The excellent site io9 has a piece up today which is a fascinating indicator of the nature of popular science publications as a lagging indicator. It is a re-post of a piece published last April, How Mitochondrial Eve connected all humanity and rewrote human evolution. In it you have an encapsulation of a particular period in our understanding of human natural history through evolutionary genetics. Notice for example the focus on maternally transmitted lineages, mtDNA and Y chromosomes. And the citations on genealogy date to the middle aughts. The science is mostly correct as far as it goes in the details (or at least it is defensible, last I checked there was still debate as to the validity of the molecular clocks used for Y chromosomal lineages),
but it misses the big picture of how we've reframed our understanding of the human past over the last few years
. The ...
