The Out of Africa Crowd May Shit A Brick

[Minimalist]

No, Toba catastrophe only talks about that breeding HSS population living 79000 years ago which direct contributed the most to the gene pool of the modern HSS population that lives on earth today. That particular population, call it A, dwindled down to a few thousand at the time of Toba eruption. Since that population's genes later passed onto to all living humans, all living humans carry in our genes the evidence of the Toba bottleneck.

Toba catastrophe says nothing about whether there were other populations of the HSS, HNS, or Homo Erectus on the earth at the time, or how they were effected by Toba. There could well have been many other populations of homo genus on earth at the time of Toba. Some of those population may have been wiped out by Toba, but some of those populations may well have not been effected much by Toba at all. We simply don't know. All we know is if there were a lot of other HSS populations 79000 years ago, they for whatever reason did not later interbreed extensively descendants of population A. They for whatever reason did not prosper genetically and did not contribute much to our gene pool.

I agree fully with Chuck here, the genetic evidence is the strongest evidence we have for the "Out of Africa" theory.

This article (July 2007) announced the alleged triumph of the OOA Theory.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/We-All-Or...0314.shtml

No hanky spanky with the Neanderthals, or ape-men (Homo erectus) in our family tree. A new study shows that we are 100 % an African product. This is the result of a comparison of skulls and DNA of human remains found worldwide. It appears that human species living elsewhere in the world did not contribute to our ancestry.

The team led by Andrea Manica at the University of Cambridge, England, compared over 6,000 skulls from more than 100 ancient human populations. The research discovered a loss of genetic diversity the farther away from Africa people lived.

This supports the single origin, or "out of Africa" theory that states early humans colonized the Earth after spreading out of Africa some 80,000 years ago.

But then...less than 2 years later...the Neanderthal genome project comes out and

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shorts...d-wit.html

Human evolution is looking more tangled than ever. A new genetic study of nearly two thousand people from around the world suggests that some of our ancestors bred with other species of humans, such as Neanderthals, at least twice.

"The researchers suggest the interbreeding happened about 60,000 years ago in the eastern Mediterranean and, more recently, about 45,000 years ago in eastern Asia," Nature News reports from the annual meeting of the American Society of Physical Anthropologists in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

That conclusion is based on a study of over 600 genetic markers, called microsatellites, sequenced in nearly 100 different populations.

Now, it seems to me that there are only three answers to this.

One. HSS and HNS did interbreed and were capable of producing fertile offspring ( no "ligers" here!) which accounts for the genetic mix detected...and which calls into question those definitions of "species" which hold that a species is a group capable of bearing fertile offspring. In fact, it suggests that HNS and HSS are not different "species" at all but more like what we call "racial" types.

Two. They did not interbreed successfully at all but both descended from a common ancestor ( Homo Erectus? Homo Ergaster?) which possessed these genes and passed them along to both.

Three. They were descended from HE/HErg and still managed to interbreed successfully because the condition of isolation which Darwin proposed gives rise to new species did not exist.

The notion of the hulking, dim-witted, brutish HNS has taken a number of serious hits in recent years. It was a Victorian prejudice that became "common" wisdom. Bottom line seems to be that they were not all that different from HSS.

But I love a mystery. Keeps the brain churning!