How to translate text using browser tools
1 July 2007 GENETICS AND RECENT HUMAN EVOLUTION
Alan R. Templeton
Author Affiliations +
Abstract

Starting with “mitochondrial Eve” in 1987, genetics has played an increasingly important role in studies of the last two million years of human evolution. It initially appeared that genetic data resolved the basic models of recent human evolution in favor of the “out-of-Africa replacement” hypothesis in which anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa about 150,000 years ago, started to spread throughout the world about 100,000 years ago, and subsequently drove to complete genetic extinction (replacement) all other human populations in Eurasia. Unfortunately, many of the genetic studies on recent human evolution have suffered from scientific flaws, including misrepresenting the models of recent human evolution, focusing upon hypothesis compatibility rather than hypothesis testing, committing the ecological fallacy, and failing to consider a broader array of alternative hypotheses. Once these flaws are corrected, there is actually little genetic support for the out-of-Africa replacement hypothesis. Indeed, when genetic data are used in a hypothesis-testing framework, the out-of-Africa replacement hypothesis is strongly rejected. The model of recent human evolution that emerges from a statistical hypothesis-testing framework does not correspond to any of the traditional models of human evolution, but it is compatible with fossil and archaeological data. These studies also reveal that any one gene or DNA region captures only a small part of human evolutionary history, so multilocus studies are essential. As more and more loci became available, genetics will undoubtedly offer additional insights and resolutions of human evolution.

Alan R. Templeton "GENETICS AND RECENT HUMAN EVOLUTION," Evolution 61(7), 1507-1519, (1 July 2007). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2007.00164.x
Received: 12 January 2007; Accepted: 19 April 2007; Published: 1 July 2007
JOURNAL ARTICLE
13 PAGES

This article is only available to subscribers.
It is not available for individual sale.
+ SAVE TO MY LIBRARY

KEYWORDS
Human evolution
mitochondrial Eve
multiregional model
nested clade analysis
out-of-Africa replacement
PHYLOGEOGRAPHY
RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS
Get copyright permission
Back to Top