this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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One of my academic areas of expertise way back in the day (late '80s and early '90s) were the so-called "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Out of Africa" hypotheses. The absolute mangling of this shit by journalists even at the time was migraine-inducing and it's gotten much worse in the decades since then. It hasn't helped that subsequent generations of scholars have mangled the whole deal even worse. The only advice I can offer people is that if the article (scholastic or popular) contains the word "Neanderthal" anywhere, just toss it.
Science journalism in a nutshell.
Credit to Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
I'm curious. Are you saying neanderthal didn't exist, or was just homo sapiens? Or did you mean in the context of mitochondrial Eve?
Sientists confirm it: we are living in a simulation!
All of these things, actually. The measured, physiological differences between "homo sapiens" and "neanderthal" (the air quotes here meaning "so-called") fossils are much smaller than the differences found among contemporary humans, so the premise that "neanderthals" represent(ed) a separate species - in the sense of a reproductively isolated gene pool since gone extinct - is unsupported by fossil evidence. Of course nobody actually makes that claim anymore, since it's now commonly reported that contemporary humans possess x% of neanderthal DNA (and thus cannot be said to be "extinct"). Of course nobody originally (when Mitochondrial Eve was first mooted) made any claims whatsoever about neanderthals: the term "neanderthal" was imported into the debate over the age and location of the last common mtDNA ancestor years later, after it was noticed that the age estimates of neanderthal remains happened to roughly match the age estimates of the genetic last common ancestor. And this was also after the term "neanderthal" had previously gone into the same general category in Anthropology as "Piltdown Man".
Most ironically, articles on the subject today now claim a correspondence between the fossil and genetic evidence, despite the fact that the very first articles (out of Allan Wilson's lab and published in Nature and Science in the mid-1980s) drew their entire impact and notoriety from the fact that the genetic evidence (which supposedly gave 100,000 years ago and then 200,000 years ago as the age of the last common ancestor) completely contradicted the fossil evidence (which shows upright bipedal hominids spreading out of Africa more than a million and half years ago). To me, the weirdest thing is that academic articles on the subject now almost never cite these two seminal articles at all, and most authors seem genuinely unaware of them.