Mungo Manic
Mungo Manic

@MungoManic

7 tweets 11 reads Sep 03, 2024
Wow. I've read David Reich's papers on Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture but never heard him talk. Here are my favorite quotes from his podcast with @dwarkesh_sp:
1. "I don't know"
2. "The models that are considered to be standard dogma are now low probability"
3. "If you actually count your ancestors, if you're of non-African descent, how many of them were Neanderthals say, 70,000 years ago, it's not going to be 2%. It's going to be 10-20%, which is a lot"
4. "It's very plausible that people's ancestors are not all in Ethiopia 200,000 years ago... Some of them are in South Africa. Some of them are in Eurasia... That braid and that trellis is coming together again and again over time"
5. "You might argue that non-Africans today are Neanderthals who just have waves and waves of modern humans from Africa mixing with them"
We keep adding admixtures events to the once-simple Recent OOA model. Reic says it's like the pre-Copernican epicycles
As Weidenreich proposed, a trellis may be the more accurate model
Humans were sharing genes between Eurasia and Africa for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the OOA bottleneck 50-70kya
Adaptive genes spread far and wide, increasing brain size from South Africa to Java
I’m not sure. My impression is that some β€œmodern” genes were flowing from Africa and some into it. Also the entire concept of β€œmodern human” is on shaky ground. There doesn’t seem to be an accepted definition, whether cultural, genetic or anatomical

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