Adam, Eve and Population Genetics: A Reply to Dr. Richard Buggs (Part 1)

[DennisVenema]

@T.j_Runyon

Also, and take this with a grain of salt since my career is in its infancy, all anthropologists I’ve been been around would Define human as anyone belonging to the genus Homo. Homo Sapiens are broken down into Early Homo Sapiens, like the Jebel Irhoud specimens and anatomically modern humans. So Anne is arguing for an archaic Homo Sapiens (those that are morphologically and behaviorally between Erectus and Sapiens) Adam?

Remember that Adam and the Genome is a popular book for a lay audience. Most lay people think “human” means us. As I’ve mentioned before, I used it in AatG as shorthand for “anatomically modern human.”

If you want an example of a paleoanthropologist using the same way of speaking, Tim White would be one (when speaking to popular audiences). For example, in this lecture he uses “human” the same way as I do in the book.

But of course, another key point in the book is that species designations are attempts to draw lines of demarcation on a continuous gradient. So whatever term one uses, it will have blur around the edges.

Edit: here’s some of the transcript of the lecture that makes the point:

@Tim White

Let’s go down the stack of rocks. We have to move a little bit to the north to do that. We move a little bit further down in time. Now we’re at a half a million years. We have a specimen known as the Bodo man, a half a million years old; that’s the next one in the line over there. We rotate this man into view, and now it’s not a human anymore. We’re looking at something that nobody would mistake for an anatomically modern human. What is it? Is it an ape? No. Is it a human? No. What is it? Well, we can put labels on these things, but biologically, it is an intermediate fossil in the record of human evolution. This man studied the record of the archaeology; his name was Desmond Clark, and he founded the project many years ago. And he found thousands of these hand axes at a million years, down a little bit further in the record. And then finally, one of the graduate students from Berkeley, doing a survey found this cranium eroding from the surface. We took it out, we cleaned it up, and this is this cranium. This one is about two-thirds as large as the one, that’s the next one in line there. This is Homo erectus. It’s well known; it was discovered, the species was discovered in Java many, many years ago.