“Neanderthal” admixture seems to be higher in West Africans than in East Africans. How come? (Source) When modern humans began their expansion from a small core somewhere in East Africa, the continent probably had several different archaic populations.It now seems that one of them was related to the Neanderthals in Europe. In an ongoing study of Neanderthal admixture in present-day humans, John Hawks has found an apparently higher level of admixture in the Yoruba of Nigeria than in the Luhya of Kenya (see chart above).
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Expansion of modern humans out of Africa and within Africa. Mellars (2006).When we discuss the origins of modern humans, the term ‘Out of Africa’ is a bit misleading. Our common ancestors came not from Africa as a whole but from a r... Read Post
Skhul V – one of the Skhul-Qafzeh hominins. Were they the middleman between Neanderthal genes and the modern human genome?When I initially published my last post, I pooh-poohed the rumors about the reconstructed Neanderthal genome. ... Read Post
I was wary of this paper's conclusion as soon as I realized that the authors contended that Europeans and East Asians did not differ significantly in their levels of Neanderthal admixture. You see, Neandertals were absent from East ... Read Post