Over at Haldane’s Sieve there are more than preprints posted, there are commentaries from the authors as well. For example, for The genetic prehistory of southern Africa, the first author, Dr. Joseph K. Pickrell, has a extended comment up.
But occasionally you get contributions & perspectives from non-authors which are very interesting. And it is to one of these I want to draw your attention, Thoughts on: The date of interbreeding between Neandertals and modern humans. It’s a comment on The date of interbreeding between Neandertals and modern humans. In the post Dr. Graham Coop contends:
At this point you are likely saying: well we know that Neandertals existed as a [somewhat] separate population/species who are these population X you keep talking about and where are their remains? Population X could easily be a subset of what we call Neandertals, in which case you’ve been reading this all for no reason [if you only want to know if we interbred with Neandertals]. However, my view is that in the next decade of ancient human population history things are going to get really interesting. We have already seen this from the Denisovian papers [1,2], and the work of ancient admixture in Africa (e.g. Hammer et al. 2011, Lachance et al. 2012). We will likely discover a bunch of cryptic somewhat distinct ancient populations, that we’ve previously [rightly] grouped into a relatively small number of labels based on their morphology and timing in the fossil record. We are not going to have names for many of these groups, but with large amounts of genomic data [ancient and modern] we are going to find all sorts of population structure. The question then becomes not an issue of naming these populations, but understanding the divergence and population genetic relationship among them.
This is a bold contention, and I suspect some physical anthropologists will take issue with it. But it’s a testable prediction. We’ll know if it’s panned out in 2020. I may still be blogging between now and then, and so I will now self-importantly label this “Coop’s Conjecture.” Is there anyone who wants to wager some money on Coop’s Conjecture? Any side of the bet you think is a sure thing?
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