Is "Out-of-Africa" Dead or Just Severely Wounded?

 

Here's a good summary from the New York Times [DNA Turning Human Story Into a Tell-All]. The story is written by Alanna Mitchell. John Hawks links to it [Denisova in the news], suggesting that he thinks it's pretty accurate.

The opening paragraphs of the New York Times story emphasize the controversy ...

The tip of a girl’s 40,000-year-old pinky finger found in a cold Siberian cave, paired with faster and cheaper genetic sequencing technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of human origins.

The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, replacing all other types that had gone before.

Instead, the genetic analysis shows, modern humans encountered and bred with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time.

Their DNA lives on in us even though they are extinct. “In a sense, we are a hybrid species,” Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist who is the research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said in an interview.

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[Image Credit: The map is from The Human Journey.]