OK, thanks. I really haven't read the full Supplementary info before, only bits and pieces. If I had, I would have clearly seen that the Basal Eurasians were discussed.
What made it so confusing, is that not only has the Basal Eurasians not been discussed at any lenght in this forum, but not in other forums I visit either - before now. And it is also only now that the press has started writing about it. Seems they didn't read the full Supplementary info before either
If I understand it correctly, at least a few populations haven't any Basal Eurasian DNA, for instance (or only?) the Karitina. And those populations which have Basal Eurasian DNA, have got it through "Stuttgart", who got it though "The Near East". So perhaps these Basal Eurasians hid somewhere in or around the Near East? But why didn't the Karitina get anything? Were they busy running away eastwards before the remaining(?) people near Africa found these Basal Eurasians and mingled with them? Or have I misunderstood something?
You might want to try the Anthrogenica forum, as it's been discussed on that Board...usually in the context of the experiments being conducted using some of this new software, however.
Also, to refresh our recollections, this is their final model in that paper, although I'm sure it won't be the
final model.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YbYK8NzQNAY/UrihRsR5eSI/AAAAAAAAJbo/TYynaV4cO4Y/s1600/model.png
So far as I understand it, the prevailing
theory is tha
t Europeans got it through Stuttgart like people. As to where the Stuttgart like EEFs got it the prevailing
theory has been that it was in the Near East, which makes sense as all modern Near Easterners have EEF As I said, that doesn't seem like an isolated enough area to me for them to have avoided admixture with all of the other Out of Africa lineages for so long, unless there were physical barriers of some sort...water...desert...mountains...
Perhaps Arabia is a good choice. The bottom line is that I don't know and neither does anyone else as of yet.
A poster at Anthrogenica named Parasar has come up with a provocative theory that they were actually in southern Mediterranean Europe. I haven't thought that one through either, and I have no idea if it's correct. These ideas can be posited because we have, as yet, no idea what these southern hunter gatherers were like. (the ones from Greece, the Balkans, perhaps the now submerged lands of the Adriatic where Italy and the Balkans meet.
Someone (perhaps the same poster?), proposed that maybe it was just that the Basal Eurasians are the Eurasians who didn't mix with Neanderthas. I haven't followed the data on the locations of presumed Neanderthal admixture closely enough to say whether that's supported by the evidence. I will, say, however, that I don't believe that the development of agriculture, and later metallurgy, happened in the Near East just because they were blessed with a great climate and fauna and floral at an opportune time. Human genetic structure is not only influenced by the environment, in my view, which pushes evolution along certain lines, but rather, the genetic composition of certain groups also
changes the environment and indeed culture.
I am not, as you can probably tell, a fan of the admixture between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens Sapiens. While I don't think Neanderthals were the total brutes of the popular imagination of prior times, if the results of the admixture with them is summed out, I think we lost by it. In return for some bone and skin adaptations for cold weather, we got a whole raft of debilitating and sometimes deadly autoimmune disorders, mental disorders, and, in my opinion, some diminution of higher level cognitive function. There have been some recent papers that have discussed this issue. You can find them in this thread here:
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...y-of-the-Neanderthals?highlight=Neanderthals-
(If you read it you will see that we had quite a spirited debate, and I was unable to persuade everyone to the "correct" view.
)
I've also been looking at the abstracts of a conference just held in Florence on evolution, and found the abstract of a paper called The Higher Cognitive Functions of the Recently Expanded Parietal Lobes of Homo Sapiens (versus Neanderthals) by Frederick Coolidge. He maintains that recent research shows that this difference in brain structure manifests itself in terms of working memory, numerosity and abstract thinking, episodic memory, progressive memory, sense of self, among others.
I'd be happy to post it and others of interest here, but my attachment function won't permit it.