Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution:
Mitochondrial DNA from 147 people, drawn from five geographic populations have been analysed by restriction mapping. All these mitochondrial DMAs stem from one woman who is postulated to have lived ab7out 200,000 years ago, probably in Africa. All the populations examined except the African population have multiple origins, implying that each area was colonised repeatedly
And so was published in the year 1987 the paper which established in the public’s mind the idea of mitochondrial Eve, which gave rise to a famous cover photo in Newsweek. This also led to the Children of Eve episode on the PBS documentary NOVA. Here is the summary:
NOVA examines a controversial theory that traces our ancestry to a small group of women living in Africa 300,000 years ago.
As Milford Wolpoff has complained it is probably accurate to characterize the documentary as not particularly “fair & balanced.” Mitochondrial Eve may have been controversial, and subsequently plagued by issues of molecular clock calibration as well as spurious interpretations of the cladograms, but the tide of history was on its side, and PBS was telling that story. And the story was not just the primary science, rather, one had to understand the controversy in light of the debates among paleontologists and between paleontologists and molecular biologists. A group of researchers, spearheaded by Chris Stringer argued for the recent origin of modern humans from Africa on the basis of fossils alone. They were challenged by an established school of multiregionalists who argued for deeper roots of modern human populations, which derived from local hominins which diversified after the the migration of H. erectus out of Africa. The argument of the multiregionalists was that selective sweeps across the full range of the human populations gave rise gradually to modern humanity as we know it, a compound of specific ancient local features and trans-population characters which unified us into a broader whole. Stringer and company presented a simpler model where anatomically modern human being arose ~200,000 years ago in Africa, and subsequently expanded to other parts of the world, by and large replacing the local hominin populations. In the multiregionalist telling Neandertals became human beings, while Out of Africa would imply that Neandertals were replaced by human beings.
Into this tendentious landscape of bones stepped the molecular biologists. The critical figure here is Allan Wilson, who in the 1970s argued forcefully from molecular clock evidence for a more recent separation of the human and ape lineage than paleontologists had favored. By the 1980s the paleontologists had generally conceded that Wilson et al. were correct. After this victory he put forward the mitochondrial Eve theory with his student Rebecca Cann. Here Wilson was getting involved with an argument about paleontology. From all the material I’ve read Wilson and Cann were confident that their techniques were superior to old fashioned analysis of fossils, a method which Wolpoff defended vociferously on NOVA. People who were not invested in recent human origins often did not know what to make of the debate. To give you a flavor of what was going on in the late 1980s, here’s Richard Leakey in Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human:
……In the 1970s, I have been more reluctnant than most to accept Wilson and Sarich’s genetic evident in favor of a recent (five million years ago) origin of hominids, so I thought this would be a chance to redress the balance. In thecourse of my talk I mentioned the mitochondrial DNA evidence and indicated that “I was ready to be persuaded by it.” Surrounded as I was by molecular biologists and geneticists, I imagined it would be a wise think to do, and scientifically proper too.
I was therefore more than a little surprised when, in the bar after my talk, several participants, including the conference organizer, Stepehen O’Brien, cornered me and said, “You don’t have to swallow the Mitochondrial Eve line. We don’t.” Steve and his friends proceeded to tell me why they thought the Eve hypothesis was incorrect…Wilson may have miscalculated the rate of the mitochondrial clock, older mitochondria may have been lost by chance, promoted perhaps by occasional crashes in local pouplation size, natural selection may have favored some recent evolved mitochondrial variant, this eliminating the older lineages. Any of these possibilites might erroneously lave the impression of a recently emerged population….
…In February 1990, Milford and a half a dozen like-minded colleagues organized a session at the annual gathering of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in New Orleans, the goal of which was to “nail this Mitochondrial Eve nonsense.” Speaker after speaker argued for evidence in support of regional continuity and against localized speciation; for alternative interpretations…It was a powerful presentation, and gathered a lot of press, with headlines like “Scientists Attack ‘Eve’ Theory of Human Evolution” and “Man Does not Owe Everything to Eve, Latest Finding Says.” Chris Stringer, who was speaking at a different session of the meeting, described the anti-Eve seminar as “high-powered salesmenship.” One of Milford’s assault team, David Frayer of the University of Kansas, summarized the deep reaction to Wilson’s work: “Fossils are the real evidence.”
In the 1990s Wolpoff came out with a book, Race and Human Evolution: A Fatal Attraction. It outlined a multiregionalist framework for the origin of modern humans, and also presented a wide ranging review of human paleoanthropology past to present, and, to my eyes made the case that the multiregionalists were on the “right side of history.” I was, and remain, a natural history nerd. Especially a natural history nerd of the human species. I devoured books on the topic in the 1980s and 1990s, and saw the slow shift away from multiregionalism toward an Out of Africa model as the orthodoxy, as transmitted by scientific journalists. As I did not have any horse in the race, it was not a matter of concern either way for me, but, I did observe that the disagreements were personal and sometimes politicized. Race and Human Evolution seems to have been written in part to debunk the idea that multiregionalism gave succor to racism. Rather, Wolpoff inverted the narrative, presenting Out of Africa models as genocidal and exterminationist, in contrast to his model of human populations gliding toward sapiency together through gene flow.
The flip side of course is that many people presented Out of Africa as anti-racist par excellence. Anatomically modern humans were portrayed as the latter day Julius Caesar’s of the hominin world. They came, they saw, and they conquered. The chasm between humans and non-humans may have been wide, but the more appealing aspect of the Out of Africa model is that we were the new kids on the block. All non-African humans derived from Africans, who were the reservoirs of our species’ genetic diversity. The dovetailing of implications of the model with the egalitarian ethos of the age was natural. Here is Pat Shipman in 2003, We Are All Africans:
I don’t expect that the subscribers of the Multiregional hypothesis will be waving a white flag of surrender, although they have lost the great majority of their supporters. At least one of the theory’s most ardent proponents, Wolpoff, is still steadfast in defense of the hypothesis he has so long espoused. While it remains possible that new findings will shift the balance in favor of the Multiregional viewpoint, the consilience of such evidence creates a powerful testament. It would take many new fossils and many new genetic studies to resculpt this intellectual landscape.
By and large the arguments which Shipman lays out were persuasive to someone like me who didn’t know much about bones & stones. Though even I knew of some instances of possible continuity, the mtDNA, Y chromosomal lineages, and autosomal results, did seem to roughly line up appropriately. In the battle between paleoanthropologists who saw continuity in the fossils and those who did not, it seemed reasonable to at the time to give the “tiebreaker” to the geneticists who were generating inferences consistent with Out of Africa.
Grendel
With all that said, it has to be stated that paleoanthropologists such as Chris Stringer did not hold necessarily to total replacement of non-Africans. Total replacement may have been the case, but quite often they did qualify that there may have been some admixture and assimilation with the pre-modern substrate. But the paucity of the genetic data pointing to interbreeding between distant lineages (as opposed to a very recent exclusive common ancestry), especially once the Neandertal mtDNA was shown to be an outgroup, seems to have pushed people to the model where modern humans were an entirely different beast which simply wouldn’t have deigned to to have intercourse with the creatures of yore. In The Dawn of Human Culture the paleoanthropologist Richard Klein lays out a scholarly and measured argument for what is close to a maximalist case for the unique and distinctive nature of modern neo-African humanity:
……the simplest and most economic explanation for the “dawn” is that it stemmed from a fortuitous mutation that promoted the fully modern human brain….an acknowledged genetic link between anatomy and behavior in yet earlier people persisted until the emergence of fully modern ones and that the postulated genetic change 50,000 years ago fostered the uniquely modern ability to adapt to a remarkable range of natural and social circumstances with little or no physiological change.
Arguably, the last key neural change promoted the modern capacity for rapidly spoken phonemic language, or for what anthropologists Duane Quiatt and Richard Milo have called “a fully vocal language, phonemicized, syntactical, and infintely open and productive.”
Wolpoff was on to something. Even if the original Out of Africa proponents did not mean to do so, there was a tendency to remove “higher faculties” from the suite of capabilities of the evolutionary “dead ends.” We were H. sapiens sapiens. If we deigned to allow Neandertals to be a branch of our own species, their subspecies was distinctive. They were less than we in the ways in which modern humans were exceptional, and universal.
This orthodoxy probably resulted in a positive feedback loop for the educated public, in which I include myself. The more the Out of Africa model of neo-African human exceptionalism settled into the received wisdom, the more animalized Neandertals and other human lineages became. Naturally a multiregionalist model of continuity became distasteful, because continuity implied a connection between modern humans and subhumans. The fact that the largest cranial capacities in the whole human lineage were sported by Neandertals became a counterintuitive fact, which just went to show that it was quality, not quantity.
When I was a freshman at university I took a biological anthropology course. The instructor threw out a question to the class. He noted that some paleoanthropologists observed a continuity between the skulls of Australian Aborigines and some Southeast Asian erectine populations. Australian Aborigines are a very robust people, and have been less affected by the trend toward gracility which has been the norm over the past 10,000 years for most human populations. In any case, the instructor asked for a show of hands whether such a possibility should even be discussed openly. The solid majority of the class rejected an open discussion. When asked by the instructor why, many of the students who rejected an examination of the thesis argued that such a possibility opened the path to de-humanization, oppression, and was politically too sensitive. Milford Wolpoff had obviously lost the propaganda war. The students did not consider the possibility of multiregionalism where all human populations exhibited continuity, rather, they assumed that continuity hypothesized for Australian Aborigines was specific to them, and so would associate that population with the less human branches of the hominin tree.
Science is a human cultural endeavour. It is about something real, something objective, but we do look through the glass somewhat darkly. The acceptance or rejection of models are contingent upon correspondence to reality and precision of prediction. But the rise and fall of models, and the rate of their rise and fall, may be subject to cultural dynamics. In The Price of Altruism Oren Harman shows how the cultures of Russia and Britain shaped how they viewed the social implications of evolutionary biology. Similarly, Newtonian mechanics and Darwinian evolution may have been retarded in their initial acceptance in France due to reasons of language and national chauvinism.
Not only do scientific theories have to swim through the waters of suspicion and incomprehension across societies, but they also have to overcome the inevitable confounding of their natural inferences with normative ones. Newtonian mechanics, relativity, and quantum mechanics, have all had many peculiar and surprising downstream social consequences. The line made between these physical theories and models and sociology, epistemology, and spirituality, would likely have surprised their originators (OK, perhaps not Isaac Newton). But the human imagination is fertile, and many cognitive anthropologists argue that the connections and analogies that we make, in addition to our promiscuous pattern recognition, gives rise the baroque and baffling complexity that is culture.
By the mid-2000s the paradigm of Out of Africa had crystallized to such a point that even the fossils purportedly betrayed the multiregionalists. In Bones, Stones and Molecules: “Out of Africa” and Human Origins the authors made the case that the fossil record, and its pattern of variation, complemented the molecular record. That is, Chris Stringer was right. Other more computationally intensive analyses of morphological variation reportedly tended to support an Out of Africa model.
And yet just as Out of Africa seemed to have cleared the field, pointers in the other direction were bubbling up out of genomics and genetics. In 2006 Bruce Lahn at the University of Chicago published Evidence that the adaptive allele of the brain size gene microcephalin introgressed into Homo sapiens from an archaic Homo lineage. Nevertheless several years later there seems to have been no wide support for this hypothesis. For eample, No evidence of a Neanderthal contribution to modern human diversity. But there were other papers nonetheless. Deep Haplotype Divergence and Long-Range Linkage Disequilibrium at Xp21.1 Provide Evidence That Humans Descend From a Structured Ancestral Population. Genomics refutes an exclusively African origin of humans. Granted, this was a minority perspective. For the first few years the Neandertal genome project did not seem to support any admixture either. I saw Svante Paabo speak in late 20008, and he was absolutely unequivocal. No sign of admixture. Period.
But the equilibrium of scientific orthodoxy is not eternally robust to a hard exogenous shock of falsification. Yes, some scientists remain obstinate in the face of overwhelming evidence. One could argue Milford Wolpoff could be numbered amongst these. Fred Hoyle certainly was. But the tide turns. In the fall of 2009 Svante Paabo seemed to be far less unequivocal about the issue of admixture. Then, in the spring of 2010:
A test of the New Mexico team’s proposals may come soon. Svante Pääbo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, announced early last year that they had finished sequencing a first draft of the Neanderthal genome, and they are expected to publish their work in the near future. Pääbo’s earlier studies on components of Neanderthal genomes largely ruled out interbreeding, but they were not based on more comprehensive analyses of the complete genome.
Linda Vigilant, an anthropologist at the Planck Institute, found Joyce’s talk a convincing answer to “subtle deviations” noticed in genetic variation in the Pacific region.
“This information is really helpful,” says Vigilant. “And it’s cool.”
By this point, in April of 2010, some graduate students who were not involved in the project itself had seen hard copy drafts of the Neandertal admixture paper. Word was spreading. I already knew of its likely probability, which resulted in me turning on Google Alerts (which got me in trouble for “breaking embargo” on an embargo which I was never privy to). The hammer-blows against the old tried & true orthodoxy in 2010 were ripening throughout the year, and many people were “in the know.” In the age of transparency it is interesting that science naturally has a culture of some secrecy. Who wants to be scooped? But how sustainable is this really over the long term?
To use a religious analogy which some may find offensive, this was an instance where the heretics were once the high priests of the faith. The media reports from last spring made it clear that most of the principals involved did not initially believe that admixture had occurred. Rather, they assumed that the results they were getting were anomalies. Science is influenced by culture, but ultimately nature remains the final arbiter. The truth is what it is, and honest men and women give it its due.
At this point you presumably know the score. Ancient DNA is a powerful judge and jury. It seems that the evidence for Neandertal admixture is already modifying the conventional Out of Africa narrative. But, it has to be admitted that Out of Africa is predominantly correct. The vast majority of our total genome content seems to be traceable to African populations within the last ~100,000 years. An older model of deep rooted lineages only periodically punctuated by selective sweeps which maintain species cohesiveness is not tenable. Phyletic gradualism seems implausible in light of the genetic evidence. Here is Wolpoff (and his wife, Rachel Caspari) in Race and Human Evolution:
We agree a punctuated evolutionary pattern best describes the evolutionary histories of many phyletic groups, including, we think, the earlier and much longer part of human prehistory when humans were only another African primate species. But we believe punctuated equilibrium does not reflect what happened to humans in the later part of human evolution as they became successful colonizers and when there was no macroevolutionary change. As we read the fossil record, there is no evidence of speciation events in the recent past; in fact, there is strong evidence against them. But the Eve interpretation promised to support a punctuated model for later human evolution that was denied by interpretations of the fossil evidence such as ours.
I’m not knowledgeable enough to know what would qualify as a “macroevolutionary change.” But the ‘Great Leap Forward’ seems a plausible candidate. Whatever the details, between 200 and 10 thousand years ago, there does seem to have been a series of rapid expansions of the human range and capacity for innovation. Sometime different was in the air. I do not know the nuance of Milford Wolpoff’s thinking. The most recent data do seem to refute the contention that all ancestry but the Out of African is trivial. But, they also seem to be broadly in line with the peculiarity, almost revolutionary character, of the changes in the human lineage over the past 200,000 years. Convergent patterns of morphological and genetic variation which seem to root back to an African base indicate that Chris Stringer and Allan Wilson had properly characterized a major first order dynamic in recent human prehistory. But now we move into the second and third orders. The rough paradigm is getting sculpted into something with more verisimilitude when judged against the diversity and peculiarity of nature.
Let’s jump to the paper. The main course. Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia:
Using DNA extracted from a finger bone found in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, we have sequenced the genome of an archaic hominin to about 1.9-fold coverage. This individual is from a group that shares a common origin with Neanderthals. This population was not involved in the putative gene flow from Neanderthals into Eurasians; however, the data suggest that it contributed 4–6% of its genetic material to the genomes of present-day Melanesians. We designate this hominin population ‘Denisovans’ and suggest that it may have been widespread in Asia during the Late Pleistocene epoch. A tooth found in Denisova Cave carries a mitochondrial genome highly similar to that of the finger bone. This tooth shares no derived morphological features with Neanderthals or modern humans, further indicating that Denisovans have an evolutionary history distinct from Neanderthals and modern humans.
John Hawks has covered a great deal of ground in his FAQ. In particular, he has a gestalt understanding of the fossil record so he can run “quick & dirty” checks on some of their assertions. He notes:
What the paper doesn’t point out is that there are Upper Paleolithic specimens that equal or exceed this tooth in size. For example, the measured length and breadth of an upper second molar from Oase, Romania, are larger than this specimen, and the third molar (in the crypt) of that specimen is yet larger. There is an Upper Paleolithic-associated molar from Turkey which is also exceedingly large.
I don’t take that as a sign of relationship between this specimen and early Upper Paleolithic people — even though these are some of the earliest. It is another sign of how non-diagnostic this tooth actually is. I would say that in the absence of genetic information, we’d be looking at these remains as likely early Upper Paleolithic people, and accentuating these similarities.
People interpret information in light of their background priors. Now that we know what we did not, it may behoove us to go back and double check we may once have dismissed. Consider this paper from 2006, Archaic admixture in the human genome:
One of the enduring questions in the evolution of our species surrounds the fate of ‘archaic’ forms of Homo. Did Neanderthals go extinct without interbreeding with modern humans 25–40 thousand years ago or are their genes present among modern-day Europeans? Recent work suggests that Neanderthals and an as yet unidentified archaic African population contributed to at least 5% of the modern European and West African gene pools, respectively. Extensive sequencing of Neanderthal and other archaic human nuclear DNA has the potential to answer this question definitively within the next few years.
5% is a nice round number. They could have lucked upon it, but the first author continued to plunge onward in 2009, generating models of archaic admixture. How fruitful would this be? Here is Sarah Tishkoff in December of 2009:
…Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees, adding that, after all, every population has a strong selective pressure for intelligence, the better to succeed in its respective environment. As far as consorting with Neanderthals, Tishkoff dismisses that notion as pure speculation: “I don’t know of any evidence for that.”
I suspect that Sarah Tishkoff’s opinion would have been common among most scholars of human evolution in late 2009 (though I suspect those who were Facebook friends with people in Svante Paabo’s lab perhaps not). To be fair to Tishkoff, she had no compunction about accepting Neandertal admixture six months later when presented with evidence. She even added that “…it is possible that interbreeding introduced traits into a few human populations.”
In regards to the paper, the top line is rather clear in the three figures in the article proper. I’ve reformatted them a bit below:
Top left: a phylogenetic tree which shows the total genome relationship of various human lineages. Extant modern humans represent one clade. The Denisovans and Neandertals another. In other words, the last common ancestral population of Denisovans and Neandertals is shallower in time than the last common ancestral population of neo-Africans and the Denisovans and Neandertals. All the Neandertals also are very closely related, at least when graded on this particular curve. The Denisovans are outgroups to them, just as the San are outgroups to other humans. The French are an outgroup to the Han and Papuans, though just barely. This sort of relationship is naturally why I cast a skeptical eye to arguments of the common ancestry of French and Han 20,000 years ago when we know that the Papuans settled their island 45,000 years ago.
Top right: a PCA where HGDP populations are projected onto the two largest components of variation which shake out of a data set of a chimpanzee, Denisovan, and Neandertal. In other words, the ones deciding the rules of the game here are chimps and the two archaic Eurasian populations. Humans are constrained onto the genetic variation space of non-/pre-humans. So the position of the humans tells you how they relate to the genetic variation of the Denisovans, Neandertals, and chimpanzees. The Eurasicans, Eurasians + Amerindians, form a relatively tight cluster, apart from Africans. If non-Africans have some Neandertal admixture, this is reasonable. But interestingly the Melanesian groups stand apart as well. And, Papuans and Bougainville Islanders are also distinctive. The latter are shifted toward Eurasicans. Why? Probably because they have a minor, but significant, Austronesian ancestral component which the Papuans lack.
They estimate that 2.5% of the genes of Eurasicans and Oceanians is of Neandertal origin. And, a further 5% of the Melanesian genome is of Denisovan origin. So Melanesians are 92.5% neo-African. Eurasicans are 97.25% neo-African. At most.
Bottom: the last shows a stylized demographic model. Step 1, humans leave Africa. The neo-Africans interbreed with southwest Asian Neandertals. Step 2, the paleo-Eurasians push east, and some encounter the Denisovans, eventually reaching Sahul ~45,000 years ago.
Some people have asked me about the Denisovan in Polynesians and Australian Aborigines. Since Polynesians are ~20% Melanesian, they should have a fraction diluted appropriately. As for Australians, if they are only recently distinguished from the peoples of Papua because of rising sea levels I assume that they should carry the same fraction of Denisovan. Bougainville has always been isolated from Papua by water from what I know. A final question is in regards to Andaman Islanders and other isolated Asian peoples who seem to be hunter-gatherer relics such as the Ainu. Since the Pakistani HGDP populations share a large minor component of ancestry with the Andaman Islanders my assumption is that they should be somewhat deviated toward the Papuans. As the populations are not labeled I do not know if those groups are skewed toward the direction of the Papuans. In the supplements individual outcomes are given for the Han and French, and the Han seem somewhat shifted toward the Bougainville Islanders, though trivially. Additionally, some of the authors of this paper were involved in Reconstructing Indian History, and so I assume had access to Andaman Islander data. I would be curious if they ran some quick checks and decided to stick with the HGDP because there was unlikely to be anything there.
The main body of the paper is tightly and elegantly written. But there is so much more in the supplements. I have read through them at least once, but I can’t say I understand it very well. It is written with the tight economy of a mathematically minded individual, despite the fact that it runs to 90 pages. But much of it alludes to a “D-statistic” which actually goes back to the earlier Neandertal admixture paper, and its supplement. So let’s go back to that, and review the D-statistic at least cursorily. One might not gain a deep knowledge, but even a superficial knowledge of the technical arcana of these sorts of papers are often useful in my experience. To page 130:
To test whether Neandertals share more alleles with some present-day human populations than with others, we compared the Neandertal sequence that we generated to sequence from present-day human samples of diverse ancestry. Specifically, we discovered single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) by comparing exactly two chromosomes from different individuals (H1 and H2). We then assessed whether a test individual (H3, e.g. Neandertal) tended to match either H1 or H2 more often at sites where H3 has the derived allele relative to chimpanzee. Under the null hypothesis that H3 belongs to an outgroup population, it should match H1 and H2 equally often. In contrast, if gene flow has occurred, H3 may match one more than the other.
Here’s a graphical illustration:
The ancestral state is A, which the chimpanzee (not shown as H4) presumably has. B represents the derived state. That means it has changed via mutation from the ancestral state at some point from the last common ancestor with the outgroup. To calculate the D-statistic you are looking at a case where H3 is B and H4 is naturally A. So you have two sets: BABA and ABBA. You are comparing the counts between these two combinations. If H3 is a clean outgroup to the H1H2 clade, D will be ~ 0, as BABA and ABBA counts will approximately be equal. In contrast, if there is gene flow to H1 or H2 from H3, D will deviate from ~0. The Z-score are the standard deviations away from ~0. The table below is from the current paper under consideration. I have highlighted and reformatted:
The D-statistics make sense of what you know verbally. There is some admixture from Neandertals to Eurisicans + Oceanians. Therefore when paired with each other as H1 and H2 they do not deviate as from 0 as much as they do when paired with Africans. There is a deviation away from equal ratios of ABBA and BABA because there is putative gene flow from from H3 to H1 or H2. Notice the Denisovans. Because they’re like Neandertals they produce some elevated deviation from D, though not as much. Interestingly the maximum Z-scores occur when comparing Denisovans, Melanesians, and Africans. Finally, Melanesians and Eurasicans also result in a deviation from 0 when paired with Denisovans in the H3 position.
A quick note from the supplements on ancient population structure. Dienekes does not believe that there was Neandertal admixture necessarily among Eurasicans and Oceanians. From what I can gather he believes that there was population structure within Africa, which is preserved in non-African populations. Rather than exogenous admixture between geographically separated lineages which had only recently met, what one is presumably arguing for here is that there were long term barriers between more closely placed populations in Africa. The authors do not find it parsimonious, though they can not reject it as totally without foundation. Below is a graphical representation of their two models:
So where does this leave us? Yesterday when I said something big was going to drop Ed Brayton expressed some frustration that paleoanthropologists tend to hype stories too much. The reality is everything doesn’t change. The Hobbits, the Darwinius fiasco, and the persistent controversy over Ida, can give anyone fits of human evolution fatigue. But there is a difference here. You don’t need to take their total word for it. At some point you will be able to go to the UCSC genome browser and poke around yourself. Or, you can pull down a 153 MB file with SNPs and indels.
This is a great time to be alive if you’re a hominin natural history nerd. You never know what surprise will greet you when you wake up in the morning. You never know how you’ll have to rearrange your conception of the world. Earlier in the post I mentioned that an instructor once asked a class where I was a student whether scientists should be allowed to talk about the erectine features of Aborigines, if they believed such features existed. You probably won’t be surprised that I said that such things shouldn’t be off limits if they seemed true. Obviously science has political implications. It is idealistic and philosophically consistent to say that it is value-free, but it is also naive. Rather, we need to think hard about how our values relate to the world around us. Or at least some of us need to think hard about that sort of thing.
We shouldn’t take for granted that we all have exactly the same moral intuitions. But on the margin some of our fears are I think overwrought. I know of an individual who admits frankly that they are a “blank slate” maximalist because they don’t know how they could sleep or live if many traits had some hereditary component. Similarly, I have met many conservative Christians and Muslims who admit that they would rape, murder and steal if they didn’t believe in God. In other words, if God doesn’t exist they would become psychopaths, because “why not.” This is ludicrous. God doesn’t exist, and they aren’t psychopaths. They may believe that they aren’t sodomizing their sister because the Lord God declared from On High believes that such behavior is forbidden, but I think that’s ridiculous on the face of it (on the margin there may be some effect of belief in God on behavior by the way, but that’s not what I’m getting at here obviously). Everything may be possible, but everything is not palatable. As for the possibility that humans may differ substantially from individual to individual and group to group, if you acknowledge this one day will you then as a matter of course raise in your arms in salute? If so, it is true that humans differ profoundly in matters of moral sense, because I could not comprehend such behavior.
So Papuans, and likely Aborigines, are likely ~7.5% non-neo-African. Does that matter? Do they bleed today where yesterday they did not? In deep matters of substance nothing is different from this moment than before. Let me quote John Hawks:
Our common ancestry as humans goes back to the Early and Middle Pleistocene. The (now multiple) Neandertal genomes and the Denisova genome share genes with some people and not others because of this common ancestry.
In addition, some living people carry even more genes from Neandertals because they have an appreciable fraction of Neandertal ancestry. That makes it nonsensical to talk about “Neandertals and the ancestors of modern humans”. Neandertals are among the ancestors of modern humans.
Just so with Denisova. It’s nonsensical to talk about a three-way split between Neandertals, Denisova and modern humans. We can talk about a population model with a clade separating an ancestral Neandertal-Denisova population from contemporary Africans.
I have to remind myself again and again when I talk to people about these issues that “modern human ancestors” is not a group that excludes these Pleistocene people.
Once we put ourselves into the mode where we are referring to a population model, it is important to recognize the limitations of those models. For example, we cannot presently exclude many kinds of gene flow among these Pleistocene populations. We can understand some limits to the level of gene flow — these populations were highly structured, it wasn’t Pleistocene panmixia. But it is premature to talk about isolation without recognizing the limits of our ability to test these population models.
The difficulty with terminology tells us something very important. A large-scale reorganization of the science of human origins is upon us. The terms we are used to using will, many of them, become obsolete. Some now-obscure terms will become very important.
What we know to be good and true is still good and true. It is a small soul who is so moved by matters of terminology, we should be cautious of allowing that to happen to ourselves. I think now to the fact that both the Romans and Muslims abhorred the idea of the king. The Romans overthrew their monarchy, established a republic, and replaced it with a despotism which was a monarchy in all but name. The Muslims had caliphs, vice-reagents of God, and sultans and emirs, who were vice-reagents of the caliphs. Despite the glory which is given over to their God the Muslim despotisms were things of men. Domination of the many by one is a matter of substance, not style. Human dignity should not be contingent on details of ancestry. Isn’t that obvious? I thought that was what the 20th century was to some extent all about.
Back to the science. I began with a long historical sketch, viewed through my own personal lens, because probabilities are always filtered through a glass of accreted priors. I was not as shocked by many at the idea of intogression and admixture because Greg Cochran, Henry Harpending, and John Hawks had already predisposed me to think about the plausibility of such phenomena. Additionally, I have always had an interest in conservation genetics, as well as modeling cultural evolution. Such lateral flows are not unknown in those domains. When I first discussed the Neandertal admixture results with Oren Harman last spring he reminded me that one should be cautious of such things; many splashy science stories often don’t pan out. And yet with all due respect to Oren, in this case we do need to observe that there has been a veritable mob of scholars pouring over these data. Additionally, this is something old, not something new.
These results will not remain isolated findings with only parochial relevance. I believe these two papers will probably shift the equilibrium orthodoxy in a new direction. Old models and genetic studies will be seen in a new light. Anomalies unconsidered will get a second look. In The New York Times Stanford geneticist Carlos Bustamante seemed to indicate to Carl Zimmer that the hunt was on. Perhaps the human genome is more of a mosaic than we thought?
Finally, one wonders how this was missed. 7.5% is not trivial. And yet a generation of mtDNA and NRY studies have seemingly missed this. I presume that the archaic admixture didn’t show up in STRUCTURE because it’s a stabilized part of the genetic background of Eurasicans and Oceanians. It reminds of us the limitations of interpretation. We know what we know contingent on what we already know. Since we know more, a different set of inferences may now be generated. Though with due humility. Not quite time yet for the hardening of a new orthodoxy.
Personal note: Merry Christmas! Obviously it is time for me to take a break. Best wishes, and let’s make 2011 more informative and data rich. Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for Otzi’s genome.
Citation: Reich, David, Green, Richard E., Kircher, Martin, Krause, Johannes, Patterson, Nick, Durand, Eric Y., Viola, Bence, Briggs, Adrian W., Stenzel, Udo, Johnson, Philip L. F., Maricic, Tomislav, Good, Jeffrey M., Marques-Bonet, Tomas, Alkan, Can, Fu, Qiaomei, Mallick, Swapan, Li, Heng, Meyer, Matthias, Eichler, Evan E., Stoneking, Mark, Richards, Michael, Talamo, Sahra, Shunkov, Michael V., Derevianko, Anatoli P., Hublin, Jean-Jacques, Kelso, Janet, Slatkin, Montgomery, & Paabo, Svante (2010). Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia Nature : 10.1038/nature09710