As we have noted elsewhere in the book, modern human beings show remarkably little genetic variabilitythere's more diversity in one social group of fifty-five chimps than in the entire human population, as one authority has put itand this would expla...
By 1992, the study was largely discredited. But the techniques of genetic analysis continued to be refined, and in 1997 scientists from the University of Munich managed to extract and analyze some DNA from the arm bone of the original Neandertal man,...
With the fossil record so unhelpful, scientists have turned increasingly to genetic studies, in particular the part known as mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA was only discovered in 1964, but by the 1980s some ingenious souls at the University of...
One thing that would help to resolve matters would be evidence of interbreeding, but that is not at all easy to prove, or disprove, from fossils. In 1999, archeologists in Portugal found the skeleton of a child about four years old that died 24,500 y...
Thorne emphatically (and I believe sincerely) dismisses the idea that his theory is in any measure racist and accounts for the uniformity of human evolution by suggesting that there was a lot of movement back and forth between cultures and regions. T...
Opponents of the multiregional theory reject it, in the first instance, on the grounds that it requires an improbable amount of parallel evolution by hominids throughout the Old World in Africa, China, Europe, the most distant islands of Indonesia, w...
Above all the issue that is almost never addressed is that Neandertals had brains that were significantly larger than those of modern people 尤其重要的是,有个问题几乎从来没有人解决过,那就是尼安德特人的脑比现代人明...
Quite who they were and what they were like remain matters of disagreement and uncertainty. Right up until the middle of the twentieth century the accepted anthropological view of the Neandertal was that he was dim, stooped, shuffling, and simianthe...
For a long time, it was believed that the Cro-Magnons, as modern humans in Europe became known, drove the Neandertals before them as they advanced across the continent, eventually forcing them to its western margins, where essentially they had no cho...
These first modern humans are surprisingly shadowy. We know less about ourselves, curiously enough, than about almost any other line of hominids. It is odd indeed, as Tattersall notes, that the most recent major event in human evolutionthe emergence...