David: "Anthropologists give a lot of attention to the minutiae of kinship systems and mythology, which may well be mainly transmitted vertically..." Very accurate. See my book "The Genius of Kinship: The Phenomenon of Kinship and the Global Diversity of Kinship terminologies" (2007) for the most recent attempt at interpreting global variation in kinship structures from the perspective of vertical transmission.

I think the same Movioid pattern can be established for the populations of Homo sapiens sapiens. We see "delays" in the appearance of aspects of the modern human behavioral package in Australasia and especially in the Americas. Clovis points in North America are so much like Solutrean points in Europe, only 10K years younger. The very absence of ancient archaeological signatures in the Americas may not mean the absence of humans earlier than 13.5K years but rather low population densities and technological stagnation for a long period of time. Low effective population size in Asia and the Americas, as compared to Europe and Africa, is expressed in the reduced levels of haplotype and other measurements of diversity. At the same time, the geographic range of haplotypes is broader east of the Movius line (mtDNA haplotypes C and D, for instance, are found from India and Scandinavia to Tierra del Fuego, while Y-DNA C haplogroup is found from Australia to North America) suggesting long-term stability and lack of mutational innovations. At the same time, the levels of LINGUISTIC diversity are much higher east of the Movius line than in Africa or Europe, with America and Papua New Guinea language families encompassing 3/4 of world linguistic diversity. This again suggests great antiquity and low population size east of the Movius line, as languistic diversity shows no population-size dependency.

I haven't read the book and Razib's assessment may be very accurate but let me briefly address the whole science-philosophy debate from the angle of another controversial book. I have two doctorates in anthropology, which I think makes me enough of a scientist. My latest book "The Genius of Kinship: the phenomenon of human kinship and the global diversity of kinship terminologies" challenges (using linguistics and kinship studies as a starting point) the out of Africa model of human dispersals. And it challenges it within the single-origin paradigm. It would be very easy to dismiss my critique and my alternative theory (out of America via Asian Homo erectus) as falling somewhere between philosophy and illusion. However, science per se, without philosophical and creative "filters" will devolve (or has been devolving) either into crude materialism or into disguised idolatry, which is a philosophical and cultural problem in and of itself. Or, one could argue, that science hasn't established itself as the method to comprehend reality in all the areas of human knowledge. And such emotional territory as "human origins" is still steeped in pre-1492, pre-scientific stereotypes.