Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Wolpoffians see in the out-of-Africa idea echoes of the rather imperial
replacement model going back to W. J. Sollas circa 1911 or even
Nicolaas Witsen in the 1600s.
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The “African Eve” or “Garden of Eden”
supporters find in Wolpoff's multiregional model vestiges of the hoary
specter of polygenesis—the idea occasionally expressed in the nineteenth
century, for example, that white people descended from chimps, Africans
from gorillas, and Asians from the orangutans. Multiregionalists see the
debate in terms of cooperation versus violence, and the mitochondrial-
ists see a world of recent unity versus deep divisions.
So far, it seems that the geneticists are winning the field. Multiregion-
alists have no comparable technical wonder, and the original mitochon-
drial evidence for recency has been joined by nonmitochondrial
evidence—for instance, from the Y chromosome. Then, of course, there
are the other spectacular successes that the molecularists have enjoyed:
Svante Pääbo's extraction and sequencing of DNA from the arm bone
of a Neanderthal, suggesting a last common ancestor with humans circa
six hundred thousand years ago; the sequencing of the Ice Man of the
Alps, the Czar Nicholas II's family remains, the offspring of Thomas
Jefferson's liaison with his slave-lover, Sally Hemings, and so forth. You
really can no longer do phylogeny and ignore molecular tools.
The politics of human genetic recency, though, have been complex. On
the inegalitarian right, Vince Sarich showed in the late 1960s that
humans and apes shared a common ancestry with chimps only five to
six million years ago. On the egalitarian left, Richard Lewontin showed
about this same time that racial differentiation was relatively recent.
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Sarich's innovation can be seen as part of an effort to reemphasize the
animal in our humanity, and Lewontin's the opposite, to de-emphasize
whatever biological differences may divide us. Sarich moved up the
break with apes; Lewontin moved up the separation of races from one
another.
Confusion and Projection
The idea of human recency comes from many different directions, only
a few of which have been mentioned here.
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The ideological aspects are
interesting, because people seem to be getting different things out of
recency. Some people seem to like the fact that “we are all Africans”;
there is a kind of “black Athena” resonance in the molecularist account
