Azores to Atlantis: Africa through the shadows

In many ways the image of Africa in the minds of Westerners has become a trope. The “Dark Continent,” eternal, and primal. Like many tropes the realized existence of this Africa is only within the imagination. The real Africa is far different. For there is no real Africa, there Africas. This truth is on my mind this week as two papers of great importance in understanding African genetic history finally saw the light of day. First, Dr. Joseph Pickrell et al. posted their preprint, The genetic prehistory of southern Africa, to arXiv. Second, out of the Tishkoff lab came Evolutionary History and Adaptation from High-Coverage Whole-Genome Sequences of Diverse African Hunter-Gatherers. Let me step aside here and observe a secondary, but non-trivial, detail. The former is an open access preprint. The second is a complete paper published in a relatively high impact journal, Cell, for which the paper itself does not seem typical or appropriate. This is fair enough, most people do not read journals front to back in this day. But unlike Dr. Joseph Pickrell’s paper the paper in Cell is paywalled, and from what I …