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Fast Moving Genetics

14 April 2019
Biology

Paul Reich has only just had his paperback version of up to the minute genetics published and he is already out of date it would seem – within a couple of months. At https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.co.uk/2019/04/multiple-denisovan… … the Denisovans, contemporaries of the late Neanderthals, were discovered in a cave deposit in southern Siberia, but they appear to be a much more extensive branch of humanity than imagined up to now. An international research team with a large contingent from Indonesia has been looking at the DNA of people living in Indonesia and New Guinea and new data shows several lineages related to Denisovans. This was actually suggested by Reich – but without the necessary data proof. It is now confirmed, but remarkably it shows that up to three strains of Denisovans contributed to the DNA of people living on Palua-New Guinea. They entered the region on different occasions and modern humans have inherited their DNA. 

The Denisovan genome was inherited by modern Siberians, Native Americans, and East Asians – to varying degrees. The new evidence shows an unexpected mixing with Papua-New Guinea people as recently as 30,000 years ago. In other words, Denisova people disappeared roughly at the same time as the Neanderthals in western Asia and Europe. As catastrophism is not part of the thinking of mainstream we have a glaring anomaly that has yet to be picked up. Why would both of these groups of people have become extinct between 40 and 30,000 years ago? If a catastrophic event had reduced human numbers sufficiently and then a bottleneck would have been created – with modern humans coming out of the other end. It is remarkable but at the same point in time we have evidence of mass die-off amongst mammals, from Australia to North America and Euroasia. These are usually attributed to the arrival of modern humans, smearing the reputation of Aboriginals when instead it is more likely Palaeolithic people were able to co-exist with the animal kingdom as they provided nourishment. Not only that the idea that a few thousand spear wielding hunters were able to wipe out the mammoths is an extraordinary explanation. Lots of mammoths died around the same time Neanderthals disappeared.

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