Yesterday I pointed out that David Reich had a moderately dismissive attitude toward the new paper in PNAS, Effect of ancient population structure on the degree of polymorphism shared between modern human populations and ancient hominins. Here’s what Reich said:
…But Reich believes that the discussion would have been different if it had happened in the open. The PNAS paper questioning the Neanderthal admixture addresses issues swirling around two years ago, but not Reich and Slatkin’s latest work. “It’s been an issue for several years. They were right to work on this,” says Reich. But now, “it’s kind of an obsolete paper,” he says.
Here’s what Nick Patterson, Reich’s colleague told me via email:
Ancient structure in Africa was considered when we wrote the Green et al. paper, and we were aware that this could explain D-statistics. But the hypothesis is no longer viable as the major explanation of Neandertal genetics in Eurasia. This was discussed in the recent paper of Yang et al. (MBE, 2012). (Not referenced by the PNAS paper).
A very simple argument, that convinces me, is that the allelic frequency spectrum of Neandertal alleles in Eurasia falls off very quickly. A bottleneck flattens out the …