By Phil

The following will not all be anthropologists by trade or certification, but each carved their own little niche the distorts research. I will address them in way that reflects the weird way they are all connected.

Bruce Fenton: So thanks to RR, I’ve learned how he once peddled crap such as “giants“, among other things. Needless to say, that answered alot of my questions I had after taking apart his article on his book a while back.

Jeffery Schwarz and John Grehan: Now, to be fair, these guys deserve somewhat more credit in their premise, that is regarding the morphological links with orangutans and humans. It has some basis in how humans evolved, originally being arboreal and not knuckle walking. However, their approach of preferring inheritance based on external morphology over coding DNA and overall genetics has been criticized again, and again, and again, and again.

For clarification, I found them from an Indian study on Hominid development in Fenton’s spurces, which focused on bipedalism. It noted an “Asian hypothesis” of human origins. Technically, Grehan proposed an African-Asian distribution, and as of now Schwarz’s actual hominid data currently works with OOA as a base model while adjusting it. So it doesn’t support Fenton even if Orangutans were the actual ancestors of humans.

It’s worth mentioning as well, the commenter “Marc” in the Grehan link is a crank as well, but not for today.

Shi Huang: Shi Huang here is the only other major researcher I know of who has actually produced any notable difference in the Human-Chimp clade finding, on top of rejecting OOA.

The implications however stray further from the Cann study than Fenton’s. In fact, if you read the link on phenotypic association of human populations…it’s kind demonstrates the futility of using external phenotypes.

Overall, his theory on Africans being Denisovan and Neanderthal admixed humans doesn’t align with Haplogroup associations touched upon previously in my Fenton article linked to Dienekes, the nature of the East African cluster mentioned in my article on modern Africans with A and B y chromosomes making up the majority of Eurasian affiliated Nilotics, and my previous article on the post Neanderthal substructure making up the majority of African genetics.

Now compare all of these inferences, to this-

Fossils or traits indicating AMH migration from East Asia into Africa or Europe have
been noted before. First, native Africans such as Khoisans are well known to have certain East Asian features such as shoveling teeth, epicanthic fold, and lighter skins. Mbuti pygmies look very much like the Andamanese. The much lower frequency of shoveling teeth in African fossils and Khoisan relative to ancient and modern Chinese suggests that this type of teeth could only originate in China with its African presence due to migration. The type of shoveling teeth found in Neanderthals and Pleistocene Homo from Atapuerca-Sima de los Huesos may either be a different type from that of Asians and Africans or come from early disposal of Homo from Asia to Europe (Martinon-Torres et al., 2007; Wolpoff, 1996). Second, a combination of three features has been noted to be region-specific to China fossils with lower frequency also found in North Africa: a non-depressed nasal root, non-projecting perpendicularly oriented nasal bones and facial flatness (Brauer and Stringer, 1997). Third, Dali man of China (~250,000 years ago) had lower upper facial index and flat nasomolar angle, but these two modern features only first
appeared in Europe in Cro Magnons (Xinzhi Wu, personal communication).

I’ll admit I’m no expert in genomics, but having at least looking over the Dali paper and comparing it to this, I think anyone else who has sense and had done the same would come to the same conclusion as I would to dismiss this paper as the leaps and assertions it makes are vast and at times amateur. Wu Xinzhi apparantly read this himself, but recalling his own paper and work he was much more cautious and more involved in this kind of data. As particular as his theory was, it never devolved into statements like this.

That humans have been a single species for more than ~2 myr is consistent with the
unique feature of being human, i.e., creativity, which could be defined as constant creation of novelty. Intentionally made and constantly improved knife type stone tools, first appeared 2.3- 2.8 myr ago, may be beyond the capabilities of non-humans and mark the first appearance of creativity in life on Earth.
The appearance of modern humans should be accompanied by new technologies just as
the knife type stone tools were associated with the first appearance of the genus Homo. A technology just one step more advanced than stone tools is pottery making. Consistent with our model, the earliest pottery making intended for practical usage was found in Hunan and the neighboring Jiangxi in South China at 18,000-20,000 years ago (Boaretto et al., 2009; Wu et al., 2012). While future investigations could extend the time even earlier, one should not expect a new technology to appear simultaneously with the first appearance of AMH since it would take time for the first modern humans to grow into a large enough population to be able to invent new cultures. It is also remarkable to note that the next new invention after pottery, rice or agriculture, also likely came from Hunan (Zhang and Yuan, 1998). Both the link to his blog post on OOA and this slightly dismissal post on his work shows an ardent defender of his, one that should be very familiar.

German Dziebel: It only takes a short cross-reference to see his BS. Basically, he’s pushing some sort of hypothesis that undermines the divergences of Pygmies and Bantu farmers. This basically mean ignoring the conclusions from his own sources on genetics, here, and here. He confuses the pygmy phenotype, which is shown to be independent, with the pygmy genetic cluster. This is disingenuous to anyone familiar with the topic. He is correct that they are not genetically unrelated due to the geneflow, which accounts for language, but his proposal to explain this primarily on recent splits is contradicted by full genetic research tackling the matter.

On the Shi Huang paper, he says that the Chinese lack the possibility of “bias” Americans feel to support OOA based on guilt of African American discrimination. Perhaps, yet that doesn’t explain Manzi on the Ceprano skull, nor does that explain this paper showing Chinese lacking the substructure expected from the more popular idea of regional continuity, which actually shows bias on behalf on the Chinese to push a theory. Likewise, Wu Xinzhi who proposed the hypothesis even stated it wasn’t mutually exclusive with OOA.

I’ve been saving this as an article concept due to how amazing it was to come across each of them twice after what started as a simple cross reference. This shouldn’t, however, be read as someone who is against changes to the mainstream, but as someone with actual scrutiny on scientific stances. I can accept the meaningfulness of Orangutans, Australians, and Chinese archaic humans in modern human origins.