John Hawks has a post up, Multiregional evolution lives!, in response to Rex Dalton's reporting on Neandertal-human admixture. He notes:
These ongoing studies are concluding that present-day genetic variation is inconsistent with a simple model where a random-mating ancestral population gives rise to today's global population by means of a staged out-of-Africa dispersal. They next look at a model with some substantial (possibly complete) isolation between ancient human populations followed by a subsequent out-of-Africa dispersal. They show that this model fits the data significantly better. So far, so good. For a moment, I'm going to adopt a critical perspective. Previous results haven't yet been able to answer an important possible question: Can they distinguish the effects of intermixture outside Africa from an ancient population structure inside Africa? Increasingly it looks like population structure inside Africa may have been very important to the evolution of Late Pleistocene Africans. How can we ...
