Saturday, April 24, 2010

Gene flow into Africa

John Hawks has an interesting theory on whether or not ancient Homo sapiens mated with other species of humans:
At face value, it means that ancestral humans outside Africa did contribute genes to living populations, but only by means of very rare gene flow from Eurasia back into Africa before a subsequent replacement. In other words, the first modern humans in Africa would have been descendants of Africans and of Eurasian people. It's not surprising that the outcome is close to a model with very slight survival of Eurasian populations.

Related:

Α Historical and Demographic Model of Recent Human Evolution (Laval et al. 2010)

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