Need help. Human evolution.

Bathynomus Giganteus · #1 by **Bathynomus Giganteus** » Jan 21, 2011 10:17 pm

OK, I have an ongoing debate with someone who can't quite grasp the Out of Africa theory.
He understands that hominids evolved from African apes, but thinks the apes moved to Europe or China then evolved into humans there.
He also thinks sapiens evolved from neanderthals.

Now, I pointed out "mitochondrial eve" and mtDNA from here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/neanderthals/mtdna.html
And told him we didn't evolve from neanderthals.

Response:

other person wrote:Really - you're sure about that are you ? - modern day Africans didn't evolve from Neanderthals, that's not to say that no-one else did.

Peking man predates your woman by half a billion years, there is no reason at all why that pescies in china did not evolve like the same species in africa.

However Europeans have up to 4% of their DNA, coming from neanderthals - so we are not from a process purely of evolution, but of hybridisation.

So this means that I share 96% of my DNA with modern africans and 95% of my DNA with a chimp. That 1% makes a hell of a difference.

Peking man predates your woman by half a billion years, there is no reason at all why that species in china did not evolve like the same species in africa.

How you think a hominid can walk out of africa and find its way to china over millenia - yet somehow think that because that hominid is in a different location to the same hominid left in Africa - it couldn't have possibly evolved is nonsense

Is there anything that will shut him up? Or is he right?

The bit about Peking man comes from an earlier part of the debate:

Deep Sea Isopod wrote:
What needs to be explained about Neanderthals? Homo Sapiens did not evolve from them. They are a separate lineage. They share a common ancestor with us though.
Oldest Homo sapien skull was found in Kibish, Ethiopia.
[b]
a new study of the 1967 fossil site indicates the earliest known members of our species, Homo sapiens, roamed Africa about 195,000 years ago.

There is no doubt that H. sapiens evolved in Africa.

Now stop being a bunch of science denying creationists!

other person wrote:How unfortunate that Peking man has been now been dated as 770,000 years old. Predating those in Africa by some margin.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009- ... 002058.htm

ME wrote:

Peking man is Homo erectus. Turkana boy (also Homo erectus) predates Peking man by nearly 1million years, and was found in East Africa.
http://anthro.palomar.edu/homo/homo_2.htm
The oldest known Homo erectus date to nearly 2 million years ago in East Africa. This strongly suggests that Homo erectus originated there. In 1984, Richard Leakey's team working at Nariokotome on the western side of Lake Turkana found a nearly complete Homo erectus skeleton of a 12 year old boy dating to 1.6 million years ago. It was named the "Turkana Boy."

pawiz · #2 by **pawiz** » Jan 21, 2011 10:20 pm

The excellent answers over at Rationalia not good enough for you then?

Bathynomus Giganteus · #3 by **Bathynomus Giganteus** » Jan 21, 2011 10:22 pm

They were too scientific.

Ironclad · #4 by **Ironclad** » Jan 21, 2011 10:42 pm

Bathynomus Giganteus wrote:They were too scientific.

Oh dear. Oh dear.

Try punching this person until they believe you then.

Bathynomus Giganteus · #5 by **Bathynomus Giganteus** » Jan 22, 2011 8:38 am

Ironclad wrote:
Bathynomus Giganteus wrote:They were too scientific.

Oh dear. Oh dear.

Try punching this person until they believe you then.

Is that allowed? I mean, he's not a creationist. :eh:

Berthold · #6 by **Berthold** » Jan 25, 2011 11:55 am

Then it's just lack of grasping the relevancy of the evidence. Some basic reading about its nature, and the way it is obtained, might help.

Bathynomus Giganteus · #7 by **Bathynomus Giganteus** » Jan 25, 2011 5:26 pm

It's ok. I think it's sorted now, with help from another member of that forum (a biochem student), who emailed Assistant Professor Richard Edward Green, who replied with this link. http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/neandertals-live-genome-sequencing-2010.html

Which, incidentally, was the same link I found on one of PZ Myers blogs.

Spearthrower · #8 by **Spearthrower** » Jan 30, 2011 10:18 am

The guy you were discussing with was basically forwarding the very earliest notion of Multiregionalism called 'the candelabra model'... it was falsified in successive waves of evidence from the 50's or 60's onwards with fossil evidence, then archaeology, then finally genetics.

While we know that the greater part of what makes us biologically modern humans arose in Africa around 200,000 years ago and really radiated out quickly around 70-50kya, recent discoveries show that there was some introgression between archaic groups and the radiating humans. It's probably actually extremely complex with more radiations than we know of and clades of interbreeding archaic humans resulting in a continuum of interfertility. I strongly expect that further evidence will break down these radiating modern human groups into subdivisions.

What we can say:

90%+ of what makes us Homo sapiens arose in Africa (out of africa)
around 6% of non-African genome is Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Homo sapien denisova (multiregional)

Tyrannical · #9 by **Tyrannical** » Mar 10, 2011 6:16 am

Spearthrower wrote:The guy you were discussing with was basically forwarding the very earliest notion of Multiregionalism called 'the candelabra model'... it was falsified in successive waves of evidence from the 50's or 60's onwards with fossil evidence, then archaeology, then finally genetics.

While we know that the greater part of what makes us biologically modern humans arose in Africa around 200,000 years ago and really radiated out quickly around 70-50kya, recent discoveries show that there was some introgression between archaic groups and the radiating humans. It's probably actually extremely complex with more radiations than we know of and clades of interbreeding archaic humans resulting in a continuum of interfertility. I strongly expect that further evidence will break down these radiating modern human groups into subdivisions.

What we can say:

90%+ of what makes us Homo sapiens arose in Africa (out of africa)
around 6% of non-African genome is Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Homo sapien denisova (multiregional)

We don't know that as a fact, that is just currently the most popular interpretation of the evidence.

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2011/03/out-of-south-africa-out-of-anywhere.html

The most scathing criticism of the east African, or, indeed, any single origin of mankind comes from multiregional evolution (MRE). This theory, seen in a more favorable light after ancient DNA research's 2 for 2 record of inferring archaic admixture in modern humans questions the very idea of an "origin" of humans in some small geographically circumscribed place.

Rather, it proposes that modern humans (Homo sapiens) are genomic blends of components that originated at different times in different places: there was never an "African tribe on the verge of extinction that went on to populate the world", but a single set of interbreeding Homo populations where alleles could (and did) originate anywhere

Spearthrower · **#10** by **Spearthrower** » Mar 25, 2011 7:21 am

Cherrypicking from a blog site does not a case make. You've just forwarded assertions made by that blogger. *shrug*