Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
out-of-Africa model, the idea that fully modern humans emerged rather
suddenly in Africa about 135,000 years ago and spread from there
throughout the world, “replacing” (without interbreeding with) the
Homo erectus
populations they encountered.
The two sides are loosely represented by different instrumental
traditions: multiregionalists, led by Milford Wolpoff of the University
of Michigan, tend to be physical anthropologists; several of the
most prominent out-of-Africanists, by contrast, have been molecular
geneticists—notably the diaspora from Allan Wilson's Berkeley lab in the
1980s, including Mark Stoneking, Rebecca Cann, and Svante Pääbo, just
to name some of the more distinguished.
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Multiregionalists tend to stress
continuities in physical type as evidence of regional continuity; out-of-
Africanists tend to stress rates of nucleotide divergence as evidence of
bottlenecks and human biorecency.
Apart from these disciplinary differences, however, there are also
intriguing ideological divides, though not always those that make it into
the popular press. The tendency has been to gloss the debate as “we're
all Africans” versus “racial divisions are really deep,” when that is not
necessarily the most interesting or accurate fracture plane in the debate
(Wolpoff is not Coon). One thing going on is a deep difference over how
to grant the Neanderthals dignity. Wolpoff and the multiregionalists basi-
cally maintain the UNESCO line that to deny them a biological link to
the present is to exclude them from the family of man, a move that
smacks of racism.
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Critics of this view, like Tattersall, say that the Nean-
derthals are no less respectable for having gone extinct, or for not having
been able to breed with
Homo sapiens
; their dignity should not hinge on
their biocompatibility with successor populations.
What is also noteworthy, though, are the different rhetorical strategies
used by the two groups, multiregionalists and mitochondrialists. These
are interesting since each has tried, at various points, to accuse the oppos-
ing camp of being more racist. Out-of-Africa theorists have accused mul-
tiregionalists of exaggerating racial divisions (conceived of as going back
as long as a million years in some of the still-used “candelabra models”).
Multiregionalists, in turn, have accused out-of-Africa advocates of
implying a total and perhaps violent (genocide-like?) replacement of
Homo erectus
or Neanderthal by
Homo sapiens
.
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Such a misconception
is fueled by silly and sensationalist articles in the popular press.
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Each
side has also managed to brand the opposing camp as old-fashioned. The
