Quote:As evidence builds, theories are refined or replaced. I am not particularly married to the out-of-Africa theory so it would not be too devastating to find out that it is wrong.
I agree with you Ryft but there are generations of scholars who got their PH.D.s by promoting Out of Africa and they are going to have a shit fit about this. There is a book called The First Americans by Chris Hardaker which deals with the almost equally entrenched "Clovis-First" paradigm in the Americas. Hardaker's book is interesting in many places but never more so than when he describes the potential career-suicide by anyone who questioned Clovis-First. I recommend it.
Even in science one must guard against a theory becoming dogma.
Shel, its a question of DNA. If both Neanderthal (HNS) and Homo Sapeins ( HSS) descended from Homo Erectus it would explain a lot of things. For generations the OOA crowd insisted that there was no interbreeding between HSS and HNS. That has now been disproven. What we desperately need is an uncontaminated sample of Homo Erectus DNA to sequence.
