Man originated in Africa. Large-scale confirmation of the “African” theory of human origins has been obtained. comments: Our ancestors did not leave Africa

Analysis of craniometric (that is, related to measurements of the skull) indicators of modern humans indicates that all people living on Earth today descended from a relatively small group of individuals who lived in Central Africa 60-80 thousand years ago. As the descendants of these people spread around the globe, they lost some of their genes and became less and less diverse. In a paper recently published in the journal Nature, the hypothesis about a single center of origin of modern man was confirmed by the analysis of not only molecular genetic data, but also phenotypic data (in this case, the size of the skull).

More and more data collected in recent years indicate that “modern” man formed in equatorial Africa 150-200 thousand years ago. Its spread across the planet began approximately 60 thousand years ago, when a relatively small group of people moved to the Arabian Peninsula, and from there their descendants gradually began to spread throughout Eurasia (moving primarily east along the coast of the Indian Ocean), and then throughout Melanesia and Australia.

The process of human settlement of our planet, according to this hypothesis, should have been accompanied by a decrease in the initial stock of genetic variability. After all, at each stage, it is not the entire “parental” population that sets off on its journey, but some small part of it, a sample that could not possibly include all the genes. In other words, there should be a founder effect—a sharp decrease in overall genetic diversity with the formation of each new group of migrants. Accordingly, as humans spread, we should discover the gradual disappearance of a number of genes, the depletion of the original gene pool. In reality, this can manifest itself in a decrease in the level of genetic variability, and the further from the source of settlement, the greater the degree. If the center of origin of the species (in this case Homo sapiens) not one, but several, then the picture will be completely different.

The hypothesis of a single center of origin for modern humans was recently confirmed by molecular genetic data collected as part of the international Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP). Genetic diversity in human populations did decline with distance from Central Africa, the presumed center of human origin (see, for example, Ramachandran et al. 2005). However, it remained unclear whether this effect could be detected by referring to phenotypic characteristics, for example, the anatomical features of modern humans.

Andrea Manica from the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge (UK) together with colleagues from the Department of Genetics of the same university and the Department of Anatomy of the Saga Medical School (Japan) took on the solution to this problem. The material was based on skull measurements (craniometric indicators) collected all over the world. A total of 4,666 male skulls from 105 local populations and an additional 1,579 female skulls from 39 populations were analyzed. Data on male skulls are taken as a basis as they are more representative. Skulls older than 2 thousand years were not included in the analysis to avoid measurement errors associated with poor preservation of ancient bones.

The results of the study confirmed the hypothesis of a single center of human origin. With distance from central Africa, the variability of the main dimensional parameters of the skull decreased, which can be interpreted as a decrease in the initial genetic diversity. Additional difficulties of the analysis were associated with the fact that as man mastered new climatic zones, certain traits turned out (or did not turn out to be) useful and, accordingly, were supported or not supported by selection. This climatic adaptation also affected the size of the skull, but the use of special statistical methods made it possible to isolate this “climatic” component and not take it into account when analyzing the dynamics of the initial variability.

In parallel, in the same work, the degree of genotype heterozygosity was assessed for 54 local populations of modern humans. For this purpose, we used data on microsatellites (DNA fragments containing repeats), also collected as part of the HGDP program. When plotted on a map, these data show a distribution very similar to that revealed by phenotypic traits. As one moves away from a person's center of origin, heterozygosity (a measure of genetic diversity) decreases, as does phenotypic diversity.

Source: Andrea Manica, William Amos, François Balloux, Tsunehiko Hanihara. The effect of ancient population bottlenecks on human phenotypic variation // Nature. 2007. V. 448. P. 346-348.

See also:
1) Why man left Africa 60 thousand years ago, “Elements”, 06/30/2006.
2) The earliest history of mankind revised, “Elements”, 03/02/2006.
3) Journey of Mankind. The Peopling of the World. Bradshaw Foundation (see freely available map with animation showing the route of early man's dispersal from Africa).
4) Paul Mellars. Why did modern human populations disperse from Africa ca. 60,000 years ago. A new model (full text: Pdf, 1.66 Kb) // PNAS. 06/20/2006. V. 103. No. 25. P. 9381-9386.
5) Sohini Ramachandran, Omkar Deshpande, Charles C. Roseman, Noah A. Rosenberg, Marcus W. Feldman, L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza Support from the relationship of genetic and geographic distance in human populations for a serial founder effect originating in Africa ( full text: Pdf, 539 Kb) // PNAS. 2005. V. 102. P. 15942-15947.
6) L. A. Zhivotovsky. Microsatellite variability in human populations and methods for studying it // VOGiS Bulletin. 2006. T. 10. No. 1. P. 74-96 (there is a Pdf of the entire article).

Alexey Gilyarov

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Let me explain popularly about genetic drift. Suppose there is some large population, for example, 100,000 individuals of one species (let it be a person, but with the same success it could be a white hare, a hoodie, a forest geranium...). If we take a small random sample of 10 individuals from this large population, then obviously not all the genes present in the parent population will end up there, but those that do will, in the event of successful reproduction and an increase in the size of the daughter population, will be reproduced in many copies. If you take some other small sample from the parent population in parallel, then other genes may accidentally get there, which will also be reproduced in a large number of individuals if some new population arises from this sample. Accordingly, differences may arise between such daughter populations isolated from each other (which will also manifest themselves in the external appearance of individuals), which are not the result of natural selection (i.e., not adaptive, not adaptive), but obtained simply due to some random combination of circumstances. This phenomenon was independently discovered by Wright (who gave the name “genetic drift”), and by our compatriots, Dubinin and Romashov, who called it “genetic-automatic processes.” Populations of terrestrial animals and plants from remote oceanic islands often originate from literally a couple of individuals. Of course, The founder effect and genetic drift are especially pronounced in this case.

Human settlement of the American continent occurred no earlier than 25 thousand years ago. People crossed there from the very northeastern part of Asia along the “bridge,” a piece of land (Beringia) that then connected Eurasia to America. Then, 18 thousand years ago there was the last strongest glaciation (ice from the north reached south to latitude 55) and it completely cut off people who moved to the American continent (descendants of Asians) from contacts with the parent population. The formation of Indian culture began.

All xenophobes and nationalists of all stripes (it doesn’t matter whether they prefer the Aryan race, or Negroids, or Mongoloids) must be disappointed. Modern man descended from a very small group of people, with "Eve" being black. All of us people living on Earth are VERY CLOSE RELATIVES. For example, the genetic differences between different groups of chimpanzees living in different areas of Central Africa are much more significant than the differences between representatives of different races of Homo sapiens. The loss of genetic (and, as shown in the article discussed, phenotypic) diversity as we move away from our common homeland - Africa, is another powerful evidence in favor of the hypothesis of a single center of origin for modern humans. As in the case of humans, depleted genotypes resulting from the passage of the population through the bottle-neck (a stage of extremely low numbers) also exist in other groups of animals. For example, among all cats, the cheetah occupies a special place. All cheetahs are also very close relatives, which cannot be said about lions, tigers, lynxes and domestic cats. I apologize for the verbosity, but I hope everything is clear now.

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• Dear Alexey Gilyarov,

  It so happened that I read your note and the note “SENSATIONAL FIND REFUTED THE THEORY OF THE “EXIDUS FROM AFRICA”” (http://www.inauka.ru/evolution/article74070.html) in a row.

  There we are talking about the discovery in China of a skeleton about 40 thousand years old, which, on the one hand, is similar to a modern person, and on the other hand, is clearly different from the African phenotype.

  These data, in my opinion, are in obvious contradiction with the materials in your note, and it would be interesting to know how you can resolve this contradiction.

  On the other hand, data on the genetic variability of the African genotype may have not only a “historical” but also a “bio-geographical” nature - for example, it can be assumed that Africans, IN PRINCIPLE, due to some local geographical or climatic reasons, are more active there is a process of genetic mutations which, in particular, manifests itself in phenotypic diversity. If such a (as yet undiscovered) process actually takes place, then, in theory, the thesis that the “more diverse” African genotype is a confirmation of the “seniority” of Africans should be corrected.

  Personally, it seems to me that the state of affairs in the theory of human origins is somewhat similar to the situation with the taxonomy of chemical elements before the advent of the periodic table. The problem then was that scientists tried to “naturally” arrange all the KNOWN data “in a row”, leaving no room for the UNKNOWN ones, and THEREFORE they didn’t get anything useful. Likewise, the presence of conflicting theories of human origins, based on firmly established facts, suggests that EACH of these theories does not leave “gaps” for facts that are YET UNKNOWN - and is therefore incorrect.

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  • Dear Mikhail, unfortunately, in the note you are referring to, neither the source (the name of the journal and the coordinates of the article) nor even the names of the researchers in English transcription are given. Therefore, I cannot find the original publication about the Chinese find with which it all began, and it is simply impossible to judge from a journalistic text written without any understanding of the issue. So, if you find the coordinates of the original (and not secondary) publication, report it on the site! It is likely that this is not Homo sapiens at all, but some other representative of the hominid. If earlier for decades they talked about missing links in human paleontology, now there is even an excess of them. In any case, all major anthropologists agree that there was a period on Earth when several hominids CO-EXISTED at once, i.e. several types of ancient “people” (quotes - since people are understood in a broad sense, including, for example, Neanderthals, who coexisted with Homo sapiens in Europe for a long time, but then died out). So the remains of the “ancestors” are mostly representatives of lateral lines (who later became extinct), and not at all the real ancestors of Homo sapiens.
    As for the assumption about some particularly high rates of mutation in African human ancestors, there is no basis for it. Still, let's follow Occam's rule and not create entities beyond the need.

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    • An early modern human from Tianyuan Cave, Zhoukoudian, China
      (Late Pleistocene | Neandertals | mandible | postcrania | paleopathology)

      Hong Shang*, Haowen Tong*, Shuangquan Zhang*, Fuyou Chen*, and Erik Trinkaus
      ================

      As for Occam's razor... This is a VERY good technique, but you need to use it carefully, otherwise you can cut off what is clearly necessary :))

      In the example with the periodic table, Mendeleev committed a very serious “violation” of this principle - and he turned out to be right.

      Comparing the maps you provided with the maps of the settlement of Homo Sapiens (or at least with the dates of the settlement of Asia and Europe), I see an obvious contradiction. If we proceed from the theory of genetic drift, then the later a particular territory was populated, the less gene variability there should be. According to available data, Europe was settled later than Asia, and therefore should be "darker" than Asia. Or, more generally speaking, the cards you provided SHOULD have been “spotty”. But on them we see a “continuous gradient” - as if settlement from Africa went from south to north (Africa-Europe), and then from west to east (Europe - Asia). Don't such inconsistencies confuse you? If these maps were shown to me and no additional explanation was given about what was shown there, I would see there a clear indication of the manifestation of some planetary geophysical phenomenon and would ask what the situation is like in another part of the world (i.e. in America).

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      • Thank you very much for the link. Unfortunately, only abstract is open, from which you can learn a little. I’ll try to log in from the university computer, maybe I’ll get the whole text. As for your comments about the settlement of Europe and Asia, I cannot fully justify the author’s point of view. You need to ask them this. Look at the cards
        which are referenced on Elements (particularly with animation!). People went to Europe quite early (but already from Asia). Yes, and in PNAS there are completely open works (if this is not the very last year). There are still inconsistencies, of course. This is not surprising, since just recently we knew nothing at all. The progress in knowledge that has been achieved literally over the last 10-20 years is surprising.

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        • I hope to see a review of this article in Elements.

          Thank you very much for the animated map - this is exactly what I was looking for for a long time.

          Have you ever come across maps (static or animated) on which archaeological evidence of people’s technological progress (stone tools, dwellings, etc.) would be plotted in chronological order? Or maybe there are resources somewhere that could be used to build such a map?

          http://site/news/430144

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          • Yes, I read this article at one time. Unfortunately, it does not quite accurately correspond to the topic of discussion.

            It says that the theory of displacement by the latest human ancestors (3rd wave of expansion, about 100 thousand years ago) is not true, and genetic data indicate that biologically we humans are descendants of all immigrants from Africa, starting around 2 million years ago.

            If we take this fact into account (and I see no point in arguing with it), then I can well agree with the statement that a group of people from Africa settled in China a couple of million years ago, and by the time Homo Sapiens appeared, they had changed so much , which was no longer at all like her African ancestors. Maybe it was this group that gave rise to the synanthropes, and those, in turn, gave rise to the modern Chinese and Asians.

            In fact, from my point of view, the issue is NOT whether Neanderthals could have interbred with Cro-Magnons, or whether representatives of the 3rd wave could have interbred with representatives of earlier "waves of expansion." All this, from my point of view, has NO significance in relation to the problem of the appearance of mind on Earth, since it relates to the evolution of the body, but not consciousness.

            But what REALLY matters is finding out the reasons for the CULTURAL BLAST.

            By “cultural explosion” we mean a SHARP time boundary (approximately 40-50 thousand years ago), after which people began exponential progress in technology, culture and environmental development. Actually, we can assume that Homo sapiens (i.e., the modern bearer of consciousness) appeared exactly then - about 50 thousand years ago, and not 150, and especially not 800 thousand years ago. From this point of view, all our ancestors (including the representatives of the 3rd “wave of expansion” mentioned everywhere) who lived before this “fatal point” have nothing in common with us in terms of their level of consciousness, although they are biologically “virtually identical” to us. I gave arguments in favor of this assumption in another discussion (see?discuss=430541). And no analysis of the DNA of MODERN people, unfortunately, will answer the reasons for this “gap in consciousness.”

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            • : By “cultural explosion” we mean a SHARP time boundary (approximately 40-50 thousand years ago), after which people began exponential progress in technology, culture and environmental development.

              How was the absolute value of the level of technology, culture and environment assessed? Is there somewhere an illustration of a graph on which estimates of this level are plotted based on known facts, and from which one could draw a conclusion about the exponential growth at that time, and about the point of its beginning, if there was one? Is there an analysis somewhere of changes in environmental conditions or other factors that could act as incentives to increase this level? Finally, it would be interesting to read what the incentives are for raising this level now. :-)

              : Actually, we can assume that Homo sapiens (i.e., the modern bearer of consciousness) appeared exactly then - about 50 thousand years ago, and not 150, and especially not 800 thousand years ago. From this point of view, all our ancestors (including the representatives of the 3rd “wave of expansion” mentioned everywhere) who lived before this “fatal point” have nothing in common with us in terms of their level of consciousness, although they are biologically “virtually identical” to us. I gave arguments in favor of this assumption in another discussion (see?discuss=430541). And no analysis of the DNA of MODERN people, unfortunately, will answer the reasons for this “gap in consciousness.”

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              • >How was the absolute value of the level of technology, culture and environment assessed?...

                Read the discussion to which I provided a link. The issues you raised were partially discussed there; in particular, I presented an indirect method with which one could quantify the rate of development of consciousness (i.e., get a visual graph, and not general reasoning). On this chart, if you plot it, the “starting point” will be quite clearly visible.

                As for the “cultural explosion” itself, this is a fairly well-known fact. It’s just that after this time limit, the tools became more elegant and more perfect, the drawings became more realistic, everyday and cultural objects became more diverse, and, most importantly, over these 50 thousand years we “got” from a stone knife to spaceships (this also applies to the question of development of the environment). And ALL of our ancestors over a similar period of time only slightly improved the stone knife. Read the discussion - it probably answers most of the questions that first come to mind.

                > Is there an analysis somewhere of changes in environmental conditions or other factors that could provide incentives to increase this level?

                In the same discussion, I tried to show that, firstly, these conditions must be VERY specific (namely, they must imply a very strict evolutionary selection for the degree of development of consciousness, which we never observe in real living nature), and, in -secondly, during the period of time under consideration (40-50 thousand years ago) there were no conditions on Earth at all that suggested an increased rate of speciation. That is, based on logic and known facts, the human mind simply SHOULD NOT have appeared on our planet. But it did appear, and it makes you wonder about missing facts or incorrect assumptions underlying the logical analysis.

                >> And no analysis of the DNA of MODERN people, unfortunately, will answer the reasons for this “gap in consciousness.”

                > Firstly, is he really trying to answer _this_ question? As far as I understand, it doesn't concern him at all.

                That's the point, it really "doesn't concern you at all"! But in the literature related to the problem of the emergence of people, there is a persistent substitution of concepts. There an equal sign is put between biological evolution (i.e. OBSERVED changes in the genotype and phenotype) and the evolution of consciousness. Researchers simply refuse to recognize the fundamental difference between these phenomena.

                > Secondly, the fact that it does not show any fundamental break exactly about 50 thousand years ago is already part of the answer to this question. :-)

                This is TOO crude a tool to be used to find such differences. It's like measuring bacteria with a student's ruler.

                And then, if the emergence of human consciousness was the result of some small modification of the genome, then an analysis of the DNA of modern people will not show AT ALL when this modification occurred and whether it occurred in principle, because it is present in ALL people, and it is simply impossible to understand that this is precisely a modification of the “pre-human” genome.

                > Wasn't the transition from bacterial colonies to single-celled ones no less of a rupture? Wasn't the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms no less of a break? And so on.

                These questions are also very interesting, but, firstly, they relate specifically to BIOLOGICAL evolution and, secondly, they have a fundamental difference from the question of the emergence of consciousness, because happened much more “naturally”, i.e. over fairly large periods of time (millions of years) and by trial and error. And, besides, they were not associated with such a completely unnecessary thing for survival as Reason.

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How dare people work with statistics... On the territory of Russia (except for the edge of Kamchatka, it seems) there is not a single fence of skulls, but then they boldly paint over its territory into a very specific temporary settlement zone!

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As one moves away from a person's center of origin, heterozygosity (a measure of genetic diversity) decreases, as does phenotypic diversity.

In other words, the further from Africa, the more stable the heterozygous and phenotypic characteristics are, i.e. the entire set of characteristics went through a longer and more careful selection and the sample became stable, which means that in these regions people are older than in Africa, where they are still very, very young, and so they change every year, like children when they grow up.
And in Africa, people lived, more precisely, on a line parallel to the equator, approximately at the latitude of North Africa, where glaciers periodically drove them. From there they then, not all of them, returned home as the weather warmed up. That’s why birds fly to nest in the North, also home, just like people. In Kenya, where they have been digging so enthusiastically since the discovery of "Lucy", there are simply unique conditions in the form of a shift of the continental plate. They dig not where they “lost” it, but under the “lantern”. All these remains of “ancient human ancestors” may well have nothing to do with us. By the way, genetic analysis has already knocked the Neanderthal out of the Darwinian pack, but how they just recently forced him on us as half-brothers! Africa, as the ancestral home of humanity, was apparently chosen for reasons of parity of civilizations and political correctness. Most likely there were several Adams, “of the same type.” Six basic mutations, out of 200 known today, are believed to be present in all men on Earth. Does this just indicate a common ancestor or does it indicate the conditions of their origin that are common to all? And are these markers of mutations? It is possible that this is really a “registration sheet”, but what and why? I cannot accept the explanation that nature created a useless zone, this is not in its traditions. Maybe 6 matches is the registration code of our “post office” - Earth? Ha ha!

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In fact, if you look at the maps included in the article under discussion, you can clearly see that “something is happening” in the African region, and the intensity of this something decreases as it moves away from the center (i.e. Africa). However, this phenomenon can be explained in several ways, and the simplest of them (in accordance with Occam’s principle) is that at the “epicenter” there is some MODERN geophysical phenomenon that is reflected in biological processes, in particular, in the frequency of mutations of human genome.

This hypothesis can be easily tested - it is enough to do the same “temporary scanning” of genes not only in humans, but also in other species that lived in Africa with him and have approximately the same distribution on the planet. If a similar picture is observed in them, it means that the matter is in geophysical processes, but if only in humans, it means that either the hypothesis is incorrect, or additional factors must be taken into account.

On the other hand, a molecular clock, although it does not give the exact time of occurrence of a mutation, whether you like it or not, it shows the SEQUENCE of mutations. Those. if in Africa this mutation STILL does not exist, but in Asia it ALREADY exists, it means that the mutation appeared AFTER this species appeared in Asia, and it is difficult to argue here. As far as I understand, it was judging by the SEQUENCE of a number of mutations that we came to the conclusion that we originated from Africa. Political correctness has nothing to do with it - roughly speaking, it’s just counting on your fingers.

Personally, what annoys me in all discussions about the origins of man is the fact that the conversation is conducted exclusively around the structure of the skull, skeleton or chromosomes, i.e. around something that can be dug up, measured, broken down and weighed. It's like judging a person's intelligence by the size and style of his clothes. More than size 50 is reasonable, less is not. There is a breast pocket - a sapiens, no - a monkey.

Reasonability is, first of all, an INFORMATIONAL phenomenon. And the ability to process information is NOT reflected in the skeleton, nor in the structure of the skull, nor in the _currently known_ features of the genome structure. Although biologists have already realized that the genetic sequence itself does not mean anything - what is important is HOW genes “interact” in the process of operation of a LIVING organism, and one cannot even dream of judging this from fossil DNA. So at the moment the entire “genetic history” of intelligence is not worth a penny. It just gives a rather rough picture of who came into this world after whom.

If we judge the emergence of this INFORMATION ABILITY (intelligence) in people by the ONLY reliable (but, unfortunately, indirect) material sign - objects of material culture, tools and rock paintings, then it turns out that intelligence arose SIMULTANEOUSLY throughout the ENTIRE planet approximately 40 years ago. 50 thousand years ago, i.e. among ALL people who at that time were settled over an area of ​​thousands of kilometers from Africa to Australia. If we recognize this fact, then all “scientific” theories of the appearance of people instantly go down the drain, and we find ourselves faced with a very unpleasant choice - the intervention of “higher powers” ​​or alien intelligence.?discuss=430541), I proposed a “reasonable compromise” - “random “viral introduction of “mind genes”, but it also doesn’t look very convincing. Although, from my point of view, this is the best that can be offered at the moment, if one firmly adheres to the materialistic point of view.

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• That’s right, the count is just on the fingers, more precisely on point mutations of the nongenic zone of the Y chromosome. But there is one point! If we take, say, Egypt, the Middle East or Southern Europe as the conditional point of origin of the “most ancient mutation” - M168, then the strategic plan for the seizure of planet Earth by progressive humanity in the form of arrows on the map is drawn just as correctly. The fact is, for example, that 10-15% of non-Africans do not have the M89 (Arabian) mutator. And if we take as a basis the “exodus” through the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula, then everyone should have this “snip”. The genetic database at the time of the study included only about 50 thousand data, from, as you understand, 3 billion men on earth. Is this a sufficient sample? Don't know. I think no. But it already shows that the version of the thousand-year swim across the Red Sea is not accurate. The Australian aborigines have the last mutation M9, i.e. for almost 40 thousand years there were simply no others. The Indians also have M3 and there is also silence. How can the route of movement in time be drawn from the assumption - one snip per 5 thousand years. All these studies are conducted only in the USA. The USA is an ideologist of globalism. The most important principle of globalism is “all people are brothers.” It is also important that there is no elder among them. The only places more ideal than Africa would be Australia, Antarctica, and Atlantis. But it won't fit. Who suggested the idea of ​​placing the ancestral homeland of man in Africa? Yes, still the same Mr. Darwin. "Monophilist", damn it. Neanderthal man (Nomo sapiens) was included in the linear chain of development of modern man (Nomo sapiens sapiens) with the rights, generally speaking, of a progenitor. This was recorded in Bol.Sov.Enz. black, damn it, “in Russian.”

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Human Origins- one of the most intriguing and exciting topics in science, philosophy, and worldview. And one of the most confusing. The fact is that there is not a single direct experiment that would firmly and unambiguously answer the question of where on the planet and when our direct ancestor first appeared, which would fall under the anthropological description of the species Homo sapiens and/or “anatomically modern man” (AMH). Here, each concept is not fixed and is essentially “floating”. Ancient skeletal remains have been found, but how do you know if this is the “first time” or if something even more ancient will be found tomorrow? How reliable are datings that are in fact not reliable at all and are almost always disputed? There are dozens of anthropological characteristics that are somehow tried on the concept Homo sapiens and on the concept of “anatomically modern man”, but theory is one thing (although there is still no generally accepted complete classification), and in practice these features are almost impossible to fully apply - usually only fragments of the skeleton are found, often without facial bones, and for the most ancient bone remains almost always show some “archaic” features.

And then what is called the conscientiousness of a scientist comes into play. The stakes are high - each new skeleton or its fragment, which makes it possible to proclaim it “the oldest known” Homo sapiens or ASP becomes a worldwide sensation, with all the ensuing consequences in the form of scientific awards, large financial grants, elections to prestigious academies of sciences. Therefore, unfortunately, distortions of data described in the academic and other press, not to mention popular publications, so eager for sensations, are so common. Dating in scientific publications is sometimes inflated, archaic features are “smeared over,” and it becomes very difficult to figure out where the real data is and where the authors’ fantasies are. Cross-sectional studies are needed, which are rare. Finally, there is a lot of simply unskilled work, especially in the field of population genetics, or work focused on a predetermined result.

This is what our story will be about. Namely, about how difficult it is to break through the wall of biased research, which is “focused” on the supposed emergence of “anatomically modern man” supposedly from Africa, and what research actually shows, often by the same authors, but interpreted in a unique way. The wall is also cemented by ideological considerations, for which it is necessary to show "African origins of man", and whoever finds different data and makes different interpretations is a “racist.” The wall is strengthened by the fact that almost all articles by engaged researchers, and this is the majority of population geneticists, begin with the phrase “ As is known, anatomically modern man came out of Africa" That is, the installation goes on from the very beginning. This dramatically increases the likelihood of the article being published in an academic journal.

Here are a few examples taken from the titles of academic articles, or from the first sentences of article introductions:

Human Origins: Out of Africa (article title; Tattersal, 2009);

Human Evolution and Out of Africa (from the title of the article; Stewart and Stringer, 2012);

African origin of male (genetic) diversity (from the title of the article; Cruciani et al, 2011);

African origins of modern East Asian people (from the title of the article; Ke et al, 2001);

...anatomically modern humans arrived in Europe from Africa at least 45 thousand years ago, following the spread of humans out of Africa (Moorjani et al, 2011);

Modern humans are believed to have originated in eastern Africa (Henn et al, 2011);

It is generally accepted that anatomically modern humans originated in Africa (Hammer et al, 2011);

Africa, the ancestral home of all modern humans (Lachance et al, 2012);

...the divergence of anatomically modern humans from Africa was approximately 44 thousand years ago (Underhill et al, 2000);

Modern humans originated in Africa approximately 200 thousand years ago (Campbell and Tishkoff, 2010);

... Anatomically modern humans originated from a small isolated population in Africa 150-200 thousand years ago (Patin et al, 2009);

Sub-Sahara and north-east Africa are the most likely regions of human origin and a corridor to the rest of the world (Arredi et al, 2004);

…human divergence began in Africa (Ramachandran et al., 2005).

Below in this work it will be shown that all these provisions, and similar ones, which are reproduced in tens and hundreds of academic and other articles, are incorrect.

The question is: how did the science of human origins reach such a life? How could a “consensus of experts” have developed, based on a one-sided and well-worn interpretation for a predetermined answer? How could a situation arise in science when other reasonable interpretations of the same or other data are met with expressed aggression, political accusations, and undisguised negative emotions? Why did “out of Africa” become a religion based on faith that does not need proof?

Until the 1980s, discussions of human African origins were slow and largely marginal. Two circumstances seriously prevented us from considering this. First, it was recognized that the distant ancestor of modern man was Homo erectus, Homo erectus, which originated several million years ago, possibly in Africa, but was known to have spread throughout Eurasia almost two million years ago. That's why Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens, could become his descendant anywhere. Second, it was shown that ASP’s closest relative, the Neanderthal, did not live in Africa. Therefore, the common ancestor of modern man and Neanderthal man, who lived, according to various sources, between 600 and 300 thousand years ago, it turns out that he also did not live in Africa. In addition, the Neanderthal had light skin, and we will dwell on this below. Therefore, the African origin of modern man requires the arrival of a light-skinned direct ancestor of man in Africa, say, 500-300 thousand years ago, then there was his independent, evolutionary acquisition of black skin, otherwise he would not survive in Africa, and then his exit from Africa and his independent transformation back to black light skin. On this score, an ingenious hypothesis was even invented about the role of vitamin D in the independent (without crossing with light-skinned people, who could not exist outside of Africa, otherwise the concept would collapse) transformation of blacks into light-skinned people, but this hypothesis was never confirmed experimentally. It remained speculative.

In general, until the mid-1980s, talking about the African origin of modern man was not very serious. But the need for this “in certain scientific circles” or, more precisely, among scientists of a certain liberal worldview was clearly brewing, otherwise the subsequent development of events could not be explained. What happened was that in 1987, the journal Nature published an article by Rebecca Kann and co-authors from the University of California, Berkeley, entitled “Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution.” The article is very weak not only by modern criteria, but also by those of that time, and one can only wonder how the article passed the reviews. Suffice it to mention that in the Abstract preceding the article, it was reported that the mitochondrial DNA studied by the authors originated from a single woman who was “postulated” (!) to have lived approximately 200 thousand years ago, “supposedly” (!) in Africa.

After the publication of the article, the abyss of heaven opened up, the floodgates and gates swung open. The enthusiasm of the Western press that Africans are our ancestors was fantastic. This ancient African woman was immediately dubbed Eve, and the world's leading magazines published information about this on glossy covers. Since then, the persistent manipulation of public opinion has continued without stopping, if not increasing. This has become a generally accepted opinion, challenging which is akin to asserting the possibility of a perpetual motion machine. In other words, the challenger goes against the scientific “consensus”, which, of course, does not exist, but which is constantly proclaimed. Discussing this problem with anthropologists, I (as editor-in-chief of the international journal "Advances in Anthropology") have received and continue to receive quite a few letters in which professional scientists share that they, of course, doubt or categorically disagree that the “African origin of man” is at least somehow justified, but they do not want to speak about it in print, because “ dearer to yourself." And because an article in a scientific journal will still be rejected, no matter what data there is and how it is substantiated.

So what's in Rebecca Cann's 1987 article? What formed the basis of the new religion? How did it all start? Let's get a look.

Kann et al.'s (1987) seminal article on "out of Africa"
In the introduction to the article there is not a word about Africa and the supposed origin of humanity there. That is, the article positions itself as the first in this regard. The experimental part of the article is the determination of the nucleotide sequence of mtDNA from 147 women from five main regions:

Africa– 20 people (two were born sub-Saharan, the rest are black residents of the United States, usually mestizos with an admixture of Y-DNA of Caucasian men, but these 18 people “are presumed to have African mtDNA, which is also indicated by the pattern of mutations of mtDNA fragments”);
Asia(China, Vietnam, Laos, Philippines, Indonesia, Polynesia/Tonga) – 34 people;
Caucasians(Europe, North Africa, Middle East) – 46 people;
Australian Aboriginals– 21 people;
New Guinea– 26 people.

All mtDNA was split into fragments using restriction enzymes, resulting in a total of 467 independent mtDNA sections, of which 195 had differences in at least one person out of all 147. In other words, 195 polymorphic mtDNA sections were identified. On average, analysis was performed on 9% of all mtDNA. In general, for that time, 25 years ago, this was quite technically advanced work.

Next, we performed pairwise comparisons of the resulting DNA fragments between all 147 participants, and found that these pairwise differences ranged from zero to 1.3 mutations per 100 nucleotides (0 to 1.3% differences), with an overall average of 0.32% differences. But it was necessary to show that these differences are greatest among Africans, so all five populations were divided into clusters based on the groups of pairwise differences in each population. It turned out that

46 European mtDNAs diverge into 36 clusters,
34 Asian mtDNAs diverge into 27 clusters,
21 Australian mtDNAs diverge into 15 clusters,
26 mtDNA from New Guinea diverge into 7 clusters,
and 20 African mtDNA were identified in one cluster, deciding that since humanity came out of Africa, there should be only one cluster there. This is what they wrote down in the note to the table in the article, where everyone has many clusters, but Africans have only one.

Africa: 0.36%
Asia: 0.21%
Australia: 0.17%
New Guinea: 0.11%
Europe: 0.09%

Next, the authors translated these “diversities” into chronological indicators, namely, into the years when these territories were first inhabited. To do this, we took the following figures for calibration: the settlement of Australia occurred 40 thousand years ago, the settlement of New Guinea 30 thousand years ago, the settlement of America 12 thousand years ago, and found that mutations in mtDNA occur at an average rate of 2-4% (that is, 2 -4 mutations for every 100 nucleotides) per million years. From here, the authors of the article calculated the average “age” of clusters in the population:

Africa: 90-180 thousand years
Asia: 53-105
Australia: 43-85
New Guinea: 28-55
Europe: 23-45

They did it clumsily, but the numbers turned out to be quite reasonable (within 100% error). As subsequent studies by other authors, including mine, which will be discussed below, showed, African DNA lines began about 160 thousand years ago, plus several archaic African lines (haplogroups A0 and A00) aged approximately 180 and 210 thousand years, respectively; Asian and European lineages - starting from 64 thousand years ago, Australia - from about 45-50 thousand years ago, and the oldest bone remains of modern humans in Europe date back to 45 thousand years ago (Benazzi et al, 2011; Higham et al, 2011). It is clear that the authors carried out calculations with an accuracy of plus or minus 100%, but nevertheless the overall picture is captured relatively correctly.

In a similar way, the authors calculated that the common ancestor of all mtDNA lived 143-285 thousand years ago, and since the common ancestor of all African mtDNA lived, according to their calculations, 90-180 thousand years ago, that is, the most ancient of all (although it overlaps in age at within the limits of calculation error), therefore, it was then that he left Africa.

Do you notice a change in concepts? The authors calculate that people outside Africa descended from a more recent common ancestor, and postulate that it therefore came out of Africa. As a result, the authors conclude and the same is written in the Abstract, a woman, the common ancestor of all mtDNA on the planet, as “postulated” (!), lived 200 thousand years ago (this is already a transformation of 143-285 thousand years ago), and “probably "(!) she lived in Africa.

It all started with this article. I repeat, I have no idea how such an article could pass the reviewers and be published in the journal Nature, with these “postulated” and “probably”, and in the absence of any data about the emergence of modern humanity from Africa, but that’s exactly how this article and began to be perceived both by the media and in population genetics, and from there in science and among the average person - which means it is irrefutably proven that modern man came out of Africa. There was virtually no other genetic evidence, and why? Everything has already been proven, hasn’t it?

Fundamental mistakes of creators and supporters
concept of “humanity leaving Africa”
There is a basic mistake that constantly plagues population geneticists. If one population is more genetically “diverse” than another, that is, collectively older, they tend to believe that it is ancestral to the second. But this is not true at all. Here we need to look at the totality of factors, and not jump to a conclusion. For example, an older brother is “more diverse” than a younger one, but this does not mean that the younger one is a descendant of the older one. They just have a common ancestor, their father. The same applies to various genealogical constructions, and if we begin to compare nephews and move their common ancestors to a common grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and so on, we will see that branches of descendants can depart from the common family tree at different times, but not To compare them “by age” linearly, directly with each other, you must certainly know when their common ancestor lived.

This is clear if you look at an ordinary tree. A thick branch and a young branch are sitting nearby, but it is not at all necessary that the young one comes out of the old one. Often they are independent up to the trunk; their common ancestor is a trunk or branch of even greater thickness. The concept of common ancestor was not addressed at all in the 1987 paper. A typical mistake of popgeneticists is “what I see is what I sing.” If they live in Africa now, it means they have always lived there. The fact that the common ancestor of Africans and non-Africans could have lived outside Africa and migrated there in ancient times is not even considered by them.

There is another fundamental flaw in the popgenetics approach based on comparing “diversity.” Diversity is informative in this sense, as thermodynamics says, only in closed systems. New York is significantly more "diverse" than, say, Boston, but does this mean that Boston, a descendant of New York, came out of it? Moscow is “more diverse” than Novgorod, but is Novgorod a descendant of Moscow? Not at all. Quite the contrary. Diversity often comes from mixing different populations, because the system is open. Here in New York and Moscow there is a mixture, and a lot of “diversity” has accumulated. Africa is also an open system. Many migrations of various haplogroups moved there in ancient times and in relatively recent times, and that’s where the “diversity” comes from. Even haplogroup R1b in its part advanced about 5 thousand years ago, now they live in Cameroon and Chad (Cruciani et al, 2010), black, because they mixed with local beauties. But the haplogroup remained, R1b. Have they added to African “diversity”? Of course, like many similar migrations to Africa. From time to time, academic articles appear that describe the “entry into Africa.” The latest article is in the same journal Nature in August 2013 (Hayden, 2013), which describes newly identified migrations of populations to Africa 3000 years ago and 900-1800 years ago. Did they add to the “diversity”? Undoubtedly. Moreover, they went south of the Sahara, where the authors of the 1987 article took mtDNA samples.

Atkinson makes the same mistake in a recent article (Atkinson, 2011), in which he writes: “ genetic and phenotypic diversity decreases with distance from Africa... supporting the hypothesis of an African origin for humans" Let's look at the diagram which will be explained below. On the left is the African branch, on the right is the non-African one. Diversity (that is, antiquity) decreases from left to right, but not at all because the left branch is ancestral. They both come from a common ancestor, which, as will be shown below, did not live in Africa.

Another illustration of the decline in diversity with distance from Africa. The age of haplogroup A in Africa is approximately 160 thousand years, after the divergence from the alpha haplogroup. The age of haplogroups R1a and R1b at a distance from Africa is 20 thousand years and 16 thousand years, respectively, they were formed in Central Asia (Klyosov and Rozhanskii, 2012a; Klyosov, 2012). Diversity falls from Africa to Central Asia? Falls. Is it because R1a and R1b originated from African haplogroup A? Absolutely not. These are unrelated events and systems.

An analogy - if there is a nursing home in one part of the city, then the “diversity” there is the highest. Does this mean that everyone in town, including the kindergarten across the street, came from the nursing home? Not at all necessary. These are unrelated events and systems. This might be true if the system were closed, meaning no one had entered the city for hundreds of years. But in reality, thousands of people move into the city who have nothing to do with those in the nursing home and those in the kindergarten, and even the elderly are brought to the former from all over the country and from abroad. Although if you measure it, its diversity is the highest. But there is no ancestry.

Here are examples of “linear thinking” regarding “diversity”:

...Haplotype diversity is highest in Africa (Hellenthal et al., 2008);

Africa not only has the highest level of genetic variation in the world, but also has significant diversity in languages, cultures, and natural environments (Campbell and Tishkoff, 2010).

All this is true, but it has nothing to do with the main thesis about the origin of humanity supposedly in Africa. These are just a couple of examples out of hundreds of the same kind.

To discuss “genetic diversity” we need to know the genesis of populations, their history, and not just formally measure this “diversity” in different populations and “linearly” compare it. This, I repeat, is the scourge of population geneticists. Why is this? Weak scientific school, there is no other explanation.

Diagram of the evolution of haplogroups of modern humanity. On the horizontal axis are the main haplogroups of the Y-chromosome of humanity, on the vertical axis is the absolute time scale. The common ancestor of the alpha haplogroup lived approximately 160 thousand years ago, the common ancestor of the beta haplogroup (or haplogroups B to T) lived 64±6 thousand years ago (from the article by A.A. Klyosov and I.L. Rozhanskii, Advances in Anthropology, 2012b). The diagram does not show the archaic African lineages A00 and A0 (the latter has now replaced the A1b lineage in the nomenclature in the diagram on the left), the updated haplogroup tree will be shown below.

There is (at least) one more reason for the lower “diversity” among non-Africans. About 64 thousand years ago, their ancestors passed the “population bottleneck.” In other words, as a result of some cataclysm, almost all non-Africans died or degenerated, and only a small group of them survived. Figuratively speaking, in the end, the descendants of only one couple survived, and now all the genealogical lines of almost all men on the planet converge to them. What kind of cataclysm or other misfortune, such as a pestilence, happened is unknown, and two hypotheses have the greatest weight - the eruption of the Toba volcano, the largest known in human history, about 70 thousand years ago, and a cold snap in the northern hemisphere. Climatologists say that the catastrophic nature of the cold snap is higher than that of the Toba eruption. Anyway, here's what happened (see diagram below).

It is clear that if we measure the “diversity” of the branches on the left (African based on the current residence of its representatives) and on the right (non-African, also based on the current residence), then the first will be older. But the right branch does not come out of the left; they have a common ancestor, the alpha haplogroup. As you can see, the diagram explains all the results of the 1987 Cannes paper, but without leaving Africa. Further proof of the correctness of this diagram will be given below.

Multiplication of fantasies as they spread
the concept of “humanity leaving Africa”
Over time, the figure somehow appeared out of thin air that modern man came out of Africa 70 thousand years ago, and it also began to be quoted in hundreds of academic articles, so that the ends were lost as to who said it first and when. And who cared? Did modern man come out of Africa? It came out a long time ago and is irrefutably shown, back in 1987. When did it come out? So, everyone writes that 70 thousand years ago, it has also been shown long ago and irrefutably. Any other questions? Who doesn't believe in consensus? Let's take a look at this one, and then take action.

And dozens and hundreds of academic articles appeared, the first phrase in which was usually “ As is known, anatomically modern man emerged from Africa approximately 70 thousand years ago." However, this dating was also “floating”, and below are examples of different datings of the “exit from Africa” in different articles. A little secret - none of them were actually calculated. All of them are just out of the blue. Yes, and until recently there was no corresponding calculation apparatus, but the one that existed - the reader has already seen what it is like and what accuracy it is.

50 thousand years ago (Jobling & Tyler-Smith, 2003);
50 thousand years ago (Thomson et al, 2000);
50-60 thousand years ago (Shi et al., 2010);
50-60 thousand years ago (Mellars, 2011);
50-70 thousand years ago (Hudjasov et al., 2007);
50-70 thousand years ago (Stoneking & Delfin, 2010);
60 thousand years ago (Li & Durbin, 2011);
60 thousand years ago (Henn et al., 2011);
60 thousand years ago (Wei et al., 2013);
60-70 thousand years ago (Ottoni et al., 2010);
60-80 thousand years ago (Forster, 2004);
54±8 thousand years ago (Forster et al., 2001);
60 thousand years ago (Stewart & Stringer, 2012);
45-50 thousand years ago (Fernandes et al., 2012);
50-65 thousand years ago (Behar et al., 2008);
50-60 thousand years ago (Cann, 2013);
60 thousand years ago (Chiaroni et al., 2009);
50-75 thousand years ago (Patin et al., 2009);
50 thousand years ago (Edmonds et al., 2004);
45 thousand years ago (Moorjani et al., 2011);
50-70 thousand years ago (Xue et al., 2005);
70-80 thousand years ago (Majumder, 2010);
40 thousand years ago (Campbell and Tishkoff, 2010);
50 thousand years ago (Poznik et al, 2013);
55-70 thousand years ago (Soares et al., 2009);
between 40 and 70 thousand years ago (Sahoo et al., 2006);
between 35 and 89 thousand years ago (Underhill et al., 2000);
between 80 and 50 thousand years ago (Yotova et al., 2011);
between 50 and 100 thousand years ago (Hublin, 2011);
between 27-53 and 58-112 thousand years ago (Carrigan and Hammer, 2006);
70-60 thousand years ago (Curnoe et al., 2012);
~110 thousand years ago (Francalacci et al, 2013);
200 thousand years ago (Hayden, 2013).

In fact, no date can be reasonably given. She simply doesn't exist. And all these datings above are of no use to anyone, they give nothing and essentially do not answer any question. It's still the same mantra.

What the Experimental Data Really Say
and their broader interpretation?
Let's stop for a while with criticism and see - what is there? If modern non-Africans are not descendants of ancient Africans, then where does this follow? Whose descendants are they?

Archaeological and paleontological data on Africa will have to be discarded with regret. They are informative for general reasons, but we do not know whether the bone remains found had any surviving descendants. Perhaps we are observing the remains of terminated lines. Until the haplogroups and haplotypes of those bone remains are established, they will not tell us anything about the continuity of these evolutionary lines. Further, we do not know where these bone remains came from there. Perhaps their close ancestors migrated to Africa. Indeed, if it was possible to leave Africa, then it was also possible to enter there. Moreover, many examples of migrations to Africa are known. Many datings of ancient bone remains are incorrect, and examples will be given below. Many claimed to be "ancient" Homo sapiens» have pronounced archaic features, and their classification as Homo sapiens is generally controversial or simply incorrect. Many finds do not relate to bone remains at all, but to sites, caves, shells found there, and stone tools. It is not known who was there at all, and the ocher found there also does not say anything. The Neanderthals of Eurasia also used stone tools and ocher for their own purposes.

So the question at hand of how ancient Africans and non-Africans are related is more appropriately addressed by looking at the DNA of both. If these data are also supported by archeology-anthropology, this is wonderful, but so far such data are few, if any. Let's look at them.

DNA data can be viewed in three ways, which in principle should provide mutually consistent data. These are (1) haplotypes and haplogroups of the human Y chromosome, (2) human mtDNA, and (3) the human genome. The latter actually means a picture of irreversible mutations in DNA, which can be interpreted in relation to human evolution, showing the direction of the flow of mutations and the appearance of new ones in the course of evolutionary development. For example, in the genome of both Neanderthals and modern humans there are many of the same mutations that are also in the DNA of chimpanzees. This means that these mutations are from the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. But if we also have mutations from Neanderthals that chimpanzees do not have, then this may mean that Neanderthals are our direct ancestor. Such mutations are either not identified, or there are very few of them and they are controversial. The data is currently being revised. The recently proclaimed 1-4% as supposedly in modern man from Neanderthal is also now being revised. Most likely they are incorrect.

In the same way, both non-Africans and Africans share mutations from a common ancestor with chimpanzees. There are many of them, and they are not interesting in deciding whether we are descended from Africans. These mutations must be filtered out. But do we have mutations that Africans have, but chimpanzees do not - this is a question that must be answered. This answer, if obtained, must be consistent with data on haplotypes and haplogroups of the Y chromosome and mtDNA. This is how the study of the question of what the evolutionary paths of modern humanity should be structured.

In fact, this answer has already been received - there are no “African” mutations in us that they acquired over the last 150-200 thousand years. There are many mutations from a common ancestor with chimpanzees, which are millions of years old, in our DNA, but there are no mutations from Africans acquired over the last 160 thousand years in our DNA.

This is what we will talk about.

So what do experimental data say about this? Let's start with human haplotypes and haplogroups projected to times more than 100 thousand years ago. Projected - because there are no fossil haplotypes and haplogroups of that time. While not yet identified, the task is technically very difficult, because during such times human DNA decomposes almost completely, especially under the influence of microorganisms. The DNA of a Neanderthal (more precisely, a Neanderthal) 45 thousand years ago has been isolated and largely deciphered, but the DNA of a person 160 thousand years ago is a task that is orders of magnitude more difficult.

What do you do in such cases? Haplotypes are determined in modern populations of men if the analysis is carried out on the Y chromosome. But the sample is analyzed not according to some “New Guinea” or “African” population, which can be completely heterogeneous, but among carriers of a certain subclade of a haplogroup, that is, among people united by a specific set of mutations. They are relatives, and for them it is quite accurately calculated when their common ancestor lived. For example, among modern Africans there is a fairly representative group of people who, according to classification, fall into the subclade A1b1b2b, marked by color (third from bottom) on the tree of subclades of haplogroup A below. This tree shows the hierarchy of subclades of haplogroup A, that is, the evolution of haplogroup A. You can see how the tree branches - the oldest haplogroup A00 has moved away from the trunk, its branches (subclades) are still unknown. The trunk is continued by haplogroup A0-T, which split into two subclades - A0 and A1; A1 in turn diverged into A1a and A1b; A1b – to A1b1 and VT. The combined haplogroup BT, as will be shown later, is very distant from the haplogroups of the “A” series, and even in the “A” series it is not clear which subclades can be called African in origin. So far it appears that only haplogroups A00 and A0, that is, the first and third from the top (moving away from the stem branch leading from a common ancestor with chimpanzees millions of years ago, to the non-African haplogroup BT) on the tree shown below, and the subclades of the latter (A0a, A0b, A0a1, A0a2, A0a1a and A01ab) can be considered African in origin or from their arrival in Africa over 100 thousand years ago. The rest, starting with A1 (located on the same stem branch), bifurcate into African (branching off to the side) and presumably non-African (stem) branches.

Let's look again, more clearly, at how the tree of haplogroups branches, how each branch diverges into forks, and how one part of the fork leaves (migrates) to Africa, while the other part remains outside Africa, and again diverges into the next fork. In other words, migrations came to Africa in waves. As a result, a non-African trunk can be traced, leading to you and me, reader, and from which African shoots extend to the side. We did not come from these escapes. Here it should be noted that the terms “trunk”, “stem” and “branching to the side” are chosen conditionally, and one can, on the contrary, call African branches stem, and non-African branches branching to the side. These concepts are actually symmetrical.

Fork 1– from the main evolutionary Y-chromosomal “trunk”, coming from common ancestors with primates (chimpanzees, gorilla, orangutan, macaque) about 300-600 thousand years ago, a branch of Neanderthals departs ( Homo neanderthalensis); they were not Africans, in any case, no traces of them were found in Africa, so we can assume that the common trunk 300-600 thousand years ago was a non-African genus Homo.

Fork 2– the most ancient of the so far discovered branches of the bouquet of haplogroups A, haplogroup A00, departs from the trunk approximately 210 thousand years ago (now all its discovered carriers live in Africa as part of the Mbo tribe, or are African-Americans; no information about their anthropology or anatomy has been found succeeded; in the article giving their haplotypes, not a word about this).

Fork 3– the trunk reaches haplogroup A0-T (presumably non-African), which diverged approximately 180 thousand years ago into the African haplogroup A0 and presumably non-African A1; in other words, another African haplogroup A0 is branching off from the trunk.

Plug 4– Non-African haplogroup A1 diverges into African A1a and presumably non-African A1b; in other words, another African haplogroup A1a departs from the trunk.

Fork 5– Non-African haplogroup A1b diverges into African A1b1 and non-African BT (beta haplogroup in the first diagram); in other words, another African haplogroup A1b1 departs from the trunk.

Now - a very important point of our consideration. Forks 3, 4 and 5 diverge from haplogroups A0-T, A1 and A1b, respectively.

From the first, A0 (which was found in Africa) and A1 (the carriers of which have not yet been found anywhere) extend to the side. We non-Africans are descended from A1 (and not descended from A0; we do not have its mutations).

Moving away from A1 are A1a (which is found in Africa) and A1b (carriers of which have not yet been found anywhere). We non-Africans are descended from her. In our Y chromosome there are mutations from A1b, but not from A1a.

Branching off from A1b are A1b1 (which is found in Africa, Europe and Asia) and BT, from which all non-African haplogroups emerged, including the main European haplogroups R1a, R1b, I1, I2, N1c1.

In order to “prove” that all people on Earth came out of Africa (in the form of their ancestors, of course), supporters of the “out of Africa” concept declare all these three node haplogroups – A0-T, A1 and A1b “African”. I repeat that none of them have been found in Africa. But this does not bother the “supporters”. The reader has already realized that there are other techniques that cannot be called scientific. They are declared African, and the “supporters” say - well, look, all European and Asian haplogroups come from African ones, from A0-T, A1 and A1b. That’s it, the concept of “exiting Africa” has been proven.

In fact, this is not proof, but a mockery of scientific consideration and common sense. It is much more likely that these three haplogroups are not African at all, and that their carriers lived outside of Africa. Then the connection between the ancestor of the light-skinned Neanderthal (more on this below) and the light-skinned modern people is easily explained. It is easy to explain the departure to Africa - after the fork divergences - of the carriers of haplogroups A0, A1a, A1b1, who now predominantly live in Africa. The huge time distances between African and non-African haplogroups are easily explained, because they converge to distant common ancestors, and do not come directly from each other (then the distances would be approximately 60-70 thousand years, but they are actually 250-300 thousand years. In principle, non-African lineages cannot emerge from African ones so that they are separated by 250-300 thousand years. And the supporters of the “exit from Africa” themselves constantly proclaim that the exit took place 60-70 thousand years ago. They did not, and do not know, that there the distance is actually 4-5 times greater.

Therefore, in the description of the forks above, I write everywhere “presumably non-African haplogroup” A0-T, A1, A1b.

Thus, wherever the ancestors of the Neanderthals and those with whom they diverged during evolution lived (that is, those who continued the “main trunk” of the evolutionary tree of the Y chromosome), carriers of haplogroups A00, A0, A1a, A1b1 migrated from them to Africa, and continued their evolution there, accepting numerous later migrants to Africa and thereby increasing African "diversity".

In general, four major ancient migrations to Africa can be counted over the last several hundred thousand years - haplogroup A00 approximately 210 thousand years ago, haplogroup A0 approximately 180 thousand years ago, haplogroup A1a approximately 160 thousand years ago, haplogroup A1b1 approximately 70 thousand years ago . Of course, there were later migrations, for example 3000 and 900-1800 years ago, described in (Hayden, 2013), which also increased the “genetic diversity” in Africa, so “diversity” is not an argument for “ancestral homeland”.

I have already mentioned that carriers of haplogroup A1b1 live in Africa, Europe, and Asia. Apparently, this is why the A1b1b2b-M13 subclade in the Haplogroup A Project turns out to be the most numerous. It diverges into two main branches - Arabic and European. We don’t know who the ancestor of these branches was and where he lived, but the branch is quite shallow, that is, it passed the population bottleneck relatively recently. Its haplotypes represent a valuable source of information, since they place even a shallow (in time) branch in the field of all haplotypes of humanity. Haplotypes and after the bottleneck, populations could not spontaneously originate; they could only continue evolution from the most ancient common ancestors. Analysis of haplotypes using the slowest, most stable 22 markers of the Y chromosome (Klyosov, 2011) shows that the common ancestor of the Arab branch of the A1b1b2b subclade had the haplotype

12 11 11 9 11 10 10 9 12 12 7 12 8 0 13 11 16 9 14 9 11 11

And the common ancestor of the European branch had the haplotype

12 11 11 9 11 10 10 9 12 12 7 10 8 0 13 11 16 10 14 9 11 11

There are only three mutations between them, which places the common ancestor of the Arab and European lineages about 7,170 years ago, with a margin of error of plus or minus five percent. For the purposes of our description, these calculations are not yet very important, since it is clear that the above haplotypes are close to each other.

Let's compare these haplotypes with the ancestral African haplotype of group A00:

13 11 12 10 11 16 10 9 14 14 8 8 8 9 12 11 12 8 12 12 11 11

This comparison shows a difference of already 30 and 29 mutations, that is, it separates the common ancestors of these haplotypes by at least 286-308 thousand years (calculation formulas are published in the work), and places the common ancestor of haplogroup A00 at approximately 210 thousand years ago. The relationship between the number of mutations and time is not linear, but power-law, since at long times some mutations return, and an appropriate statistical correction is introduced for this in the calculations (Klyosov, 2009; Klyosov, 2012). Haplotypes of haplogroup A00 were obtained from the black Mbo tribe living in Cameroon, and from an African-American, presumably taken centuries ago from the same tribe (Mendez et al, 2013).

If we now compare these haplotypes with the ancestral haplotype of haplogroup B

11 12 11 11 11 10 11 8 16 16 8 10 8 12 10 11 15 8 12 11 12 11

Then we will see 29 mutations from haplogroup A00, and almost the same number - 29 and 27 mutations - from the Arab and European branches of haplogroup A1b1b2b. This is at least 286-248 years between the common ancestors of haplogroups A and B. This colossal separation in time does not allow haplogroup B to be a descendant of haplogroup A. But having a common ancestor 160 thousand years ago and diverging from it by 250-300 thousand years - Can. This again agrees with the diagram above. These haplogroups cannot be compared “linearly” just because they are visually nearby on the haplotype tree, just as it is impossible to compare the branches of a tree in a forest “linearly”, by the distance between them, just because they happen to be nearby. And nearby there may be branches of birch and spruce growing in the neighborhood.

So, haplogroup B is very distant from haplogroup A, by 27-29-30 mutations. But it is not so far removed from the European (largely) haplogroups R1a and R1b, by only 12 and 10 mutations, respectively:

11 12 13 11 11 12 11 9 15 16 8 10 8 12 10 12 12 8 12 11 11 12 (R1b-M269)

12 12 11 11 11 11 11 8 17 17 8 10 8 12 10 12 12 8 12 11 11 12 (R1a-Z280)

These haplotypes themselves (R1b and R1a) are separated by only 8 mutations, which corresponds to the lifetime of their common ancestor (haplogroup R1) approximately 26 thousand years ago. The common ancestor of haplogroup B lived about 50 thousand years ago, and it was not formed from haplogroup A, they are independent DNA genealogical lines coming from one common ancestor - the alpha haplogroup, 160 thousand years ago.

There are other carriers of haplogroup A in Europe, although few have been found so far. A few years ago there was an academic article entitled “Africans in Yorkshire?” (King et al, 2007), which describes a family of haplogroup A carriers in England who had no idea that they had African ancestry in the male line. Their basic 17-marker haplotype turned out to be the following (in order of markers DYS393, 390, 19, 391, 388, 439, 389-1, 392, 389-2, 437, 438, 434, 435, 436, 460, 461, 462 ):

14 23 17 10 10 11 12 11 17 14 8 12 12 11 11 12 12

And the Arab branch of the subclade A1b1b2b described above

13 21 15 9 11 12 13 11 18 16 10 9 11 11 11 13 13

Between them there are 20 mutations on 17 markers, which corresponds to at least 19 thousand years before their common ancestor, the English and Arabic haplotypes of haplogroup A. It is impossible to say who in this case moved where - either to Africa or from Africa. There could be any scenarios. A supporter of the “out of Africa” concept will immediately say that they came out of Africa. This is the psychological attitude.

The debate over the past two years regarding the above chart
When the article containing the above diagram and its interpretation was published in May 2012 in the journal Advances in Anthropology, it was initially met with opposition from population geneticists. Specifically, three main findings have been controversial: (1) African and non-African DNA lineages diverged approximately 160 thousand years ago, and there is a corresponding significant distance between them; (2) non-African DNA lineages are not descendants of African haplogroups A00, A0, A with subclades; and, as a consequence, (3) modern humanity did not have any “exit from Africa,” at least in the last 200 thousand years. And if there was, it was back and forth, counter migrations, and the next “back and forth” migration did not give rise to modern humanity. In any case, in this respect they are equivalent.

It must be said that this rejection was not expressed at all in the academic scientific press. Population geneticists are full of water. Passions ran high in English-language forums and in informal discussions. It was announced that this diagram and, accordingly, its conclusions completely contradict the consensus about the exit of humanity from Africa, and contradict all published diagrams and haplogroup trees obtained through genomic research. It was also announced that non-African lineages come from haplogroups with the index “A”, which means African. This was declared to be inconsistent with the evolution of female mtDNA, in which (now) non-African lineages also emerged from Africa, and male and female haplogroups must have emerged from Africa together.

In fact, all these objections were incorrect in principle. Opponents either didn’t want to or couldn’t figure it out, and, as usual, tried to “take it by the throat.” Let's take a look and make sure that there are actually no contradictions, and opponents were simply repeating memorized mantras, which is too often accepted in population genetics.

The recent book “Evolutionary Genetics of Humans” -
correct data, incorrect interpretation
We are opening a new book - “Human Evolutionary Genetics”, authors Jobling, Hollox, Hurles, Kivisild, Tyler-Smith, published in 2014 (that’s right, the publisher has jumped ahead six months), chapter 9 - “The Origin of Modern Man” , pp. 304-305. Section "Mitochondrial DNA". Quote: “Research has shown striking features: complete separation of African and non-African lineages.” Section "Y-chromosomes". Quote: “Although less detailed than mtDNA, studies have shown close parallels: complete separation of African and non-African lineages.”

As we can see, there are no contradictions with the diagram above. But the authors are already inflating their interpretations, based on data from 2000 - both on mtDNA and on the Y chromosome. Thus, Y-chromosomal haplogroup B is considered African, and it is written that the corresponding branch contains “both African and non-African DNA lines.” We look at the diagram - yes, haplogroup B is in the same cluster with non-African haplogroups, and we showed above that it is distant from African haplogroups, and is in the same cluster with non-African ones, with one common ancestor. Why did the authors call it “African”? Yes, many carriers of haplogroup B Now live in Africa. Remember how I wrote about population geneticists? “What I see is what I sing.” They have both haplogroup B and non-African lineages in one cluster, which means “exit from Africa.” And they are all there, in that cluster, non-African. Yes, even if there was a non-African line along with non-African ones, why is it necessary to “leave out of Africa”? Why not just as well “entry into Africa”? And so, they march along the well-worn path, the answer is known in advance. The authors of the book give the dating of this cluster, containing non-African haplogroups and haplogroup B (also non-African in origin), as 52 ± 28 thousand years ago. In my article – 64±6 thousand years ago. Where is the contradiction?

The same authors give the dating of all DNA lines - 172 ± 50 thousand years ago. Indeed, in my article 160±12 thousand years ago. Where is the contradiction? That is, population geneticists dispute not in essence, not with data in hand, but simply “in principle,” for the sake of rejection. The usual thing.

With regard to mtDNA, the authors symmetrically give the same interpretations as with the Y chromosome - a similar branch containing “African mtDNA” (because they live there now) and non-African - meaning “exit from Africa”, and the dating of this “mixed” branch is between 31 and 79 thousand years ago, with a median of 40 thousand years ago, the dating of the totality of all mtDNA is between 40 and 140 thousand years ago, the median is 59 thousand years ago. The authors do not discuss the discrepancy in dating between the Y-chromosomal data and mtDNA, but why? The conclusion has long been ready - “the exit of humanity from Africa.” The same conclusion, although in a cautious form, is also in the conclusion of the chapter. It also talks about “higher genetic diversity in Africa”, and the fact that humans appeared in Africa approximately 200 thousand years ago, and outside Africa - after 45 thousand years ago. Here we also talk about the consensus of experts about “exiting Africa”. We have seen that all these (or similar) dating and “diversities” are explained by the diagram above, but popgeneticists do not want other explanations. They have a “consensus”.

Continued story from Cannes (1987)
“about leaving Africa”, but without Cannes (1991)
The continuation of the article by Cann and others (Cann, Stoneking and Wilson, 1987), which we discussed above, is interesting in its own way. A new paper appeared four years later (Vigilant et al, 1991), with Cannes no longer among the authors, but two former co-authors, Stoneking and Wilson, with three new authors. The 1991 article reports that Kann et al.'s (1987) paper was strongly opposed by many experts due to the fact that the common ancestor of humanity supposedly lived in Africa, and admits that Kann et al.'s (1987) paper had many weak links . The authors (two of whom were the authors of that weak, as they admit, work) list these weak links throughout the entire paragraph - there is an indirect method of mtDNA comparison, and a small sample, consisting mainly of Americans of African descent, and a deliberately unsuitable method “midpoint” applied by the authors of the 1987 article, and the lack of statistical processing of the data obtained, and “inadequate calibration” of the rate of mutations in mtDNA, and others. In other words, this obviously weak article, as admitted by the authors themselves, formed the basis of the “exit from Africa” theory. But the process had already begun, so the subsequent article (1991) had the goal of still justifying the concept of “out of Africa”, that non-Africans descended from Africans, and in fact replacing the weak, criticized article of 1987.

And what was that justification? Show that African mtDNA is older than non-African mtDNA. But this is again a continuation of that eternal fundamental mistake of population geneticists, that if one population is older than another, then the first population is supposedly ancestral in relation to the second. Let's look again at the same diagram above - the left branch is older than the right, but it is not ancestral to the right. They have one common ancestor. And this fundamental mistake of popgenetics has been repeated over the next 25 years, until now. Again and again, the authors of the article (1991) repeat that the African branch is older than the non-African branch, which means it is ancestral, not realizing that this is not at all evidence of “ancestry”. My uncle is “older” than me, but he is not my ancestor.

In the conclusion of the paper (1991), the authors write: we have presented the strongest evidence that our common ancestor lived in Africa 200 thousand years ago. In fact, as the reader has long since realized, what this evidence was really about was that the extant line of people now living in Africa is older than the extant line of people living outside of Africa. This “evidence” says nothing about “ancestry”. To do this, it is necessary to compare the haplotypes of populations (which the authors of the 1991 article did not do, and popgeneticists still do not do) and their snip mutations (which the authors did not do), and the latter also shows that our ancestors did not come out of Africa. This is discussed in the next section.

SNP mutations show that we are
not descendants of Africans of haplogroups A or B
Let's move on to a recent article (Scozzari et al, 2012), which is often cited as an exemplary work on the African genome and the rationale for the “exit of humanity from Africa.” Indeed, the article announces the discovery of 22 new irreversible mutations in the human Y chromosome, the confirmation of 146 known mutations and the construction of a new, improved tree of haplogroups and subclades of Africans with a transition to the non-African part of the tree, and specifically the consolidated haplogroup ST. This is the entire right side of the tree above in the diagram, from haplogroup C to R2. The authors of the article call it “emerging from Africa.” Let's see if this is true. Tree of haplogroups and subclades from the article (Scozzari et al, 2012):

The tree of the most ancient haplogroups and subclades, given in the article (Scozzari et al, 2012). The numbers of irreversible mutations (SNP, Single Nucleotide Polymorphism, or SNPs) that define certain subclades are shown. It can be seen that more than half of the subclades belong to haplogroup A, which the authors consider African. All other subclades, except one, belong to haplogroup B, which the authors also consider African. The haplogroup on the lower right, CT, consists, according to the authors, of 19 DNA lineages, all non-African. The picture is clickable.

Let's pay attention to some features of the tree in this picture. It begins (more precisely, it continues the evolutionary trunk of the human Y chromosome) in the upper left part of the diagram, immediately there is the first divergence, or fork (haplogroup A0-T, although this name is not shown on the diagram), to haplogroup A1b (as in the diagram) with subclades, on the one hand, and on the rest of the tree, on the other. In other words, the first African branch departs from the tree, and no non-Africans (haplogroup ST) descend from it. The article uses the already outdated nomenclature of 2011, and what is designated in the article as A1b is now called A0, with SNPs V148, V149 and others shown on the top line of the diagram (see also the haplogroup A tree above).

At the next fork (haplogroup A1), African haplogroups A1a and A1a1 with their SNPs M31, P82, V4 and others go to the side, and the rest of the tree goes to the other side. Non-Africans (haplogroup ST) also do not descend from the second African branch (A1a with subclade).

The third fork is haplogroup A1b according to the current classification. African haplogroups A2 and A3 with subclades (outdated nomenclature) move away from it, now it is A1b1 with SNP V249/L419, which further diverges into subclades A1b1a-V50 (former A2) and A1b1b-M32 (former A3), both with subgroups . Among the latter is the A1b1b2b-M13 subclade, the same one from which the Arab and European DNA lines emerge, the haplotypes of which we examined above. The other branch of this fork from haplogroup A1b is the composite haplogroup BT, shown at the bottom of the figure from the article (Scozzari et al, 2012). It is clear that this BT haplogroup is in no way derived from the “African” haplogroups with index A, which are all at the top of this figure. The word “African” here has to be put in quotation marks, since among their subclades are the same European and Arab branches, and the European one is mainly England, Ireland, Scotland, Turkey (although only 3% of Turkey is geographically located in Europe), Arab – mainly Saudi Arabia, and haplotypes from England, Switzerland, Finland and other countries.

Naturally, it can be argued that the European and Asian haplotypes of haplogroup A once left Africa along with migrants from there, but it can just as well be argued that they got to Africa the same way. So these arguments do not pass, although only “out of Africa” attracts support among the “out of Africa” supporters. They do not consider alternative explanations in principle.

Concluding the consideration of the figure from the article (Scozzari et al, 2012), it is worth noting the fact that the generally accepted “non-African” combined haplogroup ST (bottom line in the figure) does not come out of haplogroup B with its subclades, whether we call it African or not. It can be seen that the evolutionary path of the ST haplogroup bypasses all “African” haplogroups, even if they all contain European or other ancestors. If we move up the time scale (that is, from left to right), the mutational path of the CT haplogroup leaves the main “trunk” of the evolution of the human Y chromosome, that is, below the “tail” indicated in the figure at the top left, passes through the A0-T haplogroup (no information that it is supposedly “African” - no), then through haplogroup A1 (the same thing, there is no information that it is supposedly “African”), then through haplogroup A1b, also non-African, then through haplogroup VT, and becomes haplogroup ST. All three “African” branches (A0, A1a, A1b1) on this path go to the side through corresponding branches and forks.

We dwelled on this in such detail because such or similar analysis has never been carried out in the academic literature, and especially in the popular literature. Usually a tree is shown, as in the picture from Scozzari et al, 2012, and it is said in a patter that it “signifies the emergence of humanity from Africa.” No explanation is given. The answer is already ready. Sometimes it reaches the point of absurdity - it is reported that haplogroups BT and ST come from haplogroups A1b, or A1, or A0-T, which means that these are African haplogroups, since they have the index “A”. That is, the substitution of concepts has gone so far that absolutely conventional names are taken as evidence of the thesis. The fact that these haplogroups could just as easily be called X, Y, Z, or W no longer comes to mind. Since “A” means Africa, there is no doubt.

So there is no contradiction between the figure from the article (Scozzari et al, 2012) and the diagram above; they show the same patterns of evolutionary development of haplogroups, namely the divergence into “African” and “non-African” branches. The only difference between them is that the figure from the article (Scozzari et al, 2012) shows in more detail the subclades of haplogroups A (“African”) and B, and the diagram shows the “non-African” haplogroups BT. Another thing is that the first image is built taking into account the chronological scale, and the second is not. To show the similarities, let’s place both haplogroup trees vertically, in the same direction.

Comparison of haplogroup trees and subclades of the “African” group (the left part of both trees) and the “non-African” group (one line of the combined ST haplogroup on the left tree and a bush of BT haplogroups on the right tree). The left tree (Scozzari et al) was published in November 2012, the right tree (Klyosov, Rozanskii) was published in May 2012. The left tree shows that the series of "African" haplogroups diverges three times in succession from the non-African ones, and that the non-African CT DNA lineage (vertical line on the right) does not descend from the "African" ones. The right tree shows the same splits of “African” haplogroups from non-African ones (haplogroup bush on the right), and indicates that the divergence of the tree into African and non-African haplogroups occurred approximately 160 thousand years ago. The picture is clickable.

Both trees do not show the recently discovered haplogroup A00, which is at least 200 thousand years old. It is shown in the following figure, along with changes in nomenclature (according to ISOGG, 2013).

So, the picture as a whole has become clearer. There is no contradiction between the tree of the Y-chromosomal haplogroups of humanity obtained from the study of haplotypes of haplogroups from A to T (Klyosov and Rozhanskii, 2012b, May 2012), and the tree obtained from the genomic study of the Y chromosome (Scozzari et al, 2012, November 2012) , No. All these data, like others, show deep mutational divergence between African and non-African lineages (haplogroups, subclades), and do not reveal the “African” origin of anatomically modern humanity. Instead, the data show the divergence of African and non-African DNA lineages around 160 thousand years ago.

A logical and puzzling question arises: why, having all this data, do the authors of the studies continue to write that humanity left Africa relatively recently, in the last 50-100 thousand years? At what level of factual material or interpretation does the breakdown occur? Answering this question seems no less important than receiving the answer that humanity did not leave Africa.

Let's look at the mentioned article by Scozzari et al (2012). At what point did the phrase about the African origin of man appear there? What is it based on?

This phrase appears already in the second paragraph of the introduction to the article, and communicates that the CT haplogroup is the result of a “recent exit from Africa.” In support of this, a link is given to an article by the 1000 Genomes Project consortium entitled “Map of Variation in the Human Genome” (Nature, 2010), in which there is no word at all about the exit from Africa, nor about the CT haplogroup. Do you understand what the problem is? Proponents of the “out of Africa” concept have to be constantly caught by the hand, and this has been going on for more than 20 years. A few more paragraphs below - again about the “exit from Africa”, already haplogroup C, and no reference at all.

Diagram of the evolution of haplogroups of modern humanity with the addition of the recently discovered haplogroup A00, and with the replacement of the outdated 2012 nomenclature with the 2013 nomenclature. On the horizontal axis are the main haplogroups of the Y-chromosome of humanity, on the vertical axis is the absolute time scale. The common ancestor of the alpha haplogroup (haplogroup A1b in the current classification) lived approximately 160 thousand years ago, the common ancestor of the beta haplogroup (or ancestor for haplogroups B to T) lived 64 ± 6 thousand years ago (from the article by A.A. Klyosov and I.L. Rozhanskii, Advances in Anthropology, 2012b).

Let's follow the article (Scozzari et al, 2012) further. Haplogroup A1b is described (the topmost line in the figure taken from this article, which was the first to diverge from the rest of the tree, and is called haplogroup A0 under the new nomenclature). It also moves to the left of the tree on the updated diagram of the evolution of haplogroups of modern humanity approximately 180 thousand years ago. It is reported that very few people with this mutation (P114) have been found, only three from Cameroon, one of them in this work. My comment is very good, I personally have no big doubts that haplogroup A0 and its branches are African. But we did not descend from them, as the tree shows.

Further, the authors report that in Niger they found two people of haplogroup A1a - the second line in the upper part of the figure from the article (Scozzari et al, 2012), also “African”. My comment - and there is no problem with this. There are no non-African descendants from them either, according to the same figure.

Next, haplogroup A2, that is, according to the current nomenclature A1b1a, is the third line in the figure from the article. The authors report that speakers of this haplogroup almost all speak snapping languages ​​of southern Africa and are also central African pygmies. The authors found three carriers of this haplogroup in South Africa. My comment is great, no problem, this is a completely African line, and non-Africans do not descend from it, as the same picture shows.

Regarding haplogroup A3, that is, according to the current nomenclature A1b1b-M13, the authors found ten carriers of this haplogroup - in Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa. Another 28 people, owners of this haplogroup from European countries and Saudi Arabia, are listed in the Haplogroup A Project, to which the link is given above. But even if this haplogroup is considered African, non-Africans still do not descend from it, as can be seen from the figure in the article (Scozzari et al, 2012). The authors place haplogroup B in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as throughout Africa – central, eastern and southern. We have already shown above that the haplotypes of haplogroup B are extremely distant from the “African” ones, and clearly have a different origin, related to non-African haplogroups. But this does not matter in this case, since the “non-African” DNA lines of haplogroup ST do not come from haplogroup B. They have a common ancestor with it - haplogroup VT.

And after all this, what conclusion do the authors of the article (Scozzari et al, 2012) make? You, the reader, will laugh, but the conclusion is that the ST haplogroups came out of Africa, and not only from Africa in general, but from its northwestern region. It is there, according to the authors, that “the origins of humanity’s Y-chromosome diversity” lie. How, where? After all, even a cursory glance at the haplotype tree shows that there are no African sources at the basis of ST. They are all at the top of the diagram. And like this. There is a saying in America about this: “don’t confuse me with facts, I’m already set.”

As the reader has already understood, and understood for a long time, the “exit of humanity from Africa” has become a formal religion, based, as a religion should be, on faith, and arguments there are almost useless.

This is also the case in another relatively recent article (Cruciani et al, 2011), which already has “the origins of diversity in Africa” in the title. On what scientific basis? Yes, everything is the same - they showed that African Y-chromosomal lines are older than the lines of non-Africans. Again according to the diagram above. Their tree of haplogroups is almost the same as in the figure from the article (Scozzari et al, 2012), but with dates - 142 thousand years ago branch A1b (A0 in the new classification) moved away from the evolutionary Y-chromosomal trunk, then approximately 108 thousand years ago branch A1a departed, then, 105 thousand years ago, branch A2, then, the same 105 thousand years ago, branch A3, which the authors consider African, since they were found in four Africans in whom these haplogroups were determined - and let them count , and only then, 75 thousand years ago, the VT branch departed and then, 39 thousand years ago, the ST branch, already generally recognized as non-African. Neither BT nor CT come from “African” lines. But since the authors named the branching points with the letter “A” (A1a-T, A2-T), which is automatically taken as “African”, then this is “origin from Africa”. This type of straightforward thinking among population geneticists is striking.

Okay, this is the male, Y chromosome. It is clear that the corresponding experimental data do not show any exit from Africa. There are no African SNP mutations at the base of non-African haplogroups. Non-African haplotypes are exceptionally distant from African ones. As almost all sources admit, there is a huge gap between them, but the authors do not go further. Closing their eyes, they repeat like a mantra - “we came out of Africa.”

Cross-validation of a chart using snips (SNP)
There is another approach to checking the topology of the tree presented in the diagram just above, using snips. The fact is that during the evolutionary development of the Y chromosome, practically irreversible mutations accumulate in it, the so-called SNP (Single Nucleotide Polymorphism), or SNPs. The longer the transition in the diagram, the greater the probability of a snip, the more of them accumulate in the Y-chromosome (and in other chromosomes, but in this case we are considering only the Y-chromosome. The longest evolutionary line is haplogroup A00, it is the most archaic, therefore in carriers of this haplogroup should reveal the maximum number of SNPs. In second place in terms of length is haplogroup A0, in third place are the lines of haplogroup A (A1a). The distance between the alpha and beta haplogroups (that is, from A1b to BT) should be relatively small (by compared to the length of the lines A00 and A0), and then SNPs already accumulate during the transition from VT along the lines of specific, more modern haplogroups.

And so it turned out, in confirmation of the diagram. I will now provide a list of snips for each of the listed haplogroups - on the one hand, creating a kind of compact reference book so that anyone can work with it, and on the other, so as not to simply limit oneself in words to a certain number that is difficult to verify. True, these numbers of snips are not final – new snips are discovered from time to time. Further, since SNPs appear unordered, we are dealing with statistics, and not with absolute, immutable numbers. So the list below and the number of SNPs for each haplogroup are in development, although they give a general idea.

So - haplogroup A00, the oldest, the most archaic, its evolutionary line in the diagram is the longest. These snips were identified in the Mbo tribe (Mbo, in Russian letters) in African Cameroon:

AF4, AF5, AF7, AF8, AF9, AF10, AF13, L990, L1086, L1087, L1088, L1091, L1092, L1094, L1096, L1097, L1100, L1102, L1103, L1104, L1106, L1107, L1108 , L1109, L1110, L1111, L1113, L1114, L1115, L1117, L1119, L1122, L1126, L1131, L1133, L1134, L1138, L1139, L1140, L1141, L1144, L1146, L1147, L1148, L1149, L115 1, L1152, L1154, L1156, L1157, L1158, L1159, L1160, L1161, L1163, L1233, L1234, L1236, L1284.

In total, there are 59 SNPs in haplogroup A00. Since the age of haplogroup A00 is estimated at approximately 210 thousand years, it can be assumed that a snip mutation occurs on average once every 3600 years.

Further, as we already know, haplogroup A0-T appeared on the trunk of the haplogroup tree (diagram above), haplogroups A0 and A1 diverged from it, the latter continued the trunk of the tree. A0 now live mainly in Africa. A0-T does not have a single mutation from the A00 list. That is, A0-T did not originate from the African haplogroup A00. There is no reason to consider haplogroup A0-T African. But she is the ancestor of the African line A0, and of us, non-Africans (whose ancestors passed through the haplogroup BT, then ST, and so on).

SNPs of haplogroup A0-T, there are 32 of them:

AF3, L1085, L1089, L1090, L1093, L1095, L1098, L1099, L1101, L1105, L1116, L1118, L1120, L1121, L1123, L1124, L1125, L1127, L1128, L1129, L1130, L1132, L1135, L1136, L1137, L1142, L1143, L1145, L1150, L1155, L1235, L1273

Haplogroup A0 has the following snips, there are 51 of them:

L529.2, L896, L982, L984, L990, L991, L993, L995, L996, L997, L998, L999, L1000, L1001, L1006, L1008, L1010, L1011, L1012, L1015, L1016, L1017, L1 018, L1055, L1073, L1075, L1076, L1077, L1078, L1080, V148, V149, V152, V154, V157, V163, V164, V165, V166, V167, V172, V173, V176, V177, V190, V196, V223, V22 5, V229, V233, V239

As you can see, haplogroup A0 has 8 fewer SNPs than A00, that is, it is approximately 30 thousand years younger. Indeed, the age of haplogroup A0 is estimated at 180 thousand years, 30 thousand years less than the age of haplogroup A00.

In haplogroup A1, 21 SNPs have so far been identified:

L985, L986, L989, L1002, L1003, L1004, L1005, L1009, L1013, L1053, L1084, L1112, L1153, P305, V161.2, V168, V171, V174, V238, V241, V250

Unlike the fraternal haplogroup A0, carriers of A1 apparently did not survive to the present day. Perhaps they were caught up in the cataclysm that led to the bottleneck of the world's non-African population. To estimate the total lifetime of haplogroups A0-T, A1 and A1b (the latter has only two SNP mutations, P108 and V221), we should add up the number of their SNP mutations, we get 32+21+2 = 55 mutations, which is approximately equivalent to 198 thousand years.

Finally, in the BT haplogroup there are 30 SNP mutations:

L413, L418, L438, L440, L604, L957, L962, L969, L970, L971, L977, L1060, L1061, L1062, M42, M91, M94, M139, M299, P97, SRY10831.1, V21, V29, V59, V64, V102, V187, V202, V216, V235

This gives 108 thousand years of evolution of the beta haplogroup from the time of divergence from African haplogroup A1b1 (160 ± 12 thousand years ago) to the passage of the population bottleneck 64 ± 6 thousand years ago. This is the missing 108 thousand years on the diagram (the distance between the alpha and beta haplogroups).

The important thing is that these missing millennia in the evolution of non-African DNA genealogical lineages are reproduced both in the analysis of haplotypes (on the basis of which the diagram above was constructed) and in the analysis of snip mutations. This is cross-checking the chart. Why we don’t see these missing people in Eurasia is unknown. On the other hand, skeletal remains are known Homo sapiens with a dating between 160 and 60 thousand years old, discovered in the Middle East, but their haplogroup has not been verified. If haplogroup BT turns out to have any of the mutations listed above, the mystery will be finally solved.

Non-African mtDNA does not originate from African
What do the data on female mtDNA say about this? Well, say supporters of the “exit from Africa”, it is even more clear there. Non-African mtDNAs are “all derived from African ones.” Is it so?

Let's take a look at a recent article by the famous geneticist D. Behar (Behar et al, 2012), in which a fundamental revision of the nature of mtDNA sequence representation was carried out. The following figure shows that at the very beginning of the evolutionary tree of mtDNA of “modern man” there is a divergence of haplogroups into L0 (branch on the right) and haplogroups L1-L6 (branch on the left), from which all subsequent haplogroups subsequently originate. Haplogroup L0 actually represents a large series of fifty ancient African haplogroups, mainly found in sub-Saharan Africa - among the Khoisan population of South Africa, but also in Ethiopia and Tanzania (East Africa), in Mozambique (Southeast Africa), and among pygmies. All other mtDNA comes, as is accepted by most experts, from haplogroup L3, which is estimated to be approximately 60-70 thousand years old, that is, the same as the BT haplogroup of the Y chromosome. That is, it is likely that haplogroup L3 did not leave Africa, but, on the contrary, came to Africa along with Y-chromosome carriers, for example, haplogroup VT. What conclusion do Behar et al. make? Naturally, “humanity came out of Africa.” The deep divergence of the African haplogroup L0 from the others is not even discussed in their article, although from the data in the article it is immediately clear that the African haplogroup L0 is not ancestral to all other mtDNA haplogroups.

Schematic representation of human mtDNA, showing the mutational relationship between Neanderthal mtDNA (left) and Homo sapiens mtDNA (right). In the oval on the left and right, the abbreviations RNRS and RSRS stand for “reconstructed Neanderthal reference sequence” and “reconstructed human reference sequence,” respectively. From the work (Behar et al., 2012). Note the sharp divergence at the beginning of the human reference sequence (right), the chain of mutations for the African haplogroup L0 (bottom right), and the chain of all other mtDNA haplogroups. The picture is clickable.

In fact, the divergence of the African haplogroup L0 (age 150-170 thousand years) and the initially non-African haplogroups L1-L6, with the subsequent arrival of haplogroup L3 (age 60-70 thousand years) in Africa turns out to practically coincide with the divergence of the Y-chromosomal haplogroups of the African series A (age 160 thousand years) and initially non-African VT (age 64 thousand years) with the subsequent arrival of haplogroup B to Africa.

So with regard to mtDNA, the concept of “exiting Africa” turns out to be completely unnecessary, and is actually built on sand. Descriptions of mtDNA in academic articles and reference books are littered with the words “possible,” “probable,” and “suggested,” which essentially means that there is no data and that everything is based on speculation. One problem is that all these assumptions are always interpreted in only one direction – “exit from Africa.”

At the same time, more and more evidence is accumulating that in the ancient past, migrations of populations to Africa occurred many times. An article has just been published in the journal Nature (Hayden, 2013) which reports two migrations from Eurasia to the Khoisan tribes in South Africa, one 3 thousand years ago to east Africa, the other, its continuation - 900-1800 years ago to South Africa . It is not reported what haplogroups the migrants brought. But there is no doubt that they dramatically increased the "genetic diversity" of the Khoisan, which is considered to be the highest in Africa. The second important feature of this message is that it indicates the possibility of migrations “to Africa”, which, however, there could be no doubt about. It is not clear why supporters of the “exit of humanity from Africa” hold on to their unilateral option with such tenacity. However, the persistence is waning, and now Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the most active advocates of “out of Africa”, is already welcoming new data “to Africa”, and calls it “makes sense”, since “both archaeological and linguistic research” (Nature, 29 August 2013, p. 514).

Herpes virus migrations are erroneously reported as
allegedly confirming the “exit of humanity from Africa”
The story of the recent sensational publication “Using phylogenetics of the herpes simplex virus genome to trace ancient human migrations” is indicative of how the initial assumption about the alleged emergence of modern humanity from Africa distorts the conclusions of a scientific publication. Let me remind you that the article compared 31 genomic sequences of herpes simplex virus in populations from East Africa (Kenya), East Asia (China, South Korea, Japan), North America (USA) and Europe (United Kingdom), and found that the constructed phylogenetic the tree diverges into six clusters. These clusters corresponded to the following populations:

I – out of 10 samples, 7 were from Seattle, one “from the USA”, one from San Francisco, and the bottom one (number 17) from Scotland.

II – out of 6 samples, one was from China, one from the USA (Houston), two from South Korea and two from Japan.

III – two samples from Kenya.

IV – three samples from Kenya.

V – seven samples from Kenya.

VI – two samples from Kenya.

The authors of the article “rounded” the data and reported that the first cluster “unites North America and Europe”, the second – East Asia, the rest – “East Africa”. The origin of the American virus samples is not given in the article, that is, it is unclear whether they were obtained from American Indians or, for example, descendants of the Anglo-Saxons, but since the authors suggested that the sample from Houston, which fell out of even the rounded version, which ended up among the East Asian viruses, could belong to American Indian, it becomes clear that the remaining North American samples are most likely from the descendants of Europeans. However, the authors concluded that these clusters reflect “global migrations of (ancient) humans” and support the emergence of modern humanity from Africa (supports... the “out of Africa” theory of human evolution). The main reason is, as usual, the “diversity” argument, namely that “viruses of East African origin have the greatest diversity and form four of the six clusters.”

Let's, as we did above, look at where this “diversity” comes from. And it appears again from the divergence of populations in different directions - some go to Africa, others do not leave. But again they do not descend from each other; each time they descend from a more ancient common ancestor, who may well not have lived in Africa. That is, the situations described earlier in this article are repeated again. The data shown does not indicate any “African origin”.

Phylogenetic tree showing the dynamics of strains of the herpes simplex virus HSV-1 and its cascade divergence into six branches, as counted in (Kolb et al., 2013), which, according to the same authors, follow a certain geography: branch I - Europe / North America (strain 17 - from Glasgow, the rest - Seattle, San Francisco, "USA"), branch 2 - East Asia (China, South Korea, Japan, and Houston), branches III, IV, V and VI - East African (all from Kenya).

Let's look at the diagram below. On the left is the first divergence from an ancient common ancestor. Moving aside are the viruses that are now found in Kenyans (the top two samples, cluster VI). No non-African viruses originate from them.

Next - another fork, another divergence of populations. The Kenyan virus again moves aside, with index E07 in the diagram above. Again, non-African viruses do not originate from it. Its combination with the rest of the Kenyan samples into cluster IV is a mistake by the authors; there is no common cluster there.

Next are two more population divergence forks, and each time the Kenyan group (clusters IV and III), from which Europeans and Asians do not originate, moves away. At the last divergence, it is exclusively the non-African group that moves aside. Again, it does not come from Africans.

The latest divergence is between European and East Asian (with some exceptions) lineages of herpes viruses, clusters I and II. America, apparently, has nothing to do with it; these are not the ancient inhabitants of America, but relatively recent immigrants from Europe.

In a commentary on the paper, lead author Curtis Brandt, professor of medical microbiology and ophthalmology, said the results were “stunning,” and went on to say that “we found that all African isolates formed one cluster, all viruses from the Far East, Korea, Japan , China together form another cluster, and all viruses from Europe and America, with one exception, form another cluster." In general, despite the obvious stretches, this is true. But does this show the “African origins of modern man”? Clearly not, as explained above.

In another comment, Dr. Brandt shared quite candidly: “We found exactly what molecular geneticists who study the human genome told us, namely where humans came from (Africa - AK) and how they diverged across the planet.” This is the main problem of this and similar studies. They were told (incorrectly), they took it as a guide to action and found exactly this.

The article provides another illustration of how data is being tailored to the desired “exit out of Africa.” This is how the authors calculated the times of this “exit”, based on those supposed 50 thousand years ago, and in fact never shown. This is “consensus data”. In fact, various authors give dates from 27 to 200 thousand years ago, as a rule, again without calculations, but for some reason the figures of 50 or 70 thousand years ago look attractive to them. Recently, however, the “consensus” began to shift to 100-140 thousand years ago, but 50 or 70 thousand years continue to be given by inertia. So the authors of the article under discussion used these speculative dates as base dates. Let's see what the authors got from this. This is quite instructive.

As the authors of the article reported, in the literature there are three significantly different values ​​for the mutation rate constants of the herpes simplex virus and other herpes viruses, equal to 3x10 -9, 18.2x10 -9, and 30x10 -9 mutations per nucleotide per year. Using them to calculate the time of divergence of the virus among the human populations described above would give a 30-fold difference in time. It is clear that the authors were not satisfied with such uncertainty, and they decided to actually adjust the times of the initial divergence of the populations to the “consensus” time of “exit from Africa”, and at the first stage of calculations to adjust to the estimated time of divergence of the European and Asian populations, which they took as 23-45 thousand years ago, citing four literary sources on this subject. Having averaged these values, the authors took 34,000 ± 10,500 years ago as a “reference” value. True, instead of “European,” the authors constantly mentioned “European/North American,” although it is clear that it is essentially European - one sample of the virus is from Scotland, all the others (mostly from Seattle) are most likely descendants of immigrants from Europe. In any case, these figures are underestimated, since the separation of the haplotypes of Europe and Asia occurred no later than 55-60 thousand years ago, the oldest bone remains of “anatomically modern humans” in Europe date back to 45 thousand years ago, the aborigines came to Australia no later than 50 thousand years ago. years ago, but everything in the article is so approximate - both the dating and the rate of mutation of the virus - that this cannot be taken seriously. Since the authors’ times are much underestimated, the mutation rates should have been much higher. And so it happened - the virus mutation rate constant adjusted in this way turned out to be much faster than the known (more precisely, literary) values, namely 134x10 -9 mutations per nucleotide per year, with upper and lower limits of 214x10 -9 and 74.8x10 -9, respectively.

Using this adjusted mutation rate constant, the authors estimated that the original divergence of the virus occurred 50.3 ± 16.7 thousand years ago, and determined that this corresponds to the “exit of humanity from Africa.” A slightly corrected dating of the divergence of Europeans and Asians, according to the authors’ calculations, turned out to be 32.8 ± 10.9 thousand years ago, and the time of divergence of the only Chinese sample and the only sample from Texas turned out to be 15.76 ± 5.3 thousand years ago, which the authors attributed to the settlement of America, “which took place at that time.” period". Comments here are simply unnecessary.

All this formed the basis for the authors’ declaration that “ it is shown for the first time that phylogenetic data on the herpes virus confirm the exit of humanity from Africa" As actually shown above, this has nothing to do with “humanity leaving Africa.” Moreover, the estimate of the mutation rate constant of the herpes virus, carried out by the authors on the basis of more than rough estimates, exceeds three other literature values ​​by 4.5 – 45 times. The authors did not perform any cross-validation tests to verify the obtained mutation rate constant. The fact that the authors obtained, based on their constant, that the herpes viruses HSV-1 and HSV-2 diverged 2.184 ± 0.753 million years ago (note the given “precision” of three decimal places!) does not mean anything, It could have happened there 20 million years ago with the same success, and it wouldn’t have said anything either - it could have happened in macaques, for example. If, after all, the literary data are more correct, then the initial divergence of the herpes virus could have occurred not 50.3 thousand years ago, but 220 thousand years - 2.2 million years ago, and could also be well interpreted within the framework of human evolution. So the original, experimental data of the authors are of undoubted value, but manipulations, conclusions and interpretations are of no value. Unfortunately, this is how science is often “done” today, especially in the field of population genetics.

Anthropological data and dating
In recent years, an interesting situation has arisen when many anthropologists express doubts about the “African origin of man,” but point at geneticists as saying that we don’t have an answer, anthropological data are contradictory, but geneticists claim that they know for sure that from Africa, so how can we argue? And those geneticists who understand that genetic data are built on sand, or more precisely, on too free (fantasy) interpretations, nod at anthropologists that, they say, we understand that genetic data are weak and often simply incorrect, but anthropologists claim that from Africa, and their dating points to this, so how can we argue? This means that everything is correct with us.

Let's look at the statements that anatomically modern man (ACH) allegedly definitely originated in Africa, and it was about 40-50 thousand years ago, or 100, or 150, or 200 thousand years ago. Let us recall that an ASP is someone who does not have noticeable archaic anthropological features. First, we will sketch a brief description of the situation, then we will demonstrate this using specific material. To put it really briefly, we have five main points:

(1) all African finds of ancient bones up to about 36 thousand years ago show noticeable archaic features;

(2) often ancient bones are so fragmentary that it is simply impossible to recreate even a minimal anthropological picture from them;

(3) often the anthropological picture of bones in Africa and outside Africa is very similar, and therefore it cannot be said whether it was an exit from Africa or an entrance into Africa;

(4) often there are no bone remains at all, and statements about “anatomically modern people” are made on the basis of sites and stone tools, although they could well have been left by archanthropes, that is, archaic people not belonging to the species “Homo sapiens”;

(5) The dating of ancient bones is often so questionable that few people take them literally or even seriously.

Let's start with the last one. Unfortunately, radiocarbon dating at times greater than about 40 thousand years ago almost does not work, and the recent dating record is 60 thousand years ago. The reason is simple - the half-life of the radioactive isotope 14 C is 5730 years, that is, 40 thousand years is seven half-lives, and 60 thousand years is more than ten half-lives. The method is based on measuring the ratio in biological samples of the content of the stable isotope 12 C (and a little 13 C, almost a hundred times less compared to the content of 12 C) and radioactive 14 C (with its initial content in the amount of one ten-billionth of a percent), which over time falls, with the same half-life. Over 60 thousand years, its content decreases from the original 10 -10% by 2 10 times, that is, by another 1024 times. Modern devices no longer detect such levels of radiation, at least not the devices used by archaeologists. This is approximately 1 click per hour per gram of carbon tested. The normal background is much taller.

This opens up “wide possibilities” for mistakes, and not just mistakes. Let us recall the sensational (in narrow circles) story of the demotion and scandalous dismissal of the German anthropologist Reiner Protsch for systematically, as it turned out, falsifying the dating of ancient (and not at all ancient) bones. After checking, Protsch's date of 36,000 years ago turned out to be 7,500 years ago, his date of 21,300 years ago turned out to be 2,300 years ago, and a skeleton he dated to 29,400 years ago turned out to be the remains of a man who died in 1750, 255 years before the measurements (The Guardian newspaper) . The famous international magazine “Archaeology” also wrote about this.

There are many similar stories in archeology, but even if we discard obvious falsifiers, of which, of course, there are only a few, then the likelihood of errors is high in any case. Especially when you really want to make things ancient, and thereby go down in the history of archeology, and even the culture of mankind as a whole. It must be said that especially ancient biological finds are dated by other methods, such as argon, in terms of the 40 Ar/ 39 Ar content.

Overall, there is no anthropological or archaeological evidence for the "origins of modern man in Africa", nor is there any evidence that the stone "tools" and "industries" found in Europe or Eurasia in general were introduced from the territory south of Sugars. All claims about the discovery of skeletal remains of “anatomically modern humans” more than 50 thousand years old, and even more so more than 150 thousand years old, and especially south of the Sahara, are simply distorted or incorrect from the very beginning. A fairly comprehensive review of this topic will soon be published by the renowned Australian anthropologist Robert Bednarik (forthcoming, Advances in Anthropology).

The absence of such finds south of the Sahara is evidenced by a number of works, for example (Grine et al, 2007; Grine et al, 2010). All known finds of bones of such antiquity have obvious archaic features, starting with Omo Kibish 1 (195 thousand years ago, Ethiopia, fragments of cranial bones were found, few facial bones), Omo-2 (showing a number of primitive, archaic features), Herto (154- 160 thousand years ago, a very archaic bone structure, very different from ASC), in general, all skeletal remains dating from 100-200 thousand years ago, and in fact before 35 thousand years ago, are archaic (Rightmire, 2009). Many have no preserved facial bones at all. Even the Hofmeyr skull from South Africa, dating from 36 thousand years ago, has archaic features (Grine et al, 2007; Rightmire, 2009; Tattersall, 2009).

American anthropologist Rightmire reported: “ neither the Herto fossils nor others from the late Pleistocene, such as the Klasies River in South Africa or the Skhul/Qafzeh in Israel, have parallels with modern populations. Their skulls are robust, and only from ~35,000 years ago do people with modern anatomical morphology begin to appear"(Rightmire, 2009). He believes that "anatomically modern humans" evolved in Africa, although the process is "poorly understood." He is echoed by Michael Hammer (Hammer et al, 2011) – “ Fossil hominins showing a combination of archaic and more modern features are consistently found in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East until about 35 thousand years ago" Thus, the constant references of supporters of the “out of Africa” concept that bone remains of anatomically modern people with dates between 160 and 200 thousand years ago were discovered in Africa are false. Manipulation and distortion continue here too.

Michael Hammer, in the recent past an active advocate of the “out of Africa” concept, began to express doubts about “out of Africa,” but began to express this already in 2013, when it became clear that the situation with “out of Africa” was extremely confused. Hammer ends his article in Scientific American (May 2013) with the following words: “ Many knots remained unraveled. But one thing is clear - the roots of modern man go not only to a single ancestral population in Africa, but to populations of the Old World"(that is, Europe or Eurasia - AK).

And this seems quite reasonable. Studying the history of the ancient world, we constantly encounter mobile migrations, including very long-distance migrations. If, according to the supporters of “out of Africa”, man reached Australia in just 10 thousand years, then it is difficult to imagine that he sat still for 200 thousand years and did not spread throughout the world, including to and from Africa, and many times over. How it happened that the concept of a unilateral “exit from Africa” was so aggressively imposed on society and took hold of it so quickly should raise alarm bells – both in terms of the aggressive, peremptory imposition, and in terms of such weak-willed public perception. And what should be especially alarming is that there were and are no reliable grounds for “exiting Africa.”

To summarize, we repeat once again - our ancestors did not leave Africa in the last 200 thousand years. In other words, those who came out of Africa did not give birth to modern non-African humanity. This shows the entire complex of data obtained - genetics, anthropology, archeology, and DNA genealogy. In fact, not only in the last 200 thousand years, but also earlier. A study of the DNA of fossil Nenderthal bones showed the presence of the melanocortin receptor (MCR1), and in a variant that specifies light skin and red hair (Lalueza-Fox et al, 2007). The authors believe that Neanderthals had roughly the same hair color as modern Europeans, ranging from dark to blonde. In addition, no indicators have been found that Neanderthals were Negroids. Indeed, no traces of Neanderthals have been found in Africa. And since our closest ancestors were common to the Neanderthals, since the Neanderthal is our nephew, then the “father” of the Neanderthal and the “brother” of our “father” also most likely had light skin and did not live in Africa. It was somewhere in the range of 300-600 thousand years ago. It remains, however, unclear how our fair-skinned brothers, with whom we diverged approximately 160 thousand years ago, survived when they got to Africa, and how they acquired dark skin color, but the answer can also be found in the field of genetics, in the regulation of melanin biosynthesis. But that is another story.

Anatoly A. Klyosov,
professor, doctor of chemical sciences

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115 comments: Our ancestors did not leave Africa

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Did Charles Darwin renounce his theory of human evolution at the end of his life? Did ancient people find dinosaurs? Is it true that Russia is the cradle of humanity, and who is the yeti - perhaps one of our ancestors, lost through the centuries? Although paleoanthropology - the science of human evolution - is booming, the origins of man are still surrounded by many myths. These are anti-evolutionist theories, and legends generated by mass culture, and pseudo-scientific ideas that exist among educated and well-read people. Do you want to know how everything “really” was? Alexander Sokolov, editor-in-chief of the portal ANTHROPOGENES.RU, collected a whole collection of similar myths and checked how valid they are.

Someone argued that the center of human origin is where the so-called “primitive races” now live. There were supporters of polygenism who believed that each of the three great races - “white”, “black” and “yellow” - had its own monkey ancestors. Thus, polygenists do not have a single center: races arose independently in different parts of the world.

After the discoveries of Pithecanthropus in Java, and then Sinanthropus in China, many, including Soviet anthropologists, saw the likely center of anthropogenesis in Asia. “The homeland of man was undoubtedly the Eurasian continent. Here, in Central Asia, in all likelihood, where the Gobi Desert is now located, the situation arose that led to the appearance of the first ape-people,” wrote the Soviet paleontologist A.P. Bystrov in the middle of the 20th century.

The first discoveries of Australopithecus in Africa were met with hostility by many scientists - is it because the European ancestor is much nobler than some African monkey? However, let's not simplify it. In his book “Fossil Chronicles,” American paleoneurologist Dean Falk tries to figure out: why did it take 25 years for the scientific world to recognize the “Child from Taung” - the first discovery of an australopithecus made by Raymond Dart in South Africa? Falk cites the words of another famous specialist, Philip Tobaios:

The discovery described by Dart was ahead of its time, since its meaning could not be connected by simple logical steps with the ideas of that time. Taung's delay in recognition is not unique, Tobaios noted, because the same story happened with a number of other important "premature" discoveries, such as the laws of genetics or penicillin. Tobayos listed a number of principles of human evolution, generally accepted in 1925, that Taung challenged. Among them was the assertion (now recognized as incorrect) that Asia is the cradle of humanity; that the increase in brain size “preceded” hominid evolution, as suggested by the Piltdown find; that most of Taung's traits could be explained by his young age, and that geo; Taung's logical dating was too late for a human ancestor. ( Per. auto)

It was only after the discoveries made by Lewis Leakey and other scientists in East Africa in the second half of the 20th century that the picture began to become clearer. Homo habilis was discovered in Olduvai (Tanzania), African erecti were found, the oldest sapiens from Omo (Ethiopia) was described, and finally, the news of the discovery of Australopithecus Lucy in Hadar (Ethiopia) spread around the world. Fact by fact, brick by brick, the African version paved the way to scientific recognition.

To date, the remains of the most ancient hominids have been found in Africa (starting from Sahelanthropus about 7 million years ago). The evolutionary chain of African finds is the most complete:

(The list does not include hominids that are probably not directly related to our ancestry.)

No other continent has such a detailed chain; There are also no extra-African finds of hominids older than 2 million years - ancient man appears outside the African continent after this date.

It is important that it was in Africa that the most ancient people of the modern type and their immediate ancestors were discovered. So it can be argued that in Africa arose as a genus Homo, and, much later, our species - Homo sapiens (see also myth no. 24).

Archeology says the same thing. The oldest stone tools found in Africa (this is the site of Gona, Ethiopia, 2,600,000 years ago). All archaeological finds outside Africa are younger than 2 million years.

When it became possible to build family trees using genetic data, geneticists collected DNA samples from people of different races and built a family tree of humanity. It turned out that earlier than others, a branch containing only African groups separated from the trunk of this tree. In addition, it turned out that the genetic diversity of people decreases as they move away from Africa. This is logical: a group of ancient Homo sapiens, which once left the African continent, took only part of the African gene pool to Eurasia. Subsequently, this situation was repeated many times - after all, they settled, as a rule, in small groups, each time taking with them only a piece of the gene pool.

Not so long ago, in 2011, further evidence of human African origins came from linguistics. New Zealand psychologist and anthropologist Quentin Atkinson analyzed the sound diversity of 504 languages ​​of the world and showed that the further from Africa, the lower the number of phonemes - the minimum linguistic units - in languages. It is assumed that the same rule applies for languages ​​as for genes: phonetic diversity (as well as genetic) is maximum in the “center of origin”. (However, the correctness of the research is confirmed by some scientists, including Svetlana Burlak, a specialist in the origins of languages.

A genetic study of Caucasians found that white people descended from a group of about 20 people, with twice as many males as females.

In October 1997, a conference on human evolution was held in Cold Spring Harbor (USA). The constant references to the theory of African human origins and research on African and non-African populations prompted a disturbing remark from one participant about the ethics of such a division of humanity, associated with the sensitivity of public opinion in the United States regarding racial issues.

The Swiss geneticist Dr. Andre Langani responded wittily to this: instead of the planned report on genogeography, he gave a lecture that, judging by genetic data, we are all Africans, there are simply Asian Africans, European Africans and African Africans.

Today, most scientists adhere to theories of African human origins and they believe that the future winner in the evolutionary race arose in Southeast Africa about 200 thousand years ago and settled from there throughout the planet (Fig. 1).

Since man came out of Africa, it would seem to go without saying that our distant African ancestors were similar to the modern inhabitants of this continent. However, some researchers believe that the first people who appeared in Africa were closer to the Mongoloids.

Mongoloid race has a number of archaic features, in particular in the structure of teeth, which are characteristic of Neanderthals and Homo erectus (Homo erectus). Populations of the Mongoloid type are highly adaptable to various living conditions, from the Arctic tundra to equatorial rain forests, while in children of the Negroid race in high latitudes, with a lack of vitamin D, bone diseases, rickets, i.e., quickly develop. they are specialized for conditions of high insolation. If the first people were like modern Africans, it is doubtful that they would have been able to successfully migrate around the globe. However, this view is disputed by most anthropologists.

The concept of African descent is opposed multi-regional origin concept, suggesting that our ancestral species Homo erectus evolved into Homo sapiens independently at various points around the globe.

Homo erectus appeared in Africa about 1.8 million years ago. He made the stone tools found by paleontologists and possibly more advanced bamboo tools. However, after millions of years there are no traces of bamboo. Over the course of several hundred thousand years, Homo erectus spread first across the Middle East, then into Europe and to the Pacific Ocean.

The formation of Homo sapiens on the basis of Pithecanthropus led to the coexistence of later forms of Neanderthals and emerging small groups of modern humans for several thousand years. The process of replacing an old species with a new one was quite lengthy and, therefore, complex.

Interesting in its unusualness Porshnev concept, an alternative to Darwinism. Porshnev considers the change in the way of eating of the ancients to be the determining factor in evolution. Their gradual transition from eating “from someone else’s table” with scraps and carrion to overcoming the internal prohibition “thou shalt not kill!” and cannibalism. Porshnev identifies three branches : predators, manipulators and victims. He extrapolates their development to representatives of modern, heterogeneous human society. He considers the descendants of predators to be the powerful - the richest class, the descendants of manipulators - politicians, the bureaucratic class, and the victims - of course, poor people. The weakness of his theory, in my opinion, is that he considers the fate of every person to be predetermined, his teaching denies freedom of choice, his theory cannot explain the transitions of people between these three classes that take place in real life.

IVBiological evolution of man today

Social information is transmitted through words during learning and determines the spiritual appearance of the individual. It is created with the dominant role of socio-economic factors - social formation, level of production forces, production relations, national characteristics and rp.

Man as a social being evolves faster than as a biological being, therefore, despite the enormous achievements of civilization, there are no significant biological differences between a person who lived thousands of years ago and a person living now.

A person’s abilities, talent, emotionality, virtues, and vices depend on hereditary predisposition and the actions of the social environment. A person’s genotype provides the opportunity to perceive a social program, and the full implementation of its biological organization is possible only in the conditions of a social environment.

Although the mutation process continues, human biological evolution will continue to slow down due to the weakening of natural selection and the cessation of its species-forming function. However, within a species, fluctuations are possible: in body length (the armor of medieval knights is small for most modern Europeans), changes in the rate of ontogenesis (acceleration of adolescents), etc.

The vitality of human society as a whole increases, since as civilization develops and national and racial barriers are eliminated, the exchange of genes between previously isolated populations is ensured, heterozygosity increases and the possibility of manifestation of recessive genes decreases.

In the process of humanization, there is a decrease in fertility, a lengthening of the period of childhood, a slowdown in puberty, and an increase in the life span of one generation.

The means that control human evolution are protection from the effects of mutagenic factors, the development of methods for the treatment of hereditary diseases, the development of human abilities in childhood and adolescence and the creation of optimal conditions for training and education, to improve the cultural level of the entire society.

And so we saw the natural origin of man. We saw that earlier, many thousands of years ago, man was a part of nature equal to the rest. But in the process of evolution, step by step, man separated from it. Having started from leaving the forest and holding a stick in his hands, a man has already reached atomic bombs, but still has not stopped. Nowadays a person is able to process and use virtually anything for his own purposes. Man imagines himself to be great, the king of nature, while pointing to the creations of his own hands. Man created more and more perfect tools, first for labor, then for hunting, and then for killing others and their own kind.

For the first time we realized that humanity is capable of destroying itself by analyzing the consequences of a possible nuclear conflict. The threat disappeared and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Meanwhile, the explosion energy of all thermonuclear charges is less than the energy generated by the world's power plants in just a year. Every year, gigantic masses of matter move and transform, huge areas of the virgin land surface are disturbed, species of plants and animals disappear, and the radioactive background increases.

Anastasia Klepneva

Humanity originated not in Africa, but in Europe. This sensational statement was made by an international research group from the University of Tübingen, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the University of Toronto. Having studied the remains of great apes found in Bulgaria and Greece, scientists came to the conclusion that this species of primate appeared on European territory 7.2 million years ago, that is, at least 200 thousand years earlier than in Africa, which is considered the cradle of civilization. RT figured out how Bulgaria could become the ancestral home of man.

• Zdenek Burian

The world's first European

Scientists from the University of Tübingen, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the University of Toronto examined a tooth found in Bulgaria and the lower jaw of an ape found in Greece. According to experts, the fossilized remains belong to the direct ancestor of man, who appeared on European territory approximately 7.2 million years ago - at least 200 thousand years earlier than in Africa. According to the authors of the study, this proves that great apes appeared in Europe, but then, due to unfavorable climate changes, migrated to the African continent.

Using computed tomography, scientists examined the internal structure of the fossilized remains of Graecopithecus freybergi. In both the jaw and the molar, researchers were able to detect features that bring Graecopithecus closer to apes.

“Monkeys tend to have clearly separated tooth roots, and the teeth of Graecopithecus are partially fused, which is characteristic of modern and ancient humans, as well as several of their ancestors,” explained Professor Madeline Böhme from the University of Tübingen, who participated in the study.

New homeland

According to Boehme and colleagues, climate change has forced great apes to look for new food sources.

However, Candidate of Biological Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Biology, Moscow State University, is ready to argue with this hypothesis. Lomonosov, scientific editor of the portal “Anthropogenesis.ru” Stanislav Drobyshevsky. As he noted, from African finds one can trace a direct line from the first apes to modern humans.

“But these Europeans - yes, these are related apes, who would doubt it. They are quite similar to gorillas, but they are not human ancestors, at least in my personal opinion,” the scientist concluded.

One tooth is not enough

It seems more likely to Stanislav Drobyshevsky that these anthropoids became extinct in Europe. During the Miocene era, 7-10 million years ago, many great apes lived in both Europe and Asia. At the same time, there were climate changes that actually forced them to migrate.

“They migrated - that’s a fact, but these were not the animals that could take off and go explore a new continent. Primates move slowly through forests. And the late Miocene was a period when forests disappeared, so it was extremely problematic for them to move somewhere,” explained Drobyshevsky. “The only ones left are those who lived in tropical forests—now we have chimpanzees and gorillas, for example—and those who adapted to the African savannah, actually the australopithecus.” Those who lived in Europe happily died out.”

Among foreign researchers, the results of an international group of scientists also cause skeptical assessments. Among them is the anthropologist Peter Andrews, who was one of the first to suggest that human ancestors appeared outside of Africa. He said that changing his opinion about human history based on just one find seems like a bad decision to him.

“The emergence of direct human ancestors in Europe is in principle possible, but a very significant body of evidence speaks in favor of the version of the origin of man from Africa, including several skeletons and skulls,” says Andrews.