Matt Ridley has a column up, Did Your Ancestor Date a Neanderthal? In it he juxtaposes the two recent papers which got some attention on the relationship of modern humans to Neandertals. To be frank I think it took too much of the “two sides/opposing views/views differ” tack. From what I can gather the scientific consensus is moving further toward admixture, rather than ancient structure. Additionally, as John Hawks states flat out the PNAS paper which casts doubt on the strength of the admixture hypothesis is not the strongest of contributions to the field(in line with David Reich and Nick Patterson’s assessments, and others who shall remain nameless).
But it’s hard to keep track of all the threads, isn’t it? One of the most tragic aspects of the death of classic “Out of Africa” is that we lost an exceedingly simple narrative which had the positives of clarity and precision. The basic outlines were reducible to one sentence: all humans today descend from a small group of modern humans alive ~100,000 years ago. At this time we do not have such an elegant replacement framework. In fact, we may never have such an elegant model which …