Friday, March 18, 2016

Africa theory proved wrong again

Ars Technica reports:
You've probably heard the story about how Neanderthals were living in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, when suddenly a bunch of Homo sapiens came pouring out of Africa about 70 thousand years ago. 30 thousand years later, pretty much all the Neanderthals were dead. Many anthropologists believe that Homo sapiens killed off our large-browed cousins in a quest to dominate the Eurasian continent. But over the past 10 years, that view has changed radically thanks to new techniques for sequencing ancient DNA.

Now, two new studies make it even less likely that modern humans killed off the Neanderthals. Instead, we interbred with them at least three separate times, and our ancestors were likely sharing tools with them half a million years ago. ...

In other words, modern humans didn't sweep out of Africa, killing everything in their paths. They settled down with the locals, many different times. Evolutionary biologist Carles Laleuza-Fox, who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times' Carl Zimmer, "This is yet another genetic nail in the coffin of our over-simplistic models of human evolution."
So all the textbooks that say that modern humans emerged from Africa are wrong.

When will the textbooks be corrected? Not for decades, I suspect. Just last month the NY Times was still referring to ancient Africans as "modern humans".

The problem was not over-simplification. Before the Out-of-Africa theory became popular about 30 years ago, the consensus was the multi-regional theory that is now considered more accurate. Neanderthals were considered primitive humans, like the popular image of a cave man.

The Out-of-Africa theory was promoted by leftist anthropologists who wanted to make a statement about the equality of all people, and to credit Africa for creating humanity. In the textbooks and popular press, they said that all of human evolution took place in Africa, that modern humans emerged there about 100k years ago, that they spread to the whole planet displacing other hominids, and that there has been no human evolution since.

All of this has been proved false.

Someone is probably going to tell me that this was all a Jewish plot. What would the purpose be -- to convince non-Jews not to have any ethnic pride in their heritage? So then Jews can retain their ethnic pride and use it to their advantage?

I don't know about that, as I don't even know whether the leaders of the Out-of-Africa movement were Jewish. Regardless, it is strange how this theory was pushed on academia and the public, without any hard evidence that it was better than the previous theory.

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