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On the Common Ancestors of All Living Humans (2003) [pdf] (tedlab.mit.edu)
15 points by nabla9 on June 13, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


This article should be considerably hugely outdated as leaps and bounds of new information regarding early hominid cohabitation have been discovered since then.

It's safe to say at this point that humans are far more genetically diverse than previously thought and we may not share a single common ancestor considering that some groups contain large amounts of denisovan AND/OR neanderthal DNA that is non-existent in other groups.


Denisovan and Neanderthal admixture predates the events predicted by this article by tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years.

It's also irrelevant to the MRCA of extant humans.


I don't have the background to evaluate how good this article's methodology is or is not, but 2003 is really, really a long time ago if we're talking about the confluence of archaeology and genetics.

Again, not saying it is or isn't wrong, just that orders of magnitude more is known about this now than was known in 2003.


This article has 6 citations - not very much impact. A similar but more widely referenced one is this: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842




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