ugh, just Godwinnned my own thread, I guesss you win Tom, John et, al 
Any such conclusions do need to be evaluated in light of the fact that the “human” genome sequence is primarily the sequence of one individual human’s DNA. I could even get his name with a little digging. He still runs a laboratory out in California, if I recall correctly.
Thus, the statistical validity of a species-wide determination in this case is rather low.
I think you are thinking of Venter, but you do not recall correctly the issue.
The issue was Venter used himself as one of the samples for the Celerix effort. There were I think four others. There was also the international consortium effort, which used another sample set.
I do not think your objection has any sense to it.
It is not really my field (although I do take passing interest), but the “Out of Africa” thing seems to get more supported by data with each passing month. I am familiar with the genetic evidence, but I always kind of overlook the paleontologic (I am training as a geneticist). Anyway, a new find was reported in a pair of papers in Nature a few months ago - rather old human remains from Herto in Middle Awash, Ethiopia, which seem to fall into the gap period of 160,000 years ago. This is nice, because apparently the best dated modern humans, most complete from that period were from 115,000 years ago and were found in Israel. This places the Herto find right in the African bottleneck before radiation.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12802315&dopt=Abstract (News & VIews)
I’m sure there are alternative hypotheses, and of course these should continue to be considered, given the wide range of fields from which the evidence comes and the results which don’t always make sense. It does seem that “Out of Africa” is getting more attention, and seems to be explaining hominid radiation better than multiregionalism. Again, I defer to the real evo-paleo people on the board.
Venter used his own DNA for the Celera project, but the finished human genome is a conglomeration of public and private efforts. He was not the only sample used. Furthermore, quite a large effort is ongoing to identify and sequence polymorphic regions from populations around the planet. We’re on top of the genetics.
Edwino, I hope you didn’t take my remarks about geneticists as dispariging, I have utmost respect for the field and believe it is a great tool in an interdisciplinary study like bio-anthro, hell, I may have even taken a few courses myself I’m just saying it cannot be used independantly of paleontology to explain millions of years of history. We need each other to complete the story.
No argument here, labmonkey. I study molecular evolution, and I know how many assumptions and estimations one must make, especially in things like mtDNA analysis. It is the same with paleo in some respects. We can only hope with enough observation and enough cross check, we can get rid of all of the noise in the system.
Who was it that said (to paraphrase): “I know that my DNA had ancestors, but we don’t know if your fossils had descendants”?