The long First Age of mankind

“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a ‘Lord of the Rings’-type world - that there were many hominid populations,” says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work. - Mark Thomas, as reported by Nature This is in reference to the ancient DNA meeting where David Reich reported that the Denisovans, an exotic archaic population which contributed ~5-10 percent of the ancestry of Papuans, was itself a synthesis of Neandertals and a mysterious group currently unknown. This is not surprising, as the broad outlines of these results were presented at ASHG 2012, though no doubt they're moving closer to publication. But for this post I want to shift the focus to a different time and place, after the ancient admixture with archaic lineages, and to the reticulation present within our own. But first ...