IsThatBrothaMouzone?
Veteran
We are forever chasing our origins.
When we can’t find what we want in the present, we go back, and back further still, until there, at the dawn of time, we imagine we’ve found it. In the gloomy mists of the past, having squeezed ourselves back into the womb of humanity, we take a good look. Here it is, we say with satisfaction. Here is the root of our difference.
Once upon a time, scientists were convinced that Aboriginal Australians were further down the evolutionary ladder from other humans, perhaps closer to Neanderthals. In 2010 it turned out that Europeans are actually likely to have the most drops of Neanderthal blood, metaphorically speaking. In January 2014 an international team of leading archaeologists, geneticists, and anthropologists confirmed that humans outside Africa had bred with Neanderthals. Those of European and Asian ancestry have a very small but tangible presence of this now-extinct human in our lineage, up to around 4 percent of our DNA. People in Asia and Australia also bear traces of another known archaic human, the Denisovans. There is likely to have been breeding with other kinds of human as well. Neanderthals and Denisovans, too, mated with each other. Many in the deep past, it seems, were pretty indiscriminate in their sexual partnerships.
“We’re more complex than we initially thought,” explains John Shea. “We initially thought there was either a lot of interbreeding or no interbreeding, and the truth is between those goalposts somewhere.”
The discovery had important consequences. It raked up a controversial, somewhat marginalized scientific theory that had been doing the rounds a few decades earlier. In April 1992 an article had been published in Scientific American magazine with the incendiary title “The Multiregional Evolution of Humans.” The authors were Alan Thorne, a celebrity Australian anthropologist, who died in 2012, and Milford Wolpoff, a cheery anthropologist based at the University of Michigan, where he still works today. They hypothesized that there was something deeper to human difference, that perhaps we hadn’t all come out of Africa as fully modern humans after all.
Although this notion had been mooted before, for Wolpoff, this idea became cemented in the seventies. “I traveled and I looked, I traveled and I looked, I traveled and I looked,” he tells me. “And what I noticed was that in different regions, big regions—Europe, China, Australia, that is what I mean by regions, not small places—in different regions, it seemed to me there was a lot of similarity in fossils.” That is, they were “similar” in their difference: “They weren’t the same and they all were evolving.”
Svante Pääbo, the director of the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, who spearheaded some of the research that led to the discoveries of ancient interbreeding in the first place, was among those to marshal efforts to compare the genomes of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, in the search for what differs as well as what is present in both. And this was accompanied by plenty of speculation from others. In 2018 a set of researchers in Switzerland and Germany suggested that Neanderthals actually had quite “sophisticated cultural behavior,” prompting one British archaeologist to wonder whether “they were a lot more refined than previously thought.” An archaeologist in Spain claimed that modern humans and Neanderthals must have been “cognitively indistinguishable.” A few even raised the possibility that Neanderthals could have been capable of symbolic thought, pointing to freshly discovered cave markings in Spain that appear to predate the arrival of modern humans (the finding failed to convince Benjamin Smith).
When we can’t find what we want in the present, we go back, and back further still, until there, at the dawn of time, we imagine we’ve found it. In the gloomy mists of the past, having squeezed ourselves back into the womb of humanity, we take a good look. Here it is, we say with satisfaction. Here is the root of our difference.
Once upon a time, scientists were convinced that Aboriginal Australians were further down the evolutionary ladder from other humans, perhaps closer to Neanderthals. In 2010 it turned out that Europeans are actually likely to have the most drops of Neanderthal blood, metaphorically speaking. In January 2014 an international team of leading archaeologists, geneticists, and anthropologists confirmed that humans outside Africa had bred with Neanderthals. Those of European and Asian ancestry have a very small but tangible presence of this now-extinct human in our lineage, up to around 4 percent of our DNA. People in Asia and Australia also bear traces of another known archaic human, the Denisovans. There is likely to have been breeding with other kinds of human as well. Neanderthals and Denisovans, too, mated with each other. Many in the deep past, it seems, were pretty indiscriminate in their sexual partnerships.
“We’re more complex than we initially thought,” explains John Shea. “We initially thought there was either a lot of interbreeding or no interbreeding, and the truth is between those goalposts somewhere.”
The discovery had important consequences. It raked up a controversial, somewhat marginalized scientific theory that had been doing the rounds a few decades earlier. In April 1992 an article had been published in Scientific American magazine with the incendiary title “The Multiregional Evolution of Humans.” The authors were Alan Thorne, a celebrity Australian anthropologist, who died in 2012, and Milford Wolpoff, a cheery anthropologist based at the University of Michigan, where he still works today. They hypothesized that there was something deeper to human difference, that perhaps we hadn’t all come out of Africa as fully modern humans after all.
Although this notion had been mooted before, for Wolpoff, this idea became cemented in the seventies. “I traveled and I looked, I traveled and I looked, I traveled and I looked,” he tells me. “And what I noticed was that in different regions, big regions—Europe, China, Australia, that is what I mean by regions, not small places—in different regions, it seemed to me there was a lot of similarity in fossils.” That is, they were “similar” in their difference: “They weren’t the same and they all were evolving.”
Svante Pääbo, the director of the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, who spearheaded some of the research that led to the discoveries of ancient interbreeding in the first place, was among those to marshal efforts to compare the genomes of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, in the search for what differs as well as what is present in both. And this was accompanied by plenty of speculation from others. In 2018 a set of researchers in Switzerland and Germany suggested that Neanderthals actually had quite “sophisticated cultural behavior,” prompting one British archaeologist to wonder whether “they were a lot more refined than previously thought.” An archaeologist in Spain claimed that modern humans and Neanderthals must have been “cognitively indistinguishable.” A few even raised the possibility that Neanderthals could have been capable of symbolic thought, pointing to freshly discovered cave markings in Spain that appear to predate the arrival of modern humans (the finding failed to convince Benjamin Smith).
