The inimitable Joe Pickrell has dropped his Khoisan-are-part-Italian preprint onto arXiv, Ancient west Eurasian ancestry in southern and eastern Africa. I’m being glib in my characterization of the paper’s core conclusion, but there’s a reason for such a flip response:
the inferences that he seems to draw from the genetic data strike me as verging on crazy.
But that’s OK, what genetics is telling us is that history was a whole lot crazier than we had imagined. Let’s back up for a moment here. For several decades now geneticists have assumed that the Bushmen of the Kalahari, the Khoisan-qua-Khoisan, Africa’s last hunter-gatherers who retain their ancestral language along with the Hadza, are the ur-humans. The basal lineage that first diverged from the rest of mankind at the cusp of the Out of Africa event. This is evident in Y chromosomal and mtDNA phylogenies, where the Bushmen and their kin harbor ...
