One thing that has always bothered me about the extreme replacement hypothesis of the “Out of Africa” essentialists is that the idea that thousands of humans (or pre-humans) emerging from their African homes would find archaic proto-humans abounding throughout Eurasia and South Asia and fail to shag them. The replacement advocates want to believe that our ancestors, finding their new lands occupied by hordes of autochthonous inhabitants, proceeded to kill and eat all these people without exception.<\/p>\n
I find that idea absurd. I’m sure there were many wars, some to extinction, but I’m equally sure that there were many more fusions of disparate groups into new cultural formations, and that some of these events happened rapidly. The absolutists also want to believe that our all our ancestors were somehow so puritan that they would refuse to mate or have sex with these archaic humans who would have looked slightly “different” to themselves. Obviously, these people have never been at a club near closing, when even extreme flogging with the ugly stick is insufficient to deter some hookups. Also, to this day, some people have sex with animals, or balloons, or even Baptists, so I really don’t think that species as as strong as barrier as they would like to believe.<\/p>\n
So I was interested to see today an elegant statistical analysis that veers towards the integration rather than replacement continuum of the Out of Africa hypothesis.<\/p>\n