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Home > Science Magazine > 28 January 2011 > Gibbons, 331 (6016): 392394

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Science 28 January 2011:
Vol. 331 no. 6016 pp. 392394
DOI: 10.1126/science.331.6016.392
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ANTHROPOLOGY

A New View Of the Birth of Homo sapiens

Ann Gibbons

New DNA data from archaic human species are providing a much higher resolution view of our past.
When compared with the genomes of living people, the ancient genomes allow anthropologists to
thoroughly test the competing models of human origins for the first time. The DNA data suggest not
one but at least two instances of interbreeding between archaic and modern humans, raising the
question of whether Homo sapiens at that point was a distinct species (see sidebar). And so they
appear to refute the idea that modern humans came out of Africa, spread around the world, and
completely replaced the archaic humans they met. But the genomic data also don't prove the classic
multiregionalism model, which argues that a single, worldwide species of human, including archaic
forms outside of Africa, met, mingled, and had offspring, and so produced Homo sapiens. They
suggest only a small amount of interbreeding, presumably at the margins where invading moderns
met archaic groups. The new picture most resembles socalled assimilation models, which got
relatively little attention over the years.
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