racism amongst people. We need to be really careful in how we present scientific advancements that may affect that theory, since any erosion of its political power will give ammunition to alt-right racism at a very precarious time in world history. It is the duty of every intelligent individual navigating these topics to keep in mind that the Africa theory must be presented as the main branch of humanity with any additional findings shown only as alternate streams that change, but do NOT enhance, the base human. Obviously we must also explain that any evolutionary change to the human species coming out of Africa has been entirely lateral and not vertical, lest the same alt-right racism take it to mean the African diaspora is somehow "less evolved".
nabla9
Genetic studies have put an end to that kind of speculation.
Only crackpots and religious nuts are supporting alternatives.
wolfhumble
Which "religious nuts" support a "multi-regional hypothesis"? A mono-regional 'Eden' is supported in Abrahamic religions.
Boogie_Man
Presumably tribal religions
ty6853
All Americans are African Americans, as I put it.
Put it on your med school applications too when submitting MCAT scores.
foxhop
Politically motivated bollocks.
The white colonizer did not get colonized by tribes in Africa.
noch
> [T]he mythos of people having popped out from the same area or region that they their most recent ancestors have lived […]
>> Genetic studies have put an end to that kind of speculation. Only crackpots and religious nuts are supporting alternatives.
David Reich (author of "Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past") says[^0]:
" The modern human lineage, leading to the great majority of the ancestors of people today, was probably in sub-Saharan Africa for the last 500,000 years at least. It might be much more. Certainly our main lineage was in Africa, probably 3-7 million years ago.
But in a period between about 2 million to 500,000 years ago, it's not at all clear where the main ancestors leading to modern humans were. There were humans throughout many parts of Eurasia and Africa with a parallel increase in brain size and not obviously closer ancestrality to modern humans in one place than in the other. It's not clear where the main lineages were. Maybe they were in both places and mixed to form the lineages that gave rise to people today.
There's been an assumption where Africa's been at the center of everything for many millions of years. Certainly it's been absolutely central at many periods in human history. But in this key period when a lot of important changes happen—when modern humans develop from Homo habilis and Homo erectus all the way to Homo heidelbergensis and the shared ancestor of Neanderthals, modern humans, and Denisovans— that time period which is when a lot of the important change happened, it's not clear, based on the archaeology and genetics, where that occurred as I understand it. " (emphasis mine throughout)
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nabla9
>But in this key period when a lot of important changes happen—when modern humans develop from Homo habilis and Homo erectus all the way to Homo heidelbergensis
That's a time period before homo sapiens, not after.
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foxhop
[flagged]
hoseja
Will they also be celebrating Out of Pontic Steppe?
nkrisc
Humans didn’t originate there, so unlikely.
netdevphoenix
is that an alternative theory? I don't get the connection or is there some implied reference I am not getting?
DiogenesKynikos
I'm guessing that it's a reference to the leading theory for the origin of the Indo-European language family.[0]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_homeland
And there is so much still to uncover. Just the other day I was going through Neanderthal DNA during lunch and noticed that three of the four existing DNA samples show that they were carriers for the rs6467 form of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) due to 21-Hydroxylase Deficiency.
Neanderthals were highly inbred and had low population numbers. Being a carrier of this form of CAH would have absolutely kept the population numbers low all by itself as getting two copies would have been nonviable. Further Neanderthals are most known for contributing to human specific DNA sets such as improved immune system. Here we have something that even in the non classic form is havoc with the HPA-Axis and give incredible evolutionary pressure to resolve, one way is to simply dramatically improve the immune system.
As far as I can tell this hasn't been written about before. Lots of stuff like this will be noticed and or figured out in the decades ahead.