Maybe I’m thinking of the most ironically divergent (?) rather than the most genetically divergent.
Evidence for:
A handful (or possibly just one) of skeletons which show a mixture of apparently Neanderthal and Modern Human features. Not exactly compelling because the Skeletons all come form the Mediterranean, which brings uus to point two.
Mediterranean Neanderthals were indistinguishgable from contemporary human populations. The two groups completely intergraded in every regard. Although individual Neanderthals always displayed more typical Neanderthal features than did humans no individual feature will infallibly serve to distinguish Neanderthals from humans.
As far as anyone can tell there was never a time when the two species were physically isolated, which makes the development genetic isolation tricky.
Those three factors would probably be sufficient to lump the two groups as free breeding members of the same species were they any other taxon.
Evidence against:
A handful of of genetic samples recovered from Neanderthal fossils that show Neanderthals to be well outside the range of modern humans. That would be the clincher evidence except that for the results to be meaningful we need to make lots of assumptions about mitochondrial inheritance and hybrid compatibility as well as about human migration and genetic bottlenecks.
At this stage the evidence is still too weak either way for anyone to be certain.
There was more than some geographic overlap. The two species overlapped in the Middle East and North Africa for their entire histories as far as anyone can tell. This is one of the most difficult aspects of the two-species position. It requires one or both of the populations to have evolved relatively rapidly and to then have swept into the Middle East and North Africa displacing their own ancestors entirely without retaining any fertility with them despite continuous opportunities for genetic interchange.
The skelton from Portugal is the only one that seems to have any credebility, and even that one is contraversial.
Can we have a cite for this? I’m not sure what you consider “Mediterranian”, but the recent Neanderthal discovery in Spain is certainly distinguishable form modern humans. Link.
There was overlap in the Levant about 100k years ago, but other than that, I don’t believe this is correct.
I think there have been 4 or 5 samples (mtDNA) taken to date, and all show the Neanderthals to be outliers. Perhaps the Neandethal Genome Project will better answer this question in the next few years.
Again, the overlap in the Levant was for an isolated time (~100k years ago), and I’m not aware of any Neanderthal skeletons from Africa. Neanderthals were a strictly European and Western Asian population which remained largely isolated from the Sapiens population in Africa until the latter spread into Europe about 35k years ago.
Milford Wolpoff is the leading propoent of the multi-regional hypothesis and claims there is continuity between Neanderthal and Sapiens poplultions, but he is very much in the minority these days.
In the book ‘The Monkey Puzzle’ the authors say, if anyone doubts Neanderthal interbreeding with Homo Sapiens, then they should take a ride on the New York subway.
Interestingly Richard Dawkins (in an article I ran into recently) was quite in favour of the book’s conclusion that we are immature gorrillas.
Personally I reckon that I’ve met enough people who, if fossilized, would pass as Neanderthals, to reckon that the the human tendency to procreate with anything available is not new behaviour.
I’m not sure about Bushman genes flowing one way, you only need a lost/ostracized/kidnapped female joining a tribe for the flow to be reversed.
One does not need to be Laurens van der Post to suggest a few scenarios.
A cute saying, but worthless scientifically.
No, he didn’t say that. We show many examples of neoteny, but we are not “immature gorillas”.
That’s because you’re not a scientist and don’t understand the distinguishing features of Neanderthals. It was popular during the 60s to hold views such as you state, but most scientists today recognize that to be incorrect.
**Colibri **was talking about the Pygmies, not the !Kung San (Bushmen). And of course he was talking about the norm-- there will always be some isolated incedents outside the norm.
Thanks for that - and you’re right, there are different opinions.
You just have to look at Nelson Mandela to see that there’s a measure of Khoi blood in the Western Xhosa tribes. Some Khoi stayed in the Cape and eventually became Coloured, others went East and joined Xhosa groups (quite amicably, by the little I’ve heard)
To the OP:
Of course, round here, it’s the Bushmen who are touted as “world’s oldest people”, sometimes mentioning that they have the most varied genes, based on Spencer Wells’ work with NatGeo and his Journey of Man doccie. This is somewhat backed up by artifact finds in SA and such (“world’s oldest art”), in addition to the genetic evidence already cited. Me, I’m perfectly wiling to see that there may be two or more groups that qualify as most diverse depending on selection criteria, but the case for the Bushmen is pretty convincing.
Come to think of it, he does look a bit like the Khoi. You can tell there’s also some old (at least, before European colonization of South Africa) contact between the Khoisan and the Bantu groups in the area in the fact that Zulu and Xhosa have click sounds that clearly originated from contact with Khoisan languages.
Yes, there are a variety of Pygmy groups found in and around the rainforest belt of Africa, including the Mbuti and Efe of the eastern Congo basin, the Aka and Baka of the western forest region (Cameroon, Gabon, etc), and the Twa from southern areas.
One of my most memorable experiences was going out net-hunting with 20 Mbuti when I visted the Ituri Forest in 1993. I was visiting some researchers who were doing a radio-tracking study on forest antelope (duikers). The project had an amazing mix of high-tech and low-tech methods. When a transmitter had to be replaced, one of the Bantu assistants would locate the animal using a radio antenna. Then the Pygmys would run into the forest with long nets, surround the animal, and drive it into the nets. It is very hard to keep up with a Pygmy in the forest, even when they are laden with nets.
According to the article I linked to in post #7, the Mbuti may not be the oldest pygmy lineage; instead that distinction may go to the Aka (or Biaka):
One peculiarity of Pygmies is that they do not possess a separate language; instead they speak the languages of their Bantu neighbors. They appear to have existed in symbiosis with them for a very long time, the Pygmies providing bushmeat and other forest products to the Bantu in return for agricultural foods.
Without getting into the details of the evidence, some of which has been outlined by Blake and John Mace, as they have mentioned there are some skeletons that are alleged to have intermediate characteristics, though whether or not these represent hybrid individuals has been hotly disputed.
It would actually be surprising if modern humans and Neanderthals were intersterile and unable to hybridize. The first fossil Neaderthals date to about 350,000 years ago, while genetic data suggest that modern human and Neanderthal lineages may have been separate for 500,000 years or more. However, species of the genus Canis (wolves, dogs, coyotes, jackals) belong to lineages that split more than 1 million years ago but they are all completely interfertile.
Whether or not modern humans and Neanderthals were interfertile, the fossil and genetic evidence both suggest that they did not interbreed very often, or over extended areas. Thus they seem to have functioned as good biological species.
Exbalibre: I used the “Mbuti” because I don’t like the term “Pygmy”, and I don’t know if there is a generic term for the various groups in Africa that are lumped under that latter term. “Pygmy” makes it sound like their some sort of sub-species. And there are some other groups of short statured people outside of Africa that are called Pygmies, too. Some of them, like the Andaman Islanders, represent lineages that are quite old as well. At any rate, I should have said “The Mbuti and other short statured populations”.
I am not aware of any succinct term; you would probably have to say “Central African short-statured hunter-gatherers” or some such in order to make your meaning precise.
The populations do, I think, have some genetic and cultural commonalities and are probably related to one another at some level.
Perhaps, but they are not referred to that way as often as the African groups.
The problem is that the Bushmen/San are also a short-statured population of hunter-gatherers in Africa; to distinguish them you need to add the adjective “Central African.”
Yes, I think they do, too. But the term “pygmy” when used with non-human animals generally denotes a different species or even genus (as is the case for pygmy hippos). That’s what I was getting at, and that’s why I don’t like using that term. Maybe it’s just me and I’m imagining it to be an offensive term when its not.
Correct, and that’s why that was a secondary concern. My major concern was that I find it somewhat offensive.
Yes, I’ve even seen the Bushmen/San referred to as “Pygmies”, although not very often. So I guess the conclusion is that the English language seems to lack a generic name for the short-statured humans of Central Africa.
Originally the word referred to a diminutive tribe found in Greek mythology. When short-statured groups were discovered in Africa, the term was applied to them.
Modern Pygmies are extremely marginalized members of African societies; they are often regarded as virtually subhuman by their Bantu neighbors. They rarely receive much education, and I do not know that they perceive themselves as members of a single group. I am also not aware of any advocacy organizations promoting the rights of Pygmies as a group. (There may be some in individual nations.) Until the group itself decides on a name by which to be known, it would be difficult for outsiders to determine an appropriate one. Among the Bushmen/San, which do have advocacy groups, some favor one term, others the other.
As far as I know, that’s correct.