Re: Mitochondrial Eve a 'fact'?

Nic wrote:
floyda@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Friar Broccoli wrote:
Ron O wrote:

The multiregional hypotheses is only talking about the most
recent events and not the millions of years since we separated
from other great apes. It only takes into consideration from
Homo erectus to Homo sapiens sapiens.

Thanks for the clarification

[snip]


The mitochondrial data does not support this hypothesis. In fact, it
strongly supports the alternative that modern humans arose in Africa
(the original estimate was that "eve" existed 80,000 to 250,000 years
ago

[snip]

The multiregional adherants might claim that we haven't sampled every
human on earth so we don't really know the answer.

Hope their position isn't this silly.


It's not. It's still almost certainly wrong, but the reasons why the
multiregional model are wrong are not so obvious as that. Wolpoff is
mistaken, but he's not foolish.

There *were problems with Cann et al's original sample (e.g. use of
African American mtDNA as a substitute for African mtDNA, which was a
dumb mistake), and of course there are always small sample problems.
(IIRC, the 1987 study used something like 170 people.) But more recent
analyses give no comfort to the multiregionalists.




They might also claim something like the original
mitochondrial type of the Homo erectus population that left
Africa and colonized the old world on the order of a million
years ago, was not as good in some respects to a later
version that arose in Africa around a hundred thousand years
ago and spread through all the existing human populations of
the world. There could have been mixing with indigenous
populations, but we don't see evidence of it in the maternal
lineage because all the indigenous mitochondrial types are
extinct.

I like this. (And again back to low junk rates in mDNA.)


They can also reasonably argue that with such low populations of humans
at the time we're discussing, the loss of mt lineages to drift is not
at all unlikely.

That puzzles me. I mean what is good for the goose is good for the
gander. Doesn't the loss of mt lineages to drift when populations are
low apply mutatis mutandis to Y chromosome lineages?


Sure, assuming monogamous mating pairs, it almost has to. A man who
has only daughters is the end of that particular Y-chromosome lineage.
Can you expand upon what's puzzling you, please? I'm not quite
following (could be the hangover).


Is the most
recent common ancestor of human mitochondria surprisingly recent? Or
not surprisingly so?


Not particularly surprising. The "round-about 100K" figure has been
pretty much the consensus for decades.


That is what I assumed governs the appeal of the
mt Eve theory.

Not really. In fact, the error terms around the age estimates include
anything from around 200K or more down to about 80K, which are dates we
could already have offered just on the archaeological evidence.

But if Wolpoff and the multiregionalists were correct, then we'd expect
mtEve to have lived at some time around a million years ago. So yeah,
that might be part of the appeal.

One thing you need to remember is that the mtEve hypothesis was rapidly
adopted _by_ _anthropologists_, who are traditionally trained in the
social sciences at least as much and usually a lot more than in the
natural sciences. Although I am almost certain that the mtEve stuff is
accurate, good science, I'm also aware that anthropologists were eager
to accept it, not just on evidentairy grounds, but also on the grounds
of its implications for contemporary social issues surrounding "race"
and ethnicity. IOW, this is a case where the "social constructionists"
actually have a point. Anthropologists were happy that the good
science had implications that supported the social positions we already
held. We would eventually have adopted the science, even if it ran
counter to our pre-conceived wishes, but it would have taken longer
(witness anthropologists' hesitation to applying Darwinian models to
cultural phenomena, for an example).

HTH

.

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